The Art of Coping

The mood on campus this spring was grim. At Sarah Lawrence College—where I teach classical languages, literature, and history to undergraduates—many students appeared anxious, lonely, and depressed. Tuned in to social media and alarmed by contemporary political turmoil, they complained of insomnia and an inability to concentrate. Some seemed incapacitated by life’s ordinary, inevitable pains—a failed romantic relationship, the loss of a beloved pet, an arduous homework assignment. Some expressed hatred toward themselves and their own bodies. Sad and angry, many despaired of their future and that of the world. Inequities and atrocities both domestic and foreign can evoke an admirable commitment to social justice, but many undergraduates these days do not know how to work toward it. Feeling powerless, frustrated, and angry, they mistake vengeance for justice and venting for virtue. Adversity has left many students feeling helpless. They lack the tools to cope.

The American College Health Association reports that in 2023, 76 percent of college students “experienced moderate to serious psychological distress” and that 99 percent of students facing academic challenges say that pressures in the classroom “affect their mental health.” These are tumultuous times, and adolescence and young adulthood are difficult, stressful life stages. But in the nearly four decades that I have spent teaching, I have never seen anything approaching the current mental health crisis among young people.

We are experiencing a perfect storm. The pandemic cost students valuable in-person learning time and actual (nonvirtual) human contact. A few years later, digital engagement still dominates, as students click tirelessly through images, outsourcing their autonomy and agency to social media. Trained by these platforms to “like” or “dislike,” many young people have become accustomed to viewing Good and Evil as a simple binary. The reality of moral complexity leaves them feeling infuriated and distressed. Education should develop knowledge and understanding—essential coping skills—but elementary and high school instruction has failed to prepare students adequately in these areas, and those of us in higher education struggle to remedy the problem.

College and university administrators have come to see their role as striving to comfort customers rather than to educate young people to confront life’s challenges. Assessing four-year colleges, public and private, U.S. News & World Report detailed increases in funding for “academic support, student services and institutional support” between 2010 and 2021 and decreases in funding for instruction. The role of the humanities in higher education has diminished. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported a 24 percent drop in bachelor’s degrees awarded in the humanities in 2022 as compared with 2012. Prioritizing monetary returns for themselves and their “customers,” administrators hire more administrators, fund STEM programs, and gut humanities programs while scrambling to provide ever more professionals to address the mental health crisis.

As a classicist, I find this situation both tragic and ironic. We are systematically depriving students of the tools developed over centuries for coping with conflict, catastrophe, and existential angst. And then we are surprised at the uptick in anxiety and despair. Of course, young people are anxious and depressed. Human existence is difficult. And tragic. We all suffer. We all die. Political, economic, and environmental disasters threaten. Always. These facts would be incapacitating—if not for the humanities.

Many of today’s undergraduates, as it happens, have little access to the humanities. Though urged relentlessly to focus on their mental health, many students lack the ability to focus at all. They might find respite from anxiety and despair by reading books, but most have not read many and would prefer not to. Intellectual challenges prompt anxiety, even fear. Tasked with reading a lengthy, densely packed work of literature or writing an essay assessing their own reaction to it, many students would, well, rather not. Since sustained, focused reading does not form part of their experience, many undergraduates find literature intimidating, sometimes impenetrable.

In part a consequence of longstanding trends in elementary education, functional illiteracy remains prevalent, even at “elite” colleges and universities like Sarah Lawrence. For several decades, too many elementary schools have taught reading via ineffective and recently discredited approaches. In 2019, journalist Emily Hanford reported on the “three-cueing system,” vigorously promulgated for more than 40 years by Lucy Calkins at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, a respected training program for aspiring educators. First introduced in 1967, this system eventually gained currency in as many as a quarter of American elementary schools. According to Hanford, elementary school teachers decided that “teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.” Instead, readers were encouraged to draw on “semantic/meaning cues” (asking themselves, “Does it make sense?”), “syntactic/sentence structure cues” (asking themselves, “Does it sound right?”), and “graphic/visual cues (letters)” (asking themselves, “Does it look right?”).

