Names, texts, and terms that recur across the essays and blog — a working reference, added to as the writing goes.
Achilles
The central hero of Homer’s Iliad, given a choice between a long, obscure life and an early death followed by undying fame — and who chose fame. His fury at the death of his friend Patroclus, and his eventual mercy toward Priam, run through discussions of anxiety, mortality, and glory.
Alexandre Dumas, fils
French novelist and playwright, son of the elder Alexandre Dumas, best known for La Dame aux Camélias (1848), the novel behind Verdi’s opera La Traviata.
Arachne
A weaver in Greek myth who wove a tapestry depicting the transgressions of the gods, then paid the price for outshining Athena. A figure for art that dares to indict its own subject.
Aristotle
Greek philosopher and student of Plato, credited with the concept of “essence” — that a thing can have a nature fully comprehended in itself, apart from any particular instance of it.
Augustus
Rome’s first emperor, adopted heir of Julius Caesar, who completed the transformation of the Republic into an imperial autocracy.
Bertrand Russell
Twentieth-century philosopher and mathematician who dismissed Aristotelian “essence” as an empty idea, and who ran an experimental school built on the premise that children needed little structure.
Blaise Pascal
Seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician who divided people into three kinds: those who have found God and serve him, those who seek him without finding, and those who neither seek nor find.
Cato
Shorthand for the Roman statesman Cato and his political heirs, who stood for the old Republic and its Senate against the drift toward one-man rule — the losing, principled side that “pleased” the gods of Lucan’s poem not with victory but with virtue.
Giuseppe Verdi
Italian composer of La Traviata, Aida, and the Requiem, among many others. Verdi’s own life — an agnostic, living for years out of wedlock with Giuseppina Strepponi — shadows the sympathy of his operas for women outside respectable society.
Giuseppina Strepponi
Former soprano and voice teacher who lived with Giuseppe Verdi for years before their eventual marriage; her life outside convention is part of the backdrop to La Traviata.
Goethe’s Faust
Goethe’s lifelong dramatic project (begun in his twenties, finished in his eighties), whose restless, striving protagonist embodies the tension between everyday concern and the deeper realities — mortality above all — that press in on him.
Heraclitus
Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of flux and paradox, remembered here for the observation that a dog barks at what it doesn’t understand.
Iphigenia
Daughter of Agamemnon, sacrificed at Aulis so the Greek fleet could sail for Troy — a story read alongside Jepthah’s daughter as another child’s life spent for a father’s victory.
Jepthah
A judge of Israel (Judges 11–12) whose rash vow to God, made in the flush of victory, costs him his only daughter. A study in vows, honor, and the silence of God.
Jonathan Edwards
Colonial American theologian and Great Awakening preacher, buried at Princeton — encountered there as a reminder of how unaware we usually are of the past pressing on our own ground.
Julius Caesar
Roman general and dictator whose rise to sole power ended the Republic in all but name, and set the pattern his heirs would complete.
Kierkegaard, Søren
Danish philosopher, author of The Sickness Unto Death, who distinguished despair over not having a self, despair at not willing to be oneself, and despair at willing to be oneself — the last opening onto the possibility of surrender to God.
La Traviata
Verdi’s 1853 opera, adapted from Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias, following the courtesan Violetta toward love, sacrifice, and death.
Lucan
Roman poet (39–65 A.D.), author of the Pharsalia (also called the Civil War), an epic lament for the fall of the Republic. His criticism of Nero earned him an order to take his own life at twenty-five.
Nebuchadnezzar
The Babylonian king of the Book of Daniel, whose dream of a great tree cut down to a bronze-and-iron-bound stump becomes a meditation on pride, essence, and what remains of a man who forgets his roots.
Nero
Roman emperor whose vanity and cruelty made him the emblem of tyranny for later writers — including Lucan, whom he forced to suicide at twenty-five.
Paris (the Judgment of Paris)
The Trojan prince asked to judge a beauty contest among three goddesses, each offering a bribe — power, victory, or the world’s most beautiful woman. His choice of Aphrodite’s offer, Helen, starts the Trojan War.
Plato
Aristotle’s teacher, whose long inquiries into the meaning of “the good” prompted Aristotle’s own concept of essence, and who, with Aristotle, warned against the dangers of concentrated, unaccountable power.
Priam
The aged king of Troy who goes, under cover of night and a god’s protection, to beg Achilles for the return of his son Hector’s body.
Thucydides
Ancient Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War, held up as the model of the historian who investigates the past rather than flattering the present.