Does anyone have a recommendation or a reading list in the classics (perhaps a Coursera or something) where I can self-study? I'm tech by trade and education but I would love to read the greats through the last several millennia in the western canon. Also open to a course or reading list that has eastern philosophy in addition.
Someone bought that for me years ago and it s*at me to tears reading his deep thoughts. Paraphrasing: You should read literature to come to grips with your own death. But took about 100 pages to say so with the most meandering, tangential, irrelevant segway loaded prose that was utterly stultifying. Such as you might get from someone desperate to prove how incredibly clever they are rather than filling the role they claim to be filling.
I stopped reading it with the idea that just about anybody's else's list would likely be superior.
Obviously YMMV. Brought back the memory seeing it here. Would be really interested if someone had a different reaction to it.
Important context for those considering it: Bloom's book was seen as a rejection of those bringing new voices (i.e., non-white, non-male) into the 'canon'; it was popular among conservative culture warriors. That doesn't disqualify it, but understand Bloom might be injecting some politics into it.
I don't think so. Supporters may think Bloom's conservative position stands 'above' insufferable woke politics or something like that. In fact the politics has already been brought, so to speak, and is now inescapable. Perhaps Bloom was not the first one to inject 'politics', but once the new ideas have been brought, rejecting them is reaction and political too.
Why post that? Do you think the world is unaware that you exist, a conservative culture warrior or fellow traveler? Does it add anything but inflammatory politics?
I intended nothing either way; I was informing people about the book. Please don't include me in your politicize-everything motivations.
The reason I posted was to point out that the context you provided was unnecessary and even counter-productive. In light of your response, in particular the blatantly obvious projection, I believe I was correct in my read of your intentions.
Reading other people's minds is a fool's errand, and you got the appropriate result - you are wrong. If you thought it was counter-productive, etc., just say so.
Context is an essential part of meaning. If you don't know the context of something, you are going to misunderstand and be misled. If I yell 'fire!' in a crowded movie theater, it means something different than it does at a gun range, or huddled over some kindling in in driving rainstorm at a campsite. In this case, the context was political. We need to be able to talk about politics without actually doing it; some try to pretend politics doesn't exist, but that's a lie. It seems to me that you felt that it could not be talked about, it had to be done. Don't try to impose that on me, please.
The best internet primer I know of is Wes Cecil's youtube channel, he's a Literature professor in the PNW, and does hour long public lectures a couple of times a month and uploads them there in categorized playlists. These are good to start with because they're for a general-public audience, rather than for students who have already read the material once and are just in class to get the finer points and debate the concepts (that's why these things don't typically translate well to video lessons, his channel is an exception).
From there, you can go on and read yourself what interests you, and while I typically have little use for the prospect of learning by video rather than reading, humanities / philosophy / literary study is one example in which you will get a lot more from the material if you find a lecture that accompanies it.
Even as a humanities grad who has been through a lot of this stuff once, I find myself listening to his lectures for nostalgia's sake. Humanities classes are fun, that's why people still go to them.
Just fwiw, “classics” as in TFA means specifically Greek & Roman language & lit, not “the greats” writ large.
To be fair TFA does not make this distinction clear, and conflates “the classics department” with “the classics” to make a rhetorical point (and a good one, imo).
This is similar to "classical music". For those farther removed from this discussion, "classics" would include Shakespeare just as much as classical music would include Bach. No point in arguing "well, he's really Baroque".
You're conflating two things here re: classical music. There's classical music, the genre, which includes the Classical Period as well as The Baroque, Romantic, and Modern periods.
Admittedly, this is really confusing, and it'd make a lot more sense to call one of those "classical" things something else, but I'm not in charge of naming things (any more).
The Harvard Classics is a similar set of books that pre-dates Britannica's set. It has a 15 minutes a day reading list for the year. The reading list is in volume 50.
Dipping into this, most of the books listed are very short, especially in year one. 2.5 weeks for Hamlet, for example, is quite generous. Likewise for two chapters of Gibbon.
