Three and a half years ago, I kind of accidentally started off on a kind of self-education in classical studies. Here's where I've gotten so far, as of thirty minutes ago:

Classical Studies

BOOKS READ:

1. The Iliad – Homer, Butler prose translation (2-2-06)
2. Troy – McCarty (2-9-06)
3. The Odyssey – Homer (4-20-06)
4. Troy and Homer – Joachim Latacz (6-12-06)
5. Agamemnon – Aeschylus (7-7-06)
6. The War at Troy – Quintus of Smyrna (7-16-06)
7. The King Must Die – Renault (10-13-06) fiction
8. The Trojan War: A New History – Strauss (12-17-06)
9. Persian Fire – Tom Holland (3-25-07)
10. Histories – Herodotus (6-2-07)
11. The Classical World: An Epic History From Homer to Hadrian – Robin Lane Fox (6-5-07)
12. The Peloponnesian War –Donald Kagan (8-23-07)
13. The History of the Peloponnesian War – Thucydides (10-25-07)
14. Theogony – Hesiod (11-29-07)
15. Frogs – Aristophanes (2-12-08)
16. Hellenica: Books 1-4 -- Xenophon (2-16-08)
17. Anabasis – Xenophon (4-6-08)
18. The Persians – Aeschylus (4-24-08)
19. The Choephori (The Libation Bearers) - Aeschylus (4-27-08)
20. The Eumenides - Aeschylus (4-30-08)
21. Ajax – Sophocles (4-30-08)
22. Philoctetes – Sophocles (4-30-08)
23. Oedipus Rex – Sophocles (5-3-08)
24. Antigone – Sophocles (5-18-08)
25. Zeus:A Journey Through Greece in the Footsteps of a God – Tom Stone (7-14-08)
26. Courtesans & Fishcakes – James Davidson (2-10-09)
27. Hellenica PT II – Xenophon (3-23-09)
28. The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America – Eli Sagan (4-14-09)
29. Acharnians – Aristophanes (8-24-09)
30. Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore -- Bettany Hughes (10-17-09)

TEACHING COMPANY COURSES TAKEN:

1. Human Prehistory & The First Civilizations – Brian Fagan *****
2. The Foundations of Western Civilization – Thomas F.X. Noble (2006) *
3. Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations -- Kenneth Harl (2006) *****
4. Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor -- Kenneth Harl (2006) *****
5. Ancient Greek Civilization – Jeremy McInerney (5-25-06) *****
6. Famous Greeks – J. Rufus Fears **
7. Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age – Jeremy McInerney *****
8. The Age of Pericles – Jeremy McInerney *****
9. The Peloponnesian War – Kenneth Harl *****
10. Masterpieces of Ancient Greek Literature – David J. Schenker ***
11. Greece and Rome: An Integrated History of the Ancient Mediterranean – Robert Garland (3-5-09) ***1/2
12. The Greek & Persian Wars – John R. Hale*****

Good to have your evaluations of the Teaching Co courses, Garp. I'm currently in the middle of Harl's "Rome and the Barbarians", which is up to his usual standards.

I did the first of three sections of "History of Science: 1700–1900" by Frederick Gregory, which I was enjoying, only to find that there is a wait for the next section at my library. Oh well -- it can wait.

I've listened to TC courses on my commute to work for 13 or 14 years now.

Stellar, have you read The Man who Knew Too Much, the Robert Hooke bio? If so, what did you think?

In his Baroque Cycle Neal Stephenson touches the evolution of science and the scientific method. Of course it's fiction, but the depiction of the Royal Society around 1670 is... interesting. And despite it being three bricks of nearly 1000 pages each I've read it twice. But it's a love or loathe book, I know.

(I find it amusing that there's another book named The Man Who Knew Too Much portraying Alan Turing. Turing features in Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, just as Hooke has a supporting role in the Baroque Cycle.)

Stellar -- you got the jump on me on this TeachCo stuff but I am an addict -- I listen 30-60 min a day and I have repeated several of the courses because the material is so dense it is very valuable to go through again.

Busifer -- is this the same Neal Stephenson of Snow Crash fame?

Yes, the same. But this stuff is very different from Snow Crash. Not to mention the books (Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, Confusion & The System of the World /last three are the Baroque Cycle, but they are all connected/) would had benefited from an editor, to say the least. Still, I enjoyed reading them. But it wasn't until his latest - Anathem - that he got his style under some kind of control.

