Lord Byron’s Don Juan Essay Example for Free

Lord Byron’s Don Juan Essay Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a satirical poem that offers a seemingly comical and serious outlook of sexuality. In three different sexual relations in three different places, the events that surround Don Juan are both laughable and questionable. From an early affair with Donna Julia, to an innocently, beautiful engagement with Haidee and finally an unfulfilled and avoided relation with the Sultana Gulbeyaz, Don Juan escapes through the clutches of love with shattered innocence, a broken heart and near fatal eroticism. â€Å"As Byron’s satiric genius developed, it tended to employ less and less of the traditional axe-swinging of the neoclassic satirists and to approach more and more the mocking and ironic manner of the Italian burlesque poetsFinally, when his satiric genius had fully ripened, Byron found complete expression in serious and social satire† (Trueblood, 19). From an early age, Don Juan was destined to wander through a maze of sexuality. One can see this unfolding by merely looking at his parent’s marriage. Let us first look at Don Juan’s parents, Don Jose and Donna Inez. Byron presents the couple ironically and comically. Donna Inez, â€Å"morality’s prim personification perfect past all parallel† (Byron, I, 16-17), still is not good enough for Don Jose. A man with a greater concern for women than knowledge, Don Jose is not a particularly admirable father figure. He lacks respect for his wife, and â€Å"like a lineal son of Eve, /Went plucking various fruits without her leave† (Byron, I, 18). This allusion to Don Jose being a son of Eve is somewhat accurate and satirical. Like Eve, he is careless and unaware of the consequences of his actions. However, as Eve’s son, the offspring of God’s beautiful creation, Don Jose is given holy qualities. He cannot be blamed for his actions, and for a long time, Donna Inez blinds herself from his wrongdoings and maintains their marital status. Their relationship is practically pointless; a mother and father that wished each other dead, not divorced. The unification of Don Jose and Donna Inez is a comical union. â€Å"What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, / Is much more common where the climate’s sultry† (Byron, I, 63). The two reach a point where they canno t stand each other, yet for some reason, they stay together. At the same time, marital disputes and infidelity make for no laughing matter. They were, and continue to be, problems for couples all around the world. Byron depicts Don Jose and Donna Inez at each other’s throats, but still sleeping side by side. To further solidify ironic humour, when their divorce inevitably approaches, Don Jose falls ill and dies. His death right before getting divorced symbolizes the death of marriage. Byron might be poking fun at the fact that more and more marriages end in divorce, and that the fire shared by ‘soul mates’ typically burns out. Despite being an unfaithful and uncaring father, the narrator paradoxically calls Don Jose an honourable man. The death of the father creates increased duties for the mother. Donna Inez decides to enlighten Don Juan with the teachings of art and sciences, but in doing so, neglects teaching him the basic facts of life. Someone uniformed about basic life necessities is at risk of not knowing how to act and react to certain situations. Though Don Juan does not attempt to manipulate those around him, his lack of direction leads him to being a victim of a harsh, unforgiving world. â€Å"Ladies even of the most uneasy virtue / Prefer a spouse whose age is short of thirty† (Byron, I, 61). This is a bold statement from the narrator, but it is certainly the case for Donna Julia, Donna Inez’s friend. She falls for the young and handsome Don Juan when he turns sixteen, though her affection started before then. Donna Julia is seven years older than Don Juan. Her love for the young lad is both comic and paedophilic. Donna Julia unsuccessfully resists temptation, and eventually takes Juan’s innocence and sends him along a path of sexual confusion. As the narrator states: â€Å"Even innocence itself has many a wile / And will not dare to trust itself with truth, / And love is taught hypocrisy from youth† (Byron, I, 72). Her inability to resist Don Juan is satirical for he is sexually inexperienced. Being sexually unsatisfied, one would think Donna Julia would pursue a lover with sexual experience. Her longing for such a young man is bizarre a nd questionable. â€Å"Byron seems to the think temptation integral to creation, and fall the inevitable consequence of temptation† (Ridenour, 29). For Don Juan, an impending relationship with Donna Julia is most appealing, but in turn, it is the start of spiralling, sexual journey. â€Å"Oh pleasure, you’re indeed a pleasant thing, / Although one must be damned for you no doubt† (Byron, I, 119). Unfortunate consequences of plentiful pleasure tend to follow Don Juan around. His romance with Donna Julia