The two chapters on gibbon were a fascinating read. They focus on how Christianity came to power under the Roman Empire… a topic I’d not seen treated elsewhere.
I imagine some improvements in our understanding have been made since Gibbon’s time, and I’d def seek those out before walking around claiming I “know” what happened back then, but as an entry point is was a great, if a little bit too wordy, read.
To become motivated to read Gibbon I recommend the episode about him in the BBC In Our Time podcast. I don't have my phone with me, but I think it's in the Philosophy category.
I discovered this list some years back. As others have said it’s very doable. I’ve got a full-time job, wife, kids, friends, etc. and have been comfortably able to keep at about ~90% of the pace of the plan.
I recommend it. The organization is really nice; the years get more “difficult” as you go on and within each year the works are ordered chronologically. In this way it’s very approachable.
It’s not long before you start seeing references between the books, something referred to as The Great Conversation. I find that really exciting; it’s makes the stories richer in the same way as when you get steeped in the lore of some fantasy world… but it’s with ideas that shaped _our_ world.
Last thing I’ll say is that the ideas in the books aren’t a unified block. There is often disagreement between ideas, and sometimes explicitly called out. For example, Montaigne says he thinks Plato gives too much license to children to determine the topics they should study. Montaigne thinks instead it should be more prescribed. It’s moments like that, when you see two sharp minds disagreeing on such a topic that you ask yourself what _you_ believe. Then you can geek out on how that question was answered by Dewey and others that shaped what modern education is today.
IME, people learn best by exploring. You don't need to learn certain things by a certain time, so just explore: Find something that grabs you, start there, and follow your nose where it leads you.
Have fun, find joy and beauty, challenge and wisdom. The classics are renowned for a reason and I find them most appealing, engaging, and get the most from them when I think that the book was written by an ordinary, flawed person; there's a personality, their interior world, their experiences, their own vision, their blind spots, just like me and my ordinary neighbor - it's not scripture, there's another person in the room. Then - holy cow, it's incredible that a human created it. I think our instincts provide a good indication of what we are ready for - based on what we've learned so far and what state we are in for learning.
Also, it took me time to not see classics as tests, and to be comfortable not understanding everything. I'm probably not going to understand everything on the level of the authors of humanity's greatest works (and in their field of specialty at the pinnacle of their achievement), or of the experts who study them, or sometimes even of my ordinary neighbor - they will see things I don't; it's not a race. Sometimes, after reading something else, after more life experience, I return to them and they made more sense. Being honest with myself about what I don't understand helps me gain much more than people who fake it (to themselves and to others). For one thing, I know my strengths and weaknesses and can address them; for another, when there's something I don't grasp, I don't deny its existence (to protect my ego) or twist it into something I already think - I give myself an opportunity to learn more.
If nothing strikes you now, a short history of the ancient world might be a good starting point. It would provide ideas on what to read next, and lot's of context - even modern classics often reference or reflect ancient ones. Britannica provides excellent histories for non-specialists, long enough to take it seriously but shorter than book-length, written with personality and the author's voice voice, and usually by real experts (e.g., leading scholars). If nothing grabs your attention, I'd start with their history of Ancient Greece.
Also, I strongly recommend getting annotated editions of the books, which will explain many of the references which may be obscure to non-specialists, or no longer common knowledge.
Finally, I recommend subscribing to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is fantastic for understanding the history of a concept and all the different ways it has been perceived and expressed over time (with the actual quotes from the people who create and use the words). When you encounter a concept that feels alien - either the word itself or how it's used, a quick lookup in the OED provides immediate sense and context, and gives you some grasp of it. It's really a remarkable work of knowledge - the history of (almost) every concept ever put into words.
Start with the Iliad and I recommend the Lattimore translation although Fagles is good too. You may want to read the first book (chapter) a few times to get the flow. You may also want the backstory, the Judgment of Paris and the Golden Apple. This kind of explains why the Achaeans are there at Troy.
BTW, watch Troy with Brad Pitt. It's got its points but it really deemphasizes the gods. It takes liberties but it's fun.
