The COLLECTED
WRITINGS of DAN MEYER

My studies did not begin with antiquity. I came to philosophy by way of Buddhism, Jung, and Nietzsche, and to myth by way of Frazer’s The Golden Bough. As a historian, I was initially drawn to medieval England, Arthurian legend, and the British Empire. It was a course on Nietzsche, taught by a professor at Duquesne University with whom I developed a great fellowship, that gave me my first real taste of the ancient world through the Greek tragedians. His next course, America and Antiquity, ignited my interests entirely. It traced the roots of the American founding to Greece and Rome, with Plutarch’s Parallel Lives as its backbone. It was the hardest course I have ever taken, and I have never been able to forget it. I have returned to Plutarch again and again, and have read everything from Homer to Livy and beyond in the hope of exploring every corner of the classical world.

What animates me is that Greece and Rome are a kind of true myth. Their civilizations are archetypes, the fullest expressions of what human beings can make of themselves, and their stories have endured because we still cannot describe ourselves without them. We have surpassed antiquity in technology, but never, I think, in spirit. That is why nearly every great civilization since has called itself their successor. Rome looked to Alexander as Greece looked back to Homer. Charlemagne, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early modern world all looked back to antiquity. The American founders, steeped in the Greeks, consciously modeled our republic on the Roman one. Down to the present day, we turn to classical antiquity to tell us about ourselves and our future.

Out of this devotion came my edition of Bernadotte Perrin’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Perrin’s is the most recent complete English translation. It was first published in eleven volumes by the Loeb Classical Library, expensive and hard to come by, so most students have instead read Plutarch through Dryden’s seventeenth century translation. My edition gathers Perrin’s text into two volumes: the Grecian Lives, with Plutarch’s comparisons, and the Roman Lives. Within each volume the biographies are arranged chronologically, so that each may be read as a continuous narrative of the rise and fall of its civilization and of the figures who shaped it.

I took my degree at Duquesne in History and Philosophy, with a minor in English Literature. While there I was inducted into Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honor society, in April 2021. I was awarded the Erik Gerhard Student Award for excellence in history and the Excellence in Service to the Philosophy Department Award. Some of my fiction appeared in the university’s literary journal, :Lexicon. Since graduating I have continued my research independently, in close collaboration with my former professors through teaching, grading, and research.

Of late my attention has turned further back still, to the Proto-Indo-Europeans, as I explore their part in the lineage of Greece and Rome, and to the impression they have left on broader Western civilization.

I currently work at the University of Pittsburgh, as Operations Manager of the Dietrich School Scientific Stockroom, which supplies scientific materials, chiefly chemicals, to research labs across the university. I occasionally work as a graphic designer, and have created visual identities for both individuals and corporations, along with academic and civic institutions.

At present I am writing more than ever, working on a novel and numerous scholarly essays that will likely appear here. In the pages that follow, the reader will find such essays and book reviews, an account of my projects, and a register of the books I have read. They are offered in the hope that they may be of some use, or at least some pleasure, to those who share these interests.