Great Books I Every age has its own outlook. It
is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books
that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own world. And that means the old books.
C.S. Lewis
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition
refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
G. K. Chesterton
The idea behind a Great Books course
begins here: if we want the best for our students, why not let them learn from the best possible teachers? We can find these
teachers by seeing which ones have stood the test of time; which ones have had many generations and many civilizations point
to them as a building block of their culture. The Great Books curriculum is designed around these authors. Not all are Christian
(many are not), but they all have had a great influence on us and other Christian thinkers. Thus, part of the goal of these
courses is to allow the student to engage with these authors directly, not hidden behind a veil of quotations and commentary
from some modern textbook.
This Great Books I course is intended to introduce the student to the earliest of these
authors. The readings for this year are all from Greek authors, as the Greeks are the cradle of Western culture, and the cultural
context for the beginnings of Christianity. The student will read many of the greatest authors Greece provided, and come to
understand these authors both in the context of their own time, and in their relation to the present.
Author
and Title Reading List Homer Illiad and Odyssey
Aeschylus Oresteia
Sophocles
Three Theban Plays
Herodotus Histories
Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War
Plutarch Selected Lives, specifically Theseus, Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Alcibiades, Nicias, and Pericles
Plato Euthyphro, Apology and Republic
Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics and Poetics
This is a two-hour class which meets once a week (the tutors are always
available throughout the week via email, phone, and online message boards set up to give the students an opportunity to discuss
the work together and with the tutors):
Thursdays 1-3 pm PST
To register
for the class, please email Emily Wells (registrar) at
emily at artesian-wells.com