Teachers instructed students to identify the first few letters of a word and then guess the rest, or to try to guess at the meanings of words by looking at the pictures. Good readers, however, do not guess. They look at every letter. They just do it quickly. Unable to “sound out” every letter phonetically, failing even to look at all the letters, a student will have difficulty distinguishing expect from expert, irreplaceable from irredeemable. By guessing at the meanings of words, a reader never gets that jolt of satisfaction and pleasure, that “aha!” moment that comes from sounding out a difficult word, putting the letters together, deriving meaning from a sentence.

By 2000, cognitive scientists understood that the three-cueing system contradicted the research on reading. Hanford cites David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland, who explains that the system does not merely cultivate in students the habits of poor readers, it impedes their ability to read at all. And yet, the cueing system pedagogy remained fashionable among educators long after cognitive scientists recognized its folly. Still taught during the pandemic, the system adversely affected not only the current generation of undergraduates but also the next.

It should surprise no one, then, that many of today’s undergraduates have yet to discover the benefits of losing themselves—and finding themselves—in books. Stumbling over words such as inscrutable or insubstantial makes the process of reading effortful, unsatisfying, and unpleasant. Reading aloud passages of text in seminars or pieces of their own writing in individual meetings with me, students sometimes reverse the meaning of a sentence by mistaking now for not. Even students not victimized by the cueing system, those able to identify words phonetically, often have limited vocabularies, dislike reading, and struggle to assemble meaning from a text. Elementary and high school education may include short excerpts of larger works, but many young people have not experienced the pleasures and rewards of reading literary works in their entirety.

I vividly remember the joy I felt in first grade when working independently through a series of storybooks of escalating phonetic complexity. Each new word was a triumph of my emerging decoding skills, each sentence an adventure. Every story offered an exciting journey in space and time. I fell instantly in love with books. Years later as a teacher, I used to ask students what they read for fun. About a decade ago, coincident with the rise of smartphones and social media, students began to respond to the question with blank stares. Now I ask instead what they do for fun. The answer, more often than not? Video games.

Baffled and dissatisfied readers make unproductive, frustrated writers and thinkers. Many students find the process of developing their own thoughts in writing both arduous and ineffective. Unfamiliar with examples of good writing, students lack the tools to critique and improve their own. Many native speakers of English write as if English were a foreign language only partially acquired. Poor writing prevents students from developing their initial, unreflective reactions (or unfounded projections or prejudices) into cogent, evidence-based analyses. An impoverished vocabulary and awkward, muddled phrasing diminish a student’s ability to articulate and communicate insights and experiences. Misunderstanding, confusion, frustration, and unhappiness result. It is no wonder that undergraduates are anxious and depressed.

Direct engagement with the humanities, though undeniably not a panacea for serious mental illness, could nevertheless help students cope. Encouraged to read and reread books and to reread and revise their own writing, undergraduates can begin to develop knowledge and discover the joy of engaging in a productive conversation with themselves. I urge my students not to use AI in preparing their essays. What would be the point? The humanities can help us navigate life’s vicissitudes: hope, despair, joy, grief, love, hate, success, failure. Reading books develops intellectual and emotional understanding and a capacity for nuanced, compassionate moral judgment. Use of AI undermines the process. I tell my students, “AI cannot tell you what you think about the works we will read this semester. If you outsource your thinking to AI, you will deprive yourself of the benefit of encountering these works.” It is a hard sell. But not an impossible one. Direct encounters with literature develop students’ ability to confront life’s challenges. Rather than setting a daunting text aside—or projecting their preconceptions and prejudices onto it—they come to discover the delights of allowing a work of literature to transport and inform.

