Now! I’d like to string together various tales in the Milesian style, and charm your kindly ear with seductive murmurs, so long as you’re ready to be amazed at human forms and fortunes changed radically and then restored in turn in mutual exchange, and don’t object to reading Egyptian papyri, inscribed by a sly reed from the Nile. From Book I:1 Apuleius’ address to the reader, translated by A.S. Kline… Read more
Our next Book Club selection is different this month. You can bring your own selection, one book that you like or dislike, and share your thoughts about it. You can read any book you like, whether primary or secondary source, and depending on how many are in the session you will be allotted some time to convince us to read (or not) the book. We will start and continue discussion… Read more
If I believed it possible, friends who are attending this burial, to set forth in speech the valor of the men who lie here, I should have reproved those who gave me but a few days’ notice of having to speak over them. But as all mankind would find all time insufficient for preparing a speech to match their deeds, the city itself therefore, as I think, taking forethought for… Read more
What from the founder Esop fell, In neat familiar verse I tell: Twofold’s the genius of the page, To make you smile and make you sage. But if the critics we displease, By wrangling brutes and talking trees, Let them remember, ere they blame, We’re working neither sin nor shame; ‘Tis but a play to form the youth By fiction, in the cause of truth. This month’s Book Club selection… Read more
The first to use the term, and to call himself a philosopher or lover of wisdom, was Pythagoras; for, said he, no man is wise, but a god alone. … All too quickly the study was called wisdom and its professor a sage, to denote his attainment of mental perfection; while the student who took it up was a philosopher or lover of wisdom. Sophists was another name for the… Read more