From the Journal
Editorial essays from Virtue & Power — interpretive long-form on the questions classical philosophy returns to, written with the same source discipline as the library entries.
The essays are the platform’s interpretive surface. The library entries (on philosophers, books, themes) orient a reader; the essays argue. They are written to the same standards — primary sources, careful citation, no invented quotations — but they are willing to commit to a reading where the entries hold back.
Political philosophy
The settlement that preserved the forms of the Republic while concentrating its substance in a single ruler — and the long argument over whether it was the only available outcome.
Political philosophy
A reading of the late-Republican crisis through Caesar — what he changed, what was already changing, and the long argument over whether he killed the Republic or buried what was already dead.
Political philosophy
The two careers were not the same — and the European tradition has read them differently for the two thousand years since.
Political philosophy
The long working argument of his career — and the writings he produced in its last decade — read as the late Republic's most sustained attempt to articulate, in theory, what the practice was losing.
Political philosophy
Xenophon's Cyropaedia as the first sustained ancient inquiry into how a single ruler is formed, and why it has been read seriously for the two millennia since.
Political philosophy
What the ancient world admired in Sparta — and what it deliberately, knowingly chose against.
Political philosophy
How two careers — neither one entirely without justification — set the precedents that made the Republic's later collapse possible.
Political philosophy
Book VI of the Histories — the single most consequential surviving fragment of ancient political analysis, and what the European tradition that read it for two thousand years took from it.
Political philosophy
The civil war between two extraordinary careers — and the reason the senate's choice between them was less of a defence of the Republic than it pretended to be.
Political philosophy
How Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch and the long imperial historiography kept the political memory of the Republic alive as a working argument inside the regime that had replaced it.
Political philosophy
The two short monographs that gave the late Republic its most influential reading of itself — and the diagnosis the European moral tradition kept returning to.
Political philosophy
The biographical method the *Lives of the Twelve Caesars* developed — what it captured that the historians could not, and what the European tradition took from the technique.
Political philosophy
The argument the *Annales* and *Historiae* make, in the patient diagnostic Latin of a working senator, about what unbounded power does to the political character of those it touches.
Political philosophy
What Cicero's De Officiis tried to hold to — and what the long European tradition kept from it after the Republic it was written for was already gone.
Political philosophy
Livy, Sallust, Plutarch — and the Roman conviction that the past is the form in which a people teaches itself what it can still become.
Political philosophy
A reading of the most characteristic Roman intellectual habit — the conviction that the city's best generations had passed — and of why the European tradition received the habit so completely.
Political philosophy
The long European argument with the Roman political inheritance — what was kept, what was rejected, and why the rejection often went on reading the texts.
Political philosophy
Not a single act, but a long structural unwinding — what the ancient sources themselves understood it as, and why the question has not become a closed one in two thousand years.
Greek literature
Heroism, mortality and the obligation to one's people in the older substrate of Greek thought.
Moral and political philosophy
How the Parallel Lives read leadership through small incidents rather than great events, and what it means to take the genre seriously today.
Moral and political philosophy
Why the classical tradition treated unchecked authority as a deformation of the ruler before it became a danger to the ruled.
Ancient philosophy
Why classical philosophy was conducted by question and refutation, and what is lost when the practice is reduced to a teaching technique.
Moral and political philosophy
Why excellence of character alone rarely shapes the world it inhabits.