Reddit mentions: The best ancient greek history books

I do think Virtue is the highest good, and living with virtue in accordance with your nature is everything you should strive for. But the Stoics are pretty clear in their writings that the intended consequence of living Stoically is to reach a sense of fulfillment, flourishing, or however you want to translate "Eudaimonia" through living with virtue. So if you're unhappy and anxious, then you're not using all the Stoic tools available to you to overcome this. And that's fine! That's not an admonishment of you or your Stoic skillset - there has never been and never will be a Stoic Sage, it's natural for us to trip and tumble on this journey! What's important is that we get back up and keep working towards our ideal. If you read Meditations and Seneca's Letters, you know they both make references to the study of this philosophy being like wrestlers and boxers who get up over and over again no matter how many times they've been punched and kicked and defeated - and that's us now, against our opponent, Fortune. So don't despair that your life hasn't suddenly improved on Stoicism, your entire life is your Stoic journey - and small steps are still progress.

First you should always remember that "ruin and recovery come from within." You are so powerful in regards to yourself / your mind, and you just have to remember that at every turn - I have the power to change, I have the power to appropriately judge this impression, I have the power to set my goals appropriately!

And that last part (about setting goals appropriately) is essentially why I felt the need to comment, because if you feel your dreams are crumbling around you, then you're not setting your goals according to Stoic principles, and if you're not setting your goals appropriately, then you're not applying the Stoic Fork appropriately.

You should break down every situation into its individual parts, then separate them between things you can control and things you cannot. Let's take a job interview as an example: You want them to like you, you want the interview to go well, you want to get the job. None of those are entirely up to you! So switch them around, look at them differently. Set your goals thusly: "I will try my best, if nothing stops me, to be a likable person in this interview. I will do my best, as long as nothing prevents me, to give compelling answers to their questions and give the best interview I can." And the last part of the goal: getting the job? ENTIRELY out of your control if you think about it - they will be making that decision, not you, so why are you concerned with something outside your sphere of control? You should be focused only on things you can control. These two techniques are called goal internalization and the reserve clause.

On top of that, are you spending time on morning and evening meditations? I'm not talking about mindfulness meditation (although I do love it), I'm talking about the meditations recommended by the Stoics.
In the morning, visualize how your day will go, how you will interact with disagreeable people, how you will react to common disturbances in your life (traffic, horrible boss, lazy coworkers, etc.), and perhaps even bigger disturbances if you have time. Then end that meditation with applying the Stoic Fork "these things are not in my control, only my impressions and my (re)actions are in my control."
In the evening, review your day and ask yourself "What did I do well today? Where did I falter? Where could I have done better and how?" A lot of people say journaling this helps, I'm sure it does. I just do it all in my mind though right as I wake up and just as I'm falling asleep - it takes 5-10 minutes each time, and it's easy. I think it will vastly improve your situation.

And I don't think you should "let go of [your] hopes" - that's not what Stoicism tells you to do. Yes, you should control your desires and set appropriate goals for life, but you are allowed to prefer things in life. The key is not to let your happiness or fulfillment hinge solely on those things. For example, while it's natural that you should desire good health, you shouldn't let the loss of your health defeat you if it ever does happen. Health and many other things are preferred indifferents.

I'd also highly recommend reading Epictetus' Discourses - you will probably get a lot out of it.
What translation of Seneca's Letters did you read? I highly recommend this one, it's super easy to read and flows so smoothly. Perhaps if you were reading the older translations, some of it didn't come across so well - I certainly struggle through the older translations myself. That book is expensive, but perhaps your local library would have it...or it is possible to find it online...

Most importantly, and I know you know this, although if you're anything like me you also forget about it sometimes - reading a book isn't going to help you. Studying it and practicing what it teaches will. Since I started Stoicism, I've actually been compiling all my favorite quotes and explanations into a book for myself, because it helps me keep it all straight. You need to think of Stoicism like seriously religious people think about their religions - you can't just read the bible or qur'an or Torah once and call yourself a follower - it's about reading them, studying, finding analyses of them, studying them in depth, seeing what other scholars are saying about it, and then actually practicing it. And the Stoics knew this, it's why they recommend using maxims so heavily - having these short little phrases that stick in the brain so you can think of them right away and remind yourself "I need to be practicing this...I can do better..." So next time you read any Stoic literature, write down some short phrases that are easy to remember and recall, and memorize them, study them, get the true meaning behind them, and I think this will help Stoicism become a more ingrained way of life for you!

Always happy to help! For more info on Dionysus:

Subreddits:
/r/dionysus

Books to learn more about Dionysus (I used Amazon because it is easy, you may find these cheaper elsewhere):

Dionysus Myth and Cult - Considered by some Dionysians to be the Dionysian Bible.

Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life - Also very helpful scholarly source.

Ecstatic - Written by a Dionysian priest, this is a really good book for beginning to know the god.

Tending the Bull - Written by the same guy, focuses on a more specific aspect of Dionysus, within the Starry Bull tradition (Will explain more in the website section). If you do find yourself interested in the Starry Bull tradition, this author has several other books on amazon, you can find them on his author page.


Websites:

The Dionysion - Kinda old, lots of sites missing, but still has some useful info.

Temple of Dionysus - Another old site, might be of some use though.

The Theoi page for Dionysus - Lots of scholarly info on the god.

The Bakcheion - This is the website of the Starry Bull. It's a bit much at first, but the information is well sourced and presents a side of Dionysus many don't see. Please be sure to practice khernips before exploring their pantheon page, but their Dionysus page has a lot of great things, specifically the Feast of the Senses and Devotional Activities for Dionysus.

Here is my post after my first attempt at Enthousiasmos (Possession by the god)

Here is my post about one of my early rites for Dionysus.

Labrys, a Greek polytheist group, also celebrates Phalleforia, a Dionysian festival, once a year in Athens, and has some pretty good videos of the festival. Here are some:

2017 Phalleforia - 7:33 The official video of the festival

2017 Phalleforia - 4:19 A better edited version

2016 Phalleforia - 28:02 Unofficial video of the festival

2016 Phalleforia - 18:11 Official video of the festival

Finally here is Daemonia Nymphe's Hymn to Bacchus, probably the most well known musical hymn for the god.

Edit: Sorry if this is too much, but I missed one thing. The Bacchae's Sacred Chants from the Greek movie Two Suns in the Sky.

First, realize that your condition is normal for any "self-aware human being". We all go through these phases. The following is based on my attempts to cope with this condition. It is a ongoing process.

The key is to understand that you have to change the mental conditioning that has led you to this stage. The mental conditioning is the sum total of experiences in the various environments that you have been in since birth.

Change your immediate social environment and the change in internal perception will follow. Next, try and change your response to environmental stimulus from the pre-learnt ones. I recently read an article which beautifully explained the relationship between external stimulus and our response to it in a given environmental context (think Pavlov's dog). The gist is that, when we encounter a new stimulus in a given environmental context our initial response is based on our reading of the context, our past experiences and inferences from those. When next we again encounter the same stimulus in the same context we often choose to use the same response. Over time pathways are laid in the brain and the tuple {environmental context, stimulus, response} becomes a conditioning. Now guess what? By just putting you in the same environmental context your brain automatically jumps to the associated response even without the stimulus. Next realize that with the power of imagination we can recreate the environmental context without being physically in it. Thus i am responding in a known way to a stimulus without the context being actually present! The same also happens to be the case when the stimulus is absent but the context is recreated! Subconsciously we pick up on the context and the preset response is triggered (bodily changes) before we notice the absence of stimulus and control ourselves. Hence the great importance of controlling thought patterns.

Start by avoiding those social situations which you know are dragging you down. Learn to be comfortable in your own company i.e. cultivate healthy solitude. Exercise and maintain health so that the body helps you to control the mind. Slow down everything so that you have a chance to regulate your perception of an event and thus modulate the response. Use imagination to play out scenarios of successful response to situations before you encounter them. This is a well-proven technique. "Faking it" is a learning mechanism, not the end goal. Thus for example if you are always walking slouched and downcast, by consciously throwing out your chest, chin up, looking people in the eyes and walking straight you are breaking the previous conditioning and reinforcing a new positive one. By imagining (i.e. currently non-existent) and asserting confidence in a subject of choice, you are building up a new neural pathway so that as you progress the real confidence substitutes the scaffolding.

Here are some books which i found useful;

1. Science of Happiness: How our brains make us happy and what we can do to get happier - Nice overall view. Backed by science and not a pep talk.
   
   
2. The Body has a Mind of its Own - The synergy between mind and body.
   
   
3. Yoga and Western Psychology - Ignore the cover (some idiot's idea of appeal). The authoress was a practicing psychiatrist who saw parallels between classical Raja Yoga and western psychology (freud, jung, all that good stuff.). This book contains an overview of both and a comparison so the cultural context does not obscure the real substance. Invaluable. Nothing religious. Focuses on how to use the techniques for a better life.
   
   
4. Discouses and Selected Writings of Epictetus - Greek/Roman Stoicism. A very practical way to regulate perception and response.
   
   

Personal research, mostly. I'm a big history nerd with a slant toward religion and other macabre subject matter. I'm actually not as well read as I'd like to be on these subjects, and I basically blend different sources into a knowledge smoothie and pour it out onto a page and see what works for me and what doesn't.

I'll list a few books I've read that I enjoyed. There are certainly more here and there, but these are the "big ones" I was citing when writing all the comments in this thread. I typically know more about Christianity than the other major faiths because of the culture around me.

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years - Diarmaid MacCulloch

A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam - Karen Armstrong

The next two balance each other out quite well. Hardline anti-theism contrasted with "You know, maybe we can make this work".

The Case for God - Karen Armstrong

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins



Lately, I have been reading the Stoics, which like Buddhism, I find to be one of the more personally palatable philosophies of mind I have come across, although I find rational contemplation a bit more accessible to my Westernized nature.

Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters - Translated by Moses Hadas

Discourses and Selected Writings (of Epictetus) - Translated by Robert Dobbin

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius - Translated by George Long

I'm still waiting on Fed Ex to deliver this one:

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - William B. Irvine

Also, if you're into history in general, a nice primer for what sorts of things to dive into when poking around history is this fun series on YouTube. I usually watch a video then spend a while reading more in depth about whatever subject is covered that week in order to fill the gaps. Plus, John and Hank are super awesome. The writing is superb and I think, most importantly, he presents an overall argument for why studying history is so important because of its relevance to current events.

Crash Course: World History - John Green

So it depends on what exactly you are looking for. I remember when I was first looking into Seneca, I was very confused about what works were which, and what was contained in various books.

