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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Dostoevsky and Lutheranism, the Real Socrates, and Making Sense of Caesar

Also: Robinson Jeffers after WWII, a history of The Club, and more.
Alcibades_being_taught_by_Socrates,_François-André_Vincent

The poet Robinson Jeffers opposed America’s entry into the Second World War after Pearl Harbor. It made him persona non grata in American letters: “When ‘Pearl Harbor’ and other poems were collected in The Double Axe (1948), the appalled publisher added an extremely unusual disclaimer: ‘Random House feels compelled to go on record with its disagreement over some of the political views pronounced by the poet in this volume.’ If the author had been anyone less prestigious than Jeffers, now a Grand Old Poet, they would have much preferred to refuse publication. The affair shows how far the U.S. political spectrum had shifted since December 1941.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky didn’t care much for Lutheranism, but one of his favorite books growing up was a retelling of popular Bible stories by a Lutheran schoolmaster.

J. R. R. Tolkien’s son Christopher has not only faithfully cared for his father’s literary legacy, he has increased it: “Tolkien’s inability to finish the stories of the Elder Days, The Silmarillion, along with his exhaustion after 11 years of writing The Lord of the Rings, frustrated his own desires. Additionally, the British government continued to impose its own wartime restrictions on paper, even into the 1950s. Tolkien’s publisher had originally wanted and expected a sequel to The Hobbit, not an epic covering thousands and thousands of years, written with the depth and feeling of The Aeneid. Even after the successful publication and critical reception of The Lord of the Ringsand his own retirement from teaching, Tolkien found it painful to finish The Silmarillionand his own mythology. He often spent his time instead on questions best left to his publisher and writing gorgeous essays on the philosophical and theological implications of his created world. It would take Tolkien’s son, Christopher, four years after his father’s death to compile and publish The Silmarillion. Even then, in 1977, it remained more a beautiful outline than a true representation of the early mythology. From there, though, Christopher’s output was nothing short of stunning.”

“Plato’s Socrates is an eccentric.” Was the real Socrates more worldly, Armand D’Angour asks in Aeon?

A history of The Club: “If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men disappearing up the stairs to a private room. The Club, as Leo Damrosch explains in this group biography of its members, was a dining, drinking and debating society for some of the leading lights of the age, established by Samuel Johnson and the portraitist Joshua Reynolds in 1764 to lift Johnson’s spirits as he struggled to complete his edition of Shakespeare’s plays. At its high point in the 1770s it brought together Johnson and Reynolds, James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith and David Garrick.”

The bohemian posters (and life) of Toulouse-Lautrec: “The half-pint hedonist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born in 1864…He emerged from this shallow gene pool with a cartoonish physiognomy, and an unknown genetic disorder that caused his legs to break in his early teens. They did not heal properly. In a plot whose tidy sentimentality could have been devised by Barnum or Dickens, Toulouse-Lautrec’s exclusion from ordinary physical activity sharpened his eye. The lightness and mobility denied to Toulouse-Lautrec by his faulty legs emerged from his hand.”

Essay of the Day:

Who was Julius Caesar? Among other things, Joseph Epstein argues in First Things, he was “the wrong man at the wrong time”:

“Even before Caesar’s rise, evidence was beginning to accumulate that the Roman Empire was becoming too vast and unwieldy to continue in business under traditional republican political arrangements. One such arrangement was the republic’s seemingly admirable term limits of one year for each of its two consuls, with a ten-year stint required between holding a second consulship. At the end of their terms, the two consuls went off under the title proconsul to govern one of the ever-increasing number of Roman provinces, often enriching themselves there by plunder. Elections to the various magistracies, including that of consul, were becoming corrupted by bribery and unredeemable promises. The Roman citizen-soldier, the finest in the ancient world, perhaps the finest ever, was more and more being replaced in the Roman army by foreign auxiliaries and mercenaries fighting under the Roman eagle. Empires, as ­Montesquieu held, seem at their most stable when they are expanding; they apparently cannot bear too lengthy periods of peace. Peace, somehow, in Rome was an encouragement to civil war.

“Julius Caesar, a true freelance, was the wrong man at the wrong time—wrong, that is, if saving the republic was the name of one’s desire. No party or faction in Rome was strong enough to resist him. Alea iacta est, the die is cast, Caesar is supposed to have said when he crossed the Rubicon and brought his legions into Rome. Caesar was an inveterate gambler, tossing the dice on many occasions, a gambler upon whom fortune seemed never to frown. But he had more than fortune alone going for him. He had an indomitable army, the support of the sprawling Roman population, and an apparently unslakable appetite for power. After the crushing effect of lengthy civil war, one-man rule must have been viewed by most Romans as a relief. The only thing in question was whether he, Caesar, wished to rise to the abominable title of king—though many felt he was already that without the title.

“Given the roll of honors lavished on Julius Caesar after his victories in Gaul and his crushing defeat of the shaky partnership of Pompey, Cato, and Metellus Scipio, the title of king might have seemed a downgrade. These honors included a life-dictatorship; the title imperator before his name, pater patriae after it; a statue of him set among former kings; a ceremonial chariot to carry his statue in religious processions round the circus; a golden throne in the senate; divine status (divus Iulius), with all its accoutrements; and other honors that, as Suetonius writes, ‘as a mere mortal he should certainly have refused.’ Far from refusing these honors, Caesar not only accepted them all but sometimes in doing so showed his contempt for them.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Illuminated ice

Poem: Ernest Hilbert, “We Make Mountains So We May Move Them”

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