Then read the Odyssey. The Odyssey is a little stranger because it's kind of told backwards.
Then Virgil's Aeneid. Virgil is 'plagiarizing' Homer and steals a minor character Aeneas; so it helps to know the Iliad+Odyssey to get the homage. There is a really good course/podcast on the Aeneid by Susanna Braund from Stanford.
Thucydides The Peloponnesian War has great parallels and lessons. In the middle of the war, some idiots ( Alcibiades) decide to attack Sicily because it was going to be easy and the war will pay for itself; they get their asses kicked. You can read this as an allegory for Iraq, an expensive pointless distraction led by idiots. There's also the Siege of Melos.
Yale has a good course by Donald Kagan (Project for a New American Century Donald Kagan) that has background for all this.
Do NOT start with the Iliad. Boring AF and I love the classics.
Start with Xenophon, which is what they’d start school boys on for Greek translation. Either read his dialogues with Socrates, his “education of Cyrus” (hey, non-western!) or “Anabasis.” The last one is probably the most exciting.
Alternatively, Herodotus is fun, but you won’t read the whole thing. It is good to dip in and out of. Oh, Plutarch’s “Life of Alexander (the great)” is not too long and better than a history, because he focuses on his character and telling personal stories.
Once you get going, Plato is frikkin amazing. But you have to want it— or have a guide or group. I personally like “the Parmenides” because it is mind bending. Or the symposium to hear from a brilliant lady philosopher about the nature of love.
Oh, then if you want something fantastic, read Iamblicus’ “Life of Pythagoras.” It is very well written and will change your concept of the western world.
We're going to disagree about the Iliad. It even has a good cop, bad cop scene in it in book 10, the Night Raid. Odysseus and Diomedes go on a night raid to get ... information. Was there ever a badder bad cop than Diomedes or a smoother talking good cop than Odysseus?
Hell to the fuck yeah, when you get to Plato, you have to want it. I still haven't made it through the Republic.
Plutarch Parallel Lives has a lot of really good biographies. Pick any. Hell, pick Life of Antony.
Herodotus is fun but junk. Thucydides is tough but meaty. Switching to the Romans, Tacitus Agricola is awesome.
Read Gorgias Encomium of Helen (short), I think he's the only Sophist we have, and you might think Plato was a little tough on him.
Don’t get me wrong, Iliad has great scenes that are super exciting. But if you start from the beginning and expect to read to the end, alone, it will be a slog. I was harsh, but I do think it is a terrible way to start reading the classics.
Republic is to be avoided for the same reasons. There is great stuff in there, but maaaan. Will check out your recs!
The Iliad is only boring if you read a euphemized modern translation. Nauseating, maybe; repulsive, often; but not boring. See my comment from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28937181
In that comment you say Murray's translation is "meticulous but annoyingly archaized". Do you know a translation which is non-euphemistic and meticulous, but also not archaized?
Also, what should I read if I like the poetry of Pope, but I want the poetry to be grittier and truer to the tone of the original, (i.e. I'm fine with changes to the content for the sake of poetics, so long as they don't hide or transfigure the original's emotional content).
Like, I know someone who got a degree in Classics and the core curriculum seems to be reading and translating Greek + Latin + a modern language, either French, German, Italian, or modern Greek.
Example course:
"Roman Invective and Verbal Abuse
An exploration of the world of Roman verbal assault. Readings in Latin will range from inscriptions on sling bullets and walls, to scurrilous pamphlets, to formal full-blown invective speeches. We will investigate especially how themes within Roman invective reveal broader cultural values."
"The Roman Novel
Students will read substantial portions of the two surviving Roman novels, Petronius’ Satyricon and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (or Asinus Aureus). In addition to improving reading speed and ability, the class will introduce the genre of the ancient novel. Students will be assigned secondary readings relating to the novels and will be expected not only to translate, but also to give oral reports on assigned topics and provide commentary on designated sections of the text."
You also concentrate in literature, archeology, or history.
