In 1862, at twenty-one, my great-great-grandfather John Hodges Wadhams left Goshen, Connecticut, to seek his fortune in the West. In 1992, almost exactly 130 years later, I began keeping seriously the journal of my own early adulthood. John was the son of an old Connecticut farming family. Church, town, party, father and Civil War suppliedContinue reading “The Court of Final Appeal”
Tag Archives: Achilles
Neoptolemus
We have already met him. Neoptolemus arrives on Lemnos as the younger man Odysseus brings to retrieve Philoctetes and the bow of Heracles. He resists the deception Odysseus requires. That is Neoptolemus at his best: resistant to manipulation, not yet corrupted by the compromises of war. Sophocles gives him dignity in that moment of resistance.Continue reading “Neoptolemus”
Odysseus
Odysseus did not want to go to war. When the oath he had devised to bind the other kings was called due and the kings of Greece gathered for Troy, he attempted to escape it. He yoked an ox and a donkey to the same plow and drove them in erratic lines across the field,Continue reading “Odysseus”
Protective Arts 