M

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.