You're right that Junior and Senior classes then learn more and stop worshipping just at the feet of Greek and Roman statues. That's a good thing. Education is more than these two cultures ad nauseam.
OK, if you define classical as greco-roman, fine, I'll take Dante off :)
Point still stands, it's a decent overview, and I'd really like college students to go for breadth, not depth. You want to deep-dive, go get a PhD. (Or read on your own, it's cheaper that way ;)
Read what you like. There are great, moving works of literature in so many languages that anyway we will not finish them all. Read more, and read often.
This petty squabbles over Western Canon and Classics is just culture war nonsense.
> Does anyone have a recommendation or a reading list in the classics (perhaps a Coursera or something) where I can self-study? I'm tech by trade and education but I would love to read the greats through the last several millennia in the western canon.
"Classics" refers specifically to Greek and Roman literature from around ~700 BC to ~200 AD.
> Does anyone have a recommendation or a reading list in the classics (perhaps a Coursera or something) where I can self-study? I'm tech by trade and education but I would love to read the greats through the last several millennia in the western canon.
I'm "well educated" in the classics by most standards (I studied Latin for the better part of the decade, can spot recite poems and speeches, &c) and I think that reading "the greats" as a whole is a kind of category error: classical antiquity is a period of 1.5 millennia spread across the better part of Southern Europe and Northern Africa. Reading them as a uniform narrative is like trying to draw a line from the beginning of the Ottoman Empire to the California Gold Rush: the history is all there, but a thematic connection is tenuous.
If you want to read classics in general, I suggest picking a subject you like (plays, epics, poetry, military history) and expanding in circles. You can even pick a modern author as a guide; I can personally recommend both SPQR[1] and Introducing the Ancient Greeks[2] as excellent histories of their respective cultures.
The podcast moves chronologically through western literature. Each episode focuses on a single text, placing it in its historical context. It goes quite deep - e.g. the Iliad + Odyssey sections add up to roughly 12 hours of audio, and the section on Greek drama is particularly strong.
You can really feel that it is a passion project made with care.
I like reading generally including classics and there's some nice ebooks of some of then at standard ebooks.
But the real shortcut to a classical education is to learn absolutely anything that is so esoteric that normal people don't learn or get taught it, and then act as if it's mystically powerful and makes you special for no clearly defined reason. A dead language is a good one.
You've fallen for this trap and will find that there's no there, there, other than some cool books.
It's a great list, but I have to say that reading science written by folks hundreds of years dead is usually not very helpful for me. I'm interested in learning the science, not the history of the science, per se.
The link article is by Cornell west, a well known and generally respected black leftist (among lefties, anyways), so it’s… pretty powerful hearing him in particular condemn this thing
For clarity, this is about the university dispersing the Classics department, spreading the classes among other departments. It's not about removing classic books from the curriculum or library or anything like that.
I'm not denying the move could be a precursor to removing the classes outright, but that's speculation.
My university (probably one of the top three in the world, especially for mathematics) had no mathematics department. It had a pure mathematics department, an applied mathematics/theoretical physics department, and a department of statistics and somethingorother (maybe economics?).
You said "It had a pure mathematics department, an applied mathematics/theoretical physics department, and a department of statistics and somethingorother (maybe economics?)."
That sounds like 3 departments that focus on math.
I think you're right that mathematics is dispersed across several (math) departments, but that seems to miss the point of this change. After dispersing individual Classics faculty across other departments there will be zero departments that focus on the classics.
The point is that it will be hard to collaborate on Classics-focused work. For example, one way that a college/university can increase it's reputation in an area is to organize/run conferences. It'll be that much harder for Classics faculty at Howard to do that because each individual faculty member is now in a department that doesn't focus on the Classics and so won't have much incentive to support work (like organizing conferences).
Does my distinction make sense?
I'm having a hard time reconciling your comments with the distinction I made, above.
I‘m not sure. The article only says, that tenured personnel is dispersed among other departments. This seems to imply that these people simply cannot be let go, because they are tenured. (But one wants them to go and their positions might not be filled again if they do.)
