The hero in American Westerns (and Samurai tales and post-apocalyptic movies like “Mad Max”) is the Warrior Archetype personified, at least in its latter-day configuration of the solitary man of violence, who lives by his own code and operates as a law unto himself.

The yogis of Alexander’s India sat in silence, naked in the sun.

“I have conquered the need to conquer the world” means “I have defeated the dark side of the Warrior Archetype within me.”

Are warriors the same in all centuries, in all nations?

Today’s episode borrows heavily from Victor Davis Hanson’s book, The Western Way of War, whose thesis is that the way Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and all great Western generals down to today chose to wage war was to seek a pitched, decisive infantry battle that, at one blow, would decide everything.

The Greeks gave us democracy, courts of law, philosophy, drama, much more.

Combat for the ancient Greeks was an up-close-and-personal affair. Either you killed the man across from you or he killed you.

A writer’s story about how “Gates of Fire” came to be.