Animus Classics Journal: Vol. 1, Issue 1

8
ANIMUS VOL. 1
Marble Prisons,
Bronze Chains
Written By JORDAN TYLER HOUSTON
College of Arts and Sciences, Wake Forest University
Everything is rhetoric.
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Suppose that, by some phenomenon beyond human comprehension, a
man—a great man, perhaps Sophocles or Vergil or Homer himself—were
plucked from the waters of time and thrown, gasping, onto the shores of
the present. Suppose he were spat out, by some similarly strange cosmic
coincidence, at the foot of Stone Mountain in Georgia, and that he looked
up to see the monument engraved there. There, brutally carved into the otherwise
beautiful flesh of the mountain, he would see the figures of Jefferson
Davis, and Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E Lee. And he would look upon
the monument with awe and wonder, ingesting the magnitude and totality
of it with no hope of comprehension—even if it were thoroughly explained
to him by another.
Suppose—but it is not so.
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It was told to me—by Apollo himself!—that in Heaven, the people know
nothing except for kindness, and that in Hell, they know everything except
for it. So it is that a better world cannot be brought forth merely through
knowledge, but through understanding.
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In his dedication speech delivered at the unveiling of the Confederate
monument Silent Sam, Julian Carr says (among many, many other Classical
allusions):
As Niobe wept over her sons slain by Apollo, so the tears of our women
were shed over the consummate sacrifice of their loved ones. 1
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Robert E. Lee the Younger writes that his father (Robert E. Lee the
Elder) once received a copy of Homer’s Iliad, translated into English by
Philip Stanhope Worsley. On the flyleaf of the the translation, Worsley wrote: