Podcasts about Aristophanes

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Emily Wilson, the scholar and translator of Homer and Seneca, among many others. She tells me what tech bros get wrong about the classical world and what Cardi B can teach us about Aristophanes, as we discuss her new book, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What a lot of fun I had talking to Zena Hitz about Gulliver's Travels. As well as discussing Swift, slavery, genocide, rationality, Christianity, and science, Zena told me that good philosophy is like a box of cake mix and that a liberal education requires you to be freed of false expertise. I also took Zena on a detour to discuss Iris Murdoch, the Catherine Project, and modern philosophy. TRANSCRIPTHENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Zena Hitz. Zena is a tutor at St. John's College. She is a philosopher, the author of Lost in Thought. She runs the Catherine Project. She's famous on Twitter. We don't know how she does it all. Zena, welcome.ZENA HITZ: Thank you, Henry. It's great to be here.OLIVER: And we're talking about Gulliver's Travels because it is 300 years since it was published, and it's a book that you love.HITZ: A book that I've loved for a long time.First Encounter with Gulliver's TravelsOLIVER: So tell me, when did you first read it?HITZ: Well, it was an important moment for me. I was in high school, and I was admitted to a scholarship summer program which offered college courses at different campuses. There were some normal-looking college courses at normal-looking colleges. And then there was this course at St. John's called Science as Literature, Literature as Science. [laughs] It had this description that was just unbelievable. And I thought to myself, “This is the one, obviously the one to go to.”So I went, and we read books that no one in their right mind would assign to high school students now, and maybe not then. The fragments of Parmenides, Plato's Timaeus, selections from Aristotle's Physics, Gulliver's Travels. After reading a number of—preface to Ptolemy's Almagest, geocentric astronomy. And we read Gulliver's Travels after reading selections from Hooke's Micrographia, so the inventor of the microscope, and Galileo's Starry Messenger, which is one of the great first uses of the telescope to discover the nature of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter.So then we read Gulliver's Travels. We also read Emma and Flannery O'Connor and various other things. And one of the faculty who was running it said at one point, “Well, we thought we'd throw a bunch of things together and see what you could do, what you could make of it. We didn't actually have an idea of how these all fit together,” which I think was probably true.At any rate, I think I came to Gulliver's Travels thinking about these scientists who were looking at very large things and very small things, and thinking in general about the follies of human perception, whether that was shown in literature or philosophy or what have you, the ways in which human perception and knowledge don't work very well. And I think Swift is still one of the best people to—Gulliver's Travels is still one of the best books about that because it's in the mode of a travel diary, an eyewitness account.Gulliver is trained as a surgeon, by his own account. He at one point says he was a bit of a projector in his younger days, someone who undertook scientific projects. And he's a terrible observer, the worst imaginable observer, and Swift so brilliantly lets us see through his eyes, lets us see all the things he doesn't see. And I think it's not just about seeing and knowing. It has a very profound, I think, moral and political set of commitments. So it's a very humane book. It's social criticism, but from a point of view of a very deep humanity. So I've always loved the book for these reasons since then.I came back to it more recently because it is part of the curriculum at St. John's. So when I came back to teach there, I began to reread it. The other experience I had was that I wrote a long essay on it when I was an undergraduate. So those are my—I'm not any kind of expert. My knowledge of the historical context of the book is limited. It's not zero, but it's limited. But I have always loved it as an account of human understanding and its failures and the way that might impact how we live and how happy we can be.The Houyhnhnm ProblemOLIVER: Have you changed how you think about it as you've taught it?HITZ: I have not really changed the way I think about it. It gets more—like all of these books, the more you read them, the more comes out of them, the more details come up. Hilarious. The more jokes you get, the more . . .I think the one more recent insight I had was, I hadn't understood the full horror of the Houyhnhnms in the last book until relatively recently. I think that took me some time to really take on. It's one of the cases where Gulliver's misperceptions are a bit harder to see, and I think many readers just assume that Swift is endorsing the praise of the Houyhnhnms in some sense or other.OLIVER: There are some very serious critics in the past who have called them Swift's ideal beings. Which at this point in history seems unthinkable, but it has been a belief among serious readers.HITZ: Yes, yes. And also common among students. Yes, it's absolutely one of the wrongest opinions you could have about anything, I think.OLIVER: Why does Swift allow us to make that mistake? Are we bad readers out of the context, or has he made too good a job of his diversions and concealments and ironies?HITZ: That's a great question, and I'll just take a stab at it. I think that he has hit on a mode of misperception which is very deep to us, and it's something that we're much more guilty of. We could imagine that if we were in a place where everyone was small or everyone was large, we might make mistakes like Gulliver makes. But we all live, I think, in communities that are a bit like the Houyhnhnms. And so we are all very subject to these kinds of deceptions, and I think that's how he gets us.That's not to really excuse the bad readings because, you know, Gulliver does leave the land of the Houyhnhnms with a boat made out of human skin, which should—I think that moment should make you realize, if you haven't yet, that something is very seriously wrong with Gulliver. Gulliver has been kind of destroyed as a person by his travels, and especially by this last trip. But if you pass over that little detail, maybe you think, “Oh, wow, he found some very simple beings.”OLIVER: Well, there's also the great council where they debate the genocide of the Yahoos.HITZ: [laughs] Yes.OLIVER: And it directly contradicts several things Gulliver has come to believe about the Houyhnhnms, about the Yahoos, and about himself. And he's completely unaware of these contradictions and so in awe of the Houyhnhnms that he doesn't quite understand, I think, that he's accounting a genocide.HITZ: That's right. That's right.OLIVER: Even though he uses a phrase from Genesis that's very unmistakable. It's a sort of remarkable moment of—particularly to us, having had the 20th century. I think that's why Swift came back into favor in a way, because people used to say, Swift's unbearable view of human nature . . .This is a great bit in Boswell's Life of Johnson where, when they're traveling through Scotland, they're with a lady, and she says to Johnson, “Is any man naturally good?” And Johnson says, “No, no more than a wolf.” And Boswell says, “Well, sir, what about ladies?” And Johnson says, “God, no, absolutely not.” And this woman says, “Oh my God, this is worse than Swift,” utterly horrific view of human nature.But of course, we can actually say, did he go far enough? [laughter] I mean, Swift clearly understands something very real and deep. The council of genocide is horrifyingly familiar to us. And I think that's much to Swift's credit that he can see that, and to show that Gulliver would blind himself to it. And people still blind themselves to it, right?HITZ: That's right. And I wonder—you would know more about this than me because it is a bit of a historical question, but my understanding is that quite a lot of the savagery, the worst parts of rule over men that we see in Gulliver's Travels are pictures of Ireland in the 17th, 18th centuries. And I wonder if that took some time to reveal itself to the British, and in some ways it's still not really as known as it might be. We think of the colonial project as being something that was directed at India and Africa—OLIVER: Faraway countries.HITZ: —faraway countries where people looked really different. And we're not as familiar with the kinds of things that were done to the cuddly Irish with their nice music, and who we don't think of as being people that you would savagely oppress like that. So I think—OLIVER: So, I think partly the English are not interested in their own history in the way that they are expected to be. And partly the English interest in Irish history has become very focused on the more recent events. And it's very hard to get back past that. And it all becomes very complicated, and it's a sort of different country. So there's some of that, but I think generally we don't want to know what we did, yes.HITZ: Well, and I think in anglophone countries in general, there's going to be a history of something like that. To attribute it to the British is not to say that—I mean, Americans have chattel slavery and the genocide of the natives, and the Australians have their own situation. All of the anglophone countries have something like this on their conscience.I think that obscures the meaning of that final book. I think we don't recognize—and that's really to Swift's credit, to have a social critique that is so real and so deep that you may not even recognize yourself in the picture.Slavery in Gulliver's TravelsOLIVER: Yes. When I read it again—I read it as an undergraduate, but I really was actually more interested in the other parts of Swift's work. And I thought it was brilliant, and then I read it again. And it was more recently that—I didn't understand how I couldn't have seen it, but it's basically a book about slavery, as I come back to it.And in each of the books there is enslavement of a different sort. So, to begin with, Gulliver is the one being kept in a box or kept in a house, or he's chained up by the Lilliputians or Glumdalclitch.HITZ: Right. That's right.OLIVER: She's a very nice sort of master, as it were, [laughter] but he has that box that can be sealed, and the dwarf has him swiping at the wasps. And then the enslavement that the flying island has of the country below is like England and Ireland. And then in the final book, you know, the Houyhnhnms are whipping the Yahoos.HITZ: That's right.OLIVER: The slavery thing gets worse and worse as the book goes on. And one of the things that's clever is that it's funny when Gulliver is enslaved, right? When the wasps are let out and he has to—and Swift sort of does that clever thing where he undermines things by making it a joke at the end. By the book of the Houyhnhnms, there is really very little humor. And the twist at the end is always dark.Gulliver can't see that—he can see that he's a bit like the Yahoos. But he can't see that they've been enslaved in the way that he—the farmer wanted to take him around the kingdom and show him off, and he says, “I couldn't possibly have had children in that condition because I couldn't have it on my conscience that I had begotten a slave, someone born into slavery. I couldn't do that.”HITZ: Right.OLIVER: Then he's in the Houyhnhnms and he can't—it's quite remarkable.HITZ: [laughs] Yes. I don't think it's quite true that in the end there's no humor. I read it with some Catherine Project group a couple of years ago, and one of the readers pointed out that it's not obvious Gulliver isn't leaving his home and sitting out in the ocean and always landing on England every single time; just every time, he lands there.And there's something hilarious about an Englishman that discovers a place where there's all horses, [laughter] and his love of horses overwhelms him, and he becomes persuaded that they're the only rational beings that there are. I mean, that is funny.OLIVER: Yes, I agree. There's a lot of irony and stuff. But I think it's in Lilliput when he describes their manner of writing. And he says they don't write from left to right as we do in England, or from right to left, or up-down like the Chinese, but from one corner to the other, as the ladies do in England. This is very funny, dry humor, and that sort of thing is gone. And the things that surprise you at the end of a sentence or a paragraph are more like, “Oh, and of course I used Yahoo skin to cover the boat.” And you're like, oh my God, this is not a joke anymore.You know, in A Modest Proposal, he makes real humor out of those kind of horrors. And with the Houyhnhnms, I think he actually refuses the joke to make you feel the disgust, in a way.HITZ: Yes, that might be right. That might be right.Swift and PhilosophyOLIVER: What do you think about the idea that the Houyhnhnms are drawn from the Phaedrus and Socrates's idea of the soul with the two horses? And there's the good, rational horse and the vulgar, passionate horse, and the Yahoos are the other horse. You see what I mean?HITZ: Yes, yes.OLIVER: Is Swift showing us the two sides, and Gulliver's mistake is to prefer the one and not the—HITZ: Right, I think I have heard something like this before. I'm a bit skeptical. Swift doesn't strike me as someone who uses philosophy in quite that way. I think he's much more interested in Gulliver's—the Houyhnhnms' self-deception about the kinds of beings they are. They do not say “the thing which is not,” yet Gulliver's master hides from him this conversation about the genocide for quite some time. And maybe we don't know if he tells him quite the whole truth about it. So there's—OLIVER: And he also conceals the fact that the others don't like Gulliver because he's a partial—a reasonable Yahoo, as it were.HITZ: Right. So their self-deception, Gulliver's being taken in by their self-deception, the ways in which they—this is one of the ways that I think it's profound about the nature of slavery. And to cheer us all up, I'll make a Holocaust analogy, as you also did.When I was traveling in Germany some years ago, in one of their Holocaust museums, there was an image from a Nazi-era German newspaper of Jewish people living in complete squalor in the ghetto. And of course, they had forced them into squalor. But somehow they forced them into squalor, and then this reinforces the sense that they're these rat-like beings.And there's something very similar that the Houyhnhnms do to the Yahoos. They force them into this animal state, and then they say, “Oh God, look, these people are disgusting. They just don't know how to act.” That seems to me the kind of level at which Swift is working. He is interested in the nature of a human being, but not in the abstract Platonic sense, I don't think.He strikes me as someone who believes in common sense, common decency, basic freedom, and basic use of reason. And he finds in his time that there's distorting teachings, distorting ways of behavior that have gotten people far off track. To me, that's what it feels like it comes from. It doesn't feel like Plato is in the background to me.OLIVER: Is there an extent to which, though, it's a work of sort of anti-philosophy? As you say, Swift, he likes common sense. He likes ordinary reason, and he likes what he would call the revealed truth of Christianity. So he talks, in his sermons about people, it comes to you from God like a light. It's revealed to you. And he doesn't like this idea that the philosophers can work it all out.And in a way, that's the same sort of mistake that the scientists think they can discover all this stuff, and they go in these crazy ways. And the Houyhnhnms are a bit like that. If you had philosopher-kings, they would end up being perverted examples of rationality because they're ignoring the—so do you think it's anti-philosophy in a way? The book is saying, “No, no, I don't want philosophers”?Criticizing Elite Intellectual CultureHITZ: That's definitely a plausible reading. But it's hard to tell whether it's anti-philosophy or anti a particular style of thinking. It's worth pointing out, in that light, that Gulliver, when he arrives in the land of the Houyhnhnms, before he even meets a horse, he sees a Yahoo who, from what I can tell from the text, is trying to wave at him and say hello, who recognizes him. And he's horrified. He sees him instantly as a monster.So I think immediately upon landing, he sees the Yahoos as monstrous, and that tells me that he must already be off kilter. So he's not just corrupted by the Houyhnhnms; he's been somehow led off track, away from the capacity to recognize fellow human beings before that.And he's come from this—the third book is all about various kinds of inquiry, scientific endeavors, practical endeavors, talking to the greats of the past, necromancy, and various kinds of inquiry into wisdom or things like wisdom. And somehow that's the thing that seems to push him to the point where he can no longer tell what a human being is.OLIVER: One of my favorite parts is when he's with the wizards, and he asks to be shown Homer and Aristotle and all their commentators. And he says that there were vast rooms full of these commentators, endless numbers of them. But Homer and Aristotle didn't recognize any of them because they were all so ashamed of the terrible things they'd said about these great men's works that they kept themselves forever in a different part of the underworld. They couldn't bear the shame of being revealed to having told lies and said second-rate things.It's very, very funny. And I think that's another sort of angle on which the book says, “You're so tempted to make a comment and have an idea and be a philosopher, and you should just accept the revealed truth of what is known. Just stop it. Just stop it.” [laughter]HITZ: Well, I suppose maybe I would also put it this way, that Swift sees the condition of 18th-century Ireland, which is quite poor, very bad. And it's ruled in a savage way by the English, who have a quite flourishing intellectual culture, as it happens, at this time.So I think what he might be is not a critic of philosophy so much as a critic of intellectual culture. Because intellectual culture seems to not only not help with existential concerns like slavery and oppression and savage poverty, but even serves to mask and hide and create illusions behind it.So that's, I guess, how it strikes me, as a book that's hostile to what you'd now call elite intellectual culture. And I don't know how fundamental that critique is, in light of its inability to solve problems for real human beings or to obscure the causes of what's going on with real human beings.OLIVER: I think it's quite fundamental because outside of Gulliver's—I think this comes into Gulliver's Travels, but what he might have said more explicitly elsewhere is, there are people starving in the streets of Dublin. And we've got corrupt politicians and intellectuals saying all these things, but you know, here she is starving. You don't need to work that out. [laughter] There's no question—the reveal—just be a Christian and, like, for goodness' sake . . .HITZ: Yes.OLIVER: And when, for example, he talks to the king of Brobdingnag, and there's that wonderful satire of the English government and everything. And he says, “Those people understood mathematics and poetry and whatever, but I could never drive into their head any sense of the abstract or any of these speculative—they simply didn't know what that was. They didn't know what I was saying.” [laughter]And so in a way, his ideal government is anti-philosophical because it would just look at the human problem in front of it. It wouldn't do speculative science. It wouldn't think of itself as rational, all this Platonic stuff. It would just—she's in rags, she has bare feet, you know?HITZ: Yes, that's right.OLIVER: What do we need a philosopher-king? Like, what are you talking about?HITZ: Exactly.OLIVER: The priest understands this because he's there in the city doing it. And is there something of that in the book, that constant resistance of the cleverness of people who cannot see daily life?HITZ: I think that's absolutely true, and I think it's probably one of the things I love about the book, because I think this somehow gets to something in my own heart. Even though I'm a professional intellectual—I have been my whole life—the distance between the concerns of professional intellectuals and the concerns of living, real people in various parts of the world is very large.And it's even worse when, as it was when I was coming up in grad school, there's a ton of explicit concern and various operations underway to improve life for others, which have zero connection with anything that anyone actually does. So I think the Laputans, which is the beginning of the third book, when Gulliver—OLIVER: The flying island.HITZ: Yes, when Gulliver visits the people on the flying island, who have one eye towards the heavens and one eye pointed inward. And they study music and mathematics, and they live in a giant flying saucer, which has the—OLIVER: And the flappers.HITZ: That's right. [laughter] When someone needs to talk to them, someone flaps their ears so that they pay attention. And their wives all run off with working people because they can't bear to be treated the way they are by men like this. And the flying saucer is not just distant. It also has the power to crush the towns underneath it if it judges them to be rebellious.This image will stick with you for the rest of your life. I mean, it's absolutely perfect, and the perfect image of bad government of a kind when intellectual culture is prized. And it's hinted early on in the book in Lilliput, when the rulers in Lilliput have to do these elaborate dances with ropes.OLIVER: Oh, with the king and the chief minister hold the pole, funny angles, and if you get under it, you get a green ribbon or a red ribbon.HITZ: Exactly. [laughter] And they have these athletic contests of grace and various colored ribbons, and that determine how far you get in the halls of power.OLIVER: Yes. Are you a cabinet minister or a junior minister? Yes, yes.HITZ: Exactly. So there, it's all just a funny joke. But it develops, I think, into the Laputans, people who have kinds of expertise that are actually hostile to them doing any kind of humane governing. So yes, that seems right to me.Christianity in GulliverOLIVER: To what extent is it a Christian book?HITZ: That's an interesting question. I've never found a strong Christian element in it myself. There are satires of religious wars, both in Lilliput, where Lilliput's at war with its neighboring city. Oh, wait a second, there's two different disputes in Lilliput. One is about what side you cut your egg on.OLIVER: There are the Little-Endians and the Big-Endians,HITZ: Right. And then there's also one about heel size. So there's two different kinds of disputes.OLIVER: With the marvelous image that the king is a Short-Heeler. But they think that the heir to the throne might be favorable to the High-Heelers because he has one heel slightly higher than the other, and he walks with a wobbly gait.HITZ: [laughs] That's right. This, again, in Lilliput is just utterly hilarious, outrageous, very silly, obviously a parody of religious wars between different kinds of Christians. But it resurfaces towards the end. It's the Houyhnhnms, where he talks to the Master Horse—OLIVER: And the horse sort of pretends to this great rationality, simply can't understand that men would kill each other over the question of whether flesh is bread or bread is flesh.HITZ: That's right. That's right. That's right. So there's definitely disparaging remarks about religious wars. And as you're talking about it, where along with Swift's praise of common sense, there's a kind of basic Christian morality, which is that the poor and the suffering need attention. That all strikes me as Christian. Apart from that, I'm not sure. If you have a religious take, I'd be interested to hear it.OLIVER: I find it very interesting that Swift had quite strict beliefs. He was not in favor of Catholics. He thought Dissenters should be tolerated, but he wanted the Test Act. He was very particular about all these things. And in his other works, he's quite direct about that. But in this book, he achieves a kind of high ambivalence. And he's not a Little-Ender or a Big-Ender.HITZ: That's right.OLIVER: And he says the religious text on which this is based simply says that you must break the egg at the most convenient end.HITZ: [laughs] That's right.OLIVER: Now, of course, in reality, he's a Little-Ender, and he's very committed to the Reformation, and he thinks it's all terrible that they're not. And it's interesting that someone with such angry, insistent beliefs on the Anglican Church would take this ambivalent position.And he satirizes so much. But the anti-slavery stuff, the description of the Laputans bringing the island down, and then he says, “I've never seen so much want and misery, and there's a wild look in their eyes, and they're wearing rags.” I mean, this is Dublin, right? This is just, along with the slavery, this basic Christian concern for the oppressed, the poor, the suffering.HITZ: Yes, that's right.OLIVER: And so I don't quite know. It's almost like the book is saying, again with this anti-intellectual thing, all these doctrinal disputes and which church this and who believes that. And here we have slaves and poor people and beggars and starving people.HITZ: Right.OLIVER: Christianity should deal with that first. So is the implicit criticism of his fellow Christians, in a way, that they're more interested in these disputes than in the fact that there are enslaved people and suffering people and—you see what I mean?HITZ: Yes, that's right.OLIVER: And Gulliver—the Houyhnhnms are highly rational but not Christian, which is a significant omission. And by the end, are you supposed to wonder if Gulliver actually isn't very much of a Christian? Because he can see this suffering and not respond to it at all.HITZ: Right, when maybe the—is the best person in the book the King of Brobdingnag? Does that seem right? The person with the—at least who says the best things?OLIVER: He says the best things. I think the best person is Glumdalclitch. She shows real charity and real love towards him.HITZ: What about the Houyhnhnm, the one who likes him, who says, “Fare thee well, gentle Yahoo”? It's tear-jerking—OLIVER: Oh, the sorrel nag.HITZ: The sorrel nag. I can literally weep at that moment when she says, “Fare thee well, gentle Yahoo.”OLIVER: That's true. That's true. She and Glumdalclitch are maybe more similar characters. Yes, yes, yes.HITZ: They're similar characters. Okay.OLIVER: And they have that basic, you don't need to call it Christian. You don't need—it doesn't need theology.HITZ: Humane. I would call it humane. Yes.OLIVER: They have that basic love of their fellow. You know, Glumdalclitch doesn't say, “Oh, how amusing this little man is, or how entertaining, or I can make—” She says, “He must be cared for. He looks a bit like me. He must be cared for.”HITZ: Right.OLIVER: And the sorrel nag, again, has the love of the fellow creature.HITZ: That's right. That's right.OLIVER: So I think Swift might be bringing in this, what he thinks of as the revealed truth of Christianity. Like, you shouldn't need telling, you shouldn't need to argue. It's there.HITZ: Right. This is just me making things up, which is what I'm here for. We're podcasting. Yes.OLIVER: Yes, of course. Also, is that not what the philosophers would do? That's what Swift would say.HITZ: But if I was going to make something up, what I would say is something like this: that Swift to me, from the testimony of Gulliver's Travels, which is the book of his I really know the best. I don't know much about the rest of it. He has a level of self-awareness and sophistication. So, he knows that that religious difference is being used as a pretext. He knows that it is obscuring the suffering of these people. So, for the purposes of the book, he says, “Look, if you're a smart person, if you're a smart ruler, if you're an actually humane, intelligent, commonsensical ruler, you know that the fact that they have the wrong religious views is not a reason for them to be enslaved and oppressed and starved.” So that would be my suspicion.And that's why I think, to me, the religion is so light, because it's not really a religious problem. It's actually just a human problem and a political problem that is, how do you run your country so that these subject peoples are allowed to be free and develop themselves and be full human beings? That would be my made-up guess.Students' Views of GulliverOLIVER: What do undergraduates think? What is it that they find interesting in the book, and what do they like or dislike?HITZ: It's been a couple of years. I think they like this idea that—we all think travel is very broadening, a great way to think about the world. You know, you can learn so much about one's fellow human beings. And whatever else is going on in Gulliver's Travels, travel does not necessarily produce enlightenment.So I think they like the attention to the ways in which, even when we are trying to learn, we fail to learn. And the ways in which structures of learning, like traveling or studying science, might actually make you worse and not better, things like that. But it's not a book—I think it's fair to say it's not one of the favorite books of the undergraduates.OLIVER: Okay.HITZ: I think they find it a little bit distant, and I'm not sure why that is.OLIVER: Is it because it sort of looks like a novel, but it's not what we have come to expect a novel to be? And it sort of has that—HITZ: I think that's right.OLIVER: The pre–Jane Austen novel is kind of weird to us now.HITZ: Well, they love Don Quixote.OLIVER: Okay.HITZ: And that is a challenge of a similar kind. It's a novel which doesn't quite read like a novel, and the humor is kind of old. I mean, it's also true—undergraduates, in my experience, in general—I hope they'll forgive me for saying this on a podcast—they're not always good at comedy. They tend to think that serious things must be tragic.OLIVER: You can't get an A by making a joke.HITZ: Well, more that they have a sense that an intellectual life is something serious. It's serious.OLIVER: Oh, yes. Okay. And the syllabus slightly reinforces that, doesn't it?HITZ: Well, it's sort of self-reinforcing because we used to read more Aristophanes. We used to read Rabelais.OLIVER: If you do Shakespeare, it'll be the tragedies.HITZ: No, no, we do Shakespeare comedies.OLIVER: Oh, you do? Okay.HITZ: Yes. We have As You Like It and The Tempest. And do we have more tragedies? Maybe one more tragedy than comedy, but not a terrible imbalance.OLIVER: Well, that's good.HITZ: It's not Shakespeare-type comedy that's—maybe, correct me if I'm wrong, a Shakespeare comedy is something that ends in a marriage, more or less.OLIVER: More or less.HITZ: It's things that are funny—they don't necessarily think that humor is a way of thinking.OLIVER: Do they struggle with irony?HITZ: No, not usually. As long as it's serious irony, Anyway, I'm not sure why. I think I'm making things—I'm going too far out of the grounds for drawing conclusions.Favorite Parts of the BookOLIVER: Sure. Do you have a favorite passage?HITZ: One of my favorites is the part—is it Balnibarbi where they have people who try to speak with objects?OLIVER: Oh, yes, yes, yes.HITZ: And they have to carry around wagons full of things because they never know what you might want to talk about. [laughter] That's so weird. Because I think I spent a lot of time studying with philosophers, there's a bit of—something's on the nose about this.OLIVER: Yes.HITZ: You know, it's like, “No, you've got to say exactly—no, that's too imprecise. You have to say exactly what you mean.” Bernard Williams, the great philosopher, has something complaining about how contemporary philosophers are very controlling of their readers. They don't want anyone to make the slightest mistake about what they mean by a particular word. That's how the people who speak by objects strike me.OLIVER: Do you think that is a problem of contemporary philosophy?HITZ: Oh, sure. Yes, absolutely. Yes. The way Williams puts it is that when you write something, it should be like a cake mix, and the reader should be able to put their own egg and bake the cake themselves.OLIVER: Oh, I see. You mean like a box of mix, yes.HITZ: Yes, yes, exactly. It's like a box of cake mix. Whereas making the cake painstakingly and force-feeding it bite by bite to the reader is not actually an—OLIVER: Telling them how it tastes.HITZ: Telling them how it tastes is not an educational endeavor.OLIVER: When does this become too dominant in philosophy?HITZ: It's a feature of 20th-century analytic philosophy to be very careful with the meanings of words. And it's by no means universal; it's just a natural vice to the territory.Iris MurdochOLIVER: Is this a problem for someone like Iris Murdoch, or is it more the A. J. Ayer type?HITZ: No, it's the A. J. Ayer type, not Iris Murdoch. No, Iris Murdoch is heterodox outside of the—OLIVER: Do you like her philosophy?HITZ: I do, yes.OLIVER: What do you like about it? Platonic?HITZ: Now, see, I came here to talk about Swift. [laughter]OLIVER: I know, but you made such a good point about the satire of philosophers.HITZ: I like her writing for a more general educated audience, her not making assumptions about the philosophical training of her readers, and her use of Plato for sure, which is quite interesting and creative. She sort of ingests Plato and does something with it that I think is very interesting.OLIVER: Is she properly appreciated as a Platonist, or do you think there's more attention to be paid?HITZ: There's probably more attention to be paid, but she gets some attention. She gets some attention. I also don't think it was particularly helpful, these two books that came out a couple of years ago about Murdoch, Foot, Midgley, and Anscombe.OLIVER: Oh, yes, yes, yes. I only read one of those. It was quite good.HITZ: It might be quite good, but those four women are quite different from one another. So it's an example of where attention to identity could obscure as much as it—OLIVER: Well, one of the books was more about the ideas—they were both obviously about the ideas—and one of them was more about the fact that they were together in Oxford. And that they benefited from hanging out, talking, doing different sorts of work, sleeping with each other's husbands, et cetera.HITZ: Yes, all the good stuff.OLIVER: And from the more sociological point of view, it was very interesting to see that, actually, a lot of what Murdoch did was bound up with her friendships and relationships, in that the argument basically is, A. J. Ayer and the others get sent away because of the war. So these four women are actually—they've been banned from this seminar and told they're not allowed.Well, now they can sit around and do what they want to do. And it worked, and they all produced very interesting things. So from that point of view, I think it was—but I agree with you, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch are not the same. [laughter]HITZ: Not even particularly similar. I also feel like I've read enough of Murdoch's novels to have a sense of what the sociological situation was like.OLIVER: You like the novels?HITZ: I do like them, yes.OLIVER: Do you have favorites?HITZ: I can't remember the name of my favorite because I haven't read them for years. It's one of the things I read years ago, the one—I'd remember it if I saw the title. There's an LSD trip at the beginning of it.OLIVER: Oh, The Good Apprentice. I love that book.HITZ: The Good Apprentice, yes. I think that was my favorite. But I never fell in love with it. I just liked it, and I found it interesting, and I found the sociology interesting. Okay, this is what academics at this time period were doing.What to Pair with SwiftOLIVER: We got diverted.HITZ: “We” got diverted. [laughs]OLIVER: We did. If Swift is on a great books syllabus, what is it good to pair him with? If people are reading Swift, on or off a syllabus, do you think there are other—Hooker, you said, which I think would be interesting.HITZ: No, Hooke. It's Hooke.OLIVER: Hooke. Hooke. That's a very good point.HITZ: The guy who wrote Micrographia, who has the enormous picture of the flea.OLIVER: Yes, yes, yes. So that would be good. But any other? Is it worth reading Plato alongside him?HITZ: Well, I like to—he's on the list for something we called Life of the Mind Seminar at Catherine Project, which is our introduction to the life of the mind.OLIVER: And just to tell people, the Catherine Project—this is not a university. Anyone can join a seminar.HITZ: That's right. It's an open online readers community. Consists of small, high-quality conversations, mostly on Zoom, some in person.OLIVER: You could be some kid, an accountant, a dentist, whatever, and you come and do a—you've got a PhD running a seminar, and you get that experience.HITZ: Right. Some of them are peer led, so they're not necessarily PhDs running them. The reading groups are not necessarily run by PhDs. But the core program in which the Life of the Mind Seminar is—either a PhD or an ABD [all but degree] or someone with some academic experience is usually leading that. We have it there, and we have it there with a set of books that are meant to disorient rather than to orient.So one of the difficulties with reading great books with more or less random selections of adults is that people feel uncertain, out of place. And they bring expertise, real or fake, to the table, which makes it very difficult to have a conversation. It's usually fake expertise, for what it's worth.OLIVER: Give us an example of what you mean by fake expertise.HITZ: Well, so someone will have—we'll be, say, reading Hamlet. Someone will have taken a class on Shakespeare in college, and they'll say, “Actually, we're asking this question. But what I learned, my professor told me, is that Hamlet actually symbolizes—he has an Oedipus complex and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then this is what this means, and this is what that means.” And then your conversation's over, because you need to focus just on the text that's shared between the—OLIVER: It's not a crossword puzzle.HITZ: Exactly. It's not a crossword puzzle, and it's not something where—or the other—people often, again, they feel a bit on their back feet. So they'll google a bunch of stuff about the author, and they'll start tossing out random facts about the book or about the author, about the context. And again, you don't get really into the meat of the book that way.So, Gulliver's Travels is there to help us think about ways in which we might not be expert in things we're expert. Ways in which we might think we understand something and not understand it. And ways in which people who, with every appearance of seriousness and scientific principle, can just say unbelievably stupid things.So it's a very, very good book for that, where in that sense, it's I think very good for any liberal education program. It's liberating that way. One of the things we need to be liberated from is false expertise.OLIVER: You're talking really about these secondhand opinions that you haven't interrogated and come to understand yourself.HITZ: Exactly. Exactly, exactly, exactly.OLIVER: This is what Mill says. Everything is new to someone, and the real genius is that you find it out.HITZ: Exactly.OLIVER: You don't get taught it. Yes, yes.HITZ: Exactly, exactly. So real learning is things you find for yourself. Anyway, that's what I like it with. As for pairing it, yes, I think it would just depend on what you were—I don't have a clear thought about that. I think it'd be good to pair it with Galileo's Starry Messenger and preface to Hooke's Micrographia.But you could also pair it with Emma. Be quite good, actually, because Emma is also about someone who really doesn't know what they're doing and has no idea. Thinks they know what's going on; they really have no idea what's going on.OLIVER: Yes. Hamlet as well, in fact.HITZ: I guess so. Does he not know what's going on?OLIVER: Who's diverting now? [laughter] Well, there's an interesting question, isn't there, about whether Hamlet has legitimate doubts. So he says, “This ghost could be a demon. I should be careful. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm going to pretend to be mad. I'm going to find out.” Or whether he just doesn't want to see the truth in front of him, and he quote-unquote “delays” because of that. I don't know if you have a view.HITZ: I don't think he's deluded. I think the problem is something different, but I haven't thought enough about it recently to know what his volitional obstacle is. But I don't think he's deluded. I think he sees what's going on, but there's something about acting that doesn't work for him.OLIVER: An internal—HITZ: Something internal. Something internal. In a way, I find the play very hard. I don't know what, for instance, what does that obstacle have to do with Ophelia? What's going on with that? Anyway, he's very mysterious, but I don't—yes, that'd be my sense, is that he's not—OLIVER: Do you buy this idea that he's a nihilist?HITZ: No, although he's definitely faced with something like nihilism. He has to look at it. And of course, the play does end with everyone dead, [laughs] so it's not obvious that he's wrong.Sympathy for GulliverOLIVER: This question hangs over Gulliver as well. Is the problem by the end that he's basically become a nihilist? His response to the Yahoos is to deny meaning, deny the possibility of meaning, to shut himself away.HITZ: He is a true misanthrope. He hates human beings and refuses to interact with them and in that sense, in some way, removes himself from any further mistakes. In another way, the mistake that he's in is so massive that that hardly seems like a consolation. But yes, he's definitely stuck, and he's stuck in a place where who he is—because he's a human being. We have to remember that.So he's in a place of total self-hatred and the hatred of his neighbor, what you'd call from the Christian perspective a total loss of charity. Is that nihilist? I don't know, but it's definitely bad. It's not a good state to be in. Maybe I don't know what you mean by nihilism exactly.OLIVER: Are we supposed to disapprove of him at the end or sympathize with him?HITZ: Disapprove, I think.OLIVER: Yes? You don't feel sorry for him?HITZ: I do a bit.OLIVER: But not much.HITZ: Well, should I?OLIVER: I have come to believe—yes, this is what I've come to feel in subsequent readings, is that Gulliver, as you say, is very mistaken. He thinks he understands things that he does not understand. He has the sort of pretense of rationality, but he lacks any sort of meta rationality to see what his limits are.And he becomes, therefore—he doesn't advocate genocide, and he doesn't take any pleasure in using Yahoo skin, but he's just completely null to it. There's a sort of void there where human feeling ought to be. And it's tragic for him. It's a tragic ending that he is so isolated. And we can't sympathize with him, as it were, but we can feel sort of awful that he's shriveled into this state rather than judging or blame.I think one of the persistent themes of the book is, as I say, this kind of basic love of fellow creature, the Glumdalclitch or the sorrel. And if you take that from the book, you will wish you could bring Gulliver back.HITZ: Right. What you're saying reminds me that there is an interesting parallel in Plato's dialogues that I hadn't thought of before, Plato's Parmenides, which is perhaps the most difficult Plato's dialogue. So it's a conversation between young Socrates and the philosopher Parmenides. The first third of it is relatively clear, some arguments against what people think of as Plato's theory of forms.Then there's an extensive, insane dialectical process where various theses about the connection between being and oneness are both argued for and then refuted, and argued for and then refuted, pages and pages and pages and pages of it. So this seems to be—it's Parmenides and Zeno who are running Socrates through this ringer.And the person at the very beginning of the dialogue who they have to go find, to tell him the story of how Socrates met Parmenides, used to study philosophy. But now he just trains horses. [laughs] One of my teachers pointed this out to me, and I've never been able to get over it, that he spent this time doing philosophy, and he's like, “You know what? I'm going to work with horses for the rest of my life. If I never hear another human voice, that's fine with me.”So I think that is an interesting parallel. And I think it is not really that uncommon to see people who are totally disillusioned with relating to humans, who then relate to animals instead, like they devote themselves to animals.OLIVER: But on that reading, it might be a disillusionment with philosophical humanity. It might be philosophy that's killed Gulliver's human feeling.HITZ: That's right. Well, I think that's one possibility, one very strong possibility. That's why I think the Houyhnhnms come after the Laputans. Going to the furthest reaches of his intellectual interests just destroys his humanity.But it doesn't seem like exhaustion in the same way that whoever, I can't remember his name, the character who relates the Parmenides, where you just think he must be exhausted from having heard more than one conversation like this. [laughter] And just in the stable with the horses eating oats, I mean, it's just delightful. It's just so peaceful, you know?OLIVER: Bucolic, pastoral, yes.HITZ: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Maybe you're right that we should be more sympathetic to someone in that situation.OLIVER: Well, next time you read it, you can tell me if you change your mind.HITZ: All right. I will tell you if I change my mind.OLIVER: Very good. Zena Hitz, thank you very much.HITZ: Thank you very much, Henry Oliver. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Emily Wilson, the scholar and translator of Homer and Seneca, among many others. She tells me what tech bros get wrong about the classical world and what Cardi B can teach us about Aristophanes, as we discuss her new book, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature.Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Send us Fan MailTwo ways to support the show and unlock bonus episodes:Download and subscribe to Ekho: ancientlanguage.com/ekho/Subscribe to New Humanists+ for bonus episodes: buzzsprout.com/1791279/subscribeIn his comedy Clouds, Aristophanes turns Socrates into the arch-sophist of Athens: financially voracious, obsessed with verbal trickery, and preoccupied with irrelevant investigations. In most of the dialogues written by his student Plato, however, Socrates is not an arch-sophist, but the archenemy of the sophists: unmotivated by money, able to disarm their semantic wordplay, and concerned above all with living a virtuous life. That is what makes the Euthydemus dialogue so fascinating. In this Platonic dialogue, Socrates meets his friend Crito, and in an enthusiastic fluster, he tells Crito that the two of them simply must go become the students of the two sophists who are visiting Athens. In order to convince his skeptical friend, Socrates recounts his conversation with them, and the sometimes bizarre demonstration of their supposed wisdom. Dr. David Talcott, Fellow of Philosophy and Graduate Dean at New Saint Andrews College, joins Jonathan and Ryan to discuss the dialogue, and what it shows us about the role of education and philosophy in political life, and to draw some parallels with other Socratic dialogues.Plato's Euthydemus: https://scaife.perseus.org/library/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg021/H.I. Marrou's A History of Education in Antiquity: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780299088149New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.comSupport the show

Why read a bunch of facts about something in a textbook when you can get a first-hand account of what happened from someone who was there in the room where it happened?That's pretty much the concept of using the Great Books as the textbooks of choice in classical Christian education.At Veritas, a distinctive feature of secondary education is the Omnibus program, a comprehensive curriculum that combines literature, history, theology, civics, and philosophy. And, for the most part, students don't use textbooks for these classes. Rather, their textbooks are the "original sources;" that is, influential works written by authors and leaders of the time period.Our teachers and students have experienced first hand why this is the best way to appreciate and understand history...and why that appreciation and understanding is so crucial to a person's formation of faith and ideas.In this entertaining and eye-opening episode, three of our Omnibus teachers - Graham Dennis, Starling Reid, and Darin Beachy - talk with Mr. Fischer about their experience teaching history through the lens of the Great Books, how they inspire teenagers to wrestle with these difficult texts, and why the study of history alongside theology and philosophy is so vital to their development as citizens of our culture and disciples of Christ.What does that look like at Veritas?Well, instead of reading about the Peloponnesian War of the 4th century B.C., students read Thucydides' actual account and Aristophanes' plays. Rather than learn facts about Church history, they read Eusebius, Athanasius, and Dante's Divine Comedy. To grasp our country's founding principles, they read Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes. Great works of 19th century literature is enjoyed and discussed in conjunction with understanding modern movements.Think teenagers couldn't possibly be ready to digest this type of weighty material? Think again. A classical Christian education calls them to higher things, and year after year, our students rise to the occasion and thrive because of it! Find out how in this episode.This season of Cultivate is sponsored by Hershey Financial Advisers, a wealth management firm located on North Pointe Blvd in Lancaster, leading people to make better financial decisions and empowering them to fulfill a vision beyond themselves.

Two friends and academics recap classic literature and take it off its pedestal. In our seventy-seventh episode and International Women's Day Special, we cover one of the randiest, bawdiest texts we've had on the show: Aristophanes's sex-strike comedy, Lysistrata (411BC). We notice a dildo discrepancy, get a surprise visit from wee Donalbain, and get a lot of help from friend of the podcast (and Ancient Greek scholar) Fabio!Cover art © Catherine Wu.Episode Theme: Γω στα ξένα περπατούσα Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week Jeff and Dave conclude their brisk and breezy, dramatic reading through that old comedy standard, the Clouds. Featuring a rich smorgasbord of hilarity, inanity, and some nearly "postmodern" trends and politics, the episode starts out with an homage, a listener's letter, and some outrageous paronomasia: just what Aristophanes ordered! The hi- and lo- jinks then move on to some rather serious business, a debate between Superior Argument and Inferior Argument. Here we see that despite exuberant flatulence, and more than a little bit of invective and vituperation, the old playwright is dealing with deadly serious issues: does might make right? Is rhetoric all there is to law, or is there some abiding and underlying moral structure to the world and human society that populates it? Is it okay for children to beat their parents? What to do with a doddering fool like Strepsiades (Mr. Twisty-turny)? And, can the young like Pheidippides (Horsey Coupon-cutter) be trusted with education and a dangerous tool like logic? Also, tune in to sign up for your chance to win the new Hackett Complete Works of Aristotle, in 2 volumes.

Sokrates ist ein Mysterium. Einerseits ist er einer der berühmtesten Philosophen der Welt, andererseits haben wir all unser Wissen über ihn von anderen. Sokrates gleicht ein bisschen Jesus Christus, er hat nichts geschrieben, hatte eine Gefolgschaft, machte keinen Unterschied zwischen arm und reich - und wurde schließlich zum Tode verurteilt. Vor allem mit einem seiner Schüler ist er auf ganz spezielle Art verbunden: Platon. Denn Platon hat fast ausschließlich Texte über Sokrates geschrieben, aber ist das dann nicht *nur* der "platonische Sokrates"? Gab es da nicht noch andere Quellen? Wie sah Sokrates zum Beipsiel bei Aristophanes und Xenophon aus? Über diese Fragen spricht Christian mit Nikolaos Loukidelis, der an der TU Berlin lehrt und sich in seiner Forschung speziell mit Sokrates beschäftigt.

This week the guys take another stab at Aristophanes, this time with his Clouds. Will they rain in their criticisms? Will their jokes float lazily over your head? Haven't the foggiest, but tune in anyway. The episode begins with a discussion of Aristophanic comedy and its genre-bending mix of the lofty and the scatological. Following translator Meineck, exactly how many different ingredients did Aristophanes put in this soup? Is there anything like it today? Or, maybe it's too “localized” to properly translate? Well, step on the gas, and see what the guys find. Maybe you, too, can study with Socrates and learn how to dodge those Christmas credit card bills that recently came calling by making Inferior Argument - whoever that is - stronger. But first, try on these Persian paraffin wax booties and let's see how far you can jump. 

Le “doigt d'honneur”, c'est-à-dire le fait de tendre le majeur en repliant les autres doigts, n'a pas une origine floue ou médiévale : on connaît des sources antiques précises qui prouvent que le geste existait déjà il y a plus de 2 000 ans — et qu'il était déjà obscène.1) L'origine antique : un geste sexuel, pas une “insulte abstraite”Dans l'Antiquité grecque, le majeur tendu est un signe explicitement sexuel : il représente un phallus (le doigt dressé), parfois accompagné des doigts repliés comme testicules. Ce n'est pas métaphorique : c'est un geste de menace et d'humiliation, destiné à rabaisser l'autre en insinuant une domination sexuelle.Le témoignage le plus net se trouve chez Aristophane, dans la comédie Les Nuées (423 av. J.-C.) : un personnage fait un jeu de mots entre dáktylos (“doigt”) et le “dactyle” (le pied métrique), et accompagne la blague en tendant le majeur, comme une provocation. Cela montre que le public grec comprenait immédiatement le sens obscène du geste. On en trouve aussi des mentions via des compilations antiques et commentaires (Suda, etc.), preuve que le geste était identifié comme une insulte codifiée. 2) La confirmation romaine : “digitus impudicus”À Rome, le geste est carrément nommé : digitus impudicus, “le doigt impudique / indécent”. Là encore, pas de doute sur sa nature : il s'agit d'un signe grossier, associé à l'insulte sexuelle et à la dérision.Le geste apparaît chez plusieurs auteurs latins, notamment Martial, qui évoque le “doigt impudique” dans ses épigrammes, et d'autres textes latins de l'époque impériale. 3) Ce que ce n'est PAS : la légende d'AzincourtBeaucoup répètent que le geste viendrait des archers anglais à Azincourt (1415), qui auraient montré leurs doigts aux Français. C'est une légende moderne, démontée par des vérifications historiques : elle ne correspond pas aux sources et le geste existait déjà dans l'Antiquité. Donc l'origine exacte du doigt d'honneur est claire : c'est un geste obscène antique, attesté en Grèce au Ve siècle av. J.-C. et nommé à Rome comme le digitus impudicus — un symbole sexuel de domination devenu, au fil du temps, l'insulte universelle que l'on connaît aujourd'hui. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Edmund Burke is the founder of cultural and political conservatism. Dostoevsky, Aristophanes and T.S. Eliot also share in a similar spirit. They all warn against dismissing the past! .... Check out my new book! It's called: The Last Human: How Technology is Changing What it Means to be Humanhttps://www.amazon.com/Last-Human-Technology-Changing-Means/dp/1069510831/

TVC 719.2: Part 2 of a conversation that began a few weeks ago with author, essayist, novelist, and TV historian Mitchell Hadley (The Electronic Mirror, ItsAboutTV.com). Mitchell's latest book, Darkness in Primetime: How Classic-Era TV Foresaw Modern Society's Descent into Hell, is a series of essays that shows how certain episodes of such classic series as The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Star Trek, and The Prisoner—all of which were originally written and broadcast in either the 1950s or 1960s—not only envisioned a society of 24/7 surveillance, thought control, disinformation, persecution, and loss of freedom, but portrayed those realities in ways that are disturbingly similar to the world that we currently occupy. Topics this segment include a look at The Brotherhood of the Bell (CBS, 1970), a made-for-TV movie starring Glenn Ford (adapted for television by David Karp, based on his novel The Brotherhood of Velvet, about a secret society that is bent on world domination) that is also a variation of the classic tale of Faust; and "Susan B. Anthony, I Love You," an episode of Petticoat Junction from February 1970 that, whether by design or not, has a storyline that is reminiscent of Lysistrata, the classic Greek play by Aristophanes.

I, sir, I honor you my proxy And what will with what you make take of that, my beast and brawn affronted; That to no matter to which I may stand as though offered to the Gods, I am at bare my force and wary feast upon thy eyes as swarms, And then to no may have you since! I am at all, my eye, your arm, And hallowed crucifix! CHAOS shatters into a FIRE of FEATHERED fury and precedent mercury of volcanic embering magma and sparse clouds of silver and gold, while though first bleeding from the mouth he is engulfed in flame at once, becoming not unlike the Phoenix, a galaxy into his own forever escaping and never ending realms. Ahhh, you're right. YO WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST SEE? That's ludicrous! ah huh, I know, right. You took all that? Yep. {Enter The Multiverse} Sire, Your honor. I am bound. I have been forged. The crown. Certainly. Your high marks! Aye… You've been betrayed. …To no doubt. I am obliged to confront, your majesty, at all hours and in this your fortress— —your honor— And Chaos, that this, though there be your throne, Cannot bear weight of rock and stone to rebel archer, That which I am tied to seek, dear honor, Your vary mercy that there I, Here too, am slain! Damn. Creep shit, huh. Yeah. Why does Colbert get all the best parts?! Because he's capable of reading these types of monologues from cue cards! That circuit. He has a bigger cause than you know. [Redacted] It wasn't that I thought I was actively being watched, but more along the lines of knowing for a Friday, my mind wouldn't drift elsewhere and upward beyond, to the sixth, seventh, 8th or 15th floors— or whatever other crazy shit was apparently above them. Secret places I knew of and often thought about, but not too hard. It boggled my mind what was beyond and out of focus from the lower realms of New York, where it was dark and often dirty and hurtful to even wander. My breaths became deep and hollow; They won't turn your face to you, But they will burn through your whole world, wanting you undone Following sealing knives, half have no concious And tethered tongues— This is Levels, Watch us This is Levels, On your mark, This is levels, Christ conscious, This is Levels, Boats on the dock, Storm water, Pure thoughts of harm, But also luck, Drifting in that same water, Ducks, Not known in here our land, or others. You are no longer closer nor called for what you want It doesn't get that much more simple, nor more complex It doesn't get less disheveled than ‘anyway.' I suffer surface just to suffice this sauna trap It doesn't get any less leveled that two tall towers, September 11th. It doesn't get differentiated or dismissed, either, Without press involvement You got to love an easy bake oven and a handful of drama; You've got to love the plausible options for objections and motions to show cause You have got to love old folks and hard laughs, got to! You've got to love the cosmos for at least trying to show us God back, Though god turned back on us a month ago, Or so it was written More hard times And more cold half's And limbs lost, and marks and mauve and cranberry fortunes. More dusks and more dawns and more mortals but no heart left; No call to arms if you were worn backwards for your half. Now time for the calm but the ball bearings not lose but close hard down when you tip the nose up not to dive but force up the wheels as lifting planes does but you are donuts and dusk and dawn, and you are clutching stones in pockets, Four for corners of those the rock has, And that, North south, East west, And these days give gratitude, For wire stakes and high makes this time for more time deaf authors, Still no mortal walk has I, And still indifference to her call, my fortune is in death which may be cause to no one to suffer, As I have not love, And I have not friends, And I have not bonded and therefore this betrayal from where there speaks my meadow and assault have again lied, as devil does against all time. And so I smile, there, and welcome death, form withered birds did wander and then, before my eyes evolved to dust which then did sparkle, And there setting into scattered grains of sand. For which her shores were thought of, not as birds, but sure enough as rocks to till and thunder; And magnanimous waves you did there found I, Making graves and also these as caves, and banks, and ways to think her mazes as a construct. So now there, you are conformed, And all but may you came to offer. So there then shall tipping this and waves had planted oceans from my martyrs, And so again I called to brothers and also the fathers formed, as I had thought to know, these times and others as a motion [to show cause] So shattered banks and blanks my checkbook, scattered eyes though blue have yet been battered black and darkened; And also that became of which her office was unboxed, there was no work there, For her thoughts had caused the forests and winds to suffer from her art, therefore. There is no homeland, now or here or either, Shall I wonder? And then frayed her mark and also frayed this flag did fly for shame and horror. So there, did also Chaos sit and lack and gripping rope upon there crosses, also did my eye to mind, Him to a rope, but had departed. So I watched him hang from the noose, Though loosened grasp from known the ballet dancer, also then became the rabbit This of past and present. Ah, Fuck with me. I want you to. Aye aye. What is his power? Just wait for it… I don't think this is what you want it to— Just wait. Just listen? Listen to what? The man is just— blabbering. The cadence in his voice though; it's a rhythm. What, The cadence! In his voice— Mm. McDonald's. Okay?! But why are you saying—? Wait a minute. Wait what?! Play the tape back, and boost the audio. What for. Just do it, Mark. This costs a fortune and he's taking up all of our— THE MAN IN THE BOX has exploded. — time. What just happened. I told you he would do it. And we missed it. I don't get it. Where is he? There's no way of knowing yet. Check the grid. It's not… that simple…. Well then! Check the cadence. Or something ! Whatever you said. Jesus, I hate these alien motherfuckers! He's not an “alie What—? He's just— I mean— I do not understand. —he's human he's just— these ancients are gifted with— [sort of] Gifted?! You call that gifted?! He exploded into a fireball of feathers and— whatever this is— what is it?! It appears to be volcanic ash, sir. WHAT?! I'm moving backwards, forwards, backwards— forward time and time is dust from now on, I am in the end of my shattered and half lived life, Though bonded body to not my soul, which seeks not love and light, the morsels of the marker of my kind, And this to fill my aching desire to—- — now you've gotta run. From what? THE— AAAAhahsHAHSHjhabdbsnNadbdbamamBSBDNAGAGHAHghahsbabahaa!! WHAT WAS THAT. I DONT KNOW. I JUST HAD SIX ORGASMS. [BLACKOUT.] {Enter The Multiverse} DANE COOK wakes up from a VERY HARD NAP. …what just happened? This is your fault. You caused that. Okay. Gun in my face. I've had things, but not that. Get up. Jesus Christ. Just calm down. This is my calm. [The Festival Project ™] Do not panic. What the fuck are you telling me. Just stay calm. Do not panic. Don't panic what! That. Oh. You showed us what you are. No I did not. You want that? Uh… CC Just when you think you have me all figured out, I promise, it's not that. He has a gun! Fall back! Oh shitsauce, what in the fuck is going on! I may have had to stop and think for a moment ‘Where the fuck was I going?” The problem was I knew I already had the answer, and it was “Nowhere, fast.” Maybe even faster than ever. That hollow pit inside my stomach was calm now because most of all, I wasn't on the subway, I was on autopilot somewhere way far off from my body. Train me not, For this I die as one and always Sure to come for what is known and also for my martyr. Soon to fall I, bitter from the rock And drifting intermittent conscious, The constant not to known, But just a trough to all our horses. So this shame and guilt and rit and raft which I whitewater, so then to shall be betrayed as so they say I am, for now and onward. So her force is death and her tip have sung and those caves we made were of not fortune, but gloom and pity, merriment and pepper peer to socket and For now, my broken. Withered here and there And for to curse, But not to save my cycle, Dim this light for this I offer sacrament, Married waves and crevices of canyons I had watered, and then to twist of pine and though my time was won as always, want. The tip and twist of time would trim her down of those as slaughtered. Giving time and giving hate, and giving twins, And giving tin and giving golden graves, for maids And golden trophies. Giving taste and giving waste and giving ghosts wool coats for courthouses, Giving dim and dinner to these flames for which were ordered, have I. Giving those is taste and giving those is feasts, and giving those is masonry, created in her honor; Giving those is peace and wars, And to left ties, a peril force And giving these is tales and miners Trapped in these there caves as though you drift in barren lands. Well! Well. If I don't know who it is And I don't know what it is What I can't catch Man, Just leave the the fuck alone already, Would you? I have to wonder why I even come here, Full frozen How I'm running on low fuel, But just a sure to fact— (((Huh.))) Yeah, I recognize that dudes voice at this point Alright, maybe I am being followed. Yeah, that can't be a coincidence. It could. It is the rock. No it couldn't, Cause it's the rock. INT. ROCKEFELLER PLAZA. SUNRISE Okay, it's pretty from every angle! My fingers are frozen. Can I go inside now?! Yes. Here is the entrance. Jesus Christ! {Enter The Multiverse} Jesus All Day Christ. What are you looking at? I don't know yet. L E G E N D S It's pizza time. It's Kimmel time. [redacted] These are dangerous thoughts. Oh no, I turned my mind off. I love Kimmel, but I lost focus. Maybe this was the hour I needed without timing my life out. Then again, I did just recently watch him burst into flames in my living room. I have to wonder what that's about. Socumopolus Open On The Operating Table. Symposium, 2025/2026 TBA -Ū. Prod. By Blū Tha Gürū Symposium is a concept album that reinterprets the ancient Greek tradition of philosophical dialogue for the modern age. Taking its name from Plato's seminal text, which structured profound conversations about Love (Eros) as a series of distinct speeches, this album presents a series of intense, mythic narratives—the tracks—that each serve as a unique speech on the nature of consciousness, suffering, and transcendence. The album's unconventional structure, with initial tracks sporting double titles (e.g., forgetmenots.//follow through.), reflects the complex philosophical dualism explored throughout the work—the conflict between the body and the mind, the real and the dream, the past and the imperative to move forward. Each long-form track is a deep dive into an extreme mental state, an attempt to define the core truth of existence through an absurd or heightened reality. [Socumopolus Open On the Operating Table] This track is a visceral representation of the album's Platonic core. It is a grueling philosophical thought experiment set to music made to be experienced as though sifting through a gallery; as interpretive art rather than festival minded electronic dance music. ‘Socumolopus' opens in the uncomfortable and disjointed stairway of becoming undone at the midst of a medical mercy— unable to move or act with the understanding and awareness of a total loss of autonomy and control. A complete paralysis, but not of thought. Socumopolus Open On the Operating Table tells the story of a man undergoing high-risk, life-saving surgery. Due to a failure in anesthesia, he is trapped in a state of conscious paralysis—unable to alert the surgeons, yet fully aware as the operation unfolds. Indeed he reaches a certain purgatory of sorts and a certain death, as he becomes outward of himself enough to realize he knows nothing of this self, even his own name which he is called. He is now only Socumopolus. He is forced to watch his own body being opened, simultaneously experiencing the surgery from the table and from an out-of-body perspective above., however, once the initial shock of the blood and gore of his organs unraveling on the table before him, he drifts between lucid galaxies and worlds, traveling beyond all known time. His consciousness drifts in a purgatory spanning what is hours, but is rather eons in his own unaligned infinite outer consciousness, mingling the visceral reality of the operating room with non-sequitur dreams and the background noise of the hospital's televisions, and in and out of worlds alike; but also unknown. Symposium: A Concept Theory The track is a direct musical translation of Plato's Dualism—the belief that the mind/soul is separate from the physical body. [The Body] The character's physical being is the object of suffering (the operating table), imperfect and subject to the knife. [The Soul] His consciousness detaches, viewing the scene from above—this is the transcendent perspective, attempting to find "The Form of Truth" outside the confines of the suffering body. The character's hours-long, suspended state—neither fully alive nor dead, neither fully conscious nor dreaming—is the album's metaphor for the Ladder of Ascent in the Symposium. He is stuck in the intermediate steps, struggling between the earthly, mortal reality and the potential for a higher, purer vision, while the surrounding hospital noise and fragmented dreams represent the strange, sometimes absurd "speeches" (like Aristophanes' myth) that interrupt the pursuit of ultimate truth. In Socumopolus Open On the Operating Table, the operating room becomes the stage for a private, intense symposium on what it means to be aware when the self is literally dismantled. The surreality is not in the musicality, but the concept of the artwork itself, which reads most like an awkward statue or sculpture stationed distinctly in the way of a place you least expected, or perhaps even dead-center your normal course. It blocks the path with the cause to force you to think of creating an alternate route, or to travel or explore beyond what is familiar or known— or perhaps— just to force you to think at all when you may suppose the rest can just be turned off, as you cross out or autopilot and into a newfound structure for your own immortal cause. Thank You for Listening. Chroma 111. The Shoestring Theory. Copyright © The Complex Collective 2025 The Festival Project, Inc. ™ All rights reserved. Chroma111. Copyright © The Complex Collective 2025. [The Festival Project, Inc. ™] All rights reserved. UNAUTHORIZED REPRODUCTION OR DISTRIBUTION IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED BY LAW. INFRIGMENT IS PUNSHABLE BY FEDERAL LAW

