Since making public my half (if not indeed fully) mad idea of reading the entirety of the St. John’s College Academic Program Reading List, I have received a couple of questions that I think it is important not simply to answer privately but publicly so that there are no misunderstandings about what I am doing […]
In the very first book of his monumental history of the Peloponnesian War, whilst presenting a preliminary survey of the early Hellene culture up to the point of the war’s outbreak, Thucydides muses about the lack of critical thought given to stories and traditions, “even on matters of contemporary history which have not been obscured […]
Thus far in my reading the St. John’s list, each book I have so far read – Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Oresteia and Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, and the Theban plays, Philoctetes, and Ajax of Sophocles – has been one that I have already previously read at least once. The next book on the […]
Having now completed my readings of the plays of Aeschylus included on the St. John’s Academic Program Reading List, I have now moved on to those of Sophocles. It is remarkable how, in comparison to those of Aeschylus, how “modern” the plays of Sophocles seem.