He had a simple and straightforward request. That his son Theseus would let him know if he’d been successful in killing the Minotaur by raising the white sales upon returning home. If he’d been unsuccessful or died trying, Aegeus asked his son to raise the black sails, so he would…

Abstract terms and all-embracing metaphors have no currency here, off the northern coast of sunstruck Sardinia, the wind blows them away, the sea swallows them with the avidity of an ancient sea monster. …

For the ancients, the barbarian was someone who had a speech defect. Barbaros, said the Greeks, was someone who sounded like gibberish. Blabla, bar bar. A speech defect, therefore a thinking or cognitive defect. A cognitive defect, therefore a substantial or being defect. The barbarians were the utterly different, the…

The trouble with language is that it can’t be trusted. No matter what we do, it still ends up betraying us. There are tensions in any language as there are in any human group. Structure is never stable. Relationships are never to be fully trusted. …

Ancient drama is great because it is true. The humour is true, the fine analysis of the human condition is true, the problems, conundrums and paradoxes it reveals are all true. We still go back to them. …

In addition to being a period of ignorance, superstition, illiteracy and unchallenged authority, the Middle Ages have a reputation of being a time of silly certainties, cozy resignation, cognitive autopiloting and simple-mindedness. But the medieval men and women were as prone to restlessness and anxiety as humans have always been…

It is an evolutionary cultural thing that Horace’s adage ‘Carpe diem’ became world famous, while Seneca’s pronouncement ‘Omnia tempus edax depascitur, omnia carpit’, hasn’t made it beyond the Latin textbooks and classroom. Voracious time devours everything, time seizes everything, writes Seneca the Younger in Epistle 107. …

Whatever humans touch turns to status. High or low, always relative to other things and to other people. Nothing escapes the status game, not even language. There is one thing invented in the medieval West which we rarely think about: languages. Not one, but several. With the collapse of the…

We know that Dante found himself in a dark wood, but we aren’t told where he had been before. He didn’t choose the road, the road chose him, by procuration. For he had lost the straight path. It is also unclear where the straight path would have led. Not to…