He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous. There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity that the people in the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millennium.
Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist's snobbishness.
This seminar will be an opportunity to test Einstein's statement on the power and influence of classical authors. We will read selections from the canon of ancient classical literature, both Greek and Roman, including Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Plato, Terence, Cicero, Vergil, Tacitus, and Marcus Aurelius. We will discuss the ideas and values represented in these works, and we will consider the relationship between the ethos of antiquity and that of western culture in this new millennium. The format of the seminar is primarily discussion. In addition, students will write several essays, based on the reading assignments, as well as writing a formal final paper based on a reading of Hannah Arendt's Between Past and Future .