Category Archives: Great Books

We have finally arrived at the last stage of the history of the Roman Empire: the ultimate fall of the…

As we saw in the previous post, the events of the Fourth Crusade could have completely annihilated the Byzantine empire,…

At the end of the 10th century, when Pope Urban launched the first Crusade (1095), the Byzantine Empire had stood firm…

In the first 10 chapters of Volume III, Gibbon addresses the rise and progress of other nations across Europe, Asia,…

Heraclius reigned from 610 to 641. By this time, the Roman Empire was more aptly called (as it is by modern…

Justin II Justinian, who was childless, was succeeded by his favorite nephew Justin. Justin II began his reign with optimistic…

The Avars and the Persian War The Avars came from the people of the nation of the Ogors or Varchonites, originally living…

Compared to the pitiful decline of the Western Empire in the preceding decades, the reign of Justinian was a resurgence.…

The Rise of Theodoric The Western Roman Empire ended officially with the deposition of Augustulus by Odoacer in 476, but it…

The Establishment of the Frankish Kingdom Clovis was the illegitimate son of Childeric and the queen of the Thuringians. After…

From last time, we saw that the reign of Honorius resulted with the loss of Britain and all of the territory…

In the last two posts, we reflected on the latter half of Volume I of Gibbon. Struggling under its immense size…

Here we shall continue with the second half of Volume I, but focusing on Gibbon’s chapters on the progress of…

Having covered Rome’s Golden Age and the chaotic succession of short-lived or tyrannical emperors during the 2nd and 3rd centuries…

The time has finally come for the last part of the trio of Great Books volumes in our 5-year reading…

Finally we encounter the last two plays in Aristophanes’ surviving body of works. I’ve chosen to group these two together…

Continuing right where we left off, we move away from alternate visions of economic systems and back into anti-war territory as…

In the first post about Aristophanes, we learned about four plays named after the type of chorus. We commented upon…

I’ve finally finished all 11 of Aristophanes’ plays in the Great Books collection in the last 3 weeks. It took…

We finally finish off Euripedes’ works with the last five remaining tragedies. Compared to the dramas of the last few…

This week I finished four plays by Euripedes. I’m going slower that I’m anticipating, having yet to read anything by…

These three plays round off the series of Euripedes’ plays on the events concerning the aftermath of the Trojan War.…

Last summer I took the time to read through some of Plato’s major dialogues, including The Republic, Meno, Crito, Phaedo, The…

Similar to last week, the three plays I read over this weekend have women at the center of the story.…

Having finished the massive tome that is The City of God, starting this week I’m returning back to the Greek…

It’s been a very busy last two weeks, such that while I finished Augustine’s The City of God on March 19, I’ve…

The first 10 books of The City of God was a polemic against Roman polytheistic religion. As we saw last week, Augustine…

It’s been a very difficult and crazily busy last three weeks since I posted, but I managed to at least…

It’s over a month since I began the new commitment to a 5-year plan in reading the Great Books. I have since…

I went back to Augustine this week, starting with his shorter work, On Christian Doctrine (OCD), which is less than 150 pages,…

This last week I’ve finally finished reading the last three plays of Sophocles out of the seven which survive today…

We continue off from the review of the first, and most famous play of the Oedipus trilogy, Oedipus the King. The…

Oedipus is famous in Western culture as a character who infamously killed his father and married his mother by mistake.…

Having finished reading all of the Aeschylus plays in GBWW Volume 4, I decided to proceed with the two Electra plays by…

I managed to finish reading the four remaining plays by Aeschylus in Volume 4 of GBWW this weekend. As I…

I managed to resume my reading of the rest of the Oresteia trilogy this week after previously having read and wrote about Agamemnon,…

Augustine’s Confessions is what I would call truly establishing a genre – that of the personal narrative. Despite being written…

It’s still the holidays, so I have way more free time than usual, but I’ve managed to read my first…

I’ve decided that 2016 will be the start of my life plan to read all of the Great Books. There have…

In my last post, I outlined a bit of my personal history, including my fixation on the importance of being…

I’ve just finished my first semester as a graduate student in physics at Harvard, and it’s been an exhilarating 3…