I really need to say a special thank you to my friend Sydnie, since she sent me an awesome book while I was away on deployment about the Peloponnesian War. I'm still working my way through it, but at over halfway through I can pretty confidently say at this point that it's one of the best books I've read since my last deployment, when I read the Eric Metaxas biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Quite interestingly, both of these books pertain to what I intend to discuss; namely, the concept of standing on one's principles.
The Peloponnesian War, for those who are unfamiliar, was the last great war of Classical Greece, fought between Athens and Sparta and their various allies from 431 to 404 BC. It came only fifty years after a united Greece had turned away the Second Persian invasion of King Xerxes, made famous by the movie "300". Whereas the former Greek allies had first held the Persians in a dramatic standoff at the Battle of Thermopylae, and then finally defeated the "god-king" at the battle of Plataea, now after thirty years of unbroken peace the former allies found themselves bitter rivals fighting a long, vicious war for control of Greece. It was the last great war because it reduced both sides after thirty years of hard fighting to devastated shells of their former selves, and paved the way for the Macedonian invasion which gave rise to the empire of Alexander the Great (and eventually along came the Romans).
What does that have to do with Orlando and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, you ask? First of all, you should know that Dietrich Bonhoeffer attended Tubingen university in the early 1920s, where he joined a fraternity called the Hedgehogs. The name was a reference to a well-known literary quotation from the Classical Greek poet Archilochus, who coined the expression, "the fox knows many tricks, but the hedgehog knows one good one."
The Peloponnesian War, for those who are unfamiliar, was the last great war of Classical Greece, fought between Athens and Sparta and their various allies from 431 to 404 BC. It came only fifty years after a united Greece had turned away the Second Persian invasion of King Xerxes, made famous by the movie "300". Whereas the former Greek allies had first held the Persians in a dramatic standoff at the Battle of Thermopylae, and then finally defeated the "god-king" at the battle of Plataea, now after thirty years of unbroken peace the former allies found themselves bitter rivals fighting a long, vicious war for control of Greece. It was the last great war because it reduced both sides after thirty years of hard fighting to devastated shells of their former selves, and paved the way for the Macedonian invasion which gave rise to the empire of Alexander the Great (and eventually along came the Romans).
What does that have to do with Orlando and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, you ask? First of all, you should know that Dietrich Bonhoeffer attended Tubingen university in the early 1920s, where he joined a fraternity called the Hedgehogs. The name was a reference to a well-known literary quotation from the Classical Greek poet Archilochus, who coined the expression, "the fox knows many tricks, but the hedgehog knows one good one."
RSS Feed
