The old books............................

Victor Davis Hanson suggests that we should dust off the classics and refresh our memory about the timeless lessons they contain again.  A few examples:

"In the tragic world, thousands of personal agendas, governed by predictable human nature, ensure that things do not always quite work the way they should. We can learn from classics that most of us are more likely to resent superiority than to reward it, to distrust talent than to develop it."

"The idea of the need for a daily struggle to survive to keep moral balance is best explored in the great tetrad of Roman imperial pessimists — Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius, and Tacitus. If late republicans like Horace and Livy had hinted that a rich, globalized Roman Mediterranean was destroying the old rural Italian virtue, then the later four chronicled in graphic detail just how — and how fun it was to squander what others far better for seven centuries had bequeathed."

"The world of fourth-century Athens is one of constant squabbling over a shrinking pie: 'Don’t dare raid the free theater fund to build a warship. Pay me to vote. Give me a pension for my bad leg. The rich should pay their fair share. You didn’t build that. That’s my inheritance, not yours. Exile, confiscate, even kill those who have too much power of influence.' It is not that the Athenians cannot grow their economy as in the past, but that they despise those among them who think they still can."