I, sir, I honor you my proxy And what will with what you make take of that, my beast and brawn affronted; That to no matter to which I may stand as though offered to the Gods, I am at bare my force and wary feast upon thy eyes as swarms, And then to no may have you since! I am at all, my eye, your arm, And hallowed crucifix! CHAOS shatters into a FIRE of FEATHERED fury and precedent mercury of volcanic embering magma and sparse clouds of silver and gold, while though first bleeding from the mouth he is engulfed in flame at once, becoming not unlike the Phoenix, a galaxy into his own forever escaping and never ending realms. Ahhh, you're right. YO WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST SEE? That's ludicrous! ah huh, I know, right. You took all that? Yep. {Enter The Multiverse} Sire, Your honor. I am bound. I have been forged. The crown. Certainly. Your high marks! Aye… You've been betrayed. …To no doubt. I am obliged to confront, your majesty, at all hours and in this your fortress— —your honor— And Chaos, that this, though there be your throne, Cannot bear weight of rock and stone to rebel archer, That which I am tied to seek, dear honor, Your vary mercy that there I, Here too, am slain! Damn. Creep shit, huh. Yeah. Why does Colbert get all the best parts?! Because he's capable of reading these types of monologues from cue cards! That circuit. He has a bigger cause than you know. [Redacted] It wasn't that I thought I was actively being watched, but more along the lines of knowing for a Friday, my mind wouldn't drift elsewhere and upward beyond, to the sixth, seventh, 8th or 15th floors— or whatever other crazy shit was apparently above them. Secret places I knew of and often thought about, but not too hard. It boggled my mind what was beyond and out of focus from the lower realms of New York, where it was dark and often dirty and hurtful to even wander. My breaths became deep and hollow; They won't turn your face to you, But they will burn through your whole world, wanting you undone Following sealing knives, half have no concious And tethered tongues— This is Levels, Watch us This is Levels, On your mark, This is levels, Christ conscious, This is Levels, Boats on the dock, Storm water, Pure thoughts of harm, But also luck, Drifting in that same water, Ducks, Not known in here our land, or others. You are no longer closer nor called for what you want It doesn't get that much more simple, nor more complex It doesn't get less disheveled than ‘anyway.' I suffer surface just to suffice this sauna trap It doesn't get any less leveled that two tall towers, September 11th. It doesn't get differentiated or dismissed, either, Without press involvement You got to love an easy bake oven and a handful of drama; You've got to love the plausible options for objections and motions to show cause You have got to love old folks and hard laughs, got to! You've got to love the cosmos for at least trying to show us God back, Though god turned back on us a month ago, Or so it was written More hard times And more cold half's And limbs lost, and marks and mauve and cranberry fortunes. More dusks and more dawns and more mortals but no heart left; No call to arms if you were worn backwards for your half. Now time for the calm but the ball bearings not lose but close hard down when you tip the nose up not to dive but force up the wheels as lifting planes does but you are donuts and dusk and dawn, and you are clutching stones in pockets, Four for corners of those the rock has, And that, North south, East west, And these days give gratitude, For wire stakes and high makes this time for more time deaf authors, Still no mortal walk has I, And still indifference to her call, my fortune is in death which may be cause to no one to suffer, As I have not love, And I have not friends, And I have not bonded and therefore this betrayal from where there speaks my meadow and assault have again lied, as devil does against all time. And so I smile, there, and welcome death, form withered birds did wander and then, before my eyes evolved to dust which then did sparkle, And there setting into scattered grains of sand. For which her shores were thought of, not as birds, but sure enough as rocks to till and thunder; And magnanimous waves you did there found I, Making graves and also these as caves, and banks, and ways to think her mazes as a construct. So now there, you are conformed, And all but may you came to offer. So there then shall tipping this and waves had planted oceans from my martyrs, And so again I called to brothers and also the fathers formed, as I had thought to know, these times and others as a motion [to show cause] So shattered banks and blanks my checkbook, scattered eyes though blue have yet been battered black and darkened; And also that became of which her office was unboxed, there was no work there, For her thoughts had caused the forests and winds to suffer from her art, therefore. There is no homeland, now or here or either, Shall I wonder? And then frayed her mark and also frayed this flag did fly for shame and horror. So there, did also Chaos sit and lack and gripping rope upon there crosses, also did my eye to mind, Him to a rope, but had departed. So I watched him hang from the noose, Though loosened grasp from known the ballet dancer, also then became the rabbit This of past and present. Ah, Fuck with me. I want you to. Aye aye. What is his power? Just wait for it… I don't think this is what you want it to— Just wait. Just listen? Listen to what? The man is just— blabbering. The cadence in his voice though; it's a rhythm. What, The cadence! In his voice— Mm. McDonald's. Okay?! But why are you saying—? Wait a minute. Wait what?! Play the tape back, and boost the audio. What for. Just do it, Mark. This costs a fortune and he's taking up all of our— THE MAN IN THE BOX has exploded. — time. What just happened. I told you he would do it. And we missed it. I don't get it. Where is he? There's no way of knowing yet. Check the grid. It's not… that simple…. Well then! Check the cadence. Or something ! Whatever you said. Jesus, I hate these alien motherfuckers! He's not an “alie What—? He's just— I mean— I do not understand. —he's human he's just— these ancients are gifted with— [sort of] Gifted?! You call that gifted?! He exploded into a fireball of feathers and— whatever this is— what is it?! It appears to be volcanic ash, sir. WHAT?! I'm moving backwards, forwards, backwards— forward time and time is dust from now on, I am in the end of my shattered and half lived life, Though bonded body to not my soul, which seeks not love and light, the morsels of the marker of my kind, And this to fill my aching desire to—- — now you've gotta run. From what? THE— AAAAhahsHAHSHjhabdbsnNadbdbamamBSBDNAGAGHAHghahsbabahaa!! WHAT WAS THAT. I DONT KNOW. I JUST HAD SIX ORGASMS. [BLACKOUT.] {Enter The Multiverse} DANE COOK wakes up from a VERY HARD NAP. …what just happened? This is your fault. You caused that. Okay. Gun in my face. I've had things, but not that. Get up. Jesus Christ. Just calm down. This is my calm. [The Festival Project ™] Do not panic. What the fuck are you telling me. Just stay calm. Do not panic. Don't panic what! That. Oh. You showed us what you are. No I did not. You want that? Uh… CC Just when you think you have me all figured out, I promise, it's not that. He has a gun! Fall back! Oh shitsauce, what in the fuck is going on! I may have had to stop and think for a moment ‘Where the fuck was I going?” The problem was I knew I already had the answer, and it was “Nowhere, fast.” Maybe even faster than ever. That hollow pit inside my stomach was calm now because most of all, I wasn't on the subway, I was on autopilot somewhere way far off from my body. Train me not, For this I die as one and always Sure to come for what is known and also for my martyr. Soon to fall I, bitter from the rock And drifting intermittent conscious, The constant not to known, But just a trough to all our horses. So this shame and guilt and rit and raft which I whitewater, so then to shall be betrayed as so they say I am, for now and onward. So her force is death and her tip have sung and those caves we made were of not fortune, but gloom and pity, merriment and pepper peer to socket and For now, my broken. Withered here and there And for to curse, But not to save my cycle, Dim this light for this I offer sacrament, Married waves and crevices of canyons I had watered, and then to twist of pine and though my time was won as always, want. The tip and twist of time would trim her down of those as slaughtered. Giving time and giving hate, and giving twins, And giving tin and giving golden graves, for maids And golden trophies. Giving taste and giving waste and giving ghosts wool coats for courthouses, Giving dim and dinner to these flames for which were ordered, have I. Giving those is taste and giving those is feasts, and giving those is masonry, created in her honor; Giving those is peace and wars, And to left ties, a peril force And giving these is tales and miners Trapped in these there caves as though you drift in barren lands. Well! Well. If I don't know who it is And I don't know what it is What I can't catch Man, Just leave the the fuck alone already, Would you? I have to wonder why I even come here, Full frozen How I'm running on low fuel, But just a sure to fact— (((Huh.))) Yeah, I recognize that dudes voice at this point Alright, maybe I am being followed. Yeah, that can't be a coincidence. It could. It is the rock. No it couldn't, Cause it's the rock. INT. ROCKEFELLER PLAZA. SUNRISE Okay, it's pretty from every angle! My fingers are frozen. Can I go inside now?! Yes. Here is the entrance. Jesus Christ! {Enter The Multiverse} Jesus All Day Christ. What are you looking at? I don't know yet. L E G E N D S It's pizza time. It's Kimmel time. [redacted] These are dangerous thoughts. Oh no, I turned my mind off. I love Kimmel, but I lost focus. Maybe this was the hour I needed without timing my life out. Then again, I did just recently watch him burst into flames in my living room. I have to wonder what that's about. Socumopolus Open On The Operating Table. Symposium, 2025/2026 TBA -Ū. Prod. By Blū Tha Gürū Symposium is a concept album that reinterprets the ancient Greek tradition of philosophical dialogue for the modern age. Taking its name from Plato's seminal text, which structured profound conversations about Love (Eros) as a series of distinct speeches, this album presents a series of intense, mythic narratives—the tracks—that each serve as a unique speech on the nature of consciousness, suffering, and transcendence. The album's unconventional structure, with initial tracks sporting double titles (e.g., forgetmenots.//follow through.), reflects the complex philosophical dualism explored throughout the work—the conflict between the body and the mind, the real and the dream, the past and the imperative to move forward. Each long-form track is a deep dive into an extreme mental state, an attempt to define the core truth of existence through an absurd or heightened reality. [Socumopolus Open On the Operating Table] This track is a visceral representation of the album's Platonic core. It is a grueling philosophical thought experiment set to music made to be experienced as though sifting through a gallery; as interpretive art rather than festival minded electronic dance music. ‘Socumolopus' opens in the uncomfortable and disjointed stairway of becoming undone at the midst of a medical mercy— unable to move or act with the understanding and awareness of a total loss of autonomy and control. A complete paralysis, but not of thought. Socumopolus Open On the Operating Table tells the story of a man undergoing high-risk, life-saving surgery. Due to a failure in anesthesia, he is trapped in a state of conscious paralysis—unable to alert the surgeons, yet fully aware as the operation unfolds. Indeed he reaches a certain purgatory of sorts and a certain death, as he becomes outward of himself enough to realize he knows nothing of this self, even his own name which he is called. He is now only Socumopolus. He is forced to watch his own body being opened, simultaneously experiencing the surgery from the table and from an out-of-body perspective above., however, once the initial shock of the blood and gore of his organs unraveling on the table before him, he drifts between lucid galaxies and worlds, traveling beyond all known time. His consciousness drifts in a purgatory spanning what is hours, but is rather eons in his own unaligned infinite outer consciousness, mingling the visceral reality of the operating room with non-sequitur dreams and the background noise of the hospital's televisions, and in and out of worlds alike; but also unknown. Symposium: A Concept Theory The track is a direct musical translation of Plato's Dualism—the belief that the mind/soul is separate from the physical body. [The Body] The character's physical being is the object of suffering (the operating table), imperfect and subject to the knife. [The Soul] His consciousness detaches, viewing the scene from above—this is the transcendent perspective, attempting to find "The Form of Truth" outside the confines of the suffering body. The character's hours-long, suspended state—neither fully alive nor dead, neither fully conscious nor dreaming—is the album's metaphor for the Ladder of Ascent in the Symposium. He is stuck in the intermediate steps, struggling between the earthly, mortal reality and the potential for a higher, purer vision, while the surrounding hospital noise and fragmented dreams represent the strange, sometimes absurd "speeches" (like Aristophanes' myth) that interrupt the pursuit of ultimate truth. In Socumopolus Open On the Operating Table, the operating room becomes the stage for a private, intense symposium on what it means to be aware when the self is literally dismantled. The surreality is not in the musicality, but the concept of the artwork itself, which reads most like an awkward statue or sculpture stationed distinctly in the way of a place you least expected, or perhaps even dead-center your normal course. It blocks the path with the cause to force you to think of creating an alternate route, or to travel or explore beyond what is familiar or known— or perhaps— just to force you to think at all when you may suppose the rest can just be turned off, as you cross out or autopilot and into a newfound structure for your own immortal cause. Thank You for Listening. Chroma 111. The Shoestring Theory. Copyright © The Complex Collective 2025 The Festival Project, Inc. ™ All rights reserved. Chroma111. Copyright © The Complex Collective 2025. [The Festival Project, Inc. ™] All rights reserved. UNAUTHORIZED REPRODUCTION OR DISTRIBUTION IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED BY LAW. INFRIGMENT IS PUNSHABLE BY FEDERAL LAW

Send us a textSocrates taught his students contempt for the gods, how to defraud creditors, and useless trivialities about flea-jumping. Or at least, that's how Socrates appears in the comedy Clouds. If you want to understand something of the Athenian hostility to the great philosopher which eventually reached its climax in sentencing Socrates to death, it helps to see how he was lampooned in front of Athenian audiences by his contemporary, the comedian playwright Aristophanes. But Clouds is more than just (dirty) jokes. It is a profane and self-critical attack on educational innovation, and a call to return to the old ways, the ways which produced heroic men like Aeschylus, who with his fellows turned the Persians back at Marathon and saved Greece. The new form of education, in Aristophanes' view, threatens to reduce Athens to a pathetic bunch of weak and impious nerds. But even in his mockery of the new, Aristophanes seems well aware of the inner weakness of the old ways and the reason for their defeat. So it shouldn't be too surprising that his conclusion simply seems to be: Burn it all down.Aristophanes' Clouds trans. by Alan H. Sommerstein: https://amzn.to/4hEaykYAristophanes' Clouds trans. by Peter Meineck: https://amzn.to/4o7lr0RAristophanes' Clouds trans. by William James Hickie: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0241%3Acard%3D1Henri-Irénée Marrou's A History of Education in Antiquity: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780299088149Hesiod's Works and Days: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780674997202Herodotus' Histories: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781400031146Plato's Republic: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780465094080Leo Strauss's "The Problem of Socrates" (in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism): https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780226777153New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

POUR COMMANDER MON LIVRE : Sur Amazon : https://amzn.to/3ZMm4CY Sur Fnac.com : https://tidd.ly/4dWJZ8OD'où vient l'amour ? Voilà une question qui n'a jamais cessé d'alimenter la réflexion des philosophes. Et parmi les théories les plus célèbres, on trouve le mythe des Androgynes. Présenté par Aristophane dans "Le Banquet" de Platon, le mythe des Androgynes nous parle de la condition des premiers êtres humains, et de leur séparation en hommes et en femmes. Telle serait, selon lui, l'origine de l'amour. Analyse de cette conception.---Envie d'aller plus loin ? Rejoignez-moi sur Patreon pour accéder à tout mon contenu supplémentaire.

POUR COMMANDER MON LIVRE : Sur Amazon : https://amzn.to/3ZMm4CY Sur Fnac.com : https://tidd.ly/4dWJZ8OExtrait de l'épisode ARISTOPHANE - Le mythe des AndrogynesCet épisode sera publié sur YouTube et en podcast vendredi prochain le 24 octobreIl est d'ores et déjà disponible en intégralité sur ma page Patreon : https://www.patreon.com/posts/137542403---Envie d'aller plus loin ? Rejoignez-moi sur Patreon pour accéder à tout mon contenu supplémentaire.

Send us a textWe tend to think of the Athenians as philosophers, architects, and mathematicians. But their highest devotion was rather to sports and to music. These priorities are evident from their system of education, in which young Greek men were trained to compete in the Olympics as well as to sing and dance in the chorus. They were jocks. Think of the tragic playwright Aeschylus, who despite his literary accomplishments was remembered in his epitaph merely as a warrior at the Battle of Marathon. A man's man. So when Socrates and the sophists came around, the defenders of old-style musical and athletic education scoffed at the sickly, ugly, and weak men that philosophical and rhetorical training produced: in other words, a bunch of nerds. In this episode, Jonathan and Ryan discuss what the comic Athenian poet Aristophanes called ἡ ἀρχαία παιδεία, i.e. that old-time education of Athens.Henri-Irénée Marrou's A History of Education in Antiquity: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780299088149NH episode on Homeric education: https://newhumanists.buzzsprout.com/1791279/episodes/17406673-how-to-raise-an-achilles-episode-xciThucydides' The Peloponnesian War: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780684827902Aristophanes' Clouds: https://amzn.to/46GYaeKCato's De agri cultura: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Cato/De_Agricultura/A*.htmlPete Hegseth's and David Goodwin's Battle for the American Mind: https://amzn.to/4gHQEoxJacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781617206047New Humanists episode on Alcuin and Charlemagne: https://newhumanists.buzzsprout.com/1791279/episodes/15992673-the-barren-contemplative-life-episode-lxxviiiHerodotus' Histories: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781400031146New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Was Socrates really all that great? What does he have to say about education, anyway? Find out as we discuss Socrates' impact on the idea and purpose of philosophy, as well as the reasons for our modern society favoring nameless globalist scientists as the architects of civilization!Follow us on X!Give us your opinions here!

In this episode of Ascend, The Great Books Podcast, host Deacon Harrison Garlick is joined by Fr. Justin Brophy, a Dominican friar and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Providence College, to dive into the first half of Plato's Apology. Check out thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule.Check out our collection of guides on the great books!The discussion explores Socrates' defense speech at his trial in 399 BC, set against the backdrop of post-Peloponnesian War Athens. The conversation delves into key themes, including the role of Aristophanes' The Clouds in shaping Socrates' negative reputation, the tension between philosophy and politics, and the influence of Alcibiades on the charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. Fr. Brophy and Deacon Garlick examine Socrates' claim of divine wisdom from the Oracle of Delphi, his distinction between human and divine wisdom, and his refusal to charge fees, distinguishing him from sophists. They also discuss the broader implications of Socrates as a threat to the democratic polis, the conflict between philosophy and poetry, and the natural antagonism between the demos and the great-souled man. The episode highlights Socrates' pedagogical approach and the relevance of his trial to modern questions of truth, virtue, and societal stability.Guest Introduction: Fr. Justin Brophy is a Dominican friar and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Providence College, where he has taught for five years. Holding a PhD in political theory from the University of Notre Dame, his teaching interests include ancient and contemporary political theory, philosophical conceptions of the human psyche, and thinkers such as Plato, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, and those in the modern Catholic intellectual tradition like Romano Guardini, Joseph Pieper, and Walker Percy. Fr. Brophy also serves as the director of the Center for Catholic and Dominican Studies at Providence College, fostering mission integration and intellectual exploration. His current research focuses on the political significance of Plato's Symposium, a dialogue he considers his favorite for its exploration of Eros and its historical context tied to Athens' decline.Key Discussion Points:Historical Context: The Apology is set in 399 BC, after Athens' defeat in the Peloponnesian War (404 BC) and Alcibiades' assassination (404 BC). The charges of impiety and corrupting the youth may indirectly target Socrates for Alcibiades' role in Athens' downfall, constrained by a post-war amnesty (23B-C).Aristophanes' The Clouds: Socrates addresses old accusations (18a) that he “can make the worst argument the stronger” and “does not believe in the gods,” rooted in Aristophanes' caricature of him as a sophist and atheist in The Clouds, which shaped public perception and fueled the trial's charges (19C, 31B-C).Philosophy vs. Politics: Socrates' philosophical questioning challenges the polis' laws and cultural norms, making him a political threat. Fr. Brophy notes, “Philosophy… forces you to reevaluate… the regime… the principles of law and… your culture. And that can be dangerous” (17B).Alcibiades' Influence: Alcibiades, a charismatic figure linked to Socrates, is seen as a key example of corrupting the youth due to his role in the disastrous Sicilian Expedition and defection to Sparta, amplifying fears of Socrates' influence (23B-C).Socratic Wisdom and the Oracle: Socrates recounts the Oracle of Delphi's claim that he is the wisest man (20E), leading him to...

