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July 7th

OUR DUTY TO LEARN

“This is what you should teach me, how to be like Odysseus—how

to love my country, wife and father, and how, even after suffering

shipwreck, I might keep sailing on course to those honorable

ends.”

—SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 88.7b

any schoolteachers teach The Odyssey all wrong. They teach the
dates, they debate whether Homer was really the author or not,
whether he was blind, they explain the oral tradition, they tell students what
a Cyclops is or how the Trojan Horse worked.
Seneca’s advice to someone studying the classics is to forget all that.
The dates, the names, the places—they hardly matter. What matters is the
moral. If you got everything else wrong from The Odyssey, but you left
understanding the importance of perseverance, the dangers of hubris, the
risks of temptation and distraction? Then you really learned something.
We’re not trying to ace tests or impress teachers. We are reading and
studying to live, to be good human beings—always and forever.