Long Shadow of the Ancient Greek World
Jul. 31st, 2011 04:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Nearly finished with my current Teaching Company course, which is a relatively long one: 48 half-hour MP3 lectures. My review, from the inventory page:
Very neat course. The professor has a quaint accent (northern British?), and a generally good teaching style. This is a history of Ancient Greece, but specifically a political history. Its main themes are the development of Imperium, Democracy and Law in the Greek world. So it spends a lot of time on topics you don't hear about so much -- for instance, two full lectures on the rise of rhetoric, which became crucial as Athens went in for radical democracy, and four on how the law courts worked. (I find myself wanting to write a LARP set in the courts: it's a rich topic.) The course is principally focused on Athens, but spends a few lectures on Sparta, and the final quarter mainly on Macedonia. (Where he argues persuasively that Philip II was the really "great" King, and Alexander, aside from his skill on the battlefield, was largely an increasingly paranoid loon.)