Tag Archives: Pericles Funeral Oration

By Justin D. Lyons, Contributing Writer, Classical Wisdom Today we think of Thucydides as one of the first historians. Yet perhaps that word is a bit misleading, or at least doesn’t paint the full picture.   In his Poetics, Aristotle distinguishes the historian from the philosopher and the poet. History is not philosophic because it deals

By David Hooker, Contributing Writer, Classical Wisdom Weekly “Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” So said  the 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his magnum opus, Leviathan. It is a stark and negative statement, to be sure. Of course, Hobbes had in mind that the life of ordinary people would go much better under

It is the close of the first year of the Peloponnesian war. Athens, no stranger to war, finds itself mourning those who had fallen on the field of battle, the sons and fathers lost. As was customary in Athens the bodies of the deceased had been collected and displayed under a tent for three days.