Speak to you tonight (6/11): Thucydides intro call
Folks,
Andre and I look forward to our intro call for Thucydides tonight –
Thucydides introductory call
Monday, June 11
8pm New York time
1-800-615-2900
#11215
Tonight’s call will be focused on setting up everyone to read this wonderful edition of this great classic.
Agenda will be:
– Introductions (including discussion group leader Dr. Andre Stipanovic)
http://showsupport.typepad.com/odyssey/members/index.html
– Rules of the road (how these calls work)
– The website (how to benefit from the online resources we have assembled)
http://showsupport.typepad.com/odyssey/4_thucydides/index.html
– The Landmark edition (how to approach this edition; background on Robert Strassler)
– Review of the reading guide and questions for Book 1
Thanks!
Andre and Phil
P.S. It’s best if you can be in front of a computer and online during our call – as we’ll review the Reading Odyssey website.
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Book 1 reading guide and questions (to be discussed at the Book 1 call in July)
1. Thucydides’ goals
What does Thucydides lay out in Book 1 as his goals for writing this history? As far as we know, this is the second history ever written- the first being Herodotus’ history of the Persian Wars.
For readers of Herodotus – how does Thucydides differ from Herodotus? How does he refer to Herodotus in this first book? What does he owe to Herodotus?
2. Dates of the war
What are the dates of this war between Athens and Sparta? How does this war fit into the contenxt of Ancient Greek history? What important events happened before and after this war?
3. People, place and identity
Let’s do a quick review of how Thucydides refers to Greeks, Corinthians, Pelopenesians, Spartans, Attica, Athens.
Note: Athenians refer to the wars as the “Peloponessian Wars” while the Spartans refer to the wars as the “Athenian Wars.”
4. Origins of the Athenian Empire
How did the Athenian Empire come to develop? What was the Delian League? For readers who just finished reading Herodotus – what can you share with us about the end chapters of Herodotus – the final moments of the Persian Wars – and the rise of Athens?
5. Thucydides philosophy
As you read the early sections of Book One – especially 1.1 to 1.23 – consider Thucydides’ philosophy and biases. Keep in mind that
Thucydides was a precise writer and that every word, every section serves a purpose. Ask yourself “why is he writing this”?
6. Athenian bias? Spartan bias?
Thucydides, an exiled Athenian general, certainly sought to understand the war from different perspectives. Yet, he was reportedly criticized within Athens for a Spartan bias in his writing. From this first book – what do you think? Does he have a bias? What is it?
7. Cause of the war?
Thucydides is well-known, in part, because of his analysis of deep-rooted causes (as opposed to popular or stated reasons for the war).
Thucydides argues that because of growing Athenian power it was inevitable for Sparta and Athens to go to war.
What do you think?
8. Human nature and historical causality
In our first Thucydides reading group, we had a good dialogue in our Book 1 call about human nature and historical causality. Several members asked and debated: are greed and fear the key drivers behind all human events, or at least behind wars?
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Thoughts from Andre
The ancient writers were very deliberate in outlining their ideas very methodically. We see this in historians and even poets like Homer, Horace and Vergil. For Thucydides, who worked on this project for many years, the structure must have had some deliberate flow to it.
Book I is the introduction of Thucydides’ thought and method for the whole work, so think carefully about how he begins Book I and how he ends Book I. Think of Book I as his thesis statement and even a sample of his method of presenting history. Remember that he is reacting to other new ways of presenting history, most notably Herodotus.
Remember also that this is an experimental work for its time. We know of no one else prior to this in any part of the world that has written history in this way. This is also an age when medicine, science, math and philosophy were pushing the boundaries of discovery while mass carnage was being reported daily. It may be analogous to 1969 in the US when the headlines simultaneously read that astronauts were walking on the moon in the same moment soldiers were dying at an alarming rate in Vietnam. Democracy in our own country was being questioned, challenged and transformed. This was Thucydides’ world too.
Why does Thucydides spend time right away in discussing the history of Greece up to the present war? How does this “archaeology” (early Greek history) at the beginning of Book I relate to the “pentecontaetia” (more recent events since the Persian war leading up to the present war) near the end of Book I?
Why does he interpose more recent events in between these two sections? Why are these ordering of events NOT strictly chronological in Book I? Who is his audience circa 400 BCE now that Athens has been conquered and other Greek city states are filling the power vacuum? Does he expect Athenians, for example, to be excited about reading about a war that they had just lost? Does he think Spartans will care to read this? Thebans? Americans??? Looking forward to the next meeting, Andre
Patrick Barth (RO2)
I am co-owner of a Brooklyn Based company, New Project. We specialize in custom museum installations. We also occasionally assist artists in realizing their visions. Prior to forming my company I worked independently as an artist assistant installing their sculptures in museums and galleries around the world. Before moving to New York to pursue my own dream of being an artist I taught sculpture and drawing at Bowling Green State University. I still occasionally work on my own art. One such project I have been dabbling with for a few years now is a series of illustrations based on The Iliad. I have degrees from Brigham Young University and Ohio State University. I grew up in Utah and, although I love New York, I will always miss the west. Some hobbies include white water kayaking, and surfing (still a beginner). Most excitingly, my wife and I just had our first baby.
T. Michael Johnson (RO2)
Mr. Johnson’s primary responsibility with Citi Private Equity (CPE) is for education and marketing to Citi’s clients and financial advisors. Prior to joining CPE in 2003, Mr. Johnson worked as an attorney focusing on securities litigation and corporate restructuring for Anderson Kill & Olick LLC, an investment banker at Salomon Smith Barney in its Financial Sponsors group, and Vice President in corporate development for iVillage.com, a media company. Mr. Johnson received a B.A. from Boston College, where he graduated summa cum laude and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Carrie Gaiser Casey (RO2)
Carrie Gaiser Casey is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation focuses on women’s roles in early twentieth century American ballet. This fall she’ll be teaching a writing composition course on dance. Carrie lives in San Francisco with her outrageously adorable husband, Mark Casey. Hobbies include gardening, cooking, and anything else that allows her to bring out a new wedding gift gadget.
Stephen DiMarco (RO2)
A lifelong marketer, Stephen is responsible for leading Compete’s corporate marketing initiatives, new product and market development, and Compete.com, Compete’s award-winning web analytics site. Before coming to Compete, Stephen co-founded the internet consulting firm ZEFER with a handful of business school classmates. Stephen’s first jobs were in the entertainment industry in New York where he managed sales and marketing for News Corp., Comedy Central, and TVT Records. Stephen holds a BS from Georgetown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Eleri Dixon (TOR)
Eleri J. Dixon is the Vice President of Customer Experience for the Fidelity Investments eBusiness Company in Boston, MA. Her group is responsible for the “Customer Experience” of all of Fidelity’s customer
facing channels. Eleri and her team work closely with the UI Designers, Graphic Designers and Editors to create websites and experiences that meet the needs of very diverse customer populations.
After completing undergraduate work in psychology at Vassar College in NY, she went on to Lehman Brothers where she became an institutional preferred stocktrader.
From there she came to Fidelity where she worked on Fidelity’s first on-line trading system, created the usability team and is now broadening her focus to include optimizing the user experience for all channels that through which Fidelity Customers interact.
Homemade Herodotus
Homemade Herodotus
Bruce Upbin 01.29.07
http://members.forbes.com/global/2007/0129/068.html
It took a feisty amateur to wrest the classics from the grip of professional historians.
Robert B. Strassler calls himself a “scholar without credentials.” He doesn’t read Greek or Latin, nor does he have a tenured job at a university. He retired 20 years ago after a prosperous couple of decades running an oil drilling equipment business. Yet this amateur scholar may turn out to be one of the bestselling classicists of all time.
Ten years ago Strassler, 69, published The Landmark Thucydides (Free Press), a 713-page edition of the Greek historian’s account of the Peloponnesian War. Strassler worked on it for seven years–without a publisher’s advance. His goal: to unlock antiquity’s most intricate, difficult narrative for a modern audience. He succeeded brilliantly: 114 detailed maps in line with the text, hundreds of margin notes, a header on every page showing time and place, and 11 appendixes that illuminate military, economic and political concepts of the time.
The book was a smash (as classics go), selling 30,000 copies in hardcover and 40,000 in paperback, even though that edition cost twice that of the mass-market Penguin paperback. “I would never use the Penguin again,” says Joshua D. Sosin, associate professor of classical studies at Duke University.
