Ten virtues for the West to live by...
by Greg Swann
I'm in the process of moving my entire corpus to presenceofmind.net. One of the things I ran across was a poster of ten Roman virtues I made for my son a few years ago. The picture you see here is a pale shadow of the real thing, which is a fairly big PDF file.
I draw your attention to this because I think they are important Western virtues, values that define some of what we are and can become. If I could cite what I see as a crucial error in Hellenic thought, it would be that Western philosophy is insufficiently reverent. Not in the sense of kow-towing to ghosts of pretense, but in failing to revere the things in our thought, in our culture, that are beautiful and honorable and worthy of being cherished and worshipped.
My son starts his day with these words. Time alone will tell if they sink in, but we are what we do, and the words we speak now are the tell-tales of what we will become. If the West will speak beauty to beauty, honor to honor, worth to worth, it can yet become what it was born to be.
Should you like to join my son in honoring these great virtues, these are phonetic transliterations: dig-nee-tass, gra-wee-tass, pee-yay-tass, hugh-ma-knee-tass, ware-ee-tass, eye-kwee-tass, no-bill-ee-tass, lih-burr-all-ee-tass, ferr-me-tass, coam-ee-tass. Don't pause for the hyphens, just make the sounds. For all of these words, the syllabic weighting, the barest of stresses, goes on the antepenultimate syllable, which is the Roman way of saying the syllable before the syllable before the last syllable (that is, the third from the last, the first in three syllable words, the second in four syllable words).
