Quotes
Quotes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
From "Et tu, Brute?" to the "noblest Roman of all": the phrases that remained from the tragedy, translated and with their context in the play.
History and literature
Is "Et tu, Brute" historical?
The phrase that everyone knows does not appear in ancient sources. What Suetonius and Plutarch really tell about Caesar's death, and what is fiction.
Cultural trips
The Temple of Divine Julius in Rome
In the Roman Forum, over the place where Caesar's body was cremated, fresh flowers still appear two thousand years later. The myth that conquered death.
Cultural trips
Where Caesar died, in Rome
It wasn't in the Capitol of legend. Caesar fell into Pompey's Curia, now below street level and inhabited by cats, in the heart of Rome.
Philosophy and logic
Mark Antony's speech
Friends, Romans, compatriots. How Antony destroys Brutus using his own words, and why emotion overcame reason before the people.
Greek philosophy
What is hubris in tragedy
The excess that precedes the fall. The Greek concept of hybris is the first warning of the tragedy, when Caesar begins to speak about himself in the third person.
Philosophy
What is preventive tyrannicide
Killing to stop an evil that does not yet exist. The ethical dilemma that sustains Julius Caesar and did not die in 44 BC.
Philosophy
The Stoics, suicide and freedom
Every slave has in his own hands the power to extirpate his captivity. How the Stoics viewed voluntary death, and what this decides in Caesar's tragedy.
History and literature
Who was Julius Caesar
The historical man behind the play: the general-turned-god whose death did not save the Republic but founded the Empire the conspirators feared.
Comparative literature
The three traitors chewed by Lucifer
In the ninth circle of Hell, Lucifer has three mouths and in each one he crushes a traitor. Why Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, and Shakespeare's opposite verdict.
Philosophy
Stoicism and Epicureanism: the difference
One seeks virtue; the other, the absence of disturbance. The two great schools of good life in Antiquity, and what separates one from the other in practice.
Literature and politics
Julius Caesar, by Shakespeare: summary and analysis
The play does not tell the fall of a tyrant, but the crime of honorable men who kill for an ideal. The question she leaves without an easy answer.
Literature and philosophy
Existential anguish and loneliness in Pequeno Príncipe
The desert that opens the work is a spiritual desert. How the Little Prince goes through loneliness and anguish with Kierkegaard and Camus in the background.
Literature and philosophy
Instrumental rationality in Pequeno Príncipe
The businessman who has stars and the geographer who has never seen an ocean: how the work criticizes the reason that only knows how to measure, count and possess.
Literature and philosophy
What does the snake mean in the Little Prince
The figure who speaks in riddles divides readers. The snake is not the villain of the story: it is death as a bridge, the passage back to the essential.
Literature and philosophy
The 7 planets and the 7 deadly sins
Many readers associate the Little Prince's planets with the seven deadly sins. Where the parallel works, where it breaks and what it reveals.
Literature and philosophy
Alienation in Pequeno Príncipe
The vain man and the drunk are two portraits of alienation: living from the eyes of others and running away from oneself. How the work anticipates the modern mirror prison.
Literature and philosophy
The rose and the fox: love and friendship in Pequeno Príncipe
The rose is love with all its contradictions; the fox, friendship as a choice. The two columns of the spiritual crossing of the Little Prince.
Literature and philosophy
The essential is invisible to the eye: what does it mean
The most quoted phrase in the work is not a beautiful verse, it is the key that opens the entire book. What it means to see with the heart.
Literature and philosophy
The Little Prince: summary and analysis
A tale that seems childish and is, in fact, a treatise on the soul: the crossing of the seven planets towards the essential that can only be seen with the heart.
Literature and philosophy
Captivate: what it means in Pequeno Príncipe
"Captivating means creating bonds." The lesson of the fox and the most powerful ethical statement in the work: we are responsible for what we captivate.
Literature and philosophy
The 7 planets of the Little Prince and what they mean
Each planet visited by the Little Prince contains a vice of the adult soul. A map of the work's logic, from the king to planet Earth.
Literature and philosophy
Who was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The French aviator who transformed the experience of flight and the desert into one of the most read works in the world. Who was the author of the Little Prince?
Greek philosophy
Act and Potency, in Aristotle
How Aristotle explains change without denying that something remains, and how Saint Thomas Aquinas takes the idea to Christian theology.
Greek philosophy
Heraclitus x Parmenides: does Being change or is it immobile?
The oldest debate in Western philosophy, between the philosopher of flow and the philosopher of eternal and immobile Being.
Greek philosophy
What is Aristotle's Hexis
Virtue is not a state that is possessed once, it is a character forged by repeated practice, day after day.
Greek philosophy
What is Aristotle's Hylemorphism?
Aristotle's answer to how change is possible without destroying the identity of things.
Greek philosophy
What is Panta Rhei
Heraclitus' Greek expression for "everything flows", and because this constant change has an order, it is not chaos.
Greek philosophy
What does "no one enters the same river twice" mean?
Heraclitus's most famous fragment, and how his disciple Cratylus took it even further.
Greek philosophy
Heraclitus: No One Enters the Same River Twice
From the fragment of the river to the confrontation with Parmenides, and from change as chaos to change as growth, with Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas.