The Man With No Limits

The Greeks had one word for courage and manhood. This is what it takes to be that man. Seven laws, drawn from 2,500 years of philosophy, history and science: why the crowd is not the truth, why you must draw your line before the storm, the law above every law, why your word is your wall, how pain forges a man who cannot be broken, why you must outlast them, and why one man standing gives everyone watching permission to stand. Socrates alone against the Athenian mob and then the Thirty Tyrants. Luther before the Emperor. Regulus sailing back to Carthage to keep his oath. Frederick Douglass fighting back. Wilberforce losing for twenty years before he won. Horatius holding the bridge. "The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone." — Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People SOURCES Plato · Xenophon · Aristotle · Sophocles, Antigone · Cicero · Augustine · Luther at Worms, 1521 · Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail · Horace · Aulus Gellius · Frederick Douglass, Narrative (1845) · Seneca · Marcus Aurelius · Kierkegaard · Thoreau, Civil Disobedience · Milgram, Obedience to Authority · Livy · Macaulay, Horatius · Ibsen, An Enemy of the People ARTWORKS (all public domain) Jacques-Louis David — The Anger of Achilles (1819) Jacques-Louis David — The Oath of the Horatii (1784) Raphael — The School of Athens (1509–1511) Wilhelm von Kaulbach — The Battle of Salamis (1868) Ivan Aivazovsky — The Ninth Wave (1850) Philipp von Foltz — Pericles' Funeral Oration (1852), 19th-century reproduction, Rijksmuseum Jean-Léon Gérôme — Pollice Verso (1872) Jacques-Louis David — The Death of Socrates (1787) Gavin Hamilton — Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus (c. 1760–63) Niels Christian Kierkegaard — Søren Kierkegaard (c. 1840) Benjamin D. Maxham — Henry David Thoreau (1856) Thomas Cole — The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836) Jean-Léon Gérôme — Socrates Seeking Alcibiades in the House of Aspasia (1861) Caspar David Friedrich — The Monk by the Sea (1808–10