“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
      The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”
You can recognize the Jaberwock by his preference for words of many syllables.  He  feels right at home calling a war a “special military operation,” or using “truthful hyperbole” for a simple lie.
So, when you encounter the Jabberwock, one two, one two, let your worpal blade go through and through. 
That’s what Socrates would do, call it “the rectification of language,” or  what you will,
--
PS  Here’s a refresher link to Lewis Carroll’s  Jaberwocky poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky
 

Yo Yo Ma and his fellow performers  gave a moving  performance  of the Ukrainian national anthem  before their concert at the Kennedy Center.  You can hear it at 
​https://www.huffpost.com/entry/yo-yo-ma-ukraine-national-anthem_n_622703e5e4b004e4e384fd3c

​      Those of us who study Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian war can’t escape thinking about Melos when we follow the news about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  Melos was a small, unprepossessing island in the Aegean, with no significant resources, military power or strategic significance. .  Yet Athens, after achieving a peace with Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies, demanded the Melians submit to Athenian control.  The Melians seem to have done nothing worse than try to stay independent.    Melos was eventually subdued and could easily have been forgotten.  Thucydides, however, , put a spot light on it  with one of his most brilliant pieces of writing, a debate about power and justice. 
      Questions proliferate: Why did Athens attack?  Why did it treat the Melians so brutally? Why did Thucydides mae so much of the episode?  Can answering these questions sharpen our understanding  of Russia’s attack o Ukraine?
The analogy between Melos and Ukraine  goes only so far. The parallels are skewed: Ukraine is stronger and fiercer than Melos, and  Russia, surely,  is no Athens.  Still,  vulnerable people attacked by a superior power  speak a universal language.   They have something important to tell us: The horror, the  misery, the terror in such atrocities are not  accidental byproducts of the violence.  They are its deliberate  message.
How should we read that message? In the case of Melos Thucydides will  help - provided we are alert to one simple fact and to his technique of juxtaposition.  The simple fact is that Melos is an island, and hence vulnerable to Athens’ great naval power. There’s no way a little island can stand  up against such force, nor was it likely  that landlubber Sparta would try to help.
 The juxtaposition is between Melos and another island.  That’s the next part of Thucydides’ story – a vast armament sent from  Athens to subdue Sicily.  Surely the Sicilians knew the implicit  message of Melos:  submit or  suffer what the Melians had suffered:
The juxtaposition of an elaborate story about Melos and the huge expedition to subdue Sicily is not a narratological game Thucydides plays with his readers.  Instead, it’s an invitation   to  solve for ourselves  the puzzling attack on  Melos.  With Sicily in mind we can recognize the unstated but deliberate purpose of the attack and the  brutality that followed.  The atrocity was not an accidental by product of an expedition undertaken for another purpose.  It was  itself the purpose of the operation: a  deliberate, premeditated, an  intentional way of sending a message far across the Hellenic world: Resist us and you will end up suffering as the Melians did:
Hungry and besieged the Melians finally gave in, agreeing that  the Athenians could do whatever they wished.  That turned out to be  that “The Athenians killed all the adult males ,they had taken and enslaved the women and children.   The place itself they occupied with their own people, sending out 500 colonists at some later time. “ (Thucydides 5.116.4   . tr. J. Mynott)
Russia’s message from its atrocity in  Ukraine, I believe, is not dissimilar, and its intended audience is also widespread.   Are you listening,  Moldava and Finland?  What about the rest of you Europeans? Do you get the message?
Why should Russia stop with Ukraine?  The big prizes are further west. The  suffering of the Ukrainian people will teach other countries, one by one, not to resist.
Messages reverberate, and tyrants across the world - are eagerly listening. They’ll get the message soon enough. They will do what Russia has done.  Impose immense suffering on one people, then threaten others with their example.   It’s such a compelling message that it doesn’t even have to be made explicit.  It will work.
 Unless ....  –
unless analogy comes through at last. The invasion of Sicily turned out to be a disaster for Athens.  The Syracusans stood strong; the Spartans learned to row.  Athens suffered a humiliating defeat.  They had every reason to fear that what they had done to Melos would in due course  be done to them.

​“They make a desolation and call it peace.”  “ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” 
 Tacitus’ Agricola 30. 6, the speech of Calgacus, as Robert Kaster reminds me.   Shall we call it the Pax Putiniana? 

​From Russia my friend  Nikita Pokrovsky emailed me:
“ I arrived at the National Humanities Center in 1989 on the crest of the world's trajectory, at the climax  of Perestroika. It was a turning point in history. Now there is an equally long-lasting and opposite in its meaning turning point. “
Nikita, I think, has hit the nail on the head: we are at a turning point, not just in Ukraine, Russia, and Europe but globally, and the new era we are entering may not be the  relative calm, or maybe even honeymoon, we enjoyed from 1989 to the present.  
       But “turning point” towards what?
        I fear it we have entered a new era, not just a return to  the pre-1989  Colkd War, and maybe not “Back to the Jungle,” as Robert Kagan suggests.  More likely, I think, it’s a new historical era,
That would mean a time when things may seem to get back to “normal,” when they look the same but under the surface ideas, values, culture may change in ways we cannot fully anticipate, but which will profoundly affect our lives and those of our descendants.  