The human capacity for language makes us uniquely suited to transcend the terrors of mortal existence. The Chorus of Aeschylus’s great tragedy Agamemnon (458 BCE) advises that people can and must learn from experience. Pathei mathos, Aeschylus’s Chorus intones: “learning comes from experience.” The humanities provide something even better: the opportunity to learn from other people’s experience. Literature, history, philosophy, and art carry us beyond ourselves and our own limited experience and timespan, empowering us to assess and benefit from the achievements, suffering (  pathos means both “experience” and “suffering”), and errors of people—real and fictional—throughout the ages. I offer here examples from my own area of specialization, ancient Greek and Roman literature, but the arts of every culture offer vital models and countermodels.

Homer’s epics (c. eighth century BCE), for example, offer comfort by revealing that our anguish is not unique, that perfect human happiness is a fantasy. Toward the end of the Iliad, Achilles explains that the great god Zeus has two urns from which he distributes fates to human beings. One urn contains good fates, the other bad. To some people, Zeus distributes fates drawn from both urns. To others, Zeus distributes fates drawn from only the urn containing bad fates. Over the course of the epic, Achilles has come to understand that every human life entails a mixture of good and bad fortune—or all bad. No human being completely escapes trouble and suffering. Odysseus, protagonist of the Odyssey, exemplifies these vicissitudes of fate, enduring numerous extreme reversals of fortune. A benevolent, well-regarded king, Odysseus subsequently becomes a conquering warrior, a shipwrecked sailor nearly drowned at sea, then a destitute wanderer and starving beggar, a violent avenger, and a king once again. Despite encountering extreme hardship and adversity, Odysseus never gives up, never loses sight of his goals.

Exposing perfect, uninterrupted human happiness as a fantasy, the Homeric epics ease existential angst by reminding us that mortality is our superpower, the source of self-restraint and human connection. Impervious to suffering and death, the immortal Zeus need not—cannot—exercise self-restraint. A superstar sexual athlete, Zeus can bully, rape, and ravage at will without suffering any consequences. By contrast, mortal rapacity proves self-destructive. By raping Helen, the beautiful queen of Sparta, the mortal prince Paris causes a catastrophic war devastating to Trojans and Greeks alike. Not only life-sustaining self-restraint but also reciprocal affection and devotion elevate human over divine existence, as the loveless marriage of Zeus and Hera contrasts with the affectionate marriage of the Trojan prince Hector and his wife, Andromache. Unlike Zeus, Hector can nobly sacrifice himself in a (tragically futile) effort to save his wife, child, and community. Unlike the goddess Hera, chafing ineffectually at Zeus’s repeated affronts to her dignity, Andromache can fear for Hector’s safety and mourn his death. The enduring fidelity of Penelope, long-suffering wife of Odysseus, enables the long-absent king’s successful homecoming and resumption of political authority. Homer emphasizes not the shortcomings of mortal existence but the benefits, our distinctive access to self-control and our singular ability to foster loving human connections—both vital to mortals’ well-being and inaccessible to Homer’s immortal gods.

A defense against existential despair, the Iliad and the Odyssey extol the human condition, commending mortals’ capacity not only for self-restraint, affection, and love but also for morality and empathy. Homer’s immortal gods, incapable of self-restraint or love, also have no need for or access to either morality or empathy. But human survival and success depend on both. In Homer’s epics, violations of moral obligations such as oaths and xenia—“guest-friendship,” the mutual obligations governing relationships between guests and hosts—have predictably adverse consequences. Paris’s theft of Helen from his host’s home catalyzes the Trojan War. The Trojans’ subsequent violation of an oath perpetuates the conflict. Conversely, honoring moral responsibilities promotes human survival. One implausible but memorable anecdote in the Iliad describes a confrontation between the Greek warrior Diomedes and the Trojan warrior Glaucus. Before engaging in battle, the two enemies learn each other’s names and genealogy, discover that they have inherited the “guest-friend” relationship from their grandfathers—one of whom once hosted the other—and opt to honor that moral obligation. Instead of fighting, these two warriors exchange armor and walk away uninjured. An admirable model for all human conflict resolution, two violent, hostile adversaries exchange words, discover a connection, and choose to honor a moral obligation. Like morality, empathy also proves vital for human well-being. In the Iliad, grieving over the death of his dearest companion, Patroclus, Achilles slays his friend’s killer and many other men. He continues to ravage his enemy’s corpse. None of this brings Achilles any solace. Only the recognition that human grief is universal—that his own father will soon suffer over his son’s death, just as his enemy’s father suffers now—eases Achilles’s distress, enabling him to return his enemy’s corpse and resume his own life.

