View the ancient world through the eyes of its first historian. This course addresses the most remarkable achievement of Herodotus—his narrative account of the great Persian Wars and their causes. It considers the ways his work retains a mythical world-view and discusses his influence on later Greek historians.
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Travel back to the ancient world in this two-course set. Meet some of history’s least known influential figures in Unsung Heroes of the Ancient World. Then, broaden your appreciation of the distant past with the globe-spanning journey of History of the Ancient World: A Global Perspective.
In lectures inspired and informed by the monumental works of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plutarch, Professor J. Rufus Fears examines a gallery of fascinating characters who shaped the story of Greece from the Trojan War through the rise of Rome.
Take a detailed look at Homer's ancient Greek masterpiece of adventure. Professor Elizabeth Vandiver's The Odyssey of Homer focuses on timeless themes contained in the warrior Odysseus's voyage home through strange lands and encounters with gods, witches, warriors, and monsters. Explore the cultural assumptions that lie behind Homer's lines, weigh the poem's critical and interpretative issues, and come to view the Homeric world as a place of conflict, trial, and return that helps us answer the question of what it means to really live.
In this companion course to Famous Greeks—inspired this time by the works of Livy, Polybius, Suetonius, and Tacitus as well as the indispensable Plutarch—Professor J. Rufus Fears retells the lives of the statesmen and thinkers who shaped Rome from its rise to world power in the struggle against Carthage to the decline of the Empire after Marcus Aurelius.
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