/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.10883258]

So I've finally decided to unironically, genuinely, truthfully start with the Greeks.

Where do I begin?

[Anonymous No.10883271]

the Greeks

[Anonymous No.10883284]

>>10883258
read about the presocratics on Wikipedia and then read the apology > crito > phaedo

[Anonymous No.10883285]

>>10883271
Yes but which books? Dialogues? Speeches?

That sort of thing

[Anonymous No.10883291]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y8_RRaZW5X3xwztjZ4p0XeRplqebYwpmuNNpaN_TkgM/pub

[Anonymous No.10883294]

>>10883285

Start with the Greeks

[Anonymous No.10883297]

>>10883258
Socrates-Plato-Aristotle-Antisthenes- Zeno of Citium

[Anonymous No.10883298]

>>10883258
The Greeks

[Anonymous No.10883305]

>>10883258
Plato's Republic

[Anonymous No.10883308]

why the fuck this board can't evolve?

[Anonymous No.10883320]

>>10883308
4chan still uses wojak memes from 2011.

This place is a time capsule. Get used to it.

[Anonymous No.10883367]

>>10883285
Patricia Curd's Pre-Socratic Reader

Or Oxford's The First Philosophers

[Anonymous No.10883378]

Read the Iliad, then read the Odyssey, then read Hesiod's Works and Days. Then you can read Plato, starting with the Apology of Socrates.

[Anonymous No.10883383]

>>10883285
I know, sorry, I was just making a joke about /lit/ being retarded.

I'd start with reading Homer if you haven't already. Read a little about Greek history to get an idea of the timeline of events. Then go to the library and check out Graves' The Greek Myths and some Lyric poetry: Anacreon, Simonidies, Pindar and them. And read Philostratus' Heroicus. This is all just to get you into the mood. When you're done with that you can skip the Presocratics, really. Once you have a passing familiarity with Greek notions and character, begin with Plato. If you're totally new and want to throw yourself into it, Dover's Six Great Dialogues is the perfect place to start: Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium, The Republic. This will take some time and probably a few readings to digest, and you would be well served by a companion text or some youtube lectures or something. When you're ready, and if you're interesting in Plato's theology, attack the Timaeus.

When you're done with all that, you're basically ready to begin a serious analysis of the New Testament. This means both the blue team (Tertullian, Augustine) and the red team (Plotinus, Marcion, Proclus, etc).

[Anonymous No.10883390]

I

[Anonymous No.10883393]

>>10883308
why can't you evolve

[Anonymous No.10883455]

>>10883308
>>10883308
We do. It takes time to read.

It also might be because people don’t believe in God. That halts progress

[Anonymous No.10883476]

Song of Achilles

[Anonymous No.10883499]

Start with the sumerians

[Anonymous No.10883504]

>>10883499
Commence with the Cretans

[Anonymous No.10883816]

>>10883499
>>10883504
Approach with the Atlanteans

[Anonymous No.10883834]

All but like two of these comments are useless. The truth is hardly anyone here reads to begin with, OP. This board is a waste of time if you want to discuss books other than the Bible or IJ.

Anyways,
>Illiad
>Odyssey
>Collected Poems of Sappho
>A copy of Essential Dialogues of Plato
>Reread Republic
>Complete Works of Aristotle
>The Life of Greece by Will Durant
From there you can read stoic or epicurean philosophy if that tickles your fancy. But, at least with the stoics, most of the really popular literature of that philosophy was written by the Romans. The chart an anon posted here is also pretty good.

[Anonymous No.10883870]

>>10883834
Don't forget Aeschylus. The Oresteia is a beautiful work of metaphorical poetry that is a satisfying follow-up to the Odyssey, and it's well worth OPs time.

>I'd watch till late at night, my eyes still burn
>I sobbed by the torch I lit for you alone.
>I never let it die...but in my dreams
>the high thin wail of a gnat would rouse me
>piercing like a trumpet - I could see you
>suffer more than all
>the hours that slept with me could ever bear.

[Anonymous No.10883883]

>>10883258
Heraclitus
Parmenides
Pythagoras
Homer
Aeschylus
Euripides
Sophocles
Plato/Soc
Aristotle
Pindar
Thucydides
Aristophanes


I also highly recommend Plutarch (Greekaboo), Herodotus, Hesiod and reading the Orphic hymns, any good book on Greek mythology, the Homeric hymns out loud,

[Anonymous No.10883901]

>>10883816
Move with the Mycenaeans

[Anonymous No.10883908]

>>10883390
Is there a better source for the Greek myths? I don't want a "retelling"

[Anonymous No.10883927]

>>10883258

It depends on how deep you want to get on it anon. I've been doing serious background research and improving wiki as a result, as way to improve my own understanding.