Aaaaaand we're back. Aristophanes, the comedian of ancient Athens, has a reputation for getting into hot water for his jibes about the demagogue Cleon (which landed him in hot water, legally) and his portrayal the philosopher Socrates (which, according to Plato, fatally damaged Socrates' image for a generation). But is this reputation deserved? This episode looks at the evidence for how much Aristophanes really influenced Athenian politics and discourse.Want to read the transcript? Click here. Don't forget to rate, review, and share us with your friends! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Subscribe to the podcastBen Shapiro talked about how he thought retirement was a dumb concept. Someone responded with the story of his father-in-law struggling before he's not quite ready to retire.Aristophanes' tweetLearn about Bitcoin at a trickleBitcoinTrickle.comSponsorLiberty MugsKeep in touch with us everywhere you areJoin our Telegram groupLike us on FacebookFollow us on Twitter: @libertymugs (Rollo), @Slappy_Jones_2Check us out on PatreonLearn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours10HoursofBitcoin.comPodcast version

Produced in 405 BCE, just months before Athens' disastrous loss of the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes' Frogs is a play about how important — and ridiculous — great art can be. Featuring a poetic battle royale between the ghosts of Aeschylus and Euripides, the play blends highbrow literary satire, bawdy sight gags, and more than a little bit of reactionary xenophobia. So nothing's changed there, then.Walk through the story with us as we wrap up our Big Fat Greek Summer of Theatre. Want to read the transcript? Click here. Thanks for listening — don't forget to leave a rating or review! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Chronicles, Luca discusses Lysistrata by Aristophanes. He explores the play's critique of the sexes and its anti-war sentiment.

Today on Ascend the Greek Books Podcast, we wrap up our exploration of the Greek plays with a lively roundtable discussion. Our panel of friends delves into the key themes of the tragic plays, including divinity, eros, fate, justice, the cosmos, virtue, and suffering.We explore plays such as the Oresteia, Prometheus Bound, the Theban plays, and the Bacchae, with insights from Homer, Hesiod, and Aristophanes. Don't miss this engaging conversation as we prepare to embark on our next journey with Plato.Visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule!Visit our Patreon page for written guides and a community chat on Plato!SummaryIn this episode of the Great Books Podcast, the hosts and guests engage in a round table discussion about key themes in Greek plays, including divinity, Eros, fate, and free will. They share their favorite plays and insights gained from their readings, exploring how these themes evolve from Homer to later playwrights. The conversation highlights the complexity of Eros as both a binding force and a source of mania, as well as the characters' limited agency in the face of divine intervention.The discussion culminates in a reflection on the implications of these themes for understanding Greek literature and philosophy. The conversation explores the themes of fatalism versus determinism, agency in Greek tragedy, the role of the gods, the evolution of justice, the nature of the cosmos, virtue, and the purpose of suffering. The speakers discuss how these themes are interwoven in the works of Homer and Aeschylus, highlighting the complexity of human actions, moral order, and the divine influence in Greek thought.Chapters00:00 Introduction and Personal Updates06:38 Favorite Plays and Surprising Discoveries12:25 The Maturation of Thought on Divinity19:40 The Splintering and Obsessive Qualities of the Gods23:57 The Tension Between the Divine and Natural Phenomena25:47 Exploring the Concept of Divinity43:00 The Dual Nature of Eros55:54 Debating Fate and Free Will59:39 Plato's Symposium: Eros as Ascent01:01:30 The Interplay of Fate and Human Agency01:14:53 Justice and Retribution in Homer's Epics01:32:13 The Maturation of Justice in Aeschylus' Plays01:39:14 The Challenge of Justice in the Story of Oedipus01:44:40 The Redemptive Power of Suffering01:50:55 The Influence of the Cosmos on Virtue and Piety01:59:58 The Crucifixion: Suffering and Redemption02:09:28 Sharing the Wisdom: Importance of Discussion02:17:07 Insights into Justice, the Cosmos, Virtue, and SufferingKeywords: Greek plays, divinity, Eros, fate, free will, themes, literature, philosophy, podcast, discussion, fatalism, determinism, agency, Greek tragedy, justice, cosmos, virtue, suffering, Homer, AeschylusHashtags: #GreekPlays #Tragedy #Philosophy #GreatBooks

Today on Ascend: The Great Books Podcast, we are joined by Tsh Oxenreider to discuss The Frogs by Aristophanes. The play tells the comedic story of Dionysus deciding all the new tragic poets are terrible, so he travels to Hades to bring back Euripides to help save Athen's from her moral decay. Once in Hades, Dionysus has several adventures, which includes hosting a poetry contest between Aeschylus and Euripides to see who is the best tragedian.Visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule!Visit our Patreon page for our library of written guides to the great books!For those who do not know Tsh Oxenreider, she is wonderful. She's an author, blogger, and podcaster. I was on her podcast a while back to discuss acedia and love of eros. Great conversation. And today, we have a high-level, friendly chat about this The Frongs and our love of the great books in general.So join us today for a enjoyable conversation on Aristophanes' the Frogs.ALSO: We start PLATO on 7.22.25! Check out our website for our reading schedule. Join us!00:00 Introduction01:09 Tish Oxenreider's Background and Love for the Great Books07:07 Introduction to Aristophanes and 'The Frogs'09:17 Appreciating Aristophanes' Comedy18:14 The Role of Comedy in Teaching Lessons21:59 The Humor and Juxtaposition in 'The Frogs'27:18 Comparing Aristophanes and Euripides30:26 The Title 'The Frogs' and its Significance32:51 The Impact of Translation on the Reading Experience34:29 The Power of Lightness34:55 The Relief of Small Pleasures35:54 Remembering the Power of Truth and Beauty37:43 The Transformative Power of Great Works39:00 Dionysus as the Go-Between40:18 Poets as Teachers

In this episode, Dcn. Harrison Garlick, Chancellor and General Counsel of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa, welcomes Dr. Zena Hitz, a tutor at St. John's College and founder of the Catherine Project, to discuss Aristophanes' comedic masterpiece, The Clouds. The episode dives into the play's biting humor, its critique of Athenian society, and its timeless questions about education, piety, and moral decay. From the Thinkery's absurd teachings to the mysterious Clouds, Dcn. Garlick and Zena unpack the play's relevance to modern audiences, exploring themes of social ambition, familial breakdown, and the consequences of abandoning traditional values.Check out thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule and more!Check out our Patreon page for our library of written guides!Key Discussion PointsAristophanes and The Clouds: Born around 446 BC, Aristophanes, the father of comedy, wrote The Clouds in 423 BC, nearly a decade into the Peloponnesian War. The play, a revised version not performed but circulated for reading, critiques Athenian decadence and intellectual trends through the story of Strepsiades, a debt-ridden father, and his son Phidippides. “Aristophanes in general is interested in portraying through this kind of ridiculous, sometimes slapstick, sometimes obscene comedy, certain truths” – Dr. Zena Hitz (16:47).The Thinkery and Education: The Thinkery, led by Socrates, teaches deceptive rhetoric and speculative inquiries, parodying new intellectual movements. It raises questions about education's societal role. “The question about what an education is for and whether it helps the community or hurts it is a very basic fundamental question” – Dr. Zena Hitz (19:53).Piety and Political Stability: The play links reverence for traditional gods to social cohesion, showing how the Thinkery's impiety destabilizes family and polis. “Belief in the gods is standing in for… sticking to the moral code that's keeping the whole society together” – Dr. Zena Hitz (31:08).Socrates' Portrayal: Socrates is depicted as a buffoonish sophist, but his role is ambiguous—possibly a stand-in for broader trends rather than the historical figure. “Strepsiades is the target… Socrates in a way is just being used to show something up about Strepsiades” – Dr. Zena Hitz (44:01).The Clouds' Role: The personified Clouds, worshipped in the Thinkery, symbolize deceptive speech and align with comic poets, adding complexity. “Clouds cover things up. So there's some kind of image for deceptive speech” – Dr. Zena Hitz (49:20).Socio-Economic Context: Set in a wealthy but decadent Athens, the play critiques social ambition and debt, mirroring modern struggles. “It's in a way a very American story” – Dr. Zena Hitz (24:00).Moral Precedent and Human Nature: Strepsiades' attempt to bend moral standards for gain backfires, reflecting universal human flaws. “You never want the full consequences of that one piece of wrongdoing… It never works out that way” – Dr. Zena Hitz (33:47).Translation Challenges: The episode highlights the importance of choosing a translation that preserves Aristophanes' puns and humor, with recommendations for Arrowsmith and Sommerstein. “The translation on the Aristophanes actually matters a lot” – Dcn. Harrison Garlick (54:58).About Our GuestDr. Zena Hitz is a tutor at St. John's College and the founder and president of the Catherine Project, a nonprofit offering free, open-access reading groups and tutorials on great...

A new week means new questions! Hope you have fun with these!A magnifying glass features what kind of lens?Give any of the 3 types of animals in the titles of surviving plays by ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes.Tyrian Purple, aka Royal or Imperial Purple, was once a highly valued dye secreted by several species of what kind of animal?The Second Temple period in Jewish history ended with the Roman siege of which city?In mechanical terms, what are the toothed disks on a conventional bicycle referred to?The grape variety known in France as Syrah is called by which name in Australia, Chile and other wine regions?Comics or graphic novels originating from Japan are known by what collective term?The Louvre Pyramid, the large glass-and-metal entrance way and skylight designed by which Chinese-American architect?Who voiced Ms. Frizzle on the children's television series “Magic School Bus”?MusicHot Swing, Fast Talkin, Bass Walker, Dances and Dames, Ambush by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Don't forget to follow us on social media:Patreon – patreon.com/quizbang – Please consider supporting us on Patreon. Check out our fun extras for patrons and help us keep this podcast going. We appreciate any level of support!Website – quizbangpod.com Check out our website, it will have all the links for social media that you need and while you're there, why not go to the contact us page and submit a question!Facebook – @quizbangpodcast – we post episode links and silly lego pictures to go with our trivia questions. Enjoy the silly picture and give your best guess, we will respond to your answer the next day to give everyone a chance to guess.Instagram – Quiz Quiz Bang Bang (quizquizbangbang), we post silly lego pictures to go with our trivia questions. Enjoy the silly picture and give your best guess, we will respond to your answer the next day to give everyone a chance to guess.Twitter – @quizbangpod We want to start a fun community for our fellow trivia lovers. If you hear/think of a fun or challenging trivia question, post it to our twitter feed and we will repost it so everyone can take a stab it. Come for the trivia – stay for the trivia.Ko-Fi – ko-fi.com/quizbangpod – Keep that sweet caffeine running through our body with a Ko-Fi, power us through a late night of fact checking and editing!

Madness, piety, gore, and reason! Today on Ascend: The Great Books Podcast, host Dcn. Harrison Garlick and the always insightful Dr. Frank Grabowski delve into the first part of Euripides' The Bacchae—a chilling yet captivating Greek tragedy that explores piety, eros, the nature of the divine, and the fragility of societal order.The guys explore Dionysus, a god transformed from Homer's jovial wine deity into a “cruel” and “diabolical” figure worshipped through “frenzied madness and the bestial release of sex and violence." With its graphic imagery, raw intensity, and ambiguous morality, this play offers a rich discussion, serving as a critical antecedent to Plato's Symposium and revealing surprising parallels to Jesus Christ amidst its sordid chaos.Join us as we peel back the “bloody, terrible layers” of this darkly mesmerizing drama.Visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule and more!Visit our Patreon page to view all our guides to the great books!Guest: Dr. Frank Grabowski: At the time of recordin, a professor of philosophy at Rogers State University, third-order Franciscan, and a valued member of the Sunday Great Books group. His profound insights into Greek literature and philosophy illuminate the complexities of The Bacchae. Dr. Grabowski now serves as the Dean of Faculty at Holy Family Classical School.Why should you read The Bacchae?The Bacchae challenges readers to explore religion, erotics, piety, cosmic order, and human nature in a controversial and unsettling landscape. Euripides' intent is not clear; thus, the reader is left to interpret a drama that seems to test longstanding Greek concepts, like piety and the gods. Dr. Grabowski acknowledges the play as an integral part of the “great conversation” in the Western canon, and Dcn. Garlick agrees by highlighting the play as an important antecedent to Plato's Euthyphro and Symposium.Though the work includes disturbing imagery, it is within those images that Euripides is wrestling with erotics, piety, and the cosmos. Somewhat shockingly, the play presents several parallels to Jesus Christ and invites the reader into challenging comparisons. Overall, The Bacchae stands as an important—though controversial—work in exploring the nature of man and his relation to the divine.Next Episodes:Next week, we continue with Part 2 of The Bacchae, diving into Pentheus' tragic fall, the Bacchae's destructive frenzy, and the play's enigmatic conclusion. Upcoming episodes feature Aristophanes' The Clouds with guest Zena Hits and The Frogs with Tish Oxenreider, as we pave the way for Plato's dialogues.Thank You:A heartfelt thank you to Dr. Frank Grabowski for his brilliant insights and to our listeners for joining us on this ascent through the great books. Keep exploring, and we'll see you next week for more of The Bacchae's darkly mesmerizing drama!

This week, one of Mickey-Jo's most anticipated shows had its opening night: a brand new production of THE FROGS at Southwark Playhouse.The Frogs is among the most infrequently produced musicals with a score by Stephen Sondheim, and is based on the ancient Greek play by Aristophanes.This London production stars Dan Buckley (The Book of Mormon) alongside Kevin McHale (Glee), Victoria Scone (Rupaul's Drag Race), Joaquin Pedro Valdes (Death Note) and more.Check out the full review to find out what Mickey-Jo thought about this utterly unique show...•00:00 | introduction 02:17 | history / synopsis10:42 | material16:59 | creative choices26:28 | performances•About Mickey-Jo:As one of the leading voices in theatre criticism on a social platform, Mickey-Jo is pioneering a new medium for a dwindling field. His YouTube channel: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠MickeyJoTheatre⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is the largest worldwide in terms of dedicated theatre criticism, where he also share features, news and interviews as well as lifestyle content for over 80,000 subscribers. Since establishing himself as a theatre critic he has been able to work internationally. With a viewership that is largely split between the US and the UK he has been fortunate enough to be able to work with PR, Marketing, and Social Media representatives for shows in New York, London, Edinburgh, Hamburg, Toronto, Sao Pãolo, and Paris. He has also twice received accreditation from the world renowned Edinburgh Festival Fringe. His reviews and features have also been published by WhatsOnStage, for whom he was a panelist to help curate nominees for their 2023 and 2024 Awards as well as BroadwayWorldUK, Musicals Magazine and LondonTheatre.co.uk. He has been invited to speak to private tour groups, at the BEAM 2023 new musical theatre conference at Oxford Playhouse, and on a panel of critics at an event for young people considering a career in the arts courtesy of Go Live Theatre Projects. Instagram/TikTok/X: @MickeyJoTheatre

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics.Ted listed SIX Greek dramas for this week: Bacchae (Euripides), Lysistrata (Aristophanes), Agamemnon (Aeschylus), and the three Theban plays from Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Oedipus in Colonus and Antigone. We discuss how to read drama in general. I tried to read a little bit of background on each play before I dove in. One thing that's easy to forget with Greek drama is that the audience didn't have any spoilers; they knew all of these stories really well. They were there to see HOW it came together. That meant that some of the plot gets treated with shorthand in some ways. I tried to figure out the major players, and how they might have interacted with characters I had met elsewhere. It's astonishing how all of these characters are connected by one or two degrees of separation. Bill and I joke that it feels exactly like when we moved to Charleston a couple of years ago. I swear that every person we meet knows someone else we know through one or two people. It's the strangest thing, and Greek drama is exactly like that.I also flag my books like crazy: one flag for the cast of characters; one for the endnotes; one for a map, even if it's in a different book. As a matter of fact, my Fagles translation of the Odyssey came in handy this week. Not only are there some great maps, there is also a glossary of all the proper names in the Odyssey. Many, many of the characters I came across this week also put in an appearance in the Odyssey.Finally, I kept a brief “plot summary” of each play as I read. Only Bacchae was divided into scenes, but for each play I tried to keep a brief synopsis of the action as I read. This kept me from mixing up characters too much, and also it helped me to get an idea of how the various stories fit together. In addition, I read out loud occasionally, especially if I found myself alone in the house. It's easy to lose the thread of some of these long passages, especially where the chorus has an extended explication of action taking place off stage. Reading out loud helped me capture the rhythm of the language and also the drama of it in a way that reading silently could never do.I started with Euripedes' Bacchae, translated by Paul Woodruff. To be honest, half the reason I bought this edition was that it had Elvis on the cover as Dionysus! Not long after the founding of Thebes, Dionysus appears to bring his cult to the city. Dionysus is a son of Zeus but also the grandson of the founder of Thebes, Cadmus. Dionysus' cousin Pentheus is now king, and he refuses to acknowledge the god-status of Dionysus. Let's just say Pentheus regretted that decision. This play was shockingly brutal to me, even though all the violence always takes place off-stage in a Greek drama. There are ideas of redemption, and lack of it, woven throughout the play. Bacchae left me curious about anything related to the practice of the cult of Dionysus. Apparently the rites were so secret that nothing, not one thing, survives to help us understand what they did.Next I read Aristophanes' Lysistrata. This is a comedy, truly a farce, whose entire plot revolves around the women of Greece coming together to deny all their men sex so they will quit fighting with each other. It is hilarious, and I'd love to see this one performed live. I love a good marriage quote:“No man can live a happy life unless his wife allows it.”—AristophanesHappily, I bought an edition of Lysistrata that also had three other plays translated by Aaron Poochigian. Clouds, in particular, is a send-up of Socrates and that one is...