is of short lived passion. One November night, Don Alfonso’s suspicions reach a new height and he confronts Donna Julia in her suite. The season is significant; November represents the conclusion of fall and an approaching winter. The trees lose their leaves, plants and shrubs dwindle and the days get shorter and colder. These events can be compared to Don Juan and Donna Julia’s relationship, as its fire is extinguished by an upset Don Alfonso. â€Å"Man is chained to cold earth and is able to alleviate his sufferings only by his own efforts – by love and glory and, as we learn in the second sta nza, by poetry. This very poem is presented as an attempt to give color, form, warmth to a world naturally colorless, indefinite and chill† (Ridenour, 33). This thought can also be applied to Donna Julia, who was brightening her world with the young Don Juan. Though she promised Don Alfonso to never disgrace the ring she wore, she falls victim to the fact that â€Å"pleasure’s a sin and sometimes sin’s a pleasure† (Byron, I, 133). Donna Julia acts like a double-edged sword when confronted by Don Alfonso. She gets upsets by his unfaithful accusations, while the whole time, Don Juan is hidden beneath a pile of clothes. â€Å"Satire was Byron’s natural and habitual response to censure and injury† (Trueblood, 20). In the end, Donna Julia is left emotionally hurt and displaced, while Don Juan barely escapes from a physical punishment. Don Alfonso is left betrayed, deceived and not knowing where to turn. The first canto ends with the same disheartened feeling: â€Å"All things that have been born were born to die, / And flesh (which Death mows down to hay) is grass† (Byron, I, 220). The allusion of De ath mowing the grass of life is comic and serious. Humans age from year to year and their health eventually deteriorates. The same can be said of Don Juan’s sexual relations. â€Å"In Don Juan, Byron uses almost every possible variation of epic tone, from the frivolous to the almost entirely serious† (Clancy, 63). The tone takes a turn for the worse when Juan is involved in a shipwreck. He manages to get aboard a longboat and escape the capsizing ship. Juan’s luck only lasts so long for his tutor, who boards the longboat only to be eaten several days later. Just when Juan appears on the brink of death, he floats to safety clutching an oar. The oar can be seen as an obvious phallic symbol, and in turn, it leads Juan to his first true love, Haidee. â€Å"Amidst the barren sand and rocks so rude / She and her wave-worn love had made their bower† (Byron, II, 198). The setting of their relationship is perfect, for it is both beautiful and dangerous. â€Å"As Byron is careful to point out, it is here, on a coast whose perils have been repeatedly emphasized, that the peculiarly harmonious and ideal love of Juan and Haidee is consummatedâ₠¬  (Ridenour, 44). The love of Juan and Haidee has a quality of magnificence which Don Juan and Donna Julia lacked. The two are portrayed as soul mates that happened upon each other. They were brought together in a stroke of luck and when their union is denied â€Å"the power of love sours to lust, sex hatred and leering prudishness. What is true love is equally true of the other passionsThe attempt to contain the passions and stop the flow of life always defeats itself in some manner. This is the particular form which the standard satiric plot takes in Don Juan† (Kernan, 93). Though Haidee and Juan were meant for each other, Lambro interferes and puts an end to their relationship. He ruins the purity of love, which had ironically been washed up on a beach. Lambro puts Juan into slavery, and furthermore, causes his daughter’s coma and eventual death. Had he accepted the unification of Juan and Haidee, life in general would have been happier, gayer. Violence and disorder lurk behind tranquility and harmony, and the tranquil and harmonious are fated inevitably to dissolve again in the violent and chaotic. This is an immutable law of Byron’s world. Haidee was, â€Å"Nature’s bride† (Byron, II, 202), and the love she shared with Juan is contrasted in its naturalness with the unnatural situation of woman in society. Their union is almost an act of natural religion. (Ridenour). Mary Grant places Don Juan â€Å"among the different kinds of humor, the mild and pervasive type of Socratic irony, subtle in its half-laughter and half-earnestness, harmonized best with the ease of affability of the sermo, its change of tone from grave to gay, its arts in the absence of art† (Ridenour,10). Don Juan is brought to a slave market in Constantinople and bought by a eunuch for the Sultana, Gulbeyaz. The eunuch, Baba, can be seen as a sinister and dangerous character. â€Å"The technique of associating the subject to be ridiculed with sexual impotence is, of course, a traditional one; but the connection between impotence and lust for power exists on a much deeper level than that of mere invective† (Ridenour, 12). Baba’s sexual life has been obliterated, and his condition foreshadows a