An Ancient Decision-Making Technique for the New Year
Let Virgil’s “The Aeneid” guide you in 2022
One of the best things about being an English major was that after a few introductory classes, my books became pretty cheap. They were usually novels, poetry collections, or slim nonfiction volumes that I could get used for less than $10.
One of the worst things about being an English major was that at the end of the semester, when I took my books to the buyback tents around campus, I was usually offered $10 for the lot of them.
My reluctance to part with my books each semester — even for the price of a pitcher of beer — is how I came to have a copy of Virgil’s The Aeneid on my bookshelf. I bought it for a class on Roman poetry and decided to keep it because it looked like something a Smart Person would have and was worth something like $.50 to the buyback guys.
For a while, it appeared the book was destined to gather dust on my shelf, but it wasn’t long before I found a reason to regularly crack it open: Sortes Virgilianae.
I came across the concept of Sortes Virgilianae a few years ago in Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile, a tiresome and repetitive book that I did not finish (I have to believe even his most ardent fans can agree that things went a little sideways after Black…
