December 14: Pastoral Poems and Politics (Vol. 40, pp. 370-379)

The 17th century poet and essayist Andrew Marvell is featured today with a group of his poems. Nothing particularly striking about his work to these eyes.

December 13: To the South Seas with the Gallant Drake (Vol. 33, pp. 199-208)

Sir Francis Drake departed for the South Seas on this day in 1577, so we get more heroic narrative from the so-called Golden Age of Exploration. Of course, the heroic part depends on who's telling the story. Since Sir Francis is telling the tale, he comes off much better.

While Drake was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe and was acclaimed as the greatest seafarer of his age, any of these accounts viewed through modern eyes have to fully account for the realization that one man's "discovery" is another man's genocide in the making.

Of course, when the Harvard Classics were assembled, no one cared about the fate of the indigenous peoples who were "discovered." Historians have since corrected that oversight.

December 12: How the Glorious News was Carried to Aix (Vol. 42, pp. 1066-1068)

Robert Browning died this day in 1889, so we get the poem telling how three riders began a heroic ride from Ghent to Aix, and how only one rider survived to tell the tale.

December 11: The Most Dashing Figure in Athens (Vol. 12, pp. 106-117)

Plutarch again, this time writing about a giant of Athenian society. The handsome, dashing Alcibiades was beloved by his contemporaries until an incident involving the defacement of statues and the mockery of the goddesses Ceres and Prosperine.

Condemned by the people who once revered him, he fled to Sparta and transformed himself from decadent high-living Athenian into a hard-core Spartan.

December 10: Benvenuto Boasts of Gallantry (Vol. 31, pp. 62-72)

Cellini, the Commander McBragg of the Renaissance, checks in with a story from his autobiography about going after a soldier who made a pass at his woman.

Leaping from the window, knife in hand, he appears more like a swashbuckler than an artist -- or, at least, that's his side of the story.

December 9: Slavery's Last Stand (Vol. 43, pp. 306-312)

Today we get an interesting document, "The Compromise of 1850," which admitted California into the Union as a free state, but allowed Texas to maintain slavery.

It is among the most craven acts ever passed by Congress, and putting it into this collection serves as a reminder that our public servants are rarely so.

December 8: Dream Women Shaped His Destiny (Vol. 27, pp. 319-325)

Thomas de Quincy, yet another crazed British essayist, died this day in 1859. In today, "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow," he imagined three women were sent to him so that he might know the depths of his soul. Insane gibberish.