drastic change to Don Juan. This is fulfilled when he is brought to the palace and immediately dressed in woman’s clothing. Juan’s gender rearrangement is ironic, and turns bizarre when Gulbeyaz demands him to make love to her. As he is still in mourning for losing Haidee, Juan refuses and bursts into tears. â€Å"In the accounts of his [Juan’s] relations with women, he is not made to appear heroic or even dignified; and these impress us as having an ingredien t of the genuine as well as of the make-believe† (Eliot, 97). His actions at first infuriate the Sultana, then she feels compassion, and eventually she cries. Juan is displaced from a man to a weeping woman, while Gulbeyaz turns from a demanding woman to an apathetic female. Communication between the two is short lived as the sultan approaches the castle. Upon seeing Juan, the sultan states: â€Å"I see you’ve bought another girl; ‘tis pity / That a mere Christian should be half so pretty† (Byron, V, 155). The sultan, who has four wives and undoubtedly several mistresses, comes off as a fool for not noticing that Juan is a male. We can laugh at his blindness, but at the same time, one can only wonder what else he does not see. In Canto I we have the amusing account of the genealogy of Don Juan. Then there is a description of the first of Juan’s amours, the Julia episode. Canto II continues Juan’s adventures, including his shipwreck and subsequent love affair with Haidee. In Cantos III and IV the passionate roma nce of Haidee and Juan comes to its tragic end and Juan is soon embroiled in the ludicrous seraglio escapade which occupies the whole of Canto V and is concluded in Canto VI (Trueblood, 5). Through these episodes, Byron uses satire to portray sexuality in a comical and serious manner. â€Å"The poem is a satire on the romantic cult of passion and on the natural man whose passions are his only guide from his proper woes† (Clancy, 53). Don Juan is sent on a rollercoaster of sexuality: paedophilic love, true love ending in a broken heart and then a confusing, uncertain relation. Through hardships and endeavours, Don Juan comes out a stronger man. From the first six cantos, one can conclude that â€Å"love, which should be a means of overcoming self, of living in and for another person, is itself egotistic. The remedy merely aggravates the disorder. It is the same paradox which, in other terms, we have met so often before† (Ridenour, 75). The comedic yet serious portrayal of sexuality makes Don Juan one of the greatest satires even written.

Minimizing Effects of Foreclosure Crisis Essay examples -- Economics E

Even though I believe that education can help solve this problem, I do not believe that it alone can prevent our current foreclosure crisis. Other factors, along with education, need to be considered. Our financial mess is not only due to our own ignorance regarding financial matters and personal responsibility, but it has also been elevated by our government’s failed policies that have exacerbated an already fragile market. Politics have played a major role in our failures for a majority of Americans. When government policies are created to elevate a particular sect of the American population, for example, home ownership, those who were on the bubble for loan approval are susceptible. These individuals who were eventually approved, but then cannot sustain monthly payments, are doomed for at least a fall if not a total failure. To address the issue of education, I will point to a 2004 survey conducted by The National Council on Economic Education. The survey points out that since 2004 there are only seven states that mandate their students take a course on basic finances as a requirement for their high school graduation. Comparing the results of the survey to the individual states ranking in the category of home foreclosures, we see that this type of education has a dismal effect. According to the NCEE’s survey, thirty-eight states set school standards that indicate they want money issues and financial themes to be taught; however, many states do not enforce the standards and have not made them a part of their curriculum. By looking at the survey, we see that the following states have implemented a basic finance class as part of their required curriculum since 2004: Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, New Y... ...ollment surpassing that of our higher education system. A Responsible Citizenship curriculum will do no good unless the principles of that education are embraced and applied to our daily lives. If applied, people may be able to avoid or minimize a future foreclosure crisis and the resulting economic fallout. Works Cited Fulmer, Melinda. "States Ranked by Foreclosure Rates." MSN Real Estate. Web. 21 Oct. 2010. . "Public School Spending." Epodunk: The Power of Place. June 2004. Web. 24 Oct. 2010. . "Survey of the United States: Economic and Personal Finance Education in Our Nation's Schools in 2004." National Council on Economic Education, 2004. Web. 30 Nov. 2010. .