I mean, I went to a state school, and I don't think we had a Classics Department, but we had courses on the classical era and its works if you really wanted to take them.
Headline makes it sound like they torched all the books. Really it probably didn't make sense to still have a whole department for it.
> As German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer emphasized in the past century, traditions are inescapable and unavoidable. It is a question not of whether you are going to work in a tradition, but which one. Even the choice of no tradition leaves people ignorantly beholden within a language they didn’t create and frameworks they don’t understand.
The above is absolutely true and I can't think of the last time I saw it mentioned. Another comment mentions Bloom and Iirc he calls it "the anxiety of influence."
It's why vampire stories are really romances, why what people today think of romances are always comedies, and really beyond all that, the confirmation of Ecclesiastes 1:9...
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
Even if you don't believe in the religion in question it doesn't matter, it's in the culture you live in. If you have no knowledge of it you're a babe in your own woods.
I don't know, do we really need a whole department devoted to Classics (ie, Greco-Roman literature)? I feel like it can comfortably be out inside another department.
Typically those getting a classics degree have to learn Greek and/or Latin. There simply is no substitute for reading in the original language. A ton is lost in translation.
"Department" is not a fixed term between US colleges and universities (much less international schools): it can be anything from a single professor with a shortlist of classes to dozens of professors within a larger college/school of humanities.
The very large state school that I went to had a classics department (and I took many courses in it), but it was probably only about half a dozen professors.
Besides: "Classics" is a difficult department to fit within another department. It usually already has a few sub-departments, ancient Latin and Greek among them.
Classics should in the post data scientific age be moved into subfield of computational linguistics.
Literature is both empirical (See recent work on statistical approach to computational literature studues) and subset of linguistics proper.
The same thing holds for classics as a proper subset of literature.
Problem isn’t’ really disbanding the classics department but not having classics studies computationally based or not handing field over to computational linguists.
I’ll bite. Why would it be valuable to analyze literature or classics computationally? Are you suggesting that they ought to be considered a subset of linguistics? Linguistics is about language, not the content of language.
The meaning of texts and language as Derrida tells us has a graph like structure.
Each word in this sentenc eis defined in relation to other words and the meaning of the whole sentence can therefor be modelled as a graph.
Modern neural networks— like those used at Palantir Technologies for link analysis- can be applied to the structure of any text including this post right here.
GPT-3 can also be used for summaries of literature and biblical exegesis and will soon be an indispensable part of any computational linguist’s toolkit.
There is value in this. The digital humanities has given us new methods to approach the study of literature (and a great many other fields), which has been dominated by the method of close reading for a long time. For example, can scale our analysis of the transfer of techniques between works and use rigorous mathematical analysis to model influence and networks in a new way.
There is a lot of garbage work in the digital humanities (like all fields) that is basically just doing word choice analysis with computers, but it truly is a new method that is available to researchers to put in their toolchest and new methods are almost always good.
For a clue on the traditional importance of classics in US tertiary education, have a look at the rather extensive Greek grammar and composition parts in the Harvard admission test of 1869: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvarde...
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I stopped reading it with the idea that just about anybody's else's list would likely be superior.
Obviously YMMV. Brought back the memory seeing it here. Would be really interested if someone had a different reaction to it.
Reads like the work personally transported you.
by whom?
And what is this definition of 'politics' anyway?
I intended nothing either way; I was informing people about the book. Please don't include me in your politicize-everything motivations.
Context is an essential part of meaning. If you don't know the context of something, you are going to misunderstand and be misled. If I yell 'fire!' in a crowded movie theater, it means something different than it does at a gun range, or huddled over some kindling in in driving rainstorm at a campsite. In this case, the context was political. We need to be able to talk about politics without actually doing it; some try to pretend politics doesn't exist, but that's a lie. It seems to me that you felt that it could not be talked about, it had to be done. Don't try to impose that on me, please.
