Our purpose in this course will be to examine the foundations of Western Civilization in antiquity. We will look at the culture of the ancient Hebrews, of the ancient Greeks, and of the Romans, and we will likewise look at how these cultures interacted with each other, sometimes happily, sometimes not. In the process we will focus on how the questions they addressed and the answers they found live among us and continue to shape our lives to this very day. For in a very real sense we are all of us, as participants in Western culture, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans still.
Timothy B. Shutt is a graduate of Yale, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, where he specialized in medieval literature and the history of ideas. Shutt—who today lectures on Homer, Plato, Aristotle, the Bible and the Greek historians, Virgil, and Dante to packed houses—joined Kenyon College in 1986, and has since been honored frequently for his teaching skills.
Lecture 1 Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans: The Foundations of Western Civilization
Lecture 2 The Hebrew Bible: Overview and Genesis
Lecture 3 The Hebrew Bible: Exodus, David, the Prophets and Job
Lecture 4 Homer and the Iliad
Lecture 5 Homer: the Odyssey, and the Birth of Tragedy
Lecture 6 Aeschylus and the Greek Drama
Lecture 7 Herodotus and Thucydides: Historians and Hellenism
Lecture 8 Socrates and Plato
Lecture 9 Plato and Aristotle
Lecture 10 Virgil and the Aeneid
Lecture 11 Virgil and Ovid
Lecture 12 The Christian Bible: the Gospels
Lecture 13 The Christian Bible: the Diaspora and St. Paul
Lecture 14 Plotinus, St. Augustine: the End of Antiquity, and the Medieval