The safest general starting point is Iliad/Odyssey for culture. Then learn a bit about the presocratics (there's multiple readers and sources, but this part gets VERY hard if you get bogged down in tall weeds as I am), and then go on to the Platonic dialogues that you already know in some sense are the next step. Then some Aristotle, later.

*These are merely my personal interests. More artistically and/or mathematically inclined people should do the various plays and Euclid at appropriate points. I had the pleasure of looking up a citation in Aristotle in relation to some goofy ratio argument in Euclid a few months back. The point being that I better understand how these various texts and authors inter-relate.

[Anonymous No.10884799]

>>10883258
Read Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War. Also read Plato's shorter dialogues like Gorgias, Euthyphro etc.

Then read Leo Strauss's 'City and Man'. It's three essays on these three texts. Then read Leo Strauss' 'Natural Right and History'

Then read Alexandre Kojeve's 'Introduction to the Reading of Hegel'

Then Read Nietzsche's 'Beyond Good and Evil' and 'Genealogy of Morals'.

Then read Deleuze's "Nietzsche and Philosophy" and Lawrence Lampert's 'Leo Strauss and Nietzsche'

Then Read Michael Allen Gillespie's 'Hegel, Heidegger, and the ground of History'

Then read Richard Velkley's 'Heidegger, Strauss and the premises of philosophy'

Then attempt to read Heidegger 'Being and Time'

That should give you and absolute grounding in western thought in the shortest time possible.

[Anonymous No.10884813]

>>10883383
quality post anon. What do you mean by red and blue teams though?

[Anonymous No.10884968]

>>10884799
>Leo Strauss
>kojeve
>Nietzsche
>Deleuze
>lambert
>gillespies
>velkley
>Heidegger
Literally the only two people on this list worth reading are Nietzsche and Heidegger, Western canon my add

[Anonymous No.10885063]

>>10883908
Homer, Hesiod, Tragedians

[Anonymous No.10885100]

>>10884799
Good post.

You should add some Krauss and Bourriaud.

[Anonymous No.10885239]

>>10883383
What do you mean by having plotinus and Augustine on different "teams"? Wasn't Augustine also a neo-platonist? I recall him referencing plotinus often.

[Anonymous No.10885260]

Divide your free time into three portions. Give the principal to History, the other two, which should be shorter, to Philosophy and Poetry.
>First read Goldsmith's history of Greece. This will give you a digested view of that field. Then take up antient history in the detail, reading the following books, in the following order: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophontis Hellenica, Xenophontis Anabasis, Arrian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, Justin. This shall form the first stage of your historical reading, and is all I need mention to you now. In Greek poetry read Homer, Anacreon, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles. In morality, read Epictetus, Xenophontis Memorabilia and Plato's Socratic dialogues.

[Anonymous No.10885269]

>>10884968
>Starts post with "Literally"
>Is a brainlet
Every single time

[Anonymous No.10885289]

>>10883383
>phaedrus before sympossium

nigga

[Anonymous No.10885459]

>>10883258
Right here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1656/1656-h/1656-h.htm

[Anonymous No.10885519]

>>10883455
lmao

[Anonymous No.10885687]

>>10884813
>What do you mean by red and blue teams though?
I mean there was a set of scholars back in the day who used the apostolic texts to organize a very specific set of beliefs in order to found a new Church that preferred its followers held correct beliefs and followed correct practice over and indeed instead of philosophical ability. And their opposite number was another group of scholars who were Platonists, who opposed the formation of one 'correct' doctrine because it was a new religion and not philosophy. The Church was a synthesis of the Old and New Testaments. Platonists and their ideas had abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with Semitic messianic prophecies or

There is some overlap in these groups, which is how the Socrates-Jesus comparison gets made. Socrates had been a new form of hero over the Homeric heroes of old. He was a hero of philosophy, the virtue he made praiseworthy was cognitive ability rather than martial skill. Similarly, Jesus was also a new kind of hero. The messiah expected in the OT by the so-called new Christians, he also inverted the world. Through his teaching the weak would become strong, the poor would be rich and the pacifist would reign. And his philosophy of peace and love was true to its word: we are not sub-Saharan Africa. We have thousands of years of relatively peaceful technological development in the can because of his teachings.

>>10885239
Augustine had been a platonist, when the school was on its last legs. He'd also been a gnostic, and an atheist iirc. He changed his mind when he got older as usually happens with men and he borrowed heavily from Plotinus to write his City of God. Only instead of revering the Platonic notion of the One, he did a Find+Replace with Christ and Heavenly Father. Basically he gutted the philosophy to make a worshipful paean.