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics.An interesting combination this week. Ted Gioia, the creator of my reading list, called it “Love and War,” but it felt like a lot more than that. And last week, I called it a hodgepodge, but I can admit I was wrong.Plato's Symposium is the third of Plato's works on this list. After wrestling with Ethics in particular last week, I was happy to get back to my friend. Symposium is written as a dialogue among friends, recalled by one who wasn't there, a little like the game of “Telephone” we'e all played. The friends' topic? Love, specifically eros. Given that this is upper-class Ancient Greece, there is a significant discussion of love between men; honestly romantic love between men and women is practically ignored. The reading plan only covered a few portion of Herodotus' Histories, Books 1 and 6-8. For full disclosure, I did NOT complete the reading but stopped with Book 7. In my edition of Histories the assigned books were more than 350 pages and I simply ran out of time. If I had done all the reading this week I would have been around 430 pages! Given that I “signed up” for about 250 pages per week, I had to stop. Confession time over.As always, I have so many, many thoughts about these works. For Symposium, I summarized each person's eulogy as a way to get my hands around the text. A few ideas:Obviously Love held an important place in the lives of Greeks. This entire dialogue is centered around it, but it doesn't look like love in many ways. I'm accustomed to thinking of love as wanting and being willing to work for the best of your beloved, and that being mutual. That desiring “for” someone else, rather than merely desiring them, was absent at least as far as I could see.There are a number of points made about Love as the dialogue progresses, and they definitely don't agree. As always, you're left to parse out the better and worse arguments. “You complete me” (yes, Jerry Maguire) makes an appearance! That attitude has been around a looooong time. Aristophanes tells a long and pretty funny tale about how human beings were at one time two-headed, eight-limbed creatures, but when Zeus got mad and split everyone in two. Now we go around looking for our other half.Does Love motivate us to honor? What kind of Love would do that? Or maybe Love is a moderating force? (I found that a weak argument.) Is its purpose beauty? Those are all offered as arguments, and all are rejected by Socrates. Socrates, via his mentor Diotima, argues that Love's purpose is procreation. As someone who has actually been pregnant several times, I found Socrates' discussion of pregnancy to be uncomfortable, to say the least. There is a ton of homoerotic talk, especially from Socrates and Alcibiades. It is just so strange to me that there is virtually no discussion of love between men and women, but tons between older and younger men. As usual, my bias shows, but it's who I am.On to Herodotus. He's been on my radar since I read History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer about a year and a half ago, and seeing him on the reading list was part of my motivation to jump in. He did not disappoint. The sections that I read were the origin stories of Croesus and Cyrus, and Persia, and then the beginning of the Persian War. I ended with the Battle of Thermopylae, which is an amazing story in its own right. A few takeaways:Every military leader should read this book. I may actually send it to my son who is in the Navy! There are examples of excellent leadership, and cranky...

Gampert, Christian www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Fazit

This week, we're going all the way back to ancient Greece. We'll examine the story of Aspasia of Miletus, a woman who came to Athens around 450 BC and quickly became the talk of the town. Her name appears over and over again in writing from the time, Socrates wrote about her, Plato, Plutarch, Cicero the orator, Xenophon the historian, Athenaeus the writer, Aristophanes the comic playwright, Pericles the leader of the city-state of Athens. One woman's name was on all of their minds: Aspasia of Miletus. They loved her. They hated her. They called her a great mind, a teacher, a master of rhetoric. They called a prostitute, a cheap whore, a brothel madam. They gave her credit for writing great speeches passed on to men. They gave her credit for starting great wars, the ruin of Athens. But who was Aspasia really and why was everyone talking about her? Join me to find out! Support the show! Join the Patreon (patreon.com/historyfixpodcast)Buy some merchBuy Me a CoffeeVenmo @Shea-LaFountaineSources: Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition by Madeleine M. Henry (affiliate link) National Geographic "Greek City States"Lake Forest College "Everybody's a Little Bit Sexist: A Re-evaluation of Aristotle's and Plato's Philosophies on Women" by Kayla HuberEncyclopedia Britannica "Pericles: Athenian Statesman"World History Encyclopedia "Aspasia of Miletus"World History Encyclopedia "Women in Ancient Greece"PBS "Aspasia"Brooklyn Museum "Aspasia Place Setting"Wikipedia "Aspasia"History of Women Philosophers and Scientists "Aspasia of Miletus"University of Chicago "Aspasia of Miletus"Shoot me a message!

βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ! This week we continue talking about Aristophanes this time focusing on his comedy The Frogs. καλῶς ὑμῖν γένοιτο! Josep & Leandros Support the podcast and get access to episodes in advance as well as bonus materials such as listening exercises and episode transcripts: https://www.patreon.com/Hellenizdein  Follow us on “Twitter”: https://x.com/ancientgreekpod  Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leighcobley.bsky.social  Join our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/604916774052809  Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ancientgreekpodcast/  Send us an email: theancientgreekpodcast@gmail.com 

χαίρετε, ὦ ἀκροαταί! Welcome to 2025 and the new season of our podcast in Ancient Greek! We are now reading Aristophanes and this episode serves as an introduction to the man and his work. Who would you bring back from Hades? Let us know in the comments! καλῶς ὑμῖν γένοιτο! Josep & Leigh Support the podcast and get access to episodes in advance as well as bonus materials such as listening exercises and episode transcripts: https://www.patreon.com/Hellenizdein  Follow us on “Twitter”: https://x.com/ancientgreekpod  Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leighcobley.bsky.social  Join our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/604916774052809  Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ancientgreekpodcast/  Send us an email: theancientgreekpodcast@gmail.com 

Did you know that Socrates—yes, that Socrates—had a teacher who was a woman? And not just any woman, but Aspasia of Miletus, the queen of ancient philosophy, rhetoric, and savage comebacks. In this episode, we're diving deep into her life, her legacy, and the absolutely wild smear campaigns she endured (spoiler: haters gonna hate since 450 BCE). Get ready to learn how Aspasia schooled some of the smartest guys in Athens, ran academic salons that gave women a voice, and may have even written some of Pericles' greatest speeches. Buckle up, because we're about to hop in our time machine for a spicy mix of history, scandal, and feminist truth bombs. What's Inside This Episode? How a girl from Miletus ended up teaching Socrates (mind-blown emoji). The drama-filled romance with Pericles (a.k.a. Perry the Platypus). Her legendary intellect, her haters (looking at you, Aristophanes), and her ultimate disappearance from history. The ridiculous sexism that still erases Aspasia from textbooks today. TrovaTrip Alert! Oh hey, history buffs! Want to nerd out with me in person? Join me on a dreamy trip to Japan (hello matcha, temples, and Kyoto sunsets!) from August 24–30, 2025. Spots are limited, and early birds get a discount—don't sleep on it! What's the Tea with the Community Census? Your voice matters! Fill out the For the Love of History 2025 Community Census and tell me what you want more of (or less of!) in upcoming episodes. Plus, you'll get the chance to win a free t-shirt or one of my favorite books. Sweet deal, right? Why You'll Love This Episode: If you're into Greek history, badass women, or just want an excuse to feel smarter than everyone at your next trivia night, this one's for you. It's part historical deep dive, part roast session, and 100% a love letter to one of the most overlooked women in history. Final Thoughts: The haters may have tried to erase Aspasia, but not on my watch. Let's reclaim her legacy and give this queen the credit she deserves. Tune in, sip some wine (or tea), and enjoy the sassiest history lesson of the season!

You can read the Greek plays with Ascend!Dcn. Harrison Garlick flies solo this week as he explains why you should read the Greek plays. He discusses how the plays are an intellectual bridge between Plato and Homer and explains some of the major themes you can expect in their writings: justice, eros, fate, divinity, etc.He'll then introduce each Greek play to be read and why it is worth reading.Join us! Schedule below:HESIOD'S THEOGONY & GREEK PLAYS (2025)1/1 Intro to the Greek Plays1/7 Hesiod's TheogonyTHE ORESTEIA by Aeschylus1/14 Into to Aeschylus1/21 Agamemnon Part I1/28 Agamemnon Part II2/4 Libation Bearers Part I2/11 Libation Bearers Part II2/18 Eumenides Part I2/25 Eumenides Part IIREAD DANTE'S INFERNO WITH ASCENDWe are reading Dante's Inferno over LENT 2025.3/4 Introduction & Canto I3/11 Cantos II-V3/18 Cantos VI-XI3/25 Cantos XII-XVII4/1 Cantos XVIII-XXV4/8 Cantos XXVI-XXX4/15 Cantos XXXII-XXXIVBACK TO THE GREEK PLAYS4/22 Prometheus Bound with Dr. Jared ZimmererTHE THEBAN PLAYS by Sophocles4/29 Antigone Part I5/6 Antigone Part II5/13 Oedipus Rex5/20 Oedipus at Colonus Part I5/27 Oedipus at Colonus Part II6/3 The Bacchae Part I with Dr. Frank Grabowski6/10 The Bacchae Part II with Dr. Frank Grabowski6/17 Roundtable on the Tragic PlaysAristophanes 6/24 The Clouds by Aristophanes with Dr. Zena Hitz6/1 The Frogs by Aristophanes with Tsh OxenreiderFind out more at thegreatbookspodcast.com.

Coucou everyone! In this episode, we discuss the hilarious, raunchy, and politically-conscious comedy about a woman-led sex strike in Ancient Greece - The Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Cat then tells us about the Mati or evil eye - of course, it's blue for a reason! So grab a cup of Greek coffee and join us to go to Greece! Opa! Main topic sources: Brittanica: the Lysistrata Crash Course: The Lysistrata UCF: The Lysistrata Mini topic sources: The History of the Evil Eye, an Ancient Symbol of Protection EVERYTHING ABOUT THE GREEK MATI - EVIL EYE  Greek Evil Eye: 6 Tips to Avert the ‘Mati' Kate's recommendation: "Rivals," (2024)⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Catherine's recommendation: L'Occitane Dry Shampoo Mist Don't forget to follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tiktok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ :) Cover art and logo by Kate Walker Mixed and edited by Catherine Roehre Theme song by Lumehill Thank you all - ciao! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/europhile/support

Republicans with rare exception see the writing on the wall. Trump will get his 2nd term. Karl Rove, Liz Cheney and that ilk can't fathom the power shift that has occurred, and only the most catty Republican would not embrace what's happening. Trump has remade the Republican Party in the image of its founding. He has destroyed the Democrats and reclaimed the core values of the Republican Party. And he's doing this, fighting so-called Republicans, and of course the cabal.   For the ancient Olympic chariot-racer, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cimon_Coalemos. In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_mythology, Koalemos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek: Κοάλεμος) was the personification of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupidity, mentioned once by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristophanes,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalemos#cite_note-1 and being found also in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Lives by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutarch.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalemos#cite_note-2 Coalemus is the Latin spelling of the name. Otherwise, the word κοάλεμος was used in the sense of "stupid person" or also "blockhead".https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalemos#cite_note-3 An ancient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_etymology derives κοάλεμος from κοέω (koeō) "perceive" and ἡλεός (ēleos) "distraught, crazed".https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalemos#cite_note-4 This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology is not established, however.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalemos#cite_note-5 In Suomi language, kuolemas means "in dying"; kuolemus means "the process of dying"; and, kuolemax/kuolemaks means "deadly". [X] SB – Reince Priebus 1st time in 32 years, Republicans beating Democrats straight up Black and Hispanic voters  I'm hearing that this sex scandal with Walz is heating up. Doug Emhoff rumors are still swirling out there. Kamala Harris tried to buy off Black people, particularly men with a $20,000 bribe… The stench of desperation is what I smell. Harris refused a Newsweek interview because they said they would publish the entire transcript. And her poll numbers are not good. Here's what Rasmussen reported for PA [X] SB – Rasmussen on PA polling PA in Sept was a tie Response-bias    [X] SB – Mike Johnson on NBC pushing back on Welker Pt 1   [X] SB – Mike Johnson on NBC pushing back on Welker Pt 2 Should he release his medical records. Harris issued her medical records for a distraction   They don't care about his ego, and they are fed up with the bullsh*t "democracy" cry by the very people who have turned America into a communist country yelling "democracy". What we are witnessing is Democrats' complete panic. Even the talking heads of the media can't hide it and they are experts at subterfuge. And if you think this is "bait and switch" or reverse psychology, think again. Brzezinski said the truth out loud: this election reminds her of 2016. I've been saying this for some time. Like Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris is a flawed candidate; even more so than Clinton. Democrats know that they have far worse chances of getting Harris elected than they had of getting Clinton's fat ass over the finish line. Here are the 6 signs that Democrats have lost the election. 1. Strategy Shift 1 - The Felon Trump the "convicted felon" has gone by the way side. How many Democrats declared that Trump would end his campaign once he was convicted? And what's the number? Ninety-three indictments, yet this man walks free. And interestingly, almost all the people who attacked him are under fire in their own jobs. One of these cases was to bring Trump down, or at the very least provide a launch ramp for the Democrat candidate. 2. Dumping Biden Say what you will, but Democrats wanted to ride Biden to the bitter end. However, things got so bad for "the big guy", Democrats were forced to dump him. And I do mean forced. Dumping Biden showcased utter desperation by the Democrats. In the weeks leading to the coup of Biden Democrats began saying nicer things about Harris. I knew at the time that Biden was persona non grata, as the media tried to prop up the worst VP in the history of the Republic. And while Democrats were successful in dumping Biden and keeping him quiet by threatening him and the Biden crime family members, they really screwed up. Sixteen billion dollars invested in trying to sell buggy whips to the American public. Few people like or care about Kamala Harris, and the veneer has worn thin.    [X] SB – Rasmussen pollster on Trump in PA   3. Abandoning the Old Strategy for Harris The Democrats had no plans to parade Harris in front of the media, if they could have kept her hidden. Harris is a terrible campaigner. But due to her low poll numbers and lack of ability to resonate, Democrats panicked. So now Harris increased her interview schedule. Democrats thought Harris' parroting the story of her "growing up in a middle-class family" would be enough to keep her from talking policy. But now people are asking real questions about FEMA, Iran's nuclear plans, the One China policy, to name a few. And "growing up in a middle-class family" as an answer won't cut it. Check out Harris' answer on guns, based on her admitted gun ownership: Kamala Harris claimed in 2015 that she was a "good marksman" who had “shot a gun many times." POLITICO: “Have you shot a gun?” HARRIS: “Yes I have.” POLITICO: “Tell us about the last time.” HARRIS: “No — hahahahaha.” https://t.co/6p9g9L4VOB — NRA (@NRA) https://twitter.com/NRA/status/1844010250447585688?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw The only thing shocking about her answer is she didn't open with "I was born into a middle-class family". Let's look at the hints that things have derailed for Harris-Walz:   4. Harris wants another debate? If Harris won the debate, then why does she want another one? Simple question deserves a simple answer: because Harris lost the debate. Democrats set a low bar for Harris. And with the help of knowing the questions in advance and RF earrings, Harris answered every question with the same answer, as if she were making The Jerk II: "I was born a poor Black-Indian child." Notice that Harris has finally abandoned the canned answer, because as I pointed out earlier, she's being ridiculed for it. Moreover, as Harris tries to move to move substantive issues, she shoots herself in the foot ruining those $1000 shoes. The winner of a debate i.e. a fight doesn't need to fight again. And since Trump won, he's decided not to offer this courtesy. The nation saw Harris and now they are seeing more. Harris knows that she's slipping, and these are in the external polls. Imagine the carnage Harris-Walz sees in their internal polling. 5. Bring out the Big Gun Barack Obama I've already written about Obama as a strategy. Democrats overestimate Obama and Bill Clinton at their peril. Obama is practically despised by Blacks. And his recent tongue-lashing of Black men is more likely to get his ass kicked versus getting Black men to follow his orders. Check out Obama at this rally, and you will see that he can't control a crowd: Way to go, Patriots! Poor Barry can't seem to get a word in edgewise with the https://twitter.com/hashtag/FJB?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw chants! Keep it up, Patriots—we've got this!https://twitter.com/hashtag/TrumpVance2024?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/hashtag/TrumpVance2024ToSaveAmerica?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://t.co/9zSwPFKsiR —

