Odyssey, the long journey home of the
battle-weary Odysseus after the Trojan
War represents the soul’s longing for
home, both temporally and eternally. The
truly blessed home is that place where we
are fully known and fully loved.
Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way will
introduce students to the great minds
of ancient Greece, shot through with
a clear Judeo-Christian perspective.
Lavish seminal quotations portray the
ancient’s continual pursuit of truth and
beauty, exposing the young scholar to an
appreciation for the birth of philosophy—
the love of wisdom. For Hamilton, an
understanding of the Greek way is essential
to true education. She shows deftly how
ancient Greece established the Western
foundations of art, literature, architecture,
sculpture, drama, tragedy, comedy,
philosophy, and science, and overarching
all is the relentless and intractable
pursuit of truth. As Hamilton notes, these
Athenians, “being free from masters they
used their freedom to think. For the first
time in the world the mind was free, free as
it hardly is today.” 3 We moderns would do
well to sit with Aristotle, Plato, Socrates,
Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes.
Their wisdom can inform and enlighten
our understanding of God and the
transcendent truth to which we ascribe as
Christians in a postmodern world.
In ancient Greece, the three Tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides—established the very foundation
of tragic drama in all its marvelous
complexity. Indeed, it is unlikely there
would have been a Shakespeare had he
not drunk at the spring of these ancient
Greeks. Isaac Asimov calls the three
Tragedians “the most important literary
figures, perhaps, between the time of
Homer and Shakespeare.” 4 Students who
have read Shakespeare in grammar school
will have little trouble following the
magnificence of Aeschylus’s Prometheus
Bound—where the noble Prometheus as
a messianic archetype suffers interminable
and inexorable pain for his love and service
to mankind. As Hamilton notes, this play
explores the “mystery of undeserved
suffering” and the great conundrum of
divine justice and fallen humanity.
In Oedipus Rex, the great tragedy
penned by Sophocles, the noble Oedipus
stands as a metaphor of how goodness and
evil can be resident within an individual.
Only through a painful and exacting
68 Summer 2010 z Styles: Charlotte Mason
process of anagnorisis—self-revelation—
can we see ourselves as we truly are. In
the following passage, the tragic Oedipus
realizes too late his true history and finds
his pride has brought his ruin. In much the
same way, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,
Brutus contemplates Caesar’s meteoric rise
to power through his prideful ambition.
The literary influence of the ancient Greek
poet upon Shakespeare is clear in this
comparison. Both texts present marvels of
metaphor, alliteration, and lyric beauty.
But tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition’s
ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns
his face,
But when he once attains the
upmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his
back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the
base degrees
By which he did ascend.
—Julius Caesar, II.I. 21–27
Pride is the germ of kings;
Pride, when puffed up, vainly, with
many things
Unseasonable, unfitting, mounts
the wall,
Only to hurry to that fatal fall,
Where feet are vain to serve her.
—Oedipus Rex
Moving from ancient Greece, where
we could easily spend an entire academic
year and only scrape the surface, we find
ourselves in Ancient Rome. Here, too,
are great minds and literary treasures to
mine. Every student studying this period
should undertake at least Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.
Shakespeare’s source for both of these
plays is Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Olivia
Coolidge’s Lives of Famous Romans is an
easily accessible abridgement of Plutarch
by an Oxford-trained scholar. Coolidge
has provided the same service in her
Caesar’s Gallic War, giving the modern
reader access to one of the most important
historical records of Roman conquest. A
novel of Rome set at the time of Nero is
Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz, who
won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1905.
The novel involves a beautiful Christian
convert named Ligia and a young Roman
