June 14: A Philosopher Prefers Prison Cell (Vol. 2, pp. 31-43)

Socrates and Crito are sitting around talking in this passage from Plato's "Crito." Socrates was presented with the opportunity to escape his death row cell, but refused. He insisted on dying with the integrity he lived by, even though he was sentenced to die on false pretenses. The man definitely had some big stones.

June 13: Athens Flouts Aristides (Vol. 12, pp. 85-94)

Athenians called Aristides "The Just." Of course, with a moniker like that, people are going to get tired of you after a while. Sure enough, they did and banished him from Athens for no other reason than just being tired of his presense. Plutarch tells the story today and it's great reading.

June 12: Vishnu Holds Up a Battle (Vol. 45, pp. 785-798)

It still seems rather astounding that a group of white Anglo-Saxton Protestants would include the Bhagavad-Gita in the Harvard Classics. But I guess they weren't so uptight that they could recognize merit in Hindu literature. That said, this selection of the first two chapters is still gibberish to me.

June 11: He Sang of His Beautiful Elizabeth (Vol. 40, pp. 234-245)

The English poet Edmund Spenser married his beloved, Elizabeth Boyle, on this day in 1594, so we get a selection from "The Epithalamium," the poem he wrote to commemorate that happy day. It's windy and overwrought like most things Elizabethian (the Queen, that is, don't know much about Ms. Boyle).

June 10: Horrible Prophesy Fulfilled (Vol. 8, pp. 209-223)

The start of Sophocles' "Oedipus," the play about the man who "really loved his mother," as Tom Lehrer once sang.

June 9: Enchanting Songs of David (Vol. 44, pp. 168-179)

We get the Book of Psalms today, starting with No. 23 and ending with No. 31. It's a brief sample of the beseeching and praying of David to his God.

June 8: Eloquence Wins Over Predjudice (Vol. 1, pp. 302-312)

On this day in 1772, John Woolman arrived in London to meet with that city's Quakers. He died of smallpox a few months afterward. This selection from Woolman's "Journal" shows the piety that makes his writing a bit hard to take, a common affliction of writers in this series.