October 20: Odysseus Adrift on a Raft (Vol. 22, pp. 68-80)

More from Homer's "Odyssey" today, as the gods decree that our hero would be set adrift at sea to run into more troubles. Not much to recommend here.

October 19: Virtue in Smiles (Vol. 27, pp. 285-295)

Loss is always a hard thing to wrap one's head around, but who would think that in an age of stoics, one would encounter someone who believes tears "refresh the fever of the soul -- the dry misery which parches the countenance into furrow."

James Henry Leigh Hunt's essay today, "Deaths of Little Children," deals with the death of a child and the deep and inconsolable pain that comes with it. He writes how a dead child is frozen in time, an immortal child instead of a future man or woman. He aptly sums up how we the living grapple with the sorrow of a life ended too soon.

October 18: "If Winter Comes" (Vol. 41, pp. 329-335)

As you can tell from my previous posts, I'm not a big fan of poetry. And Shelley writes the kind of poetry that makes people hate poetry — overwrought, hyperemotional, overly sentimental.

Shelley could be considered the James Dean of English poets. He lived fast and died young at 30. That short life and poetry that's filled with romantic longing and yearning makes him a favorite of those of a certain age.

Are these the silly love songs of the early 19th century?

October 17: Reason His Only Religion (Vol. 3, pp. 253-265)

We get 17th century philosopher Thomas Browne's "Religio Medici" today, and it is wiggy, unreadable tripe -- a now-obscure rant on religion that doesn't make any sense. This is a good example of how a writer's reputation can fade upon the application of more critical judgments.

October 16: When Medicine Was a Mystery (Vol. 38, pp. 3-5)

The ancient Greeks may not have been terribly advanced in the practice of medicine, but at least Hippocrates had a good idea of the principles that a practitioner of medicine should have.

"With purity and holiness I will pass my life and practice my art," wrote Hippocrates in his oath. It called for devotion to the craft of medicine above all else. It was perhaps his greatest gift to the medical profession. The techniques and theories of medicine may have improved with the passage of 2,500 years, but the principle of disinterested service to others remains a critical part of medicine. That principle carries over into other endeavors, for a true professional lives his life with purity and practices his craft in a way that serves others.

Likewise for Hippocrates' observation that "timidity betrays a want of powers, and audacity a lack of skill. They are, indeed, two things, knowledge and opinion, of which the one makes its possessor really to know, the other to be ignorant."

Knowledge is the most important thing. It can overcome everything else. It's the only thing that matters.

October 15: First Families of America (Vol. 43, pp. 28-44)

Celebrating genocide seems to be the theme this week, with bits of imperialism thrown in for good measure. On this day in 1498, Americo Vespucci returned from his first voyage from what came to be called America.

Taken together with Columbus' letter from earlier this week, you can see that the age that the Harvard Classics were assembled in was an age where the white male was supreme and the darker hued folks were mere impediments to the spread of western "civilization."

That is the significant difference between a century ago -- when Columbus, Vespucci and the rest of the explorers were still considered heroes -- and our present age where we see them for what they really are.

"Revisionist" is often used as a slur in the field of history. But, in the case of historians such as Howard Zinn -- who told the story of America from the point of view of the conquered -- revisionist history is a necessary corrective to the original narrative. To not acknowledge the brutal subjugation of native peoples is to gloss over the original sin of the American story.

October 14: No Spice and Little Gold (Vol. 10, pp. 395-404)

Today's selection from Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" might have been better used as the Columbus Day reading, for in it, Smith looks at the failures of the Spanish conquistadors. The gold-crazed Columbus and those who followed him were doomed to fail, because finding gold is a crap shoot at best.

Smith writes that colonies traditionally serve as safety valves for increased population. When the existing land was filled, some other place had to be found to help absorb the excess. Also, colonies have the added benefit of providing extra security for the colonizing country -- at least that's how the Greeks and Romans approached it.

The Spanish colonizers of the New World in the 15th and 16th centuries were looking for riches, not territory. The lands Columbus found were abundant in natural resources, but that was not enough to justify their taking. It was gold they sought, and given the general defenselessness of the indigenous peoples, it was easy to strip them of the trinkets they had.

The thirst for gold and the failure to recognize its scarcity were the problems that doomed the Spaniards. Smith called it, "the most disadvantageous lottery in the world." Yet the Spaniards had, in Smith's words, "the absurd confidence which almost all men have in their own good fortune," and expected to find more gold and silver than actually existed.

Gold and silver have value because of its scarcity, Smith concluded. That the Spaniards were deluded into thinking otherwise was a big reason why they failed in their efforts to settle North America.