Latin America Transformed

This work focuses on four different areas for understanding the dynamics of Center America and the Caribbean. The first is the comparative evaluation of development policies in the region prior to neoliberalism. The second involves analytical work that combines the nature of the neoliberal model applied in the Caribbean and Central America. The third is the study of the role of migration and trading blocks in contemporary Caribbean and Central American development. The fourth considers the Cuban exception as a socialist state in a capitalist sea. The republics of Central America and the Caribbean share many historical characteristics. All of these countries formed part of the Spanish colonial system for three centuries or more. However, both regions have inherited highly unequal distributions of agricultural land (Gwynne & Kay 104). Although the countries spun out of the Spanish colonial orbit at different times and in different contexts, Spanish colonialism established important elements of coherence that helped lay the foundations for the challenges of nation-state construction after independence. Furthermore, Central America and the Caribbean have shared, since the late nineteenth century, the strong political, social, and economic influence of the United States and the development of agro-export economies. Either through the direct creation of classic enclave economies (mining, sugar, timber, bananas, and so on); the development of export infrastructures; or the less visible participation in the production and marketing of other products, such as coffee, cattle, or food, foreign -especially U.S., German, and English – entrepreneurs helped connect the region firmly to the North Atlantic economy. Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, national elites struggled to channel and contain social and political movements in order to promote the kind of order and progress they and foreign investors depended upon and also to construct memories, histories, and images of nations that were functional to their political and economic projects and their dreams of national power and stability. At the same time, foreign political and economic control and their own internal weaknesses and contradictions led them to seek, at least rhetorically, national unity and independence and to make strategic concessions to popular classes in an attempt to form nationalist or populist alliances. This kind of opening both influenced the ways popular struggles came to be defined and created situations in which popular forces could effectively make their voices heard in the national political arena. CBI should be seen as a vanguard policy for a reconstituted US regional hegemony under neoliberalism (Gwynne & Kay 105). Caribbean governments in the context of their efforts at promoting economic and social development and with the external debt crisis hanging heavily over their heads had been stressing the need for a meaningful, coordinated program of emergency assistance in the form of aid and market and investment preferences. Indeed as early as 1979, Edward Seaga, then the opposition leader of Jamaica, proposed the need for a mini-Marshall Plan and a Puerto Rico-style relationship between the US and the Caribbean. CBI could therefore be regarded as a response to those appeals. The most salient studies in Cuban history written in the 1970s and 1980s focused on the transition from slave labor to free labor in Cuba's plantation economy and were led by the research of Manuel Moreno Fraginals into Cuba's plantation sector and Rebecca Scott's work on the abolition of slavery and its impact. Since then, studies have addressed issues of racial and ethnic formation and identity, immigration, and social banditry, as well as the women's and labor movements. Jorge Ibarra has begun a process of revision and reconsideration of the classic themes of Cuban historiography, including the island's social structure. Since the nineteenth century Cuba has essentially had a one-crop (sugar cane) exporting economy with the concomitant vulnerabilities of output and price fluctuations and deteriorating terms of trade (Gwynne & Kay 118). Cuba is now almost totally isolated and potentially a source of future conflict and violence. Cuba has ceased to be the totalitarian state it once was as the state itself was severely weakened by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Spurred on by the international climate favoring regional trading blocs, Middle American countries have recently formed the Association of Caribbean States, but beyond several regional summits have taken no firm steps towards region-wide economic integration (Gwynne & Kay 100). The Association of Caribbean States (ACS) encompasses 200 million (plus) inhabitants of the region and, along with free trade arrangements between CARICOM and Venezuela, Colombia, and the Southern Cone countries, represents the consolidation of a Caribbean strategy to participate as fully as possible in the movement toward hemispheric free trade. Ironically, the Caribbean is moving in the direction of the foreign conception of the region in that U.S., European, Japanese, and other external policy-makers have long dealt with the Caribbean programmatically as a seamless, if culturally diverse, unit. Regional academics and policy-makers, however, depart from this programmatic view in recognizing that certain aspects of sub-group uniqueness must still be maintained. For example, the existing Caribbean Community (CARICOM) integration area will for the foreseeable future co-exist with the ACS. For both the Caribbean and Central America, the version of import substitution adopted to a large extent involved US multinational corporations (MNCs) relocating production