A phrase for all seasons: Alumnus Benjamin Treger on the lasting impact of his classics education
Tatteco/Etsy
On his first date with his now-wife, Sarah, Benjamin Treger’s knowledge of Latin went a long way.
| July 28, 2026
Benjamin Treger earned a bachelor’s degree in Greek and Latin and economics with a specialization in computing from UCLA in 2009. He is an employment attorney living in Los Angeles and Pisgah Forest, North Carolina. This article was adapted with permission from the Department of Classics summer 2026 newsletter.
I am living proof that Classics can get you an amazing spouse. No joke.
It happened one June day in 2019, on my first date with my now-wife, Sarah. On her forearm was a tattoo: amor fati, Latin for “love of fate,” the idea that we should not merely accept what life brings, but embrace it as part of the life we are meant to live. I noticed it but played it cool and said nothing.
As we walked the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, a man and his friend approached us. The man was going blind, and he was having people write words of encouragement on his shirt to help him cope. Sarah crossed the street, wanting to stay aloof. I engaged.
What did I write? Amor fati, of course. What phrase could be more fitting? When I caught up to Sarah and told her what had happened, her jaw dropped, first because she had a tattoo of that very phrase, and second because she had finally met someone who actually knew what it meant. The rest is history.
I’d wager that the time my fellow classicists and I spent at Dodd Hall has found its own quiet ways of shaping our lives. Classics, after all, is an all-encompassing discipline: history, linguistics, archaeology, philosophy, and more.
After UCLA, I found myself at Stanford Law School. Most of my colleagues expected Classics to give me an edge with legal terms like respondeat superior and res judicata, and while that was true enough, the real benefit came from somewhere less obvious: the intense, deliberate way Classics forces us to dissect a sentence, to be precise with language, and to understand the foundations of our legal system. An oration of Cicero teaches the modern lawyer more about persuasion than any dictionary of legal terms.
Benjamin Treger and his wife, Sarah, with their two older children.
And so went my legal education, after which I found myself in “big law,” where you trade your freedom for a lucrative salary. I eventually moved to a boutique employment law firm in Santa Monica, where the trade-off let me add otium to the heretofore all-encompassing negotium. From there, life’s twists and turns took me to Miami, then back to Pacific Palisades. And it was there that it became my turn to learn the true meaning of amor fati.
On January 7, 2025, our home burned down. Everything I owned went up in ash. This was my community’s Vesuvius, though, thanks to text-message alerts, we did not perish.
The winds carried us to our vacation property in Pisgah Forest, North Carolina, where we now reside. And just like that, I went unwillingly from urbs to rus. Horace’s farmer in the second Epode sighs over the blessings of country life, only to reveal he’s a moneylender who never leaves the city. In our case, the fire chose for us. The daydream he only sighed about became our reality.
But what was one to do? Embrace this fate, and love it. With stoic teachers like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, disaster became an opportunity for growth, and in time we began to thrive again. Pulling a page from Virgil’s Georgics, we now raise our own animals and vegetables, including the ducks and chickens that supply our morning omelets.
I have also started my own law practice and now have three children under three: a circumstance, I assure you, far more difficult than losing a house to fire. And so it goes.
Classical literature has carried me through more than I ever imagined when I was a student. One day, when the children are grown, and my hair has grayed, I will pull Cicero’s De Senectute down from the shelf and let him teach me how to grow old as well as he once taught me how to argue. Amor fati, after all, is not a phrase for one season of life. It is for all of them.