Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
What can an ancient war-poem teach us about politics, not as partisanship, but as the perennial question of how human beings can live together?
In this virtual open house session for Ralston College’s M.A. in the Humanities, Professor Daniel Gallagher offers a glimpse into the kind of inquiry that defines the program: close reading, shared reflection, and a serious encounter with the sources of Western civilization. Beginning with Homer’s Iliad, Gallagher traces political life to its deepest roots—honor (timē), wrath, friendship, family, justice (dikē), and the difficult emergence of the polis.
Along the way, he places Homer in conversation with Aeschylus and Virgil, drawing on Heidegger’s distinctions between physis, poiēsis, and technē to illuminate what ancient literature still reveals about community, law, and the limits of political order—especially in a technological age.
This open house also introduces Ralston’s distinctive format: an immersive year beginning in Greece with Ancient and Modern Greek, then continuing in Savannah, Georgia, through sustained study of the Western canon in a close-knit intellectual community—one ordered to the free pursuit of truth.
What can an ancient war-poem teach us about politics, not as partisanship, but as the perennial question of how human beings can live together?
In this virtual open house session for Ralston College’s M.A. in the Humanities, Professor Daniel Gallagher offers a glimpse into the kind of inquiry that defines the program: close reading, shared reflection, and a serious encounter with the sources of Western civilization. Beginning with Homer’s Iliad, Gallagher traces political life to its deepest roots—honor (timē), wrath, friendship, family, justice (dikē), and the difficult emergence of the polis.
Along the way, he places Homer in conversation with Aeschylus and Virgil, drawing on Heidegger’s distinctions between physis, poiēsis, and technē to illuminate what ancient literature still reveals about community, law, and the limits of political order—especially in a technological age.
This open house also introduces Ralston’s distinctive format: an immersive year beginning in Greece with Ancient and Modern Greek, then continuing in Savannah, Georgia, through sustained study of the Western canon in a close-knit intellectual community—one ordered to the free pursuit of truth.
