Vanishing point

Looking back at our reading it begins to seem as though we have been looking at the same question through a variety of lenses. We moved from the vulnerable defenders of Melos and students of the Encheiridion to some of the prime movers and shakers of the ancient world, but many of the texts seem to grapple with a recurring cluster of concepts and motifs -- materialism and immaterialism, Fortune and freedom, empire and res publica, agents of change and those seeking to remain faithful to past origins, virtue and chance. All having to do, one way or another, with the question of liberty -- individual, political, expressive (parrhesia), and ontological.*


More and more clearly one sees that the comparison of Caesar and Alexander would have been the capstone, or perspectival axis of the Lives - a crucial text, involving judgments about two of the most complex figures of the ancient world. (A rather elementary effort by Appian is here.) That it is "lost" is just another enigmatic property attaching to these two ultimate men of mystery.


Mussy will be sending an update of our schedule, but in brief, we begin Sept. 3, 1 p.m., at the Fruitville Library with the Story of David. The Robert Alter text will be used by some, the King James Bible by others, but any good edition is fine. That will be followed in October by the Wasteland. Paul should be updating us with more on this soon.

*This first section was rewritten in part in an effort to be clearer.

Anthony Grafton reviews A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century

Here's the opening:

History was born in Greece in the middle of the fifth century B.C.E. It has flourished ever since then, in diverse but recognizably related forms, and it still exists today, as a form of inquiry into the past, a literary genre, and a set of practices plied and taught in universities. That's our story, in the West, and we're sticking to it. Or at least John Burrow is. After a swift glance toward ancient ways of keeping records, Burrow begins his elegant and erudite book with a rich study of Herodotus and Thucydides, the Greek founders of the genre. Then he bounds forward, passing in review Hellenistic and Roman, early Christian and medieval, Renaissance and Enlightenment historians, and ends up in the territory that he has cultivated throughout his career: Europe, and especially Britain, in the last two centuries. The trip passes quickly, Burrow makes a highly accomplished guide, and the reader ends up--rather as the tourist does after a well-organized two weeks in Italy--tired, impressed, and gratified. But is it history? That is the sixty-four-talent question, to which we will eventually return.