An antidote to gloom and hopelessness, Homer’s epics also expose the fallacy of assuming that might equals right in the realm of human beings. Gods live forever, and Zeus rules eternally by force and intimidation, but human existence is finite, every human choice therefore time-limited and consequential. In the Iliad, King Agamemnon epitomizes the foolishness of any mortal who believes he can exercise the consequence-free, absolute, perpetual authority of the gods. Lacking self-restraint and foresight, Agamemnon harms himself and his own warriors by recklessly appropriating another man’s sex slave, previously awarded by the soldiers as a prize for military valor. This irresponsible abuse of autocratic power alienates the Greeks’ best warrior, his absence resulting in the deaths of many Greeks in battle. In the Odyssey, the suitors’ rapacious abuse of the family and possessions of the absent Odysseus harms the suitors themselves, precipitating their destruction by the indignant king on his return. Eviscerating the “might equals right” doctrine, the Iliad and the Odyssey offer the comforting assurance that bullies and thugs cannot prevail forever.

In their celebration of the uniquely human capacities for self-restraint, love, morality, and empathy, Homer’s epics also empower us against hopelessness by inspiring a taste for adventure and achievement. Immortality, for Homer’s mortal characters, consists not in some imagined afterlife but in achieving things so great that future generations will recall them in perpetuity. The Iliad depicts human life as finite and death as the end. The Odyssey portrays the afterlife as a nonlife, the antithesis of being, devoid of all earthly pleasures. Mortals in both epics strive to accomplish great things in order to earn kleos, the glory achieved by gaining eternal remembrance in poetic song. In Homer’s telling, Odysseus turns down an offer of immortal life with the beautiful goddess Calypso in favor of a human life of adventure and the joys and responsibilities of family and community. Remaining in a fantastical land—Calypso’s island or the fairy-tale paradise of Scheria, site of his initial landfall after shipwreck and days floundering at sea—Odysseus would earn no kleos. No one would ever hear of his exploits. He would disappear from the human world, forever anonymous. If Odysseus stayed in paradise, abandoning his personal and political responsibilities, his family and community would continue to suffer the depredations of the suitors currently ravaging his home in pursuit of his wife and royal authority. Prioritizing the hardships and rewards of real life over eternal existence in a fantasy paradise, Odysseus inspires us to resist the deadly seductions of “virtual reality.” His example reminds us that time spent in imaginary spaces—whether mythical lands or video games or the fabrications of social media—deprives us of opportunities for real-life relationships, pleasures, responsibilities, and accomplishments.

A taste for adventure and achievement fosters in turn an appreciation for the survival skills of courage, ingenuity, and—most crucially—moral discernment. Without hesitation or a backward glance, Odysseus bravely departs from Calypso’s island on an intricate raft of his own devising. In doing so, he faces an uncertain future with fortitude, cunning, and even glee. Cleverness repeatedly preserves his life and enables him to recover his home, family, and political authority. Despite his bravery and resourcefulness, Odysseus nevertheless provides a cautionary warning as well as an inspiration. He delights in his own courage, cunning, resilience, and talent for lies and wordplay, but his words and actions cultivate our moral judgment and our skepticism. Odysseus is a self-proclaimed liar, and he harms a great many innocent people in the course of his adventures. Unprovoked, he attacks and plunders. He gratuitously prolongs the suffering of his family and loyal servants longing for his return. He spins tall tales of his own adventures. His implausible accounts of fantastical supernatural encounters help to fortify us against the deceptions of any unreliable narrator. He offers, for example, a lengthy description of a visit to the Underworld and conversations with the spirits of the dead. Can we accept this story as true? Only by denying the reality of our own lived experience. As an unreliable narrator and a morally complex role model, Odysseus also exemplifies the perils of reckless greed and curiosity without forethought: his incautious, uninvited intrusion into the cave of the Cyclops costs him the lives of several companions and nearly his own.

