Bill Caraher |

The events of the past week have likely tested our national reserve of empathy and will probably continue to do so. 

In these situations, I find myself turning to literature — often ancient literature — to find my place in the world. This week, I turned to Tacitus’s Agricola. Written at the end of the 1st century AD, it stands as one of the greatest works of ancient literature (and in the lingo of our day, it is tragically underrated). It is a biography of the Roman general and statesman Gnaeus Julius Agricola. He was Tacitus’s father-in-law, and Tacitus saw in his life and death a model for how a good man could live in an unjust age.

You can read the Agricola here.

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Bill Caraher is the editor of North Dakota Quarterly and in a previous life studied Greek and Latin.