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Caught that did you! 😆
Pericles, to me, was the ideal statesman. He personified the law and the essence that was Ancient Greek Civilization. Pisisstratus was nothing but the first Greek tyrant....a usurper, but still mild by our standards of tyrants. Themistocles was the great leader in battle--perhaps the real Agamemnon of Greek history, as was Leonidas for the Spartans. The rest were lawgivers of various degree. Lycurgus was perhaps the wisest, and Draco the harshest.....with Damocles, Cylon, and Solon somewhere in between. Alexander is in a whole new category. His conquests speak for themselves, but do winning wars make him greater than the others?
The question to be considered is, why do historians perceive these Greek leaders to be so great? What were their contributions to Western Civilization beyond the legends that surround their names?I like Robert Bork….I wish he had been confirmed. As for the ones who were confirmed, I like Scalia and Thomas is a close second. What are your thoughts on Warren Burger? ❓
Yes the influence is very noticeable, but not from the children of the revivals. Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, Samuel Davies, and Theordore Frelinghuysen might not have all approved of independence. Most of them I suspect (because of their devotion to Calvinism) would have been loyalists being the more conservative minded ideologically. The real radicals politically would have been Charles Chauncy, Ezra Stiles, Timothy Dwight, and Jonathan Mayhew who were either critics of enthusiastic religion or were traditionalists in other ways. James Davenport and Isaac Backus, however, fit neither mold. Edwards loved British society and made friends with George Whitefield and Isaac Watts. The connection to see, though, is the ideological rhetoric that was crafted during the Great Awakening later used in a political way. The fight for religious tolerance and tithing to Standing Order churces by dissenting sects, created the skeleton for the arguments colonials used in refusing to pay taxes without representation. All I’m saying is that the Great Awakening evoked subtle changes in political thinking, but the primary figures of the revivals might have been just as likely to be loyalists as patriots. Perhaps the French and Indian War did more to accelerate the maturation of the Awakening’s influence than anything else. But that is another thread for another day. 😉
I’m going to go with Napoleon. He was created from the excessive humanism that engulfed the French Revolution. He became the embodiment of humanity’s vanity and despair. He turned those convulsions into a rabid nationalism that foreshadowed Nazi Germany. Where Robespierre and Marat failed, Napoleon succeeded in harvesting the unchecked passions of a nation drunk on the wine of frenzied egalitarianism. The insidiousness of the Napoleonic Wars and the tragic fall of a nation who believed in his false dawn, to me is more evil than anything. Of course Hitler took this scenario to its fullest extreme, but had Napoleon rose to power in 1933 rather than Hitler, I surmise that his genius would have made the world suffer twice that it did under the terrors of the Third Reich.
Secession was technically legal in 1861, but now it is not. The irony was that Southerners (Madison, Jefferson, Pinckney etc…) contributed the most to the creation of the Constitutuion. Southerners had such a tremendous amount of influence over the fashioning of our early republic that it seems almost hypocritical of them to turn their backs on it when it began to threaten their interests. Some have argued that if Lincoln had allowed the Southern states to secede, they would have eventually negotiated to return to the union. As a matter of fact, some have argued that Lincoln pushed the South into secession by not dispelling their fears of his political views. At any rate, the Civil War was avoidable, but it had been brewing since the 1840’s. Only the Mexican War and the efforts of Henry Clay postponed a civil war from happening much earlier. Some might not realize that John Calhoun’s Nullification Theory was actually first introduced at the Constitutional Convention when Massachusetts threatened to secede because it feared Virginia was going to dominate the new nation. America was a nation founded on compromises and when those compromises ceased to satisfy the interests of all sections, the republic’s delicate structure collapsed. The dark memories of our Civil War, and the increasing complexity of our economy, and the changing world around us has reconstituted our political thinking into a more unified national structure, but underneath this more stable structure lies deep rooted fractures that threaten to tear it apart again if neglected.
the founder’s non-theistic Deism
Careful. There is no historical consensus that the Founders were Deists aside from Jefferson and Franklin. Deism is not necessarily non-theistic (just think about it....non-theistic Deism?). Actually Jefferson did believe in God, but he disputed God's role in everyday life. He saw God as the great watchmaker who wound up creation and set it in motion and remained content to let it run its course. No one really knows how deeply religious Madison was, but it was completely certain both he and Jefferson were adamant that religion should play a role in government as the conscience of the people.Phidippides:
You are correct it was Henry VIII. I told you it had been a long times since I dealt with this area of history! 😆 I've always had a hard time keeping track of all those Tudors and Stuarts and what not. I do plan on shoring up my British history when I enter a doctoral program.....hopefully William and Mary. Henry wanted that divorce and More parted ways with his king which cost him his head. Thomas More was sainted by the Catholic Church in 1935.Of course the burden of proof is always on the plaintiff so they have to have a higher standard of presented facts to win, accept in civil trials where reasonable doubt is not a component of the burden of proof. I see what you are saying. I was in a labor arbitration case where the defendant (my union president) had three eyewitnesses that he was assaulted by a supervisor, and language in the collective bargaining agreement to support his position, but still the Arbitrator (a Juridical Phd. professor at Northern Kentucky University and a former judge) decided in favor of the Company we work for. Needless to say I was miffed when my testimony was rendered irrelevant and the supervisor walked away victorious and my union president lost his job. I lost faith in the arbitration process and if it ever happens to me, I will waive my Weingarten rights and my collective bargaining agreement in favor of an attorney. I won’t be chumped like that without a legal fight. 😡
I haven’t found the time to read the irreverent pagan’s little diatribe against religion. 😆
I'll get around to it some day. I liked Thomas More and Erasmus better, but it's been so long since I read Utopia and The Praise of Folly I can't hardly remember them. Just goes to show, if you don't use it, you lose it. By the way, did you know that More and Erasmus were best friends? Erasmus wrote to More while he was imprisoned in the London Tower for not bowing to James' religous expectations. Oh, and while I'm on the subject, I want to find the time to read Spencer's The Faerie Queene, too. 😀Yeah, the Inquisition replaced the Crusaders and the Protestants, Jews, and other non-Catholics replaced the Saracens. Of course I am over generalizing a bit. 🙄
All I'm saying is once Jerusalem was lost and it became abundantly clear it was not going to be regained any time soon, the focus of attention turned inward to European politics and religion. Islam was a powerful unifier while the struggles raged, but once they ended, Christendom fell apart at the seams proving "Christendom" had been a myth from the get go.So where does Yoda fit in? I’m sure there are some parallels, but my knowledge of Greek poems has faded enough that I can’t draw any offhand. Nevertheless, best line – “Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try.”
Yoda could either be Creon from Sophocles' Oedipal Trilogy or old Nestor from the Iliad.