Seneca's works are generally split into the following categories:

• Letters/Epistles to Lucilius (Roughly 124 philosophical letter he wrote to a friend, meant to be published)
  
• Consolation Letters (Philosophical consolation letters he wrote to friends and family members)
  
• Moral Essays (Various philosophical essays, On the Shortness of Life, On Anger, On the Happy Life, etc...)
  
• Natural Questions (Seneca commenting on the natural sciences of his day―rivers and earthquakes, wind and snow, meteors and comets, etc..)
  
• Tragedies (Seneca re-wrote a bunch of classic tragedies from antiquity with his own twist)
  
  Most people will be more interested in the top three items from that list.
  
  The Penguin classics "Letters from a Stoic" gives you a small, hand picked selection of the Letters to Lucilius (maybe about 25% of the 124 Letters?). If you just want to get your feet wet to see if you like Seneca at all, then this is a decent place to start. I own it, the translation is ok, this was my first book on Seneca. My biggest issue with it is that, the table of contents for which specific letters are included is non-existent, so if you want to look up a letter, you have to scour through the book, hoping you find it, and all of the letters in that book are labeled with Roman Numerals, which I am pretty bad at remembering as soon as you go past the number 10, your mileage may vary with this one.
  
  The "Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters." looks like a good mix of Letters to Lucilius, Consolation Letters, and Moral Essays, but I don't own it, so can't say much about it beyond that.
  
  Oxford's University Press version of "Dialogues and Essays" looks like it has a nice mix of Consolation Letters and Moral Essays, and even an excerpt from Natural Questions, but no Letters to Lucilius, I don't own this one either.
  
  If you were only ever going to get two books, I would highly recommend Letters on Ethics by Chicago Press, which includes and excellent translation of all 124 Letters to Lucilius along with Hardship and Happiness which includes his best (in my opinion) mix of Moral Essays and Consolation Letters. They are relatively expensive, but worth it in the long run if you are serious about diving into Seneca.
  
  At one point I had the Loeb Editions of pretty much all his works, but since I can't read Latin at all, I didn't see them as too helpful, the translations were decent.
  
  So yeah, really it depends, hopefully some of that info was helpful to you.

>Your being friends with a relatively high-profile engineer really does not make your plans more coherent.

Oh my holy titty fucking christ. Continually harping on the "you have not explained this to my satisfaction" without specific questions is getting old. I am honestly not sure about what part of my plan is not coherent. Honestly. the inability to accurately describe what is inside my mind to others is my single greatest failing as a human being and I readily admit that.

1. Incorporate and prepare for resource allocation.
   
2. Begin online media campaign to raise awareness and accept resources.
   3.Build first facility to demonstrate feasibility of tech and iron out design complications yet to be realized. (this includes the Hughes-001 a scout drone of my design) Which will serve a variety of functions including safety and scientific purposes.
   
3. Introduce long range drone designs and test feasibility at the now SLE-0001.
   
4. Optimize agriculture production. (I plan to fly in Ron finley and Carleen Madigan and compensate them for their time) Train the first OFH agriculture specialists and prepare them for exponential growth.
   
5. Begin deployment of decentralized manufacturing grid. Supporters will receive 3D printers in their home that they can use for free but we can also remotely command to print parts we need. This is crucially essential to building the sheer number of drone chassis that will be needed within a very short amount of time.
   
6. Strategically build out SLE-0002 SLE-0003 SLE-0004 etc... There is a reason why I have been going around for the past 2 years securing hundreds of acres of land. I plan to fucking use it.
   
7. Connect SLE's using the long range drones in a metropolitan area. (this may take several years to do the first time)
   
8. Begin Operation POLR (exponential growth through the path of least resistance)
   
9. Begin A.I. program.
   
   
   Do you want me to give you my business plan word for word so you steal it? No thanks.
   
   > Can you honestly look at what you've typed here about the deployment of the Macedonian army and not understand why someone would think you are delusional?
   
   Not if that person is smart enough to understand that historical reference and the significance of the acheivment. Unheard of at the time.
   
   > If your plans really made sense you would be able to convey the gist of them in a way that similarly made sense. Yet you haven't... or were you going to claim again that I'm too stupid to understand it?
   
   Help me to help you Let me just walk you through every single facet of my plan so that you can run to Oprah and declare it your idea. If you have specific questions just ask them and I will try to help you.
   
   >So here you are claiming and claiming again that you and whoever are working on something that will revolutionize everything! while simultaneously shitting all over anyone skeptical of your claims and anything that contradicts you. Please take another moment to think critically about why people have responded to you the way they have.
   
   I am not pitching perpetual motion. Just an overall societal vision of using soon to be common technologies to disrupt industries and establish a new parcel delivery system that generates excessive energy surplus as a by product using less than 10,000 supporters out of 7 billion potential supporters. Culminating in a connected one world automated drone grid. This is why I am waiting for you to have an aha! eureka! moment.
   
   The reason why you believe I am insulting your intelligence is because I have explained this plan countless times and (I would estimate) less than 5% of people get it. And these are really smart people I talk to.
   So I have developed a callousness to the nay sayers.
   I don't have time to explain to you the way I see the world. You are probably not capable of ever getting it. And that is ok.
   
   You would think a human being that have been alive for the rise of cell phones would be more receptive to the possibility of this.
   
   >Perhaps you should combine this thought:
   
   Oh are you a therapist now?
   
   

People of the Book is almost pornography for bibliophiles. This book had me seriously considering going back to school to learn about document preservation.

I went through a period of wanting to read a lot of books about books about a year ago. I think I even have an old submission in r/books on the same subject. Here are a bunch of books I still have on my amazon wishlist that date to around that time. This will be a shotgun blast of suggestions, and some may be only tangentially related, but I figure more is better. If I can think of even more than this, I'll edit later:

The Man who Loved Books Too Much

Books that Changed the World

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

How to Read and Why

The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Classics for Pleasure

An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books

The Library at Night

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Time Was Soft There

I have even more around here somewhere...

Edit: Ok, found a couple more....

Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book-Hunter in the 21st Century

At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries

Candida Hofer

Libraries in the Ancient World

The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read

A Short History of the Printed Word

Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption

Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work

The Book on the Bookshelf

A History of Illuminated Manuscripts

Bookmaking: Editing, Design, Production

Library: An Unquiet History

Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms

A Passion for Books: A Book Lover's Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Lore, and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for, and Appreciating Books

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

And yet I still can't find the one I'm thinking of. Will get back to you...

Fuck yeah, I found it!

That last is more about the woman who own the store than about books, but it's awash in anecdotes about writers and stories we all know and love. Check it out.

In my view, Nietzsche was overly optimistic in citing the will to power as the fundamental drive of living humans. Ironic that one so associated with nihilism would be too optimistic. Reading Nietzsche helped me realize that the vast majority of people don't really care about finding meaning in life, and are perfectly happy substituting complacent contentment for meaning. Contentment, on the surface, feels like existential fulfillment, but it's impossible to stress how harmful that nondistinction can be. Meaning-seeking is proactive and individualistic, of which most people are neither and few are either. Most people who (mis)read Nietzsche see themselves as the higher man, rather than a sheep, for who wishes to see himself as an ovine puppet? Nietzsche is fantastic at exposing hypocrisy, including (indirectly) in his own readers, even if they're not self-honest enough to see it. He was one of the best arguers for relativism of beliefs, showing how our morals (and most other ideas) are influenced so heavily by circumstance and bias that they can scarcely be called objective or untouchably sacred.

Beyond that, Nietzsche's Apollonian-Dionysian distinction is my favorite dichotomy in philosophy, one that has shaped many aspects of my thinking. He didn't coin it, but he popularized it (along with Walter Otto).

Nietzsche goes against so many values my society holds, so he's rejected, caricatured, and miscontextualized left and right. To be clear, I don't think many people should subscribe to his philosophy; it's not for everyone, and it wouldn't be feasible for everyone to be Nietzschean. But (and I say this as a female liberal) I think his particular idealization of masculinity is something to be celebrated, something quite missing in our imbalanced culture today (especially when most people who think they're manly are anything but).

He's a delightful writer, and probably the easiest philosopher for me to read (factoring in how important the flow of prose is), and he's so independent from philosophical canon that laypersons could read him without immense difficulty or much preparation. I think they should. Nietzsche has a lot of things to say that people would benefit from hearing and understanding.

Robert Graves' 2 volume The Greek Myths is comprehensive, but there's a catch: Graves has arranged and chosen his version of the myths in order to facilitate a kind of narrative continuity that's not particularly true to the way that the Greeks understood their myths. Karl Kerenyi and Carl Kerenyi's The Greek Gods and The Greek Heroes are closer to the source material, and will give you a better sense of the variety and disagreements involved. Ultimately, though, it's a matter of preference: Do you want narrative sweep, or fidelity to tradition?

Alternately, you could go back to the sources themselves. Ovid's Metamorphoses is basically a treasury of Greco-Roman myth. Again, there's a catch: Ovid's theme is that of things transforming into something else (hence the title), so there's a definite bias in favor of myths that suit that motif. That said, Ovid is also as close as you're going to get to the original form of a lot of Greco-Roman myths, so it's hard to go wrong there.

If you really want to do some heavy lifting on the Greco-Roman myths, get a copy of Pausanius' Guide to Greece, Vol. I and Vol. II. This is basically a travelogue of Greece, written for the Roman Emperor, and it lists in detail most of the locations associated with Greek myths and legends, and gives some detail on most of the lesser known ones. There's a lot to sift through here, and you'll probably want to have an Atlas of the Ancient World on hand to get a sense of where he's talking about at any given time, so I definitely don't recommend starting out here, but if you're looking for really in-depth source material, this is the place to go.

For the Norse myths, there's the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, as well as a slew of sagas that are worth looking into. On of the most famous is certainly The Nibelungenlied, on which Wagner based his [Ring Cycle]() (you know, "Ride of the Valkyries," and all that), which was the basis for much of Lord of the Rings. Personally, my favorite of the sagas I've read so far is the Volsungs.

For the Sumerians, the obvious starting point is Gilgamesh. Our sources are pretty fragmented, and there are editions that reflect that fragmentation, but for pure readability, I suggest the Herbert Mason retelling. Or, if you're really into it, get both and compare. The go-to author for Sumerian myth and religion in general is Samuel Noah Kramer; his book Sumerian Mythology is as good a general survey as you're likely to find, particularly if you're interested in the archeological method behind our knowledge of the Sumerians.

What else? For the Egyptians, E. A. Budge is your man. Dover Books in general has a good series of older, public domain works on mythology, including books on Japanese and Chinese mythology. I wish I had some sources to give you on meso-American or African myth, but those are areas of inquiry I'm just delving into myself. But then, you're probably overwhelmed as it is.

