The COLLECTED
WRITINGS of DAN MEYER

These pages are the record of a long and ongoing apprenticeship to the past. I studied History, Philosophy, and English Literature at Duquesne University. 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.

My studies did not begin with antiquity. As a historian I was first drawn to medieval England, Arthurian legend, and the British Empire. Two courses at Duquesne, taught by a professor with whom I developed a great fellowship, turned me toward the ancient world: the first on Nietzsche, which exposed me to the depths of Greek tragedy, and the second, America and Antiquity, which traced the roots of the American founding to Greece and Rome, with Plutarch’s Parallel Lives as its backbone. I have since read everything from Homer to Livy and beyond. What holds me is that historical Greece and Rome have taken on the status of myth. Their civilizations are living archetypes, and nearly every great civilization since, from Charlemagne’s empire to our own republic, has sought to establish itself as their legitimate successor. We still turn to them 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.

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

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 individuals and corporations as well as academic and civic institutions.

At present I am writing more than ever. In the pages that follow, the reader will find such essays, 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.