Archive for October, 2010
This Just In…Greek Civilization a fraud!!
Required reading from the Onion: Historians Admit to Inventing Greece WASHINGTON—A group of leading historians held a press conference Monday at the National Geographic Society to announce they had “entirely fabricated” ancient Greece, a culture long thought to be the intellectual basis of Western civilization. The group acknowledged that the idea of a sophisticated, flourishing […]
We are Rome! Or are we?
Speaking of conversations in print… In his column Third Party Rising, Thomas Friedman compares destructive factors in modern American politics with the conditions that led to the fall of the Roman Empire. He envisions a third party presidential candidate proclaiming to the American people… “I am not going to tell you what you want to […]
An Evening with Derek Walcott
On Sept. 27th, classics majors and members of the Classics and English departments spent an evening conversing with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. Mr. Walcott is best known for his poem Omeros, a Caribbean epic loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey. He regaled his audience with tales of living by the sea and his days learning Latin […]
Socrates, Plato, and “Can you twitter your way to a good life?”
A flurry of recent articles and responses made me think about my Plato class with regard to the advantages and disadvantages of different modes of communication and the relationship of each to civic engagement. In his New Yorker article “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”, Malcolm Gladwell makes the argument that despite forecasts that […]