Good luck.

Good morning! It's near 5am and I can't sleep, woo.

Right, well I go to Swansea university! I'll in my second year of my superduper awesome history degree come September/October time. I did literature for a year and a half before truly acknowledging it bored me silly and it was the historical context and the impact the literature and the time had on one another. Seeing how I haven't studied history since I was 14 this was deemed both a bold and a stupid move by many. I am studying all the cool stuff this year: Ww1 and its impact on society (perfect for my literary angle), Roman warfare, Norman warfare, Ancient Greek city states, silly compulsory core module where our assignments are centered around a specific type of source rather than era which could be interesting anddd got a study trip which I've been told is to Italy this year.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0006863434/ref=aw_ls_2_4?colid=2QNVOI81XJ2RT&coliid=IJM76MS576NA4
Book! Courtesan and fishcakes: the consuming passions of classical Athens. For one the title amuses me somewhat and would be awesome on my bookshelf. But more importantly last year I rocked at my classical Athens module and was second highest in the class and led our athenian style assembly because I'm a bossy boots. I intend to do better with Greek city states thus year which means more and wider reading. Even if it doesn't end up directly tying in, a good base of knowledge is never a bad thing.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0863560237/ref=aw_ls_2_7?colid=2QNVOI81XJ2RT&coliid=INI4OFB9X5L34
The crusades through Arab eyes! Seriously this is an amazing book, especially as someone who adores crusader warfare and history. Whilst it doesn't currently directly link to my modules, it is a fascinating book and I'm super good at twisting things to my interest (i'm looking at you core module and third year)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B001LROSD6/ref=aw_ls__10?colid=153S0RWLKO7S0&coliid=IKGNVIMCS2GG4
Harvest moon, island of happiness, to keep me from murdering the 19 year olds when trying to arrange the numerous group projects I know are coming. Especially as I've learnt the hard way that many currently can't even keep their bibliographies together, find pictures or get out of bed on time.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00E5RZC9S/ref=aw_ls__1?colid=1JBIXB61FKU32&coliid=IZC4KR4CV3HT8
Sticky page markers, for all my referencing and flicking back and forth in books.

>It had nothing to do with sexual preference of the period.

I would contend that this is incorrect, according to most evidence from the period. The small penis was viewed as the ideal of male beauty in Greek society. Big penises were, as I noted, considered to be vulgar and a depiction of a man as being more beast than man, or as belonging to a barbarian. This was a matter of sexual culture, as well.

It's well-documented that the ideal male penis, according to the ancient Greeks, was "small, thin, and had a pointed foreskin," as noted by McLaren (2007).

Good sources which discuss this matter are:

Garland, Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks, 1998.

Hodges, The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome: Male Genital Aesthetics and Their Relation to Lipodermos, Circumcision, Foreskin Restoration, and the Kynodesme, 2001.

>Here, the allusion to the posthe clearly, although humorously, summons up an image of the entire penis, albeit one that conforms to the aesthetic ideal seen in artistic depictions of gods and heroes. The imprecise use of the word posthe serves the humorous context because, as others have shown, the Greeks valued the longer over the shorter prepuce in relation to the length of the entire penis, and the smaller over the larger penis as a whole. Even if one were to argue that the word posthe was being used precisely here, the rules of proportion, as deduced from art, would require that a petite posthe be part of a proportionally even more petite penis. (Hodges, 2001)

McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History, 2007.

McNiven, The Unheroic Penis: Otherness Exposed, 1995.

>Most nude male figures in Athenian vase painting are standard types: handsome, slim, and well muscled. With few exceptions, the penis is small. That this was associated with the ideal in ancient Athens is clear from Aristophanes' Clouds (l.l0l4).

You may also read Kenneth Dover's book, Greek Homosexuality.

I like the trial and death of Socrates.

It may not be the best place to start in the whole world of philosophy, but it is the best I know of. The Euthyphro dialog is particularly fun and accessible as far as primary sources go.

People will tell you to stick to/stay away from primary sources at first. Don't listen to either party. Read what you are interested in. Reading what you are interested will kindle your love of philosophy and improve your philosophy reading skills.

That said, Kant is not a good place to start. You now know one place that is not a good place to start. Best of luck.

> while his peers

Let's not paint with too wide a brush now. I'm Greek, but was raised without religion and have been an atheist for years now. The vast majority of Greek Orthodox priests and monks are more than happy to just sit down and have a conversation with someone regardless of if they're gay, atheist, muslim, or whatever else.

Just like Catholicism. Or Buddhism. The religion is made up of many different people, and the holy men are the same way.

One of my father's friends is a Greek Orthodox priest. He trained as a priest right after high school, and the guy is reaching 70 now. Growing up, my father knew him because he was the priest in their village. They kept in touch and now the guy is posted in Toronto. Him and my father speak every now and then, mostly when the priest gets some cool piece of technology he wants to show off. He drives an STI, has an Android phone with a custom ROM he put on it himself, and he goes on weekend skiing trips (on which he ends up looking hilarious in his long black robes and long North Face skiing jacket). He's been on the side of homosexuals for many years, and always said it was a matter of time before they become accepted by the church. Obviously the Metropolitan in the OP isn't speaking for the entire church but he's speaking for many in it.