​The first casualty comes before the first shot is fired.  The dying continues long after peace is declared.  You can recognize war is coming by monitoring these casualties. They are in plain sight, “independence,” “genocide,” “neo-Nazis,” “peace-keeping,” “freedom.” 
War Lords, thugs really, love to watch language choke and gasp.  They make it grovel, submit and, at the end, call it “peace.”
Nothing is too brutal for them.  They will not settle for silence; they force Language to close her eyes, bite her tongue. whine loudly enough to block what all could otherwise hear and despise.
This is the quintessential war crime.  If language is what makes us human, then this is the true  crime against humanity, a crime for which there can be neither reparation, nor forgiveness. 

​“Mike” Keeley, as we all called him, died this morning,  February 22, 2022.  I miss him beyond words and so can only say what Homer envisioned, Cavafy gave voice to, and Mike translated:
  
The Horses of Achilles
  
When they saw Patroklos dead --
so brave and strong, so young--
the horses of Achilles began to weep;
 their immortal nature was upset deeply
 by this work of death they had to look at.
They reared their heads, tossed their long manes,
 beat the ground with their hooves, and mourned
 Patroklos, seeing him lifeless, destroyed,
 now mere flesh only, his spirit gone, defenseless, without breath,
turned back from life to the great Nothingness.
 
Zeus saw the tears of those immortal horses and felt sorry.
 “At the wedding of Peleus,” he said,
 “I should not have acted so thoughtlessly. Better if we hadn’t given you as a gift,
my unhappy horses. What business did you have down there,
 among pathetic human beings, the toys of fate. You are free of death, you will not get old,
yet ephemeral disasters torment you.
Men have caught you up in their misery.”
But it was for the eternal disaster of death
 that those two gallant horses shed their tears. 

​       The cognitive scientist, Laurie Santos,  who teaches Yale’s most popular course. Psychology and the Good Life, a.k.a. The Happiness Course, is  taking a leave to avoid burnout, theNew York Times reports. I sympathize:  she is teaching more than 500 students, plus a podcast, plus media interviews, plus all those science journal articles to read before they are made obsolete by the next batch. . .
She’s entitled to take a break!
       I wonder, though, whether part of the trouble is that she has herself fallen into The Happiness Trap.  
       The question “Am I really happy?” soon turns into the question “Why am I not more happy?” Then that becomes “Why am I so unhappy?”  The more you think about happiness the less happy you are likely to be
That’s the Happiness Trap. Maybe Prof. Santos got caught in it.
       Is there a way to get out of the trap once it snaps shut?   After all, we all want to be happy, don’t we?
Ask Aristotle, who got us into it in the first place by structuring his Nicomachean Ethics around the idea that all human goods,  health, wealth, pleasure, are merely means to a greater good, happiness.  He holds the patent on the trap.  But don’t stop there. Look again at the famous first sentence of his Metaphysics: “It’s our nature to crave knowledge.”   That‘s a free translation of  πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει but no matter how you translate it, the message is clear, Go  for knowledge, big time.
Follow that line of thought and you may find that happiness is a by-product -- not the goal itself, but something extra, that results when someone focuses on some other goal. 
What goal?  Maybe anything that isn’t totally self-interested.  Metaphysics, if you’re brainy enough; if you’re just one of us  ordinary hedgehogs, maybe it’s try to love your neighbor as yourself.  You may never succeed but you might wiggle out of the Happiness Trap.

​      How do the Greek and Roman Classics make a serious contribution to civic well-being at a time that seems to be tilting toward demagogy and autocracy?
     David Brooks has an answer  and, I believe, is on the right track in his article “The Dark Century”  (New York Times February 18 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/opinion/liberalism-democracy-russia-ukraine.html).He writes:        
          “While the Constitution guarded against abuses of power, the founders recognized that a much more important set of civic practices would mold people to be capable of being self-governing citizens: … ; leaders were to receive classical education, so they might understand human virtue and vice and the fragility of democracy  “
        Elitist? Nostalgic? Outdated? Quaint?   OK, sure, but come up with a better way of sustaining a democracy – right now, when autocrats and their Wannabees abound, the Know Nothings are riding high, and the Great Demagogue is standing in the wings, ready to step on stage and dominate our lives once again.  The answer is not modelling or catering to narcissism.  
               Don‘t take my word for it. Read Brooks’  essay with an open and critical mind.  Then tell us what you think.
 

Andrew Bridges writes    “On the relevance of the classics and Enlightenment thought, I commend Susan Neiman's excellent lollipop of a book, "Why Grow Up: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age."  https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374536147 ‘
     I have not yet read the book, but I will follow Andrew’s lead, anytime.