Literature can alleviate despair by inviting us to develop coping skills and empowering us to survive and thrive. The Iliad and the Odyssey commend self-restraint, supportive and loving relationships, empathy, moral responsibility, endurance, ingenuity, resilience in the face of adversity, moral discernment. Other ancient Greek and Roman works offer a similarly therapeutic alternative to despondency, cultivating insights and skills necessary for human well-being.

Writing in the 440s–430s BCE, the Greek prose writer Herodotus, for example, introduced the distinction between myth and history. Ancient tales of the Trojan War (and even earlier events) had circulated for hundreds, probably thousands, of years as stories of the Greeks’ distant past—until, centuries after Homer, Herodotus pointed out that these stories occurred too long ago for verification. Herodotus chose to describe instead another great—but more recent—conflict, the Persian Wars (490s–479 BCE), for which some eyewitness accounts and even pieces of material evidence were still available. A legendary or fantastical story can have no evidentiary corroboration and needs none. Historical truth requires verifiability and verification. Herodotus himself does not always adhere to his own precept, but by introducing the distinction between history and myth, he fortifies the 21st-century reader against evidence-free deceptions and falsehoods generating fear, anger, and hatred. Both fact and fiction can be entertaining and educational, but the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy remains crucial for maintaining good mental health—and necessary for resisting tyrannical efforts to obliterate the distinction.

Many other ancient works cultivate coping skills. Although Greek tragedies of the fifth century BCE often include divine characters, the plays guide our focus to the aspects of life within our control. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides expose the consequences of destructive and constructive human choices. Their plays encourage deliberate, farsighted decision making. They caution against rage, cruelty, overconfidence, and a lack of self-control. They cultivate instead critical self-reflection, honesty, generosity, compassion. Catullus, Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, and other ancient Roman writers similarly invite healthy exploration of human identity, hierarchies of power and privilege, optimal and suboptimal ways of navigating life and relationships. The Roman poet Horace advises us to be cautious in favorable times and hopeful in hostile ones.

I offer the example of my own students as anecdotal evidence of the benefits of the humanities. The study of ancient Greek and Latin languages and literature helps to remedy the illiteracy emanating from undiscerning digital engagement and the cueing system by fostering mental concentration and sharpening logical reasoning skills. At Sarah Lawrence, my first-year Latin students spend nine months (two semesters) learning to identify and interpret every letter of every word—while simultaneously gaining practice in logical deduction. Unlike English, Latin conveys meaning not primarily through word order but through word inflection—changes to the spelling of words to indicate their grammatical role in the sentence. In English, Kate gave a book to Ellie means one thing, whereas Ellie gave a book to Kate means quite another, and the meaning depends solely on word order. Latin, by contrast, encodes grammatical relationships in the final letters of each word. Word inflections follow a vast variety of set patterns for noun and adjective declensions and for verb conjugations. These patterns, called paradigms, require diligent memorization as well as dedicated practice until students can recognize individual word formations in context. Since most significant spelling changes occur in the final few letters of each word, “decoding” a Latin sentence requires identifying all letters, especially the final ones. Even more challenging, many word endings yield more than one interpretation. Drawing on other clues in a sentence, readers must use deductive reasoning to exclude all but the one meaning applicable in any particular instance. (Sometimes ambiguity remains, especially in Latin poetry, and this, too, can be illuminating.)

Countering the adverse effects of social media, digital scrolling, and the cueing system, the process of decoding Latin combines the gratification of puzzle solving with the joys of discovery. Over the course of two semesters, my Latin students experience the intellectual and emotional rewards of sustained, focused concentration. They begin to read as everyone should: not assuming that the text mirrors and affirms their expectations but instead allowing for the possibility of gaining unexpected insights. The Latin word for “literature” is litterae, literally “letters.” Acquiring access to litterae, my students attain access to literature.