One more thing - we all have this idea that the Byzantine Empire (pretty much the origin of the current Greek Orthodox church) was this ass-backwards nation of monks and nuns but, in reality, it was a very progressive Empire with a lot of things you wouldn't expect outside of Ancient Greece/Rome and modern societies like open relationships and homosexuals.

EDIT: Shameless plug for an amazing podcast and great book (links don't show because of subreddit style but hover over the words "amazing podcast" and "great book" for the podcast site and Amazon book link respectively).

Hi!

This is a fantastic project and it is clear you have a lot of enthusiasm for history. I especially like how you tried to get away from the old historiographical view that Rome 'fell' in 476, and I think your efforts will be really good for getting people into this exciting field - my own interest in the empire began when I read about it in the Cartoon History of the Universe! There are still a few simplifications/mistakes though, so I'd encourage people to check out my post here at /r/askhistorians, and if anyone here would like to read a bit more on the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire, these books are excellent introductions for the general reader!

Questions are also welcome, and good luck with your project OP!

The Romans had a highly established logistical system. Every province was responsible for maintaining a series of depots and when imperial armies marched through, they could requisition food and equipment while maintaining a minimal supply train. Additionally, the Romans could build up supplies of all kind in advance of campaigns: food, animal feed, equipment, horses, beasts of burden, etc. According to various papyri (see the papryi from Panopolis), when Constantius II was preparing to campaign against Julian, 120k metric tons of wheat in Brigantia and 3 million in the Cottian Alps were to prepared in advance. During the republican era, Roman armies were fed by allied states or were delivered by the state. Having the Mediterranean Sea and lands plentiful in rivers in your backyard makes moving enormous amounts of supplies very easy. The lands where the Rhine legions were stationed couldn't possibly feed them at all and so the state had to bring in enormous amounts of food every month. Using the Saône, Moselle, and Rhine Rivers, you can move grain almost entirely by water. The Romans during the republican era also maintained a series of supply depots. If necessary, the Romans would send out foraging parties but this was only a short term solution. If you want to read more on Roman logistics, I recommend the book The Logistics of the Roman Army at War (264 B.C.-A.D. 235).

Logistics in Alexander the Great's time wouldn't have been that enormously different from the Romans. Again, it helped that he used captured Persian food stores to feed his army. His rapid campaign also resulted in the rapid political disintegration of the Persian government and Alexander won over former enemies pretty rapidly; this would have solved his supply problem pretty quickly. To read more on this subject, please see Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army.

Hannibal relied heavily on his Italian allies to feed his army. People seem to forget that when Hannibal invaded Italy, he courted many of Rome's disgruntled allies to his cause. Of course, it also helps that you're invading in rich farmlands.

Much is often made of Napoleon lightening the load of his soldiers so that they could move faster and in doing so, they had to live off the land. This is partly true and partly false. The French had their own series of supply hubs and depots that were stocked up in advance of major campaigns. At the height of his reign, Napoleon also had the advantage of have many allies and vassals who provided for his army. Living off the land was only a temporary solution and it was probably more like part looting part foraging forests for berries and game. If you want to read more on this subject, I recommend Napoleon's Italian Campaigns: 1805-1815.

In pre-industrial warfare, there were simple logistical laws that no army could break.

The Constitutio Antoniniana which granted Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire was issued in 212 AD and there is quite a lot of Roman history after that. Soon follows the so called “crisis of the 3rd century” between 235 and 284 AD throughout which the empire was shaken by internal as well as external problems. Next comes Late Antiquity, a period which has attracted a lot of scholarly attention in recent decades. It saw some huge changes like Christianity’s rise to dominance or the final partition of the empire into a western and eastern half that you mentioned. And while the western part already disappeared throughout the 5th century the Eastern Roman Empire would survive for a long time further. The rise of the first Islamic caliphate in the 7th century AD cost it much of its territory and caused further transformations. This surviving remnant of the Roman Empire, now centred around Constantinople, is usually called the Byzantine Empire. Its eventful history would continue through the entire Middle Ages until 1453 AD when it was finally conquered by the Ottomans. So all in all there is more than a millennium of further Roman history to cover.

• Michael Kulikowski, The Triumph of Empire. The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine (2016) might be a good point to start as it begins right in the period you’re already familiar with and leads you through the 3rd century crisis to the beginning of Late Antiquity.
  
  
• Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity. AD 150-750 (1989) is pretty much the foundational text for the modern scholarship on the named period. Its short, richly illustrated and just all around fantastic.
  
  
• Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire. A new history of Rome and the Barbarians (2007) covers the developments that would lead to the end of the Western Roman Empire.
  
  
• Peter Sarris, Empires of Faith. The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam. 500-700 (2011) has a larger focus than just Roman history and also concerns itself with the post Roman kingdoms in the west as well as (like the title says) the rise of Islam.
  
  
• Judith Herrin, Byzantium. The surprising life of a Medieval Empire (2009) is probably one of the best ways to first familiarise yourself with the huge timespan that is Byzantine history.
  
  
• Averil Cameron, The Byzantines (2006) is another excellent introduction to the entirety of Byzantine history.
  
  There are quite a lot of books that go into further detail about the different periods of Byzantine history but for the start those two general introductions should probably suffice. Of course you can always ask for more. I hope this helps!

Starting out in philosophy, I think, requires a historical approach. In order to fully understand some work (say, Marx's Das Kapital) means you need the background literature that led up to that work (say, Hegel's Phenomenology). The important thing to remember when reading through the history of western philosophy, is that all of these writers are in dialogue with one another, and that none of their views makes perfect sense in a vacuum. So, I suggest we start at the beginning.