This week, Jeff and Dave welcome into the studio seasoned translator Diane Arnson Svarlien, to talk about her new addition of three plays by the brilliant, scatological, Athenian comedian Aristophanes. Timed to the release of Hackett's new, attractive volume, Diane shares with us her own background in the Classics, how she became interested in Greek comedy, what it takes to translate iambic trimeters, pentameters, and more. Drawing from perhaps Aristophanes' three most popular send ups – Lysistrata, Ladies of Thesmophoria, and Addled Amphibians – the conversation ranges (and rages) widely. If you have been thinking about reading Aristophanes, dabbling in politics, the war between the sexes, and bathroom humor, or if you just want to know what it takes to make a great translation, don't miss this conversation with our friend Diane. Phlattothrattophlattothrat! Note: the muse in this episode is pretty spotless, but if you sign up for the Aristophanes giveaway, you should have some sense of what you're getting in advance. For those with young children, please use discretion.

What’s more cultivated and genteel than classical theater? David Loehr discusses Aristophanes’s Lysistrata (411 B.C.E.) John McCoy with David J. Loehr.

What’s more cultivated and genteel than classical theater? David Loehr discusses Aristophanes’s Lysistrata (411 B.C.E.) John McCoy with David J. Loehr.

Some of the most realistic, sympathetic, complex, and villainous women of the ancient world are found in the works of Euripides. He seemed to have had an interest in the people on the margins, women, foreign "barbarians", and enslaved people. Today we're looking at them, and Euripides through them. Find the International Podcast Day livestream here! CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Sources: (Translations listed under each) Euripides' Hecuba, The Trojan Women, Medea, Hippolytus, Andromache, The Suppliant Women; Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae; Mary Lefkowitz' Euripides and the Gods. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ralston College Humanities MA   Dr Paul Epstein is a distinguished classicist and Professor Emeritus of Classics at Oklahoma State University, renowned for his extensive knowledge of Greek and Latin literature.  In this lecture and discussion—delivered in Savannah during the x term of the inaugural year of Ralston College's MA in the Humanities program—classicist Dr Paul Epstein considers how Sophocles's tragedy Women of Trachis and Aristophanes's comedy Frogs arise from—and reflect upon—the polis-centered polytheism of ancient Greece as it appeared during the Athenian flourishing of the fifth century BC. Professor Epstein explores how these Greek dramas articulate the relationship between human beings, the gods, and the community. Tragedy, in Professor Epstein's account, is about the overall structure of the community, while comedy starts with the individual's exploration of that community. Yet both forms ultimately reveal an understanding of the individual that is inseparable from the polis in which he or she lives. Professor Epstein argues that our contemporary notion of the self as an entity fundamentally separate from context would be entirely alien to the ancient Greeks. Grasping this ancient understanding of the individual is vitally necessary if we are to correctly interpret the literary and philosophical texts of Hellenic antiquity. *In this lecture and discussion, classicist Dr. Paul Epstein considers how Sophocles's tragedy Women of Trachis and Aristophanes's comedy Frogs arise from—and reflect upon—the polis-centered polytheism of ancient Greece during the Athenian flourishing of the fifth century BC. Professor Epstein explores how these Greek dramas articulate the relationship between human beings, the gods, and the community. Tragedy, in Professor Epstein's account, is about the overall structure of the community, while comedy starts with the individual's exploration of that community. Yet both forms ultimately reveal an understanding of the individual that is inseparable from the polis in which he or she lives. Professor Epstein argues that our contemporary notion of the self as an entity fundamentally separate from context would be entirely alien to the ancient Greeks. Grasping this ancient understanding of the individual is vitally necessary if we are to correctly interpret the literary and philosophical texts of Hellenic antiquity.   —   0:00 Introduction of Professor Epstein by President Blackwood 6:25 The Polytheistic World of the Polis 01:09:35 Dialogue with Students on Polytheism and the Polis 01:22:40 Sophocles's Women of Trachis 01:44:10 Dialogue with Students About Women of Trachis 01:56:10 Introduction to Aristophanes' Frogs 02:24:40 Dialogue with Students About Frogs  02:49:45 Closing Remarks for Professor Epstein's Lecture   —   Authors, Ideas, and Works Mentioned in This Episode:    Athenian flourishing of the fifth century BC  Sophocles, Women of Trachis  Aristophanes, Frogs William Shakespeare Plato, Symposium Aristophanes, Lysistrata Homer, Odyssey  Aristotle, Poetics Peloponnesian War   Plato, Apology nomizó (νομίζω)—translated in the talk as “acknowledge” nous (νοῦς) binein (Βινέω)  Johann Joachim Winkelman  Nicene Creed  Titanic v. Olympian gods  Hesiod  Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility  Sigmund Freud  Existentialism  techne (τέχνη) logos (λόγος) eros (Ἔρως)  hubris (ὕβρις) Philip Larkin, “Annus Mirabilis”  Athansian Creed psuche (ψυχή)—translated in the talk as “soul” thelo (θέλω)—translated in the talk as “wishes”  Aristophanes, Clouds mimesis (μίμησις)  —   Additional Resources    Dr Stephen Blackwood    Ralston College (including newsletter)   Support a New Beginning    —   Thank you for listening!  

Ralston College Humanities MA   Dr. David Novak is a distinguished professor at the University of Toronto, renowned theologian, and esteemed rabbi. He has authored numerous books, delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures, and bridges ancient philosophical traditions with modern ethical issues. Recorded live at Ralston College in Savannah, GA in November of 2022. Dr David Novak—Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto—offers a lecture on the Book of Job followed by an extended question and answer session with students enrolled in Ralston College's Master's in the Humanities Program. In his lecture, Dr Novak explores the complex position of Job in the canon of Jewish scriptures, surveys diverse scholarly accounts of the concluding passages of the book, and offers his own interpretation of Job's “face-to-face” interaction with God, one that emphasizes direct knowledge over abstract understanding and finds in the book's conclusion a vision of the resurrection of the body.    —   00:00 Introduction 08:20 Dr. David Novak's Lecture on the Book of Job  53:25:00 Question and Answer Session with Ralston College Students and Dr. Novak  54:45 Question: Does Job's Vision Occur Before or After Death? 59:40 Question: Why are Job's Friends Punished for Their Conceptual Understanding? 01:03:00 Question: How Does This Align With the Belief That No One Can See God and Live? 01:09:05 Question: What is the Purpose of the Dialogues Between Job and His Friends? 01:13:05 Question: Did Job's Friends Hear God's Voice During the Appearance? 01:14:55 Question: What is the Significance of God Doubling Job's Possessions? 01:15:30 Question: Is There a Visual Aspect to God's Response to Job, or Is It Only Auditory? 01:15:30 Question: What Does it Mean for God to Make a Bet with the Adversary? 01:19:10 Question: Is Job's Refusal to Curse God a Prerequisite for His Later Vision? 01:25:15 Question: What Do You Make of the Relationship Between Satan and God? 01:29:05 Did God Use Job to Prove a Point to Satan, Knowing the Outcome? 01:31:20 Question: Can Man Question God and Express Grievances? 01:35:40 Question: Does Elihu Suggest People Perceive God Through Suffering and Visions? 1:41:30 Question: How Has Your Belief in Providence Impacted Your Life? 01:44:45 Closing Remarks —   Authors, Ideas, and Works Mentioned in this Episode:    The Book of Job The Book of Ezekiel The Book of Leviticus  The Book of Esther The Book of Ecclesiastes Robert Gordis, The Book of God and Man: A Study of Job  mashal (משל)—Hebrew, “parable” Katagoros (Hebrew—קָטִיגור; Greek—κατήγορος)—”accuser”  Fredrich Nietzsche Johann von Rist, “O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid”  G.W.F. Hegel Richard Rorty Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man  Leo Strauss  Plato, Republic  Yehuda Haleri  Aristotle Thomas Aquinas The Book of Isaiah  via negativa  John Rawls Eric Gregory  Chaim ibn Attar Tzimtzum (צמצום)    —   Additional Resources    David Novak    Dr Stephen Blackwood    Ralston College (including newsletter)   Support a New Beginning    —   Thank you for listening!  

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aristophanes' comedy in which the women of Athens and Sparta, led by Lysistrata, secure peace in the long-running war between them by staging a sex strike. To the men in the audience in 411BC, the idea that peace in the Peloponnesian War could be won so easily was ridiculous and the thought that their wives could have so much power over them was even more so. However Aristophanes' comedy also has the women seizing the treasure in the Acropolis that was meant to fund more fighting in an emergency, a fund the Athenians had recently had to draw on. They were in a perilous position and, much as they might laugh at Aristophanes' jokes, they knew there were real concerns about the actual cost of the war in terms of wealth and manpower. WithPaul Cartledge AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge Sarah Miles Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham UniversityAndJames Robson Professor of Classical Studies at the Open UniversityProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Aristophanes (ed. Jeffrey Henderson), Lysistrata (Oxford University Press, 1987)Aristophanes (ed. Jeffrey Henderson), Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women (Routledge, 2010)Aristophanes (ed. Jeffrey Henderson), Birds; Lysistrata; Women at the Thesmophoria (Loeb Classical Library series, Harvard University Press, 2014) Aristophanes (ed. Alan H. Sommerstein), Lysistrata and Other Plays: The Acharnians; The Clouds; Lysistrata (Penguin, 2002)Aristophanes (ed. Alan H. Sommerstein), Lysistrata (Aris & Phillips, 1998)Paul Cartledge, Aristophanes and his Theatre of the Absurd (Bristol Classical Press, 1999)Kenneth Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (University of California Press, 1972)Germaine Greer, Lysistrata: The Sex Strike: After Aristophanes (Aurora Metro Press, 2000)Tony Harrison, The Common Chorus: A Version of Aristophanes' Lysistrata (Faber & Faber, 1992)Douglas M. MacDowell, Aristophanes and Athens: An Introduction to the Plays (Oxford University Press, 1995)S. Douglas Olson (ed.), Ancient Comedy and Reception: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Henderson (De Gruyter, 2013), especially 'She (Don't) Gotta Have It: African-American reception of Lysistrata' by Kevin WetmoreJames Robson, Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Bloomsbury ancient comedy companions (Bloomsbury, 2023)James Robson, Aristophanes: An Introduction (Duckworth, 2009)Ralph M. Rosen and Helene P. Foley (eds.), Aristophanes and Politics. New Studies (Brill, 2020) Donald Sells, Parody, Politics and the Populace in Greek Old Comedy (Bloomsbury, 2018)David Stuttard (ed.), Looking at Lysistrata: Eight Essays and a New Version of Aristophanes' Provocative Comedy (Bristol Classical Press, 2010)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aristophanes' comedy in which the women of Athens and Sparta, led by Lysistrata, secure peace in the long-running war between them by staging a sex strike. To the men in the audience in 411BC, the idea that peace in the Peloponnesian War could be won so easily was ridiculous and the thought that their wives could have so much power over them was even more so. However Aristophanes' comedy also has the women seizing the treasure in the Acropolis that was meant to fund more fighting in an emergency, a fund the Athenians had recently had to draw on. They were in a perilous position and, much as they might laugh at Aristophanes' jokes, they knew there were real concerns about the actual cost of the war in terms of wealth and manpower. WithPaul Cartledge AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge Sarah Miles Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham UniversityAndJames Robson Professor of Classical Studies at the Open UniversityProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Aristophanes (ed. Jeffrey Henderson), Lysistrata (Oxford University Press, 1987)Aristophanes (ed. Jeffrey Henderson), Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women (Routledge, 2010)Aristophanes (ed. Jeffrey Henderson), Birds; Lysistrata; Women at the Thesmophoria (Loeb Classical Library series, Harvard University Press, 2014) Aristophanes (ed. Alan H. Sommerstein), Lysistrata and Other Plays: The Acharnians; The Clouds; Lysistrata (Penguin, 2002)Aristophanes (ed. Alan H. Sommerstein), Lysistrata (Aris & Phillips, 1998)Paul Cartledge, Aristophanes and his Theatre of the Absurd (Bristol Classical Press, 1999)Kenneth Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (University of California Press, 1972)Germaine Greer, Lysistrata: The Sex Strike: After Aristophanes (Aurora Metro Press, 2000)Tony Harrison, The Common Chorus: A Version of Aristophanes' Lysistrata (Faber & Faber, 1992)Douglas M. MacDowell, Aristophanes and Athens: An Introduction to the Plays (Oxford University Press, 1995)S. Douglas Olson (ed.), Ancient Comedy and Reception: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Henderson (De Gruyter, 2013), especially 'She (Don't) Gotta Have It: African-American reception of Lysistrata' by Kevin WetmoreJames Robson, Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Bloomsbury ancient comedy companions (Bloomsbury, 2023)James Robson, Aristophanes: An Introduction (Duckworth, 2009)Ralph M. Rosen and Helene P. Foley (eds.), Aristophanes and Politics. New Studies (Brill, 2020) Donald Sells, Parody, Politics and the Populace in Greek Old Comedy (Bloomsbury, 2018)David Stuttard (ed.), Looking at Lysistrata: Eight Essays and a New Version of Aristophanes' Provocative Comedy (Bristol Classical Press, 2010)

979. In the first segment, we unravel the mysteries surrounding the origins and transformation of punctuation. From the early days when words ran together without spaces, to the introduction of punctuation systems by scholars like Aristophanes, we explore how punctuation has played a pivotal role in shaping written communication. In the second segment, we look at noun clusters that can gum up your writing. You'll see how simple steps like reordering, adding clarifying words, and transforming nouns into verbs can transform noun clusters from mind-bending to crystal clear. > The punctuation segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.> The noun clusters segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at DragonflyEditorial.com.| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/punctuation-noun-clusters/transcript| Please take our advertising survey. It helps! https://podsurvey.com/GRAMMAR| Grammarpalooza (Get texts from Mignon!): https://joinsubtext.com/grammar or text "hello" to (917) 540-0876.| Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates.| Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.| Peeve Wars card game. | Grammar Girl books. | HOST: Mignon Fogarty| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475) or https://sayhi.chat/grammargirl| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.Audio Engineer: Nathan SemesDirector of Podcast: Brannan GoetschiusAdvertising Operations Specialist: Morgan ChristiansonMarketing and Publicity Assistant: Davina TomlinDigital Operations Specialist: Holly Hutchings| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.| Grammar Girl Social Media Links: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon.

Join Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Sami Winc for discussion of Aristophanes and some current news: US-Hamas in secret talks, illegal immigrants and secret transport, California Senatorial race, Musk imbroglios, and Pope Francis' fantasies from the Vatican.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.