J. Rufus Fears - Famous Greeks_

Sorry for trouble, deleted previous torrent by mistake, re-seeded again.
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Famous Greeks
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General Information
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Type.................: Spoken Word
Platform.............: Audio
Image type...........: CD Rip
Artist...............: Professor J. Rufus Fears
Album................: Famous Greeks
Genre................: Speech
Audio Format.........: MP3
Ripper...............: Exact Audio Copy
Encoder..............: LAME
Bitrate..............: (VBR)
Source...............: CD - Thank your local library.
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Post Information
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Posted by............: Takdun
Posted to............: Alt.Binaries.Sounds.mp3.Spoken-word
Posted on............: 5/1/2004
Fills Policy.........: None - Use Pars
Repost Policy........: 5 days after original post
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Release Notes
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Famous Greeks
Course Number 337?24 lectures (30 minutes/lecture)
Taught by: Professor J. Rufus Fears?University of Oklahoma
One of the most instructive and intriguing ways to learn history is through
biography. By pondering the lives of great individuals?people who leave deep
marks on both their own times and distant posterity?you can chart broad currents
of events while also studying virtue and vice, folly and wisdom, success and
failure as they appear, not in abstract textbooks of ethics or psychology, but
in the real circumstances of life.
From the heroes of the Trojan War to Alexander the Great and Cleopatra, classics
scholar and master storyteller J. Rufus Fear lays open for your consideration
the lives, achievements, and influence of the warriors, statesmen, thinkers, and
artists who made Greek history. While not slow to draw on the best of recent
historical, archaeological, and literary scholarship, he remains close to the
spirit of the great classical authors who inspire his work.
His eye for human character and his shrewd judgments are informed by both a fine
moral awareness and a deep knowledge of the historical context in which these
famous lives were lived. By attending to that context, Professor Fears is able
to offer new ways of reading familiar classics by Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides,
Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato.
Homage to Plutarch
Plutarch, a Greek writing during the heyday of Rome, composed his Lives of the
Noble Grecians and Romans out of a conviction that the study of such lives can
make us better as individuals and as citizens.
For 19 centuries, readers have agreed. Plutarch fed the imagination of William
Shakespeare, who based Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra on the Lives. The
American founders, including both the Harvard graduate John Adams and the
self-taught Benjamin Franklin, regarded Plutarch as a treasure-trove of wisdom,
and wanted to see a copy of Lives in every schoolhouse. Harry Truman was an avid
reader of Plutarch, and spoke of the practical insight he gained from time spent
with the Lives. In keeping with that spirit, Professor Fears draws lessons from
each life studied in this course.
Politics and Creativity: Fifth-Century Athens
Our lives will illuminate the intellectual and artistic currents of one of the
most creative civilizations in world history.
However, for the Greeks, politics was the center of human existence. "Man,"
Aristotle said, "is a political animal." This truth has determined our selection
of lives and the approach we take. The leading thinkers, artists, and writers of
classical Greece can be understood only in the context of the political events
of their day.
The most important single lesson we learn from Greece is that a free nation can
survive only if its citizens care, at the deepest level, about politics. We
focus on the five major periods of Greek history: the Trojan War; Archaic Greece
of the eighth through the sixth centuries B.C.; the Persian Wars; the golden age
of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.; and the age of Alexander the
Great.
To the Walls of Troy: Homer?s Age of Heroes
For the ancient Greeks, the Trojan War was as real as yesterday?s headlines are
to us. Homer?s Iliad and Odyssey held near-Scriptural status. Alexander the
Great slept with his copies. Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, and Odysseus were role
models and cultural heroes, and the influence of Homer resonated throughout
Greek history.
Your study of famous Greeks begins where Plutarch does, with the Athenian
founder Theseus. His story helps to explain how Athens came to be a city that
would defy a mighty empire, and offers an opportunity for reflection on the
relationship between legend and history in the soul of a people.
The next three talks focus on the four central figures of the Homeric epics:
Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, and Odysseus. Professor Fears argues that no modern
work on leadership can rival the depth and power of Homer as the great poet
dramatically explores what it takes to guide people and nations through the
crises and hardships of life.
In Lectures 5 and 6, you meet the two premier lawgivers of the two leading Greek
cities: Lycurgus of Sparta and Solon of Athens. The mysterious figure of
Pythagoras takes on new clarity when considered in the framework of these two
very different ordainers of regimes.
A Stand for Freedom and Against the Odds:
Greeks versus Persians
The decade of the Persian Wars (490?479 B.C.) was one of the most decisive in
world history. It determined that Greece would remain free and bequeath to later
ages the legacy of political liberty.
Thus in Lectures 7 through 11 you examine the lives of five of the most
important actors in this momentous conflict. Your path to understanding wends
through the pages of Herodotus. In the eyes of the "Father of History," King
Croesus of Lydia and the Persian emperor Xerxes become exempla of all those who
would abuse their power, and whom free peoples must resist.
In Lectures 9 through 11, you look at three of the crucial Greek leaders. From
the gallant stand of Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at Thermopylae to the courage
and tactical skill that enabled Themistocles to defeat the Persian fleet at
Salamis and Pausanias to crush a superior Persian army at Plataea, you will
follow the stirring events of this epochmaking war for liberty.
Glory and Misery: Periclean Athens
and the Peloponnesian War
The fifth-century golden age of Athenian democracy is the centerpiece of the
course, encompassing Lectures 12 through 19. Thinking about the lives of famous
Athenians such as Pericles, Sophocles, Phidias (the designer of the Parthenon),
Aspasia (Pericles?s mistress and advisor), Thucydides, and Alcibiades
illuminates the links that bound together political, cultural, spiritual, and
intellectual life during the heyday of the Athenian experiment in
self-government.
Although remembered as an age of glory, the fifth century was also a time of
widespread misery, for it closed with the three-decade long cataclysm of the
Peloponnesian War. That war?its causes, its course, and its consequences?forms
the prism through which Professor Fears reads the famous lives who make up the
subject matter of this section.
Why did Pericles lead Athens into war with Sparta and her allies? What lessons
about morality, power, and leadership can we draw from Thucydides? great account
of it? Can the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides be read as comments on the
war and the attitudes that lay behind it? Here Professor Fears introduces you to
new ways to read such familiar classics as Euripides? Persian Women and the
Oedipus plays of Sophocles.
From Socrates to Alexander the Great and Beyond
The trial of Socrates was the test case of the ideals of the Athenian democracy.
We discuss that trial in the context of the impact of the Peloponnesian War and
its aftermath of recrimination among the Athenians.
The execution of Socrates?the best and wisest man of his day?would condemn the
Athenian democracy in the eyes of posterity, but this greatest of teachers would
leave an immortal legacy in the philosophical thought of Plato and Aristotle.
The death of Socrates at the hands of the Athenian democracy convinced his
influential followers Xenophon and Plato that the best form of government would
be the rule of one outstanding individual. Lectures 21 and 22 introduce you to
the figures of Philip of Macedonia and his son Alexander the Great, monarchs,
conquerors, and statesmen who would expand and transform the Greek world and
outline a vision of transnational brotherhood that remains an ideal today.
But Alexander died young, and the Romans and their empire would be his true
heirs. Thus your study of the lives of famous Greeks concludes with two
remarkable figures who challenged Rome for world domination: Pyrrhus, the
Greek-speaking king of Epirus, and Cleopatra, the last ruler of Egypt in the
line of Alexander?s general, Ptolemy. Both failed, but in instructive ways that
make them worthy of inclusion in a course on famous Greeks.