This year I had the honor of being a Tragos Scholar with 18 other undergraduate brothers from around the country. The entire experience of the Tragos Quest to Greece is ineffable. Never before have I been surrounded by so many intelligent, passionate, and driven young men all united in a journey toward self-actualization and improvement. We laughed, we cried, we hiked the mountains of Greece, but most importantly, we challenged each other daily to dig deeper into the Ritual, Greek history and ourselves. 

While I cannot put into words the transformative nature of this experience, or even what it was like to take part in it, there is one moment from the trip that I owe it to myself and others to share as best as I can.

In order to reach the cave, we had to hike for 45 minutes on foot up this 8,000-foot mountain. It was tiring, exhausting, and none of us really had any idea of what we were about to experience. At the end of our hike, we came upon the entrance to the cave – a small opening on a small plateau below the mountain’s summit that led into a massive limestone chasm. Right at the opening was an ancient stela with an inscription denoting the cave as the home to the nymph Corycia and sacred to the satyr god Pan. We entered and looked around in wonderment at the cave to which people have traveled for over two millennia. While there we all ate our lunches out on the plateau, discussed the significance of the cave, and finally returned one last time to sing the anthem before leaving. While the experience of actually standing in the Oracle’s Cave and understanding its significance was truly sublime and something none of us on the trip will ever forget, the symbolism of the cave in our lives was far more powerful.

In Book VII of Plato’s masterwork The Republic, he provides us with one of the most famous metaphors in all of history, the Allegory of the Cave. Plato uses the allegory to illustrate his Theory of Forms and how we come to attain true knowledge. While the Platonic Theory of Forms is generally accepted as false metaphysically, the Allegory of the Cave still has a role in our lives as SigEps. 

Of the 19 Tragos Scholars this year, 18 of us came to college with no interest in joining a fraternity. We believed that fraternalism was nothing more than tanks, Chubbies, Sperry’s, and partying. In this way, we’re prisoners in the cave fettered by cynicism and only able to see fraternities as what the media projected to us through movies and TV. Then someone or something shattered these chains about our neck and allowed us to turn away from the wall of shadows and toward the light at the cave’s entrance. Perhaps it was an enthusiastic vice president of recruitment or maybe it was a senior who asked a freshman to get coffee and talk about SigEp. No matter the cause, we turned about. At first, we struggled to look ahead. We had trouble believing everything we once thought about Greek life could be wrong, but then we adjusted and climbed up. The further along our journey up the cave the more we saw and the more truth we sought, until finally we made our way out of the cave and into the world. 

Here brotherhood is not defined by the views of others, nor is it affected by the stereotypes portrayed in pop culture. Here Virtue, Diligence and Brotherly Love reign supreme.

But just like the true philosophers from Plato’s Republic who have escaped the cave and attained true knowledge in the world of forms, we must also descend back down into the cave to rule and continually break the chains of cynicism binding others to a false perception of fraternalism and the values that we hold so dear. The power of our visit to the Oracle’s Cave while on the Tragos Quest to Greece lies in this realization. As SigEps, we have made our way out of the cave and understand the power and value of fraternal life, but we must continue to defy the stereotype and help others understand as well.