Essays / Sample Excerpt # 1

  From time immemorial, men have armed themselves, bid goodbye to their loved ones, and gone to war. We see this in the small intertribal battles of Paleolithic men, as well as in recent conflicts in the Middle East. And yet the way that these conflicts are approached, as well as the place which warfare holds in any individual culture, varies widely from one society to another. For this reason, there are as many definitions of a hero as there are heroes themselves; in some societies, a hero is a person who defends the status quo; in others, a hero is someone who defies it. A hero may be a person who saves lives; in other circumstances, a hero may be someone who kills. The tremendous cultural differences in one’s definition of a hero are largely dependent on the values which the culture itself promotes. This can be clearly seen in an examination of the role of war and the hero in Vergil’s Aeneid, a long narrative poem which tells the story of the founding of Rome by the hero Aeneas.

1. Heroism in the Aeneid
2. Queen Mary I of England
3. Urban Ecology / Baltimore
4. Chopin's The Awakening

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