Now Strassler is expanding his project across the bookshelf. There are four more Landmark editions in the works: A new translation of Herodotus by adjunct professor Andrea Purvis of Duke University, with 21 appendixes and 123 maps, will appear in late 2007, to be followed by reader-friendly volumes of Xenophon’s Hellenica, Arrian and Polybius. “The work he’s doing is monumental,” says Edward Kastenmeier, Strassler’s editor at his current publisher, Pantheon. “Bob put it together on his own.”
Strassler’s father made a bundle in the wake of the Depression, running syndicates that bought and fixed up liquidated companies. Strassler was introduced to the classics at Fieldston, a prep school in New York’s Bronx, and again as a history major at Harvard. In his junior year there he pestered the deans into assigning him a former Oxford don to tutor him three hours a week in the history of ancient Greece. Says Strassler, “It was the best thing Harvard ever did for me.”
Later, after graduating from Harvard Business School in the top 5% of his class in 1961, he went into the family business. His father told him to revive or dump a Tulsa, Oklahoma company that made equipment for oil rigs. Strassler handled the business well through an oil boom, but when a bust came, in 1983, he was worn out. His bond portfolio seemed like a better place for his and his family’s money–no employees or regulations to worry about. So he joined the board of Simon’s Rock College, a liberal arts school in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. At the request of the provost he taught a class in ancient Greek literature in translation, sympathizing with students who found Thucydides impenetrable: The Modern Library edition has one map of the entire Hellenic world, with 180 labels on it. Students must constantly flip back and forth to figure out where they are. The Penguin edition has an index Strassler deems “useless.”
In 1989 he drew up a proposal for a much more inviting version and cast around for a professor to do the work. Some said they were busy; others couldn’t understand why Strassler would bother making Thucydides accessible to the lay reader. That got Strassler steamed. “These people would rather write about how the letter sigma changed over 200 years. That’s what you get points for,” he says. “Then they cry in their beer that no one reads the classics anymore.”
So he put together his own sample edition, with roughed-out maps, margin notes, an index and a list of appendixes, and sent it out again. Yale historian Donald Kagan, an expert on the Peloponnesian War, was enthusiastic and introduced Strassler to his book agent, Glen Hartley. The proposal went out to a dozen publishers. Only one, Simon & Schuster’s Free Press, agreed to take it on–but without an advance. Strassler had to finance the entire project himself.
In 1997, before the glow faded from the raves over Thucydides, Strassler started work on the new translation of Herodotus. He scored a big advance from Pantheon, using that money to fund a classics factory, of which he is chief executive officer. He expects his future costs to run higher than what he paid for Thucydides: $30,000 for the designer, $20,000 for the cartographer, and $500 per appendix to professors.
In light of his success, he is surprised not to have engendered competition. “I thought I would be copied,” he says, “but no one picked up on it.” That strikes him odd, since the classics remain the underpinning of Western philosophy: “We are the heirs of the Greeks and the prisoners of their thought.”
Questions for 1st reading group call: The Ultimate Question
Books 8 and 9 Herodotus – audio recording
Here’s the audio recording for Herodotus Books 8 & 9 and our special guest scholar, Robert Strassler, editor of the forthcoming “Landmark Herodotus.” Listen online or download the mp3 file and listen to it as a podcast on your ipod.
Gratias
Dear all,
I just wanted to say once more that it has been a pleasure reading through Herodotus with you. Thank you for keeping me accountable with great questions, insights and comments. I know we learned a lot together through this experience. This group and our interest in reading these great authors is a great witness to my three sons, who see how beneficial and fun learning is through one’s whole lifetime. You’ve balanced our serious discussions with a healthy dose of good humor. That is one of the best lessons for us all.
I hope we can share more of this experience with each other in the future and/or with our colleagues in each of our respective professions. Remember Augustine’s epiphany “tolle, lege” (i.e. ‘pick it up, read it) whenever you think of what we have accomplished together this past year. It can change lives, it can change the world we live in.
Sincerely,
Andre
05. June 2007 by readingodysseyauthor
Categories: Commentary, Herodotus | Tags: Herodotus | Comments Off on Gratias