[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.

[mongo42.livejournal.com]

Do you like reading plays? If so, you might want to check out the comedies of Aristophanes, and/or the tragedies of Euripides.

And I actually enjoyed reading Homer's Odyssey, way back in school. I wasn't as interested in the Iliad, though.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I think lots of the good translations are still well within copyright (I remember hearing about Robert Graves at Princeton being a good translator of Homer in the '90s - I could ask classicist friends for other recommendations).

What you may be more interested in is the Perseus project, which I believe is an open-source project to digitize everything about the ancient world. I remember when I was taking Ancient Greek in high school, our teacher had lots of fun showing us the CD-ROMs, and showing how you could switch between the Greek, the English translation, and some sort of canonical Latin translation, and how every word in the texts was indexed into a central database where you could look up every instance of that verb, or tense, or mood, or conjugation, in the entire library of all Ancient Greek writing that has survived.

However, I don't know what to recommend as far as things that would actually be interesting to read. What I know from philosophy is that people think Aristotle is amazing. Plato is more literary, and was the teacher of Aristotle, but Aristotle is the one whose ideas stand up. He's really the first person to do interesting, rigorous studies of things, both philosophical and scientific. Of course, he got lots of stuff wrong, like thinking that the function of the brain is as a radiator to cool the body, but at least he got the project started. Also, I had always thought that "metaphysics" refers to the stuff that's "beyond physics", in the sense of explaining what the physical world is made of, so that physics has a foundation. However, it turns out that it's just the stuff that happened to be in the book that Aristotle write just after he wrote the book called "Physics", so, "meta" just means "after" here.

I don't know how much sense it'll make out of context though. I haven't really read any myself.

[doublefeh.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed all the greek drama I was exposed to in IHUM (Sophocles, Euripides, a bit of Aristophanes).

I also second the recommendation of the Odyssey. It's not in the public domain, but Robert Fagles did great translations of both it and the Illiad (and the Aeneid, for that matter) in the past decade. The Odyssey is the only long work that we read excerpts from in IHUM that I actually went back and re-read in its entirety. Learning about the poetical structure and Homeric performing tradition was fascinating, too.

[jacquesk.livejournal.com]

I would suggest starting with Plato's Republic (http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html) and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html).
Your blog is cool!

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

The Odyssey was one of the only books I read for high school that I actually enjoyed.