Motivation

“Ye were not made to live like unto brutes”: The Greatest Motivational Scam in Italian Literature (and Why Ulysses Was History’s Worst CEO)

10/22/202610/21/2026 in Categories Odyssey

Bust of Ulysses overlooking the sea, with a ship on the horizon, inspired by Canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno.

If social networks, corporate training rooms, and sellers of motivational courses have one thing in common, it is the compulsive urge to lift literary quotations out of context and print them on mugs, PowerPoint slides, or LinkedIn bios. …

Antiquity & Absurdity

Un progetto dedicato alla mitologia, alla letteratura classica, alle curiosità storiche e all’irresistibile assurdità dell’essere umano contemporaneo.

Realizzato con cura per una lettura senza distrazioni

Manage your preferences

We use cookies and similar technologies to make the site work and, with your consent, to remember your preferences and understand how the site is used. You can accept all cookies, reject non-essential cookies, or customize your choice. You can change or withdraw your consent at any time. Refusing cookies may adversely affect some features and functions.

Functional Functional Always active

Technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or solely for carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.

Preferences Preferences

Technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that have not been requested by the subscriber or user.

Statistics Statistics

Technical storage or access used exclusively for statistical purposes. Technical storage or access used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.

Marketing Marketing

Technical storage or access is necessary to create user profiles for sending advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.

Manage options
Manage services
Manage {vendor_count} vendors
Read more about these purposes

View preferences

{title}
{title}
{title}