Tuesday One of my most satisfying reads in recent years is Caroline Alexander’s The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and The Trojan War. Alexander is the kind of writer that I aspire to be: an academic who taps into the meticulous research of other scholars to write for a popular […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Iliad, warfare, wars | Comments closed

Amazon Fires and the Fury of Achilles

By Robin Bates | Published: August 25, 2019

Monday Few news items have alarmed and depressed me as much as the burning of the Amazon rain forests, often called the “lungs of the world.” As National Geographic reports The Amazon rainforest—home to one in 10 species on Earth—is on fire. As of last week, 9,000 wildfires were raging simultaneously across the vast rainforest […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Amazon fires, climate change denial, global warming, Iliad, Jair Bolsonaro | Comments closed

Teach Game Theory through Greek Myths

By Robin Bates | Published: June 6, 2019

Friday The other day I stumbled across an American Economist article, written up in JSTOR Daily, arguing that teachers who want their students to retain the fundamentals of game theory should turn to Greek myths. Economist James D. Miller and classicist Debbie Felton explain their reasoning as follows: For professional economists, game theory is about […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Economics, Game Theory, Odyssey | Comments closed

We Need Barr to Be a Homeric Hero

By Robin Bates | Published: June 2, 2019

Monday Asked last week about damaging his legacy on behalf of Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr invoked Homer. “Everyone dies,” he said, “and I am not, you know, I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?” In […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Donald Trump, heroic ideal, Justice, Odyssey, William Barr | Comments closed

Will Odysseus Shape 2020 Election?

By Robin Bates | Published: April 14, 2019

Monday I won’t take credit for this but Washington Post’s Molly Roberts recently penned a very Better-Living-with Beowulf type column where she contrasted two Democratic presidential candidates by examining which version of the Odysseus/Ulysses story they prefer. Her piece gives me an excuse to apply other versions of the story to various 2020 contenders. Roberts […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged 2020 election, Aeneid, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Beto O'Rourke, Donald Trump, Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, Joe Biden, Joseph Campbell, Odyssey, Pete Buttigieg, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Virgil | Comments closed

Through Lit, We Learn Compassion

By Robin Bates | Published: January 8, 2019

Tuesday My brother Sam, an enthusiastic Unitarian Universalist, gave me Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life for Christmas, and I was pleased that the author sees literature playing a major role. In today’s post I share how she draws on the ancient Greeks. Armstrong writes, “All faiths insist that compassion is the test […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Prelude", Aeschylus, compassion, Eumenides, Euripides, Heracles, Iliad, Oedipus at Colonus, Oresteia, Sophocles, Tintern Abbey, William Wordsworth | Comments closed