facilities within the region to serve customers there, rather than a dramatic expansion of domestically-owned industries (Gwynne & Kay 100). Both liberal, free-market rhetoric and collective bodies of capitalists (domestic holding companies and multinational corporations) spearheaded the drive to enter foreign areas. The ideology praised individualism and free market values, but the actual agencies of penetration were collectivized planning organizations. U.S. businessmen and politicians looked first to Central America for markets because that region had long been expected to become a closer economic partner. But U.S. officials conducted little study of the Central American economic situation and entered into no systematic consultation with Central American leaders because the U.S. vision expressed in the doctrines of Manifest Destiny and the Open Door was restricted to resolving U.S. domestic problems, not meeting Central American needs. The Americanism initiated in the 1880s, which was expected to create the market conditions necessary to assure U.S. commercial expansion, also exposed fundamental differences between the U.S. and Central American visions. While the United States proposed mainly commercial programs, the Central American delegates often struggled to include political, social, and cultural affairs. Among the alternatives available, it seems that the neoliberal model has begun to prevail. This model, which is well known and well supported from outside, substantively modifies the structure of Central American countries. Its hallmark is the absence of attention to social aspects. In the case of Central America, it eliminates what little economic equilibrium had existed before, producing a growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, and a progressive pauperization of the rest of the population. Consequently, it will crumble democracy throughout the region. Neoliberalism puts pressure on already highly-trade-dependent Middle America to export more (Gwynne & Kay 104). The progress or modernization pursued by the Latin American governments required increasing sums of money to import the machinery, railroads, luxuries, and technology that would be used to try to transform their nations into replicas of the European nations the elites and middle class so much admired. To earn that money, the Latin Americans increased their exports, the foods or minerals they traditionally had sold abroad. The export sector of their economies received the most attention. In that sector, they increasingly concentrated investments, technology, and labor, leaving the domestic economy weak and increasingly inadequate. The number of those exports was limited. The highly prized railroads, built at staggering expense, opened new lands for exploitation but always were linked to the export sector, rushing the material products of the interior to the coastal ports where ships waited to transport them to Europe and the United States. Most of the modernization concentrated in the export sector. It contributed to some impressive growth but did little to develop Central America. In fact, modernization contributed to deepening dependency. Central America and the Caribbean is a region of small, economically vulnerable and trade-dependent countries surrounded by larger and more industrialized countries that are moving more aggressively towards economic integration (Gwynne & Kay 99). From one perspective, global transformations create challenges and opportunities for policymakers who can adapt to changing environments and prudently recalculate basic questions of survival, viability, and effectiveness. There is reason to believe that this process is under way in Cuba, though the nature of these calculations and their long-term consequences are unknown. For example, Cuba must carefully calculate its interests in a context of rapidly changing balances and one in which its currency – defiance, moralism, anti-imperialism – has lost much of its value. Systemic reasons rooted in a command model and a series of blunders and poor decisions by government largely explain Cuba's economic predicament. It is increasingly recognized in Cuba itself that its substantial economic, financial, and trade dependence on the former communist world actually deprived it of the advantages that would have accrued to it had relations been expanded with more capitalist countries. Unfortunately, Middle America denotes a region anxious about, and reacting somewhat defensively to, hemispheric movements towards trade alliances to its north and south. Spurred on by the international climate favoring regional trading blocs, Middle American countries have recently formed the Association of Caribbean States, but beyond several regional summits have taken no firm steps towards region-wide economic integration (Gwynne & Kay 100). The revival of the integration movement has been encouraged by the perceived world wide trend to form trading blocks spearheaded by the European Community (EC). This development led to a perceived need in the United States, Canada, and some Latin American countries to form a hemispheric economic block in order to counterbalance the strengthened European integration movement. Once the NAFTA movement got underway, some LAC countries realized the need to participate in it to avoid the possible negative economic effects that NAFTA may have on their economies. The Central American Common Market (CACM) consists of five countries with a long history of linkages: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica (Gwynne & Kay 121). Together, the original CACM members experimented with the development strategy known as Import Substitution Industrialization, or (ISI). This strategy called for a change in the nature and structure