My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange! Immortal gods inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves and all things you have changed! Oh lead my song in smooth and measured strains, from olden days when earth began to this completed time! Invocation, translated by Brookes More This month’s Book Club selection is taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. We previously read Books 12 and… Read more
Often before now have I applied my thoughts to the puzzling question — one, probably, which will puzzle me for ever — why it is that, while all Greece lies under the same sky and all the Greeks are educated alike, it has befallen us to have characters so variously constituted. Proem of Theophrastus Characters, translated by R.C. Jebb For April, our Book Club selection is the Characters of Theophrastus. Theophrastus,… Read more
Mark the situation, men of Athens: mark the pitch which the man’s outrageous insolence has reached, when he does not even give you a choice between action and inaction, but threatens you, and utters (as we are told) haughty language: for he is not the man to rest content in possession of his conquests: he is always casting his net wider; and while we procrastinate and sit idle, he is… Read more
I was hunting on the island of Lesbos when I saw the most beautiful sight I have ever seen in the grove of the Nymphs. It was a story about Eros. The grove was a beautiful place, abounding in trees and flowers. Streams of water gushed down, flowing from the same spring that nourished the trees and flowers. But I found more pleasure in the painting, instilled as it was… Read more
Atreus … I must dare some crime, atrocious, bloody, such as my brother would more wish were his. Crimes thou dost not avenge, save as thou dost surpass them. And what crime can be so dire as to overtop his sin? Does he lie downcast? Does he in prosperity endure control, rest in defeat? I know the untamable spirit of the man; bent it cannot be – but it can… Read more