From there, you can go on and read yourself what interests you, and while I typically have little use for the prospect of learning by video rather than reading, humanities / philosophy / literary study is one example in which you will get a lot more from the material if you find a lecture that accompanies it.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ff15w4ufviWfv9UfIuByA
Even as a humanities grad who has been through a lot of this stuff once, I find myself listening to his lectures for nostalgia's sake. Humanities classes are fun, that's why people still go to them.
To be fair TFA does not make this distinction clear, and conflates “the classics department” with “the classics” to make a rhetorical point (and a good one, imo).
I edited my post a little though to address that West is talking about both, but only one is actually in danger.
Admittedly, this is really confusing, and it'd make a lot more sense to call one of those "classical" things something else, but I'm not in charge of naming things (any more).
I think for a academic department, Classics would be Ancient Greece and Rome, not Shakespeare (which would be in the English department).
http://www.greatconversation.com/10-year-reading-plan
The Harvard Classics is a similar set of books that pre-dates Britannica's set. It has a 15 minutes a day reading list for the year. The reading list is in volume 50.
https://www.harvardclassics365.com/p/free.html
With 20 books per year, this list implies that spending only ~2.5 weeks on each book would be both possible and fruitful. I doubt that very much.
I imagine some improvements in our understanding have been made since Gibbon’s time, and I’d def seek those out before walking around claiming I “know” what happened back then, but as an entry point is was a great, if a little bit too wordy, read.
I recommend it. The organization is really nice; the years get more “difficult” as you go on and within each year the works are ordered chronologically. In this way it’s very approachable.
It’s not long before you start seeing references between the books, something referred to as The Great Conversation. I find that really exciting; it’s makes the stories richer in the same way as when you get steeped in the lore of some fantasy world… but it’s with ideas that shaped _our_ world.
Last thing I’ll say is that the ideas in the books aren’t a unified block. There is often disagreement between ideas, and sometimes explicitly called out. For example, Montaigne says he thinks Plato gives too much license to children to determine the topics they should study. Montaigne thinks instead it should be more prescribed. It’s moments like that, when you see two sharp minds disagreeing on such a topic that you ask yourself what _you_ believe. Then you can geek out on how that question was answered by Dewey and others that shaped what modern education is today.
Really a delight to go through.
Have fun, find joy and beauty, challenge and wisdom. The classics are renowned for a reason and I find them most appealing, engaging, and get the most from them when I think that the book was written by an ordinary, flawed person; there's a personality, their interior world, their experiences, their own vision, their blind spots, just like me and my ordinary neighbor - it's not scripture, there's another person in the room. Then - holy cow, it's incredible that a human created it. I think our instincts provide a good indication of what we are ready for - based on what we've learned so far and what state we are in for learning.
Also, it took me time to not see classics as tests, and to be comfortable not understanding everything. I'm probably not going to understand everything on the level of the authors of humanity's greatest works (and in their field of specialty at the pinnacle of their achievement), or of the experts who study them, or sometimes even of my ordinary neighbor - they will see things I don't; it's not a race. Sometimes, after reading something else, after more life experience, I return to them and they made more sense. Being honest with myself about what I don't understand helps me gain much more than people who fake it (to themselves and to others). For one thing, I know my strengths and weaknesses and can address them; for another, when there's something I don't grasp, I don't deny its existence (to protect my ego) or twist it into something I already think - I give myself an opportunity to learn more.
If nothing strikes you now, a short history of the ancient world might be a good starting point. It would provide ideas on what to read next, and lot's of context - even modern classics often reference or reflect ancient ones. Britannica provides excellent histories for non-specialists, long enough to take it seriously but shorter than book-length, written with personality and the author's voice voice, and usually by real experts (e.g., leading scholars). If nothing grabs your attention, I'd start with their history of Ancient Greece.
Also, I strongly recommend getting annotated editions of the books, which will explain many of the references which may be obscure to non-specialists, or no longer common knowledge.
Finally, I recommend subscribing to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is fantastic for understanding the history of a concept and all the different ways it has been perceived and expressed over time (with the actual quotes from the people who create and use the words). When you encounter a concept that feels alien - either the word itself or how it's used, a quick lookup in the OED provides immediate sense and context, and gives you some grasp of it. It's really a remarkable work of knowledge - the history of (almost) every concept ever put into words.
