For Thanassi

• Author: Robert Thibeaux
• Position: Robert Thibeaux, Member, Carver Darden, New Orleans, LA. Like the front of the LSU law school building or the Pantheon in its day, Thanassi was an embodiment of the continuing legacy of classical Greek thought and achievement in modern society. He loved her poets, as he loved Louisiana, his adopted home.
• Pages: 1101-1102

For Thanassi

Robert Thibeaux

Aeschylus found many truths in justice;

The god was needed, essential weakness

Required a higher good, an artifice,

A law: and so we searched; our uniqueness

Common to any areopagus,

To any people of lusts and commerce,

One necessity, a god among us,

Wisdom’s revenance, if our laws rehearse.

And so from Athen’s rock bearing one gift

You came; giving freely as the gods do,

Departing as gods depart. Shall we lift

Eyes above to follow you, to find you?

Look there, Louisiana, for his place;

Sophia’s code, the wings of Samothrace.

2/17

The Thanassiad

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts . . . Virgil, the Aeniad

Captive Greece captured her rude conqueror . . . Horace

Those bearing gifts: an old Roman slander

Disproved by the very poem, now quoted,

Prelude to the Latin echo noted,

Copyright 2018, by ROBERT THIBEAUX.

 Robert Thibeaux, Member, Carver Darden, New Orleans, LA. Like the

front of the LSU law school building or the Pantheon in its day, Thanassi was an

embodiment of the continuing legacy of classical Greek thought and achievement

in modern society. He loved he r poets, as he loved Louisiana, his adopted home.

We in Louisiana will forever be enriched by this student of the Academy 2500

years after its founding. These works pay tribute to his achievement, to the culture

into which he was born, that he loved, and to the rich gifts of wisdom—sophia—

that he brought from the land of Greece to our state’s Civil Code. Like Vir gil

himself in t he Aeneid, we can never stop hearing these echoes from ancient

Greece, this Homer, in the Greek, Athanassios—the immortal one. The wings of

the Victory of Samothrace, indeed.