of demand – away from imported consumer goods and toward imported industrial goods, which could then be used to produce domestically the same goods that would formally have been imported. During its initial stages, ISI was considered quite successful and was often credited with the economic â€Å"boom† that swept the region at the time of its inception. In reaction to neoliberalism, a growing number of people have tried to emigrate to North America and Europe, where about 5 million Caribbean islanders have gone since 1945 (Gwynne & Kay 120). For example, Salvadorans initially migrated to San Francisco, while Hondurans migrated to New Orleans. Migration has been such an integral part of the Eastern Caribbean culture that almost every Eastern Caribbean citizen has a relative or friend living in a major country. This factor is significant when analyzing both the political and economic system of the Eastern Caribbean. Since 1979 there has been significant changes in migration patterns and, notably, in the volume of people leaving Central America. Not surprisingly, Nicaragua and El Salvador, both of which suffered tremendous damage from war and social unrest, witnessed one of the most dramatic migrations of their people to other Central American countries, Mexico, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. To cite an extreme example, for every five people born in St Kitts and Nevis and alive today, two now reside in the United States (Gwynne & Kay 120). Neoliberalism, in particular, has made a major contribution to the dynamic and contradictory processes of globalization in the Caribbean and Central America. One important conclusion that comes from this study is that the neoliberal structural adjustment programs are very limited. Although export agriculture has produced some wealth, it has also created massive structural problems of inequality, and it has not achieved self-sustained, modernizing growth over the long run. In conclusion, a feature of Caribbean and Central American migration that deserves further exploration and research is the potential for continuous and circular migration, principally between the islands of the Caribbean and the United States. This phenomenon has important implications for labor markets in regions of origin and destination.   Many of the people now returning to their homelands are bringing with them the wealth of accumulated knowledge and experience. This should significantly enhance the level of human capital in these Central American economies and serve as an important element for the growth and development of the region. Works Cited Robert N. Gwynne, Cristà ³bal Kay. Latin America Transformed: Globalization and Modernity. Arnold: London, 1999.   

Characteristics of Human Greatness - 975 Words

The Iliad by Homer is about characteristics of human greatness. In this epic poem, characters vie for greatness and the thought of being remembered by all. By encountering many different warriors, kings, gods and goddess, the reader becomes familiar with both vice and virtue. In The Iliad there are many characteristics that could distinguish a warrior. The three most important of these traits are courage, honor, and determination, none of which may be lacking in a person who is ‘great. Courage is the most important quality of the three necessary for greatness. Courage is present in a person when they prove it is possible for them to overcome a perceived danger. Achilles displays courage when he is faced with the news of his own†¦show more content†¦471). Although he is suffering with the death of Patroclus, Achilles is determined to gain revenge on Hector. Soon there after, Hector proves of his persistence by standing in front of his troops and exclaiming, You fool, enough! No more thoughts of retreat paraded before our people (p. 477), speaking about forcing the Argives back onto their ships. Hector will not allow his army to disgrace the people again at this point. He wants to prove to them that they are capable of defeating the Achaeans. Without determination, many men would not acquire honor and would not obtain honor in their lives. By showing perseverance, they may just prove to the people that there is a reason for them to be remembered. Achilles seems to be the best portrayer of the characteristics of human greatness in this epic poem. Although he has some weaknesses as a hero towards the beginning, and feels invincible at times, he was quickly grounded by the gods, and continued to be ‘great. In the end, Achilles even showed mercy towards the Trojans and King Priam by returning the body of Hector and promising not to fight for as long as Priam required for the burial of his son. This only added to the many qualities Achilles showed in The Iliad. Courage, honor, and determination are essential to human greatness at this time period because a man could only be judged and remembered based on his ability inShow MoreRelatedIs Magnanimity Is Defined By Aristotle And How Virtuousness Separates The Magnanimous From The Pusillanimous And The Vain968 Words   |  4 Pagesin this excerpt from Nicomachean Ethics reflect on behavior and attitude, virtue and vices, and identification of self-worth, and how these might define one’s greatness. However, one might ask, what significance does this play in judging one’s character in modern times? Throughout book IV Aristotle discusses the defining factors of greatness, and how virtuousness separates the magnanimous from the pusillanimous and the vain. After analyzing the text, it is conclusive that some of Aristotle’s teachingsRead Moreâ€Å"by the Waters of Babylon† vs Epic of Gilgamesh. Essay632 Words   |  3 Pagesdespite the fact that they are not from the sam e era of time. 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