Message edited by its author, Oct 18, 2009, 10:55am.

Snow Crash drove me crazy because of the flawed whacko ending, but I enjoyed the book more in retrospect than I did while reading it. So Bus -- are you saying they are worth reading or no? If I was to pick one, which one?

Message edited by its author, Oct 18, 2009, 11:10am.

Oh, definitely worth reading, I think, especially for anyone interested in history.

Cryptonomicon mixes a wwII timeline involving among other things cryptography with a present day (read late 90's) timeline involving information security (and a lot of other things). Here we meet Alan Turing plus get a look on the Enigma stuff. It is also a kind of sequel, albeit written first, to...

...the Baroque Cycle, which is set at the time when alchemy got challenged by what would become science. We meet Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren, Huygens, Liebniz... among others. I think it is impossible to read only one of the books, but Quicksilver is the first.
The history of science is only one layer, though - it is also about money and banking, and bizarrely enough it is an adventure story as well.

Anathem is not involved with history but with philosophy and science, and were the others are historical novels with a streak of sf/f Anathem is science fiction - it is set in a parallel universe. So maybe not for the history buff, but the most accomplished of his works; it actually has an ending! ;-)

All this said I know people whose taste in books I otherwise share who just can't stand him. He is more interested in ideas than in characters, and sometimes he goes off on a tangent, rambling about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the story but which can be interesting if you're as interested as he is in the ideas he is exploring...

Message edited by its author, Oct 18, 2009, 12:10pm.

He became known early in his career for the cyberpunk-y Snow Crash-ish stuff, but is now one of the few genre writers whose renown and saleability grants his works a place of prominence on book store shelves-- He's quite good, IMO.

Not enough Aristophanes.

I agree geneg. Working on it!

Gotta learn Greek first though, eh? :-D

want to, but will prob read more aristophanes in translation before i get to it

What you should do is look for one of those books that are designed to teach you Greek BY reading the plays and stuff themselves. Not the Loebs mind you, since those aren't 100% helpful. But around the end of the last century there were quite a few books of this sort. I'm sure Amazon has some reprints.

Can't I just hire you as my tutor?

That would be inadvisable... haha

I mean I actually do have a shitload of stuff I could send you if you want. My Greek 101 class was sort of designed to be an online course because my prof is super lazy, but we eventually managed to get him to have a "brick and mortar" version too. The only thing I'd say is, it is really hard to figure some of the stuff out on your own. I tried the online version first but finished with an incomplete because it just piled up and got mind boggling after a while. But after having an actual class where you're saying the stuff outloud, and chanting, and all that stuff, it really begins to stick.

Message edited by its author, Oct 19, 2009, 8:32pm.

I wanted to find an eccentric elderly professor like in the The Secret History and instead of actually studying just spend my time drinking with fabulously wealthy sociopaths, but alas it was not to be ...

I took thirty hours of Greek, most of which I've forgotten due to lack of use, with these teaching and reference books. The Liddell Scott and Smythe are essential. The interlinear Bible is not necessary to learning Attic Greek, in fact it might be a little confusing at first until you get the hang of the difference between Attic and Koine. It's along the lines of the difference in the language between Shakespeare and Dickens. The difference is even larger between Homeric and Attic Greek.

Message edited by its author, Oct 20, 2009, 12:02pm.

Once you get as far as Rome, you'll need Virgil on the list. And I'm curious how well Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire stands up these days in classical studies? I've never read it but I've been tempted.

I think Gibbon is great for what it is, but you have to remember to look at it from a historiographical standpoint as well. The one major flaw in his work is that he relies heavily on the so-called, Historia Augusta, which is nowadays regarded as sort of pseudo-historical, but wasn't necessarily when Gibbon was writing. At times it also feels like Gibbon was determined to not let lack of sources keep him from writing a continuous narrative, so there are parts where he says things that are really only conjectural or partly based in fact.

By and large though, it's a great read and as long as you keep a few of these caveats in mind, you can learn a lot from Decline and Fall.

geneg -- your link is dead so i can't see the books ...

I'm sorry. If you go to my library and enter Greek Text in the search argument you should get the seven books.