In class at least, students enrolled in my Beginning Latin course this past year seemed not anxious and despairing but deeply focused and engaged in the process of acquiring an ancient language. They appeared to relish the arduous challenges of identifying, interpreting, and internalizing Latin vocabulary, word inflections, grammatical structures, and idioms. They took pleasure in decoding a Latin sentence and “encoding” an English one into Latin. They marveled at the ways that English and Latin do and do not align. One day, I arrived to class a few minutes early and found my students all present, already hard at work deciphering a Latin sentence, one student at the blackboard, chalk in hand, the others offering suggestions.

Even at this early stage in their comprehension of Latin, these students could access ancient wisdom. Authentic Latin aphorisms offer inspiration and motivation. Cicero provides a bracing reminder of the power of effort, maintaining, >Assiduus usus uni rei deditus et ingenium et artem saepe vincit. That is, “Constant/persistent application/practice devoted to one thing often gains mastery over [literally, “conquers”] both talent and skill.” Cicero’s words encourage students to take ownership of their accomplishments, knowing that they are not responsible for inborn attributes of talent and skill but that they can control their time and efforts. Their accelerating grasp of Latin, a product of hard work, both confirmed Cicero’s statement and yielded immediate and ongoing gratification. Ovid’s Saepe creat molles aspera spina rosas, “Often the harsh thorn creates soft roses,” heartens with the realization that difficulties, even pains, accompany life’s most beautiful and worthwhile things. My students discovered that knowledge is power and, as Seneca explains, Timendi causa est nescire: “The cause of fearing is not knowing.” The ancients generously share their understanding of the supreme value of literature, for Seneca insists, Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultra: “Leisure without literature is death and a tomb for a live human being.” Ovid celebrates the ability of literature to transcend the limits of mortal existence, maintaining that carmina morte carent—“songs/poems lack death.” That we can still read Ovid and other ancient writers today validates this ancient Roman poet’s confidence in the enduring survival and value of literary works.

The study of Latin—like all of the humanities—takes students out of themselves and also returns them to themselves. Literature offers students something to think about other than their own immediate concerns. At the same time, ancient literature helps students recognize that their own struggles are not unique but part of the human experience. Decoding excerpts of authentic Latin poetry and prose, students gain confidence and insight. At the end of the semester, my Beginning Latin students tackled, in the original, Vergil’s magnificent Aeneid (first century BCE). Exquisite and delightful as poetry, this epic depicting Rome’s beginnings also offers a valuable education in moral complexity, as it simultaneously celebrates and condemns Roman imperial conquest.

The students in my literature-in-translation seminar similarly seemed to be having fun reading and interpreting ancient Greek tragedy. Fun reading tragedy? It sounds counterintuitive, but Athenian tragedies of the fifth century BCE reward focused interpretive examination and discussion. Like the process of reading Latin, the effort to read tragedies, even in English translation, demands intense concentration and judicious moral evaluation. Students must interpret unfamiliar phrases and look up unfamiliar words. They encounter themes both foreign and familiar. Assessing morally ambiguous characters who confront dire predicaments—some of their own making, some not—students develop and engage in the practice of nuanced moral reasoning. They begin to connect these ancient stories to their own experience. Euripides’s Trojan Women (415 BCE), for example, depicting the aftermath of the fall of Troy from the perspective of the city’s survivors—newly enslaved, formerly royal women of the city—vividly dramatizes the catastrophic reversal of fortune occasioned by war. The play evokes not merely sympathy for these destitute women but also admiration for their ability to use the only power remaining to them, the power of speech. With their words, the women express their understanding and emotions, comfort one another, and demonstrate that misfortune has not altered their noble natures. Exalting articulate human speech for its power to preserve character and enable human beings to support one another and endure the unendurable, this powerful dramatization of human suffering and strength both inspires and emboldens.