BTW, watch Troy with Brad Pitt. It's got its points but it really deemphasizes the gods. It takes liberties but it's fun.
Then read the Odyssey. The Odyssey is a little stranger because it's kind of told backwards.
Then Virgil's Aeneid. Virgil is 'plagiarizing' Homer and steals a minor character Aeneas; so it helps to know the Iliad+Odyssey to get the homage. There is a really good course/podcast on the Aeneid by Susanna Braund from Stanford.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/virgils-aeneid/id38423...
There is also the Harvard class, the Ancient Greek Hero, which may help.
https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/ancient-greek-her...
Thucydides The Peloponnesian War has great parallels and lessons. In the middle of the war, some idiots ( Alcibiades) decide to attack Sicily because it was going to be easy and the war will pay for itself; they get their asses kicked. You can read this as an allegory for Iraq, an expensive pointless distraction led by idiots. There's also the Siege of Melos.
Yale has a good course by Donald Kagan (Project for a New American Century Donald Kagan) that has background for all this.
https://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205
Start with Xenophon, which is what they’d start school boys on for Greek translation. Either read his dialogues with Socrates, his “education of Cyrus” (hey, non-western!) or “Anabasis.” The last one is probably the most exciting.
Alternatively, Herodotus is fun, but you won’t read the whole thing. It is good to dip in and out of. Oh, Plutarch’s “Life of Alexander (the great)” is not too long and better than a history, because he focuses on his character and telling personal stories.
Once you get going, Plato is frikkin amazing. But you have to want it— or have a guide or group. I personally like “the Parmenides” because it is mind bending. Or the symposium to hear from a brilliant lady philosopher about the nature of love.
Oh, then if you want something fantastic, read Iamblicus’ “Life of Pythagoras.” It is very well written and will change your concept of the western world.
Hell to the fuck yeah, when you get to Plato, you have to want it. I still haven't made it through the Republic.
Plutarch Parallel Lives has a lot of really good biographies. Pick any. Hell, pick Life of Antony.
Herodotus is fun but junk. Thucydides is tough but meaty. Switching to the Romans, Tacitus Agricola is awesome.
Read Gorgias Encomium of Helen (short), I think he's the only Sophist we have, and you might think Plato was a little tough on him.
Republic is to be avoided for the same reasons. There is great stuff in there, but maaaan. Will check out your recs!
Also, what should I read if I like the poetry of Pope, but I want the poetry to be grittier and truer to the tone of the original, (i.e. I'm fine with changes to the content for the sake of poetics, so long as they don't hide or transfigure the original's emotional content).
Like, I know someone who got a degree in Classics and the core curriculum seems to be reading and translating Greek + Latin + a modern language, either French, German, Italian, or modern Greek.
Example course:
"Roman Invective and Verbal Abuse
An exploration of the world of Roman verbal assault. Readings in Latin will range from inscriptions on sling bullets and walls, to scurrilous pamphlets, to formal full-blown invective speeches. We will investigate especially how themes within Roman invective reveal broader cultural values."
"The Roman Novel
Students will read substantial portions of the two surviving Roman novels, Petronius’ Satyricon and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (or Asinus Aureus). In addition to improving reading speed and ability, the class will introduce the genre of the ancient novel. Students will be assigned secondary readings relating to the novels and will be expected not only to translate, but also to give oral reports on assigned topics and provide commentary on designated sections of the text."
You also concentrate in literature, archeology, or history.
You're right that Junior and Senior classes then learn more and stop worshipping just at the feet of Greek and Roman statues. That's a good thing. Education is more than these two cultures ad nauseam.
Point still stands, it's a decent overview, and I'd really like college students to go for breadth, not depth. You want to deep-dive, go get a PhD. (Or read on your own, it's cheaper that way ;)
This petty squabbles over Western Canon and Classics is just culture war nonsense.
"Classics" refers specifically to Greek and Roman literature from around ~700 BC to ~200 AD.
I'm "well educated" in the classics by most standards (I studied Latin for the better part of the decade, can spot recite poems and speeches, &c) and I think that reading "the greats" as a whole is a kind of category error: classical antiquity is a period of 1.5 millennia spread across the better part of Southern Europe and Northern Africa. Reading them as a uniform narrative is like trying to draw a line from the beginning of the Ottoman Empire to the California Gold Rush: the history is all there, but a thematic connection is tenuous.
If you want to read classics in general, I suggest picking a subject you like (plays, epics, poetry, military history) and expanding in circles. You can even pick a modern author as a guide; I can personally recommend both SPQR[1] and Introducing the Ancient Greeks[2] as excellent histories of their respective cultures.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28789711-spqr
[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316534-introducing-the...
The podcast moves chronologically through western literature. Each episode focuses on a single text, placing it in its historical context. It goes quite deep - e.g. the Iliad + Odyssey sections add up to roughly 12 hours of audio, and the section on Greek drama is particularly strong.
You can really feel that it is a passion project made with care.
But the real shortcut to a classical education is to learn absolutely anything that is so esoteric that normal people don't learn or get taught it, and then act as if it's mystically powerful and makes you special for no clearly defined reason. A dead language is a good one.
You've fallen for this trap and will find that there's no there, there, other than some cool books.
https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-bo...
I'm not denying the move could be a precursor to removing the classes outright, but that's speculation.
which implies the destruction of the classics department
what do you think are the implications of the destruction of a department dedicated to a particular subject on the teaching of that subject?
You said "It had a pure mathematics department, an applied mathematics/theoretical physics department, and a department of statistics and somethingorother (maybe economics?)."
That sounds like 3 departments that focus on math.
I think you're right that mathematics is dispersed across several (math) departments, but that seems to miss the point of this change. After dispersing individual Classics faculty across other departments there will be zero departments that focus on the classics.
The point is that it will be hard to collaborate on Classics-focused work. For example, one way that a college/university can increase it's reputation in an area is to organize/run conferences. It'll be that much harder for Classics faculty at Howard to do that because each individual faculty member is now in a department that doesn't focus on the Classics and so won't have much incentive to support work (like organizing conferences).
Does my distinction make sense?
I'm having a hard time reconciling your comments with the distinction I made, above.
Headline makes it sound like they torched all the books. Really it probably didn't make sense to still have a whole department for it.
The above is absolutely true and I can't think of the last time I saw it mentioned. Another comment mentions Bloom and Iirc he calls it "the anxiety of influence."
It's why vampire stories are really romances, why what people today think of romances are always comedies, and really beyond all that, the confirmation of Ecclesiastes 1:9...
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
Even if you don't believe in the religion in question it doesn't matter, it's in the culture you live in. If you have no knowledge of it you're a babe in your own woods.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modern-mathematic...
The very large state school that I went to had a classics department (and I took many courses in it), but it was probably only about half a dozen professors.
Besides: "Classics" is a difficult department to fit within another department. It usually already has a few sub-departments, ancient Latin and Greek among them.
Literature is both empirical (See recent work on statistical approach to computational literature studues) and subset of linguistics proper.
The same thing holds for classics as a proper subset of literature.
Problem isn’t’ really disbanding the classics department but not having classics studies computationally based or not handing field over to computational linguists.
Each word in this sentenc eis defined in relation to other words and the meaning of the whole sentence can therefor be modelled as a graph.
Modern neural networks— like those used at Palantir Technologies for link analysis- can be applied to the structure of any text including this post right here.
GPT-3 can also be used for summaries of literature and biblical exegesis and will soon be an indispensable part of any computational linguist’s toolkit.
There is a lot of garbage work in the digital humanities (like all fields) that is basically just doing word choice analysis with computers, but it truly is a new method that is available to researchers to put in their toolchest and new methods are almost always good.
What does that mean and who agreed that it is the "end and aim" of education?