Ryan Hammill (@HammillRyan) / X

Ryan Hammill

4,966 posts

Ryan Hammill

@HammillRyan

Humble internet language merchant @theancientlang @vergilpress @ekholang @agoge_classical

God’s Republic

Joined August 2020

Pinned
Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Jan 16
A language, before anything else, is made of sound. It can be easy to forget this when dealing with ancient, or historical, or dead languages.
Ekho
@ekholang
Jan 16
Replying to @ekholang
The @theancientlang cofounder @HammillRyan announces Ekho and discusses what you'll find in the app, here: ancientlanguage.com/announcing-ekh…
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Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Jul 10, 2024
When Solzhenitsyn came to the US as a Soviet exile he was a celebrity dissident. The Harvard Address was his first major public appearance. People were excited to hear the great dissident speak. They were very disappointed—even angry.
Jeremy Wayne Tate
@JeremyTate41
Jul 10, 2024
The most famous commencement speech of the entire 20th century took place at Harvard University in 1978. The speaker, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, was in exile from the Soviet Union. In his speech Solzhenitsyn gave a dire warning to the West. 22 chilling quotes from his speech🧵
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Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Jul 10, 2024
Replying to @HammillRyan
The distinguishing mark of the west, in Solzhenitsyn’s mind, was the decline of courage. This was the result of the functional atheism at the heart of liberalism and capitalism—a frightening convergence of capitalist and communist.
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Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Jul 10, 2024
Replying to @HammillRyan
Rather than denounce communism, Solzhenitsyn used the commencement speech to point out the soul sickness of the capitalist west, a sickness similar in kind to that in the communist east.
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Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Jul 10, 2024
Replying to @HammillRyan
One particularly galling aspect to his listeners: He saw the American defeat in Vietnam as tragic and shameful, engineered by an interfering and pernicious media class.
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Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Jun 30, 2025
Does any discipline outrank Classics in having so many insiders who forthrightly desire to annihilate it?
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Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Jul 10, 2024
Replying to @HammillRyan
Two years after the speech, the @EPPCdc put out a great book that includes the text of the address itself as well as a sampling of the befuddled and angry press responses that followed both immediately afterwards and a bit later after the fact.
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Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Jan 3, 2025
Imagine unknowingly making the linguistic discovery of the millennium, sharing it only with your bro in a letter, the letter gets lost, only for your letter to be found again 400 years later.
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Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Jul 10, 2024
Replying to @HammillRyan
A young Charles Kesler, then a grad student at Harvard under Harvey Mansfield, wrote a response (also in National Review) that was much more complimentary of Solzhenitsyn. The young Straussian identified the Russian as—quelle surprise!—a classical political philosopher:
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Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Jul 10, 2024
Replying to @HammillRyan
The National Review offered a somewhat trifling six-point refutation of the speech including this skeptical rhetorical question (one in which I think Solzhenitsyn, pace NR, has been completely vindicated)
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Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Jul 10, 2024
Replying to @HammillRyan
A sampling of some of the responses: The NYT called Solzhenitsyn a zealot who was “calling up a holy war.”
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Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Jul 10, 2024
Replying to @HammillRyan
The Washington Star criticized Solzhenitsyn for dark “obsessions” and for being full of “exaggerations.”
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Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Feb 26, 2025
C.S. Lewis on “the Parthenon vs the Optative” A hard teaching—even for the classical education movement, which is interested in things like “inspiring wonder” and “reenchantment” and “classroom hospitality”.
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Ryan Hammill
@HammillRyan
Apr 20, 2024
There is only ONE French Huguenot church in America. Here it is.
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