Plato. Folks will tell you to read the pre-socratics, but if you aren't a professional or a student, it's not entirely necessary. Plato is the ground floor in terms of western philosophy and the upshot is that the dialogues are fairly easy and light reading (in the context of western philosophy, which can often get very dense). I'd suggest the Meno which covers a bunch of intro epistemology, the Republic, which covers a lot of P's political and moral thought. The trial and death of socrates is also really great. It's a collection of dialogues.

Then I'd suggest Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics which is a direct response to Plato.

Then I'd move on to the early modern guys. Some will tell you to dig into the Romans and the medieval stuff, but again, if you just want a beginners list, I'd skip em for now.

In terms of early modern stuff, the period runs roughly from Francis Bacon or Galileo, to Kant. All of these guys are debating with each other so its important to move through it chronologically, in order to understand the context of the writings.

I always suggest that my students pick up this book: http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Philosophy-Anthology-Primary-Sources/dp/0872209784/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375192962&sr=1-1&keywords=early+modern+philosophy+reader
Get an old edition, and a dirty used cheap one if you are buying the book. No point in going nuts when there's no difference between editions.

It is an anthology (with good translations) of Descartes' Meditations, Spinoza's Ethics, Leibniz's Monadology, Locke's Essay, Berkeley's Three Dialogues, Hume's Enquiry, and Kant's Prolegomena. Plus more- checkout the table of contents.
This book will give you the whole history of early modern, without you having to buy a ton of different books. But these are the books a beginner would read, in this order.

Once my beginner had finished these texts, he'd have a good idea of what the history of philosophy looks like, and would be in a really good position to start tackling more contemporary stuff. It will also give you an idea of what issues in philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, political philosophy, etc.) you are interested in so you can dial in what else you want to read.

Remember!: All of these books are in the public domain and you can find free copies online. The only downside is that the translations can be a little rough.

I also suggest (as you can no doubt tell by now), that a beginner tackle primary sources. People will tell you to read some secondary book that "breaks it down for you," but the only way to build up the ability to read the history of philosophy is by actually digging in and getting messy. Philosophy can be really hard to read, but you get the hang of it. But this only happens if you struggle with the text's themselves. The payoff is worth it.

Edit: /u/realy provided an absolutely badass reading list from St. John's undergraduate great books program. Check it out!!

>Is Attica the name of the main body of land in southern Greece?

Attica is the general area around Athens.

> Was the main body of the Pelopennes the northern landmass of Greece?

The Peloponnesus is the big southern peninsula (Though it looks almost like an island on maps) where Sparta was.

>I've found reference to the Corinth canal; what is the name of the water passage that connected the Adriatic and Aegean seas?

I don't recall reading anything about a Corinthian Canal in Thucydides (Though it's been a while). The canal there is a relatively recent thing.

Good luck with Thucydides. It can be a difficult text. If you are interested, the best version to read is The Landmark Thucydides by Robert Strassler. There is a lot of good commentary, useful maps, and timelines. It's really helpful for deciphering what can be a very dense work. It's also not very expensive!

It's not Marx, but Plato's dialog Crito sets up the social contract theory. Also, reading Plato is fun and good for you.

https://www.amazon.com/Trial-Death-Socrates-Plato/dp/0872205541

It's ultimately utter horseshit and a pure rationalization for colonial exploitation and the rise of the bourgeoisie, but if you want to understand American society, Locke's Second Treatise of Government is foundational.

Rousseau's The Social Contract and Second Discourse are universally foundational and Rousseau's fairly easy to read and not a total chud.

Mr. Dick remembers Kant's Towards a Perpetual Peace as being pretty o.k., but reading Kant is always daunting.

I'm a fan of Antony Beevor.

I know, I know, he's an author, not a book. "Stalingrad" and "Berlin" were excellent, imo. I think you can trust whatever he writes.

I really enjoyed I F Stone's "Trial of Socrates."

The lengths Stone went to to write this is almost as fascinating as the book. (if for no other reason than that he can put a paragraph together that doesn't make your eyes glaze over. Same with Beevor.)

Actually, I think Stone's book is my all-time favorite in the genre. If I had a spare copy, I would send it to you!

It seems to me that the two strengths of the series are world-building and character depth. If this is your favorite series, you probably like it for one or both of those things.

If you like it for the world building, I recommend history books such as the History of the Peloponnesian War or A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.

If you like complex characters, then the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. Another strength of asoiaf is that it isn't too heavy handed regarding magic in the story, and this is a strength of the Mistborn series too.

I'm interested in this period too and have seen recommended for the immediate aftermath and wars 'Ghost on the Throne' and 'Dividing the Spoils'. If you're interested in the wider historical aftermath for the period and have the appetite for a 1000 page tome then you might want to look at 'From Alexander to Actium'.

​

Unfortunately for this time period (the 'Hellenistic Period') we don't have a good narrative history from early sources like we do for some other periods. Herodotus, Thucydidesand Xenephon tell us the story of Greece from roughly 500-362, then we have a frustrating gap for the rise of Philip II (Alexander's father and seen by many ancients as more impressive than Alexander), then various accounts such as Arrian's of Alexander's conquests 336-323. But then there's a big 60 year gap after Alexander until Polybius's histories start in 264 (by which time this is the story of how the Successor Kingdoms and Carthage alike are ultimately defeated by Rome).

