[travel] Tell me more about the dead white people

[mattbell]

My college humanities courses tended to avoid the canon of dead white people at all costs, instead focusing on alternative voices, indigenous cultures, oppressed peoples and the like. Some of it was very interesting, some of it wasn't. However, after a visit to the stunning Athens Archaeological museum, which showed me firsthand the achievement's of Athens' Golden Age, I want to learn more about the intellectual culture that spawned the world's first democracy, a rich theatrical tradition, and numerous other achievements. To those of you who sought out the traditional classics, I ask what you would recommend, keeping in mind that I'm on the road so online material is preferred. I assume it's all well out of copyright, even the translations.

Comments

[veleda.livejournal.com]

http://plato.stanford.edu/
has lots of good stuff.

Honestly.. I would read some Plato and Aristotle. This is good stuff.

I think the passion of the western mind is a great book in terms of scoping western intellectual culture across the ages.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

That link is to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which probably does have a lot of stuff about Ancient Philosophy, but I think it has much more by and about living white people than dead ones.