Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
I began with the desire to speak with the dead.
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. Life should be organized to serve the pursuit of happiness. There is no ethical purpose higher than facilitatin...
I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read. Much of the pleasure and interest of poetry depends on such attention. But it is nonetheless poss...
Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them...
Although the absurdity of the demagogue’s rhetoric was blatantly obvious, the laughter it elicited did not for a minute diminish its menace. Cade and his followers will not slink away because the trad...
On occasion monasteries tried to secure their possession by freighting their precious manuscripts with curses. For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, one of t...
It was Sir Thomas More, from whom Shakespeare borrowed so much of his portrait of Richard III, who put the matter most clearly almost a hundred years earlier: When I consider any social system that pr...
I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read.
A succession of murders clears the field of most of the significant impediments, actual or potential, to Richard's seizing power. But it is striking that Shakespeare does not envisage the tyrant's cli...
You needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything that alarms or eludes you. That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. If you can hold on to and re...
Venus and Adonis is a spectacular display of Shakespeare’s signature characteristic, his astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints....
Most teachers of the humanities lived itinerant lives, traveling from city to city, giving lectures on a few favorite authors, and then restlessly moving on, in the hope of finding new patrons.
If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?
Even in systems that have multiple moderating institutions, the chief executive almost always has considerable power. But what happens when that executive is not mentally fit to hold office? What if h...
Not regard copying manuscripts as an exalted activity; on the contrary, as they were highly aware, most of the copying in the ancient world had been done by educated slaves.
There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on t...
The key point, as Epicurus’ disciple Lucretius wrote in verses of unrivalled beauty, was to abandon the anxious and doomed attempt to build higher and higher walls and to turn instead toward the culti...
What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it?