The Human RenaissanceAn old man enters the shelter of the man who killed his son. A young woman buries her brother against the king’s command. A philosopher asks a prosperous citizen why he has taken such trouble over his reputation and so little over his soul. Open the books and they begin again. The Ancient Greek Way is an invitation to keep company with them.
Its subject is the art of being human: how to desire, how to bear loss, how to enjoy the world, how to live with other people, and how to use power without becoming its servant. Greek literature gives those questions bodies and voices. Before courage becomes a definition, someone must stand his ground. Before justice becomes a principle, a body lies outside the city walls and someone must decide whether to bury it. Edith Hamilton opened that world to me.
I reached her through Robert Kennedy, and through him reached Aeschylus. The encounter became part of a difficult life: years of reading, failures I could not read my way around, a classroom in Detroit, work in politics, friendships, a marriage. Those experiences enter these pages where they help make a question visible. The questions belong to the reader as much as to me. There is pleasure here.
There had better be. A civilization that left us comedy, love poetry, athletic contests, conversations beside a river, and arguments about the best kind of dinner deserves something livelier than a manual for enduring catastrophe. The Greeks could be terrible to one another. They could also be astonishingly glad to be alive. I want room for that gladness, including the kind that arrives before we have earned it by putting our affairs in order.
The book moves through Self, State, and Cosmos: from the difficulty of knowing and governing a life, through friendship, education, and citizenship, to the powers now placed in human hands. The Human Renaissance is the name I give the hope running through those movements: that increased human capability can be joined to a more demanding education of human judgment. The ancient Greeks disagree with one another. So do their interpreters. Socrates is not Aristotle; Epicurus is not a Stoic; the voice of a tragic character is not automatically the judgment of the playwright.
Greek freedom also coexisted with slavery and exclusion. An honest encounter makes room for those difficulties. Admiration should sharpen our attention enough to notice what a beautiful account leaves out. I write as an American bringing these works into the country and the life I know. A mixed family, a public school classroom, a congressional office, a friendship strained by politics: these are places where inherited arguments acquire consequences.
America has its own history, its own injuries, and its own promises. Athens cannot settle them for us. It can give us a more exacting conversation about what we are doing. You need no prior knowledge of Greek to enter. A name will arrive with a person, a term with a problem, a work with enough of its setting to make the encounter possible.
At the back are paths into the texts themselves. This book will have served its purpose if you eventually find that a passage in Homer or Sophocles has become more necessary to you than my account of it. Begin with the person on the page. Stay long enough to discover what troubles your first judgment. There is a great deal of life waiting there.
Writer, educator & civic leader. The Eternal Renaissance · The Human Renaissance.
About the author →