Classical Wisdom Litterae - April 2020

When I first decided on the topic for this month’s issue, I had no idea how significant the theme would be. At the time, the word ‘sacrifice’ was nothing more than an abstract idea, an action belonging to heroes, martyrs, and hooded barbarians. But now it’s much more than that... it’s a deed being performed by billions around the world. Right now we are sacrificing freedoms to help the vulnerable, sacrificing security or health to keep the world continuing, or even sacrificing our previous way of life in order to take care of ourselves and our families. This concept that we may feel so deeply and profoundly today, however, is very far removed to how it was practiced in the ancient world. Sure, there were times when their and our experiences of sacrifice overlapped... or at least existed in the same Venn diagram. Soldiers laying down their lives for their country, for example, and other such acts of patriotism. However, the majority of time, theirs was an almost incomprehensible version to us, one that did not translate through the extended gauntlet of time. Indeed, the form that their sacrifice took was often a bloody ritual, filled with chants and slicing of the throat, whether beast or human, performed with such frequency as to appear almost banal. But perhaps it is the very exoticness, quite foreign to our modern sensibilities, that captures our imagination so. As such, we’ve dedicated this month’s Classical Wisdom Litterae Magazine to the world of ancient sacrifice, stretching from the Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Romans, to the Druids and other such ‘barbarians’. Delve into this other domain and learn about a completely different type of sacrifice... Anya Leonard Founder and Project Director Classical Wisdom II