With warfare and territorial aggression a perpetual fixture of human life, now as then, this play also offers a reassuring depiction of the self-destructive consequences of victors’ unrestrained ruthlessness and rapacity. Produced on the eve of the Athenians’ catastrophic Sicilian Expedition (415–413 BCE), the Trojan Women cautions against overconfidence, reckless opportunism, and abuses of power. In the play, the Greeks fail to restrain themselves in victory, violating temples of the gods, killing and raping suppliants at the altars, sacrificing a Trojan princess at the tomb of a Greek warrior, hurling Hector’s son, a toddler, from the battlements of Troy. As Euripides’s contemporary audience well knew, the brutal victors soon suffered for their sacrilege; the gods destroyed many Greek ships returning home from Troy. Many men did not survive the journey. Others returned years later, after many difficulties, encountering troubles in their homes, as Homer’s Odyssey describes.

The uplifting final words of Euripides’s dark play emphasize both the extraordinary fortitude of the Trojan women and the inevitable, calamitous consequences of rapacity. The elderly Hecuba, the former queen of Troy now destined to be the slave of Odysseus, heads bravely toward her fate, a model for the other captives, encouraging herself with these words: “Trembling limbs, carry my footstep. Go forward, wretched one, toward the enslaved day of your life.” And the Chorus of enslaved women accompanying her intones stoically, “Alas for the wretched city! Nevertheless, carry your foot forward toward the oar blades of the Greeks.” With these last words, the Chorus ominously references the Greek ships—most of which, as everyone knows, will never make it home.

The students in my literature seminar likewise found sustenance in Euripides’s Heracles (c. 417–414 BCE), a similarly inspiring tragedy commending human friendship and the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit. Produced, like the Trojan Women, during the dark days of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), a widespread, brutal conflict pitting Athens and its subject citizen-communities and allies against a Spartan-led Peloponnesian League of citizen-communities, the Heracles reverses the traditional story of the protagonist’s exploits. Instead of completing his labors as expiation for slaughtering his wife and children in a moment of madness, as in the traditional account, Euripides’s Heracles has made a deal with Eurystheus, king of Mycenae. If Heracles rids the world of the monsters threatening civilization, Eurystheus will allow him and his family to return home to Mycenae. Defenseless in Heracles’s absence, his mortal father, wife, and children huddle for safety at the altar of Zeus. The new tyrant of Thebes threatens to kill them all, their only hope being Heracles’s return. In a horrifying reversal, Heracles, the great monster slayer and civilizer, returns from his labors in triumph—and is driven mad at the command of the goddess Hera. Instead of protecting the members of his family as they had hoped and prayed, Heracles, in his divinely sent madness, slaughters them all. Awakening to the horror of his own actions, Heracles determines to kill himself. The intervention of Theseus, king of Athens and one-time beneficiary of Heracles’s extraordinary talents, persuades the devastated man to endure and go on living. Willing to share in Heracles’s dreadful suffering, Theseus offers his supportive physical presence and the sanctuary of his home and city.

A testament to the sustaining power of human friendship, the Heracles also revises the traditional definition of human excellence. Long famous for his brute strength and physical endurance, Euripides’s Heracles transforms before our eyes into a new model of human excellence, a human being able to inspire and accept devoted friendship and possessing the courage to persevere, even in the face of the unbearable.

My students found respite, solace, and inspiration in these stories of long ago. Striving to discover themselves and their place in the world, disappointed by the feckless actions of modern leaders, dismayed by vicious political polarization and nefarious falsehoods fomenting hatred and fear, they derived comfort and encouragement from reading these ancient tales that recall us to our shared humanity. I offer this random sampling of examples as not exhaustive but representative—tantalizing evidence of the wealth of human wisdom and experience available in the literature, philosophy, historiography, and arts of all times and places.

The humanities remind us that in daunting times, despair is not an option. Enabled to lose ourselves and find ourselves in the arts and experiences of others, we develop ingenuity and resilience. Productive investigation replaces fruitless worrying. Knowledge offers not only power but also pleasure. Understanding, discovering, figuring things out—in books and in our own lives—feels great. Human life is challenging, scary, depressing, sometimes traumatic. Young people know that something—much—is wrong, as it always is. Access to the humanities can restore to them the tools to cope.