[Anonymous No.10885701]

>Platonists and their ideas had abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with Semitic messianic prophecies or
Woops, forgot to finish my sentence. They had nothing to do with Semitic heritage and rejected the assimilation of their reasonable ideas into what amounted to a new cult. By Augustine's time, however, Christianity had been the official religion of Rome for a couple of centuries. The wind was blowing in a new direction and the Platonist's days were numbered.

[Anonymous No.10885716]

>>10883258
How to Read a Book

[Anonymous No.10885725]

>>10883390
>Sophoklēs over Aiskhulos
>Theban plays
Sure is modernist in here, only one that's really relevant to understanding Greek culture is Oidipous at Kolonoi.

[Anonymous No.10885740]

>>10885701
Gnosticism and Hermeticism are decidedly semitic you fucking LARP fag and the Church had nothing legitimate to do with Platonism at any point. Christ doesn’t use the dialectic in the Corpus or in the Dialogues at all. He doesn’t deduce from first principles, he doesn’t argue coherently.
>using pedo anime
fuck off

[Anonymous No.10885748]

Ok so once we read the recommended books on the Greek list what are we supposed to do with the information we learn? I want to learn how to read/write well but I'm not sure how to start. Over the past year I have gained an interest in Western mytholgy, Hinduism, and various occult topics but I don't know anyone irl to discuss these topics with.

[Anonymous No.10885751]

>>10885740
>Gnosticism and Hermeticism are decidedly semitic
Not true, semitic belief systems are all decidedly materialist.

[Anonymous No.10885775]

>>10885740
>using pedo anime
uh she clearly has breasts, retard. I'm going to ignore most of your post until you learn to read and come back with something more substantive. Except for this piece right here:

>He doesn't deduce from first principles
Precisely. The Church functions under the assumption that God exists, and its qualities are those which are highest good: truth, beauty, justice. It is a deification of the first principle. It was the obvious next step in the evolution of Platonic thought.

[Anonymous No.10885938]

>>10883258
Start with a good overview. Something like Guthries' The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle and something like Dover's Ancient Greek Literature.

[Anonymous No.10886605]

B U M P

>>10883258
did you start yet

[Anonymous No.10886606]

>>10883455
this, but ironically

[Anonymous No.10886617]

>>10883383
Wow who would’ve thought, a useful post on /lit/ for once.

Thanks anon.

[Anonymous No.10887026]

>>10885775
I'm not the guy youre responding to but
>It is a deification of the first principle. It was the obvious next step in the evolution of Platonic thought.
Previously you said that Platonists had nothing to do with semetic prophecies... but that point above makes it seem like the reversal would be true. So which one is it? You are not mentioning if the old or new testament was influenced by Platonism or not and confusing my smoothbrain with vagueness.

[Anonymous No.10887234]

>>10887026
The Old Testament is just that. Old, from about the time of the Iron Age or Homer. It contains the tribal chronicle of the Israelites and their creation myth, a prophecy of a messiah, and a book of laws. There is no Christ in it, and in fact the Jews (specifically the Sanhedrin) viewed Jesus as a false messiah. There is also no Platonism in it as far as I know -- though some of Isaiah could be interpreted as being a reference to an unknowable God -- because it is the Jewish book.

The New Testament is much, much newer. It was assembled around the 1st-2nd centuries from apostolic texts by Hellenic Jews, who no doubt would have held the works of Plato and Aristotle as sacred. Remember Paul, one of the foremost of the apostles? He was a Jew, and a Greek philosopher, who converted to Christianity. His conversion story is in the book of Acts. Before his conversion he was merely Saul of Tarsus, who according to the legend was on his way to persecute the Christians before encountering Jesus himself on the road to Damascus. This short narrative in itself is a flash retelling of the Christian signature role reversal, where the meek inherit power and those whom power has corrupted (the wicked) repent.

It's important to note that the New Testament was written with an eye on the Old. It was specifically designed to sit on top of the OT and draw authority for the new religion from it. This is why Christ is in the messiah role. To a Jew, the NT is literally viewed like the Book of Mormon would be to a Catholic.

>>10886617
You're welcome anon.

[Anonymous No.10888163]

bump

[Anonymous No.10889274]

hesiod theogony

this is mandatory, you must start with this, no other way

[Anonymous No.10889910]

>>10883258
Brief History of Ancient Greece
Mythology
Homer – Iliad, Odyssey
Hesiod - Theogony / Work and Days
Aeschylus – Tragedies
Sophocles – Tragedies
Herodotus – Histories
Euripides – Tragedies
Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
Hippocrates – Medical Writings
Aristophanes – Comedies
Plato – Dialogues
Aristotle – Works

[Anonymous No.10889918]

>>10883908
dude, hamilton is really good. just read it. If you want to die of boredom read apollodorus' library. It's basically the same thing but extremely boring.

[Anonymous No.10890471]

>>10883285
the Greeks