Episode 330: Where to Start with Ancient Literature with Dr. Anne Phillips
This week on The Literary Life Podcast, our hosts seek to answer your questions about reading ancient literature. Angelina and Thomas and joined by their colleague, Dr. Anne Phillips, and together they cover some of the most frequently asked questions about diving into the ancients, including the following:
- Which epic should a person start with, and why?
- How should kids be introduced to the epics?
- What is a good place to begin reading the Greek dramatists?
- Where to begin becoming familiar with Greek myth?
- Where should someone start to dip into ancient history?
- What if a person wants to read ancient philosophy?
Don’t forget to check out everything going on over at HouseofHumaneLetters.com to stay up to date on all the upcoming new summer classes and webinars. Also, you can visit Cassiodorus Press to order Dr. Jason Baxter’s newest books, and get on the email list so you don’t miss any publication news!
Episodes Mentioned Today:
Episode 60: Why Read Pagan Myths
Episode 188: Why Translations Matter
Listen to The Literary Life:
Commonplace Quotes:
Good literature continually read for pleasure must, let us hope, do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.
A.E. Housman, from his lecture “The Name and Nature of Poetry”
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don’t mind being that.
Northrop Frye, from The Educated Imagination
There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to tell you what mutton tastes like.
W. Somerset Maugham, from A Writer’s Notebook
Antony and Cleopatra
by José-Maria de Heredia (trans. by Edward Robeson Taylor)
On Egypt sleeping under sky of brass
The twain gazed wistfully from terrace high,
And watched the Flood, through Delta rolling high,
Toward Sais or Bubastis slowly pass.
The Roman felt beneath his thick cuirass —
Like captive soldier stilling infant’s cry —
On his triumphant bosom swooning lie
Her form voluptious in his close embrace.
Turning her pallid head between his arms
Toward him made mad by perfume’s conquering charms,
She raised her mouth and crystalline, fond eye;
And o’er her bent, the Chieftain did behold
In her great orbs, starry with dots of gold,
Only a boundless sea where galleys fly.
Book List:
Amazon affiliate links below
The Iliad by Homer
Black Ships Before Troy by Rosemary Sutcliff
The Wanderings of Odysseus by Rosemary Sutcliff
The Children’s Homer by Padraic Column
The Tale of Troy by Roger Lancelyn Green
The Odyssey of Homer by Andrew Lang
The Clouds by Aristophanes
D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths by Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire
Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation ed. by Smith, Brunet, and Trzaskoma
Bulfinch’s Mythology: Complete Works by Thomas Bulfinch
Mythology by Edith Hamilton
A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends by Alice Terry White
Stephen Fry’s Green Myths Series
Famous Men of Rome and Greece by John Haaran
The Story of the Romans by H. A. Guerber
The Story of the Greeks by H. A. Guerber
Poetics by Aristotle
From Achilles to Christ by Louis Markos
Heroes of the City of Man by Peter Leithardt
Latin Literature by J. W. Mackail
Ancilla to Classical Reading by Moses Hadas
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