Unknown artist and date, The Pilgrimage to Canterbury
Unknown artist and date, The Pilgrimage to Canterbury
4,059 words
Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)
There’s an old story within a story told by a pilgrim knight about ancient Thebes and two Theban cousins named Arcite and Palamon.[1] According to everyone who knew them, no two warriors were more perfect. (more…)
Horace Vernet, Napoleon at Jena: “En Avant!”
Horace Vernet, Napoleon at Jena: “En Avant!”
1,990 words
1. Homer, Iliad. W. C. Bryant, trans. Perth, Aus.: Imperium Press, 2019, 576 pp.: While everyone knows the story, few people today have actually read it. You can bet that almost every great military commander in Western history read it. Composed during the Greek “Dark Ages” and (probably) based on a real event, Iliad is an echo of the even earlier Bronze Age — of war’s power at its all-encompassing, glorious, and terrible pinnacle. (more…)
6,299 words
Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
Dante’s Inferno
Dante Alighieri’s conceptual map of Hell also lay at the intersection where biblical and classical ideas about the afterlife crossed. Virgil, fellow Italian poet and ancient Roman author of the Æneid, accompanied him during much of his journey, for Virgil was someone who had imagined his own hero Aeneas successfully navigating the underworld. (more…)
5,781 words
Guillaume Durocher
The Ancient Ethnostate: Biopolitical Thought in Classical Greece
Self-published, 2021
It almost goes without saying that any book written today by someone from the Dissident Right on the subject of Classical Greece will be more accurate to the spirit of antiquity and more honest about the racial realities that underlie it than anything that could be published in contemporary academia. This book gives a good survey of the history, culture, and ideas of key writers of various sorts in Ancient Greece. (more…)
Nietzsche at age 18.
Nietzsche at age 18.
3,017 words
In the Alps I am unconquerable, that is, when I am alone and have no enemy other than myself. — Nietzsche, letter to Malwida von Meysenburg
Friedrich Nietzsche remains the most enigmatic of philosophers. Claimed by both the political Left and Right over the 121 years since his death (by which time he had been incurably insane for 11 years), the Lutheran pastor’s son left a philosophical legacy which remains mysterious, and yet to the “philosophers of the future” for whom Nietzsche wrote, ultimately uplifting even in its ominous predictions for the Western culture to which he felt he was a physician. (more…)
5,071 words
“And there was the Odyssey, whose vigorously sonorous, measured numbers gave an intimation of a vanished, clearly articulated and joyous life.” – Hermann Hesse[1]
“An easily forgotten fact of cultural history [is] the radical, white-to-black, up-and-then-down variations in the periodic estimates of men and works. . . . To the Renaissance, Cicero was the supreme man of letters; today he has been banished even from the classroom.“ — Jacques Barzun[2] (more…)
942 Wörter
Übersetzt von Le Fauconnier
Für die Ältesten war Homer “der Anfang, die Mitte und das Ende”. Eine Weltanschauung und sogar eine Philosophie leiten sich implizit aus seinen Gedichten ab. Heraklit hat den kosmischen Sockel mit einer formulierung gut zu ihm zusammengefasst: “Das Universum, das für alle Wesen gleich ist, wurde von keinem Gott oder menschen geschaffen;sondern es war immer, ist und wird ewig lebendiges Feuer sein . . .” (more…)
Illustration of a firebird by Kay Nielsen in Hansel and Gretel & Other Stories (1925)
Illustration of a firebird by Kay Nielsen in Hansel and Gretel & Other Stories (1925)
6,744 words
Yet more and greater ills by land remain.
The coast, so long desir’d . . .
Thy troops shall reach, but, having reach’d, repent.
Wars, horrid wars, I view a field of blood,
And Tiber rolling with a purple flood.
— The Æneid [1]
I hope Counter-Currents readers are enjoying the first flush of spring and continue to find moments of happiness despite all the petty Javerts in our midst. (more…)
Detail, Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus boasting to Polyphemus, 1896.
Detail, Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus boasting to Polyphemus, 1896.
1,772 words
Anyone with a decent education knows that the Iliad and Odyssey concern the fall of Troy and the struggle of Odysseus against a series of eldritch terrors on his voyage homeward. The timeless appeal is clear; the style is quite gripping, which especially comes out if one has a good translation or happens to know Greek. (more…)
Michael Drolling, The Wrath of Achilles, 1819.
Michael Drolling, The Wrath of Achilles, 1819.
1,636 words
Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays. Along with eating turkey and pumpkin pie, it is a day where I reflect on all the things that I am thankful for in my life. As our governments take advantage of the COVID lockdowns to impose draconian measures and the Great Reset, I found myself feeling more angry than thankful (more…)
2,507 words
Donna Zuckerberg
Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018
Homer
The Odyssey
Translated by Emily Wilson
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017 (more…)
