Collection 13 · Open · also tagged women · law · religion · death
The Greeks, in Order
Epic first, then tragedy, then the historians, then comedy, then Plato — read in the order they were written, so you can watch the arguments start. Homer sets the terms. Aeschylus and Sophocles put them on trial in front of an audience. Herodotus and Thucydides ask what actually happened. Aristophanes laughs at all of it, Socrates included. Then Socrates is put to death, and Plato spends the rest of his life on the question of whether Athens was right to do it.
Every other collection here cuts the corpus sideways, by subject. This one is a path through it: one term's reading, in sequence, from a Great Books syllabus taught at the University of Michigan by Prof. H. D. (Don) Cameron in the early 2000s. Don has since died, so nobody else will take the course. The reading list does not have to go with him. Nothing on it is obscure, and that is the point of it — it is the shortest route from never having opened a Greek book to having read the ones all the others are answering.
What is in it
Each strip is the places that work names, in the order it names themA soldier takes ten years to sail home from a war that already took ten. He loses every ship and every man he started with. Meanwhile his wife holds off a hundred and eight suitors who have moved into his house and are eating it empty, and his son goes looking for news of a father he has never met. When he finally lands on his own island he arrives alone, asleep, and disguised as a beggar — and spends the second half of the poem finding out who in his own household can be trusted.
An Athenian farmer is being eaten alive by the debts his horse-mad son runs up, and he has heard there is a school next door where they teach you to argue your way out of anything. He enrolls, fails — he is too old and cannot hold a thought — and sends the son instead. The son learns beautifully. He comes home, wins an argument that beating your father is just, and offers to prove that beating your mother follows. The father burns the school down. The head of the school, hanging in a basket studying the sun and denying that Zeus exists, is a man named Socrates, who was in his forties, alive in the city, and had another twenty-four years to live.
An Athenian jury of five hundred is asked to decide whether a man has been corrupting the young and importing new gods. He answers by cross-examining his accuser, telling them the god at Delphi put him up to it, and warning them that killing him will damage them more than it damages him. Convicted, and invited to propose his own penalty, he proposes free dinners for life at public expense.
The places are the one thing here with no machine judgement in them. Every count above is of Pleiades gazetteer records opened and checked by a person, and the map on each passage draws from the same records. Named is not the same as visited, and a place that could not be verified gets no dot rather than a guessed one — which is why some works with a great many place names in them show very few, and why a work with none shows nothing at all rather than an empty frame.
Still to come
Proposed, not present — none of this is on the site yetHomer Iliad and Odyssey · Aeschylus Oresteia (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides) · Sophocles Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone · Euripides Medea, Hippolytus, Bacchae · Herodotus on the Persian Wars · Thucydides Book I, the Funeral Oration, the Plague, the Melian Dialogue · Aristophanes Clouds and Lysistrata (alternates Frogs, Birds) · Plato Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, and Republic on the Cave and the philosopher king