Quintus Curtius

We begin with a few recommendations on books and resources to use in understanding Dante's "Divine Comedy." Then we switch gears, and get into the meat of the podcast. It seems we become substantially different people every seven to ten years, more or less. We may feel self-conscious or uncomfortable about the things we said, wrote, or believed when we were younger. Is it normal to feel this way? And is it better to preserve a record of one's thought, or to renounce beliefs one no longer holds? We discuss.

Rights and liberties that have been won by past generations will not remain won without active and forceful advocacy by successive generations. Systems of power and control will inevitably regroup and counterattack, and seek to roll back the clock. This is happening all around us now. Those who are unwilling to assert their rights, and unwilling to protect what past generations earned, will find themselves stripped of their patrimony.

In an 1842 letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle chastised Emerson, saying, "A man has no right to say to his generation, turning away from it, 'Be Damned!' It is the whole past and the whole future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, I tell you." What did he mean by this? And what importance does Carlyle's admonition have for us today? We discuss.

In this podcast I describe unforgettable images that emerge from the aftermaths of certain battles. We discuss Livy's description of the battlefield after Cannae, a scene in Dante, and an anecdote from the American Civil War.

In this podcast we take a quote from Seneca, discuss its meaning, and apply it to some modern life lessons.