[Links in para above are to excellent scholarly versions: Landmark editions in particular are fantastic with maps, good footnotes and annexes etc. But as these are all ancient and so out of copyright you can probably get old translations for free on kindle etc.]

Right, back again, so as books go you really can not go wrong with Jean Bingen's Hellenistic Egypt, and/or Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age, Alexander to Actium, and The Hellenistic Age: A Short History all by the eminent Peter Green with the last one being especially useful to familiarize yourself with the topic, and here is a link where you can read Greek Nomos and Egyptian Religion by Ronaldo Guilherme Gurgel Pereira without having to go buy a book and wait for it. Now, I tend to favour Oxford journals and publications a bit too much but I think you should not go too far astray in reading Social Unrest and Ethnic Coexistence in Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid Empire and the Oxford bibliography of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt has some good recommendations.

PDF of Evolution of the Technique of Mummification by Riana McArthur this one is a bit self explanatory and can also be read online for free.

Plus, a somewhat random NatGeo article about Lion Mummification in Hellenistic Egypt (this one I remembered just because it is kind of neat, I mean imagine if one of these was resurrected a la The Mummy :-p)

Edit: I just condensed the other comment into this one for convenience.

If you're interested in the 'rarer' and more obscure Greek myths, try to find copies of The God of the Greeks and The Heroes of the Greeks both by Karl Kerenyi. He does an amazing job pulling many of the Greek myths into a very good narrative and really focuses on a lot of the lesser known stories or versions of stories, many which I've not seen referenced outside the source material.

I would highly recommend starting with Epictetus and Socrates.

Stay away from the popular marketing stoics of our age, as they teach that stoicism is not about exalted truth and virtue, but that it is about lying to gain power, fame, fortune, and money. That is the exact OPPOSITE of True Stoicism and a sign of our times.

Many good recommendations here: http://twitter.com/philocowboy

"Instead of the lying marketing stoics and foolish professors, read Epictetus who honored Socrates: https://www.amazon.com/Discourses-Selected-Writings-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140449469/ "

You should read the book Courtesans and Fishcakes: the Consuming Passions of Ancient Athens. tl;dr: sex with women was very popular with classical Athenian men. As was drinking to oblivion and, perhaps more surprisingly, eating fish hot off the skillet. Fun fact: Socrates was present at every drinking party recorded during his lifetime.

The Greeks called Dionysus Bacchus as well. There's a really good book called Dionysus: Myth and Cult that goes into the particulars of his history as a deity worshiped in Greece and cultic practices that sprung up.

I think my favorite Dionysus story is when the maenads wanted two house wives to come with them to the forest, but since they were devotees of Hera they stayed home. Well, old Dionysus didn't like that very much so he decided to visit them. Things ended poorly for the women. The walls started bleeding honey, they went mad, and tore their eyes out. He's my favorite Greek god. I actually have a statue of him that my cat likes to knock over.

So, it's important to draw a difference between the planet Venus and the goddess Venus. They're not the same, even though they're definitely mythologically connected; properly speaking, the ancient Greeks and Romans considered Venus/Aphrodite (who also weren't the same but generally considered to be so similar as to be indistinguishable) an Olympian, while the planet Hesperos/Eosphoros was a celestial wandering titan. In other words, the planet generally didn't have cult like the goddess proper did unless you were a magus.

I started out worshipping Venus as an astrologer-magus, but my practice has since evolved to focus on the Greek goddess Aphrodite, and based on my experiences, they're not the same but they are associated with each other. According to the ancient Greek calendar used in Athens, Aphrodite had monthly festivals on the fourth day of the lunar month as well as other yearly festivals here and there. Several resources for working with her would include:

• Theoi.com's article on Aphrodite
  
• Roman Religion: A Sourcebook
  
• Ancient Greek Religion
  
• Worshipping Aphrodite: Art and Cult in Ancient Athens

Discourses by Epictetus

A truly amazing book by a slave-turned-philosopher on having a mindset to face any challenges one might face.

Fun fact: The teachings of this philosopher bore a significant influence on Marcus Aurelius and his writings in The Meditations; as well as further Christian scholars down the ages as they adapted Epictetus' teachings to their own by replacing Epictetus' view of "fate" or "destiny" with one of "God".

I posted this a few days ago; just ignore the Norse stuff. As far as non-fiction, you can't do much better than the work of Walter Burkert. Ancient Greek Religion is probably a better introduction; you'll have to read something about Eleusis, too.

If you'd like to get into myth in general, definitely look into archetypal theory and criticism. It can be challenging, but it's very much worth it and quite illuminating.

EDIT: It might also be a good idea to keep this on hand.

Byzantium by Judith Herrin is extensive yet accessible. She is a professional archaeologist and an academic. The book is a rung on the ladder above pure popular history but is still readable if you have little background info on Byzantium. It is also a broad overview encompassing the entire span of the Empire.

I also recommend Lars Brownworth's 12 Byzantine Rulers podcast for a first contact with Byzantium. This is less academic and more popular history than Herrin's book, but is very well researched and also covers the entire span of Byzantine history from its Roman roots to its fall.

Not pop history, but this is an amazing primer on the Hellenistic world. I loved it.


http://www.amazon.com/The-Hellenistic-Age-History-Chronicles/dp/0812967402

If you are looking to get handle on the Aristotