A century and a half ago, Athens was a humble, forgotten city of about 8,000 people. Today, one out of every three Greeks packs into this city of over 3 million. The city is infamous for its sprawl, noise, and pollution. For a long time, my advice was to see the big sights, then get…

Commentary Previous installments in this series have covered four Greek scholars whose thought helped shape the American Constitution. (For links to previous installments, see the following: first, second, third, fourth, fifth.) This installment covers a later Greek scholar: Polybius. After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., the conqueror’s generals carved out large…

Have you ever heard someone describe something as sublime? Over the past 2,000 years, this lofty term has been explained, lost, reexamined, and re-explained. One of its earliest interpretations comes from the first-century Greek literary critic Longinus. “On the Sublime”—a text of uncertain authorship traditionally attributed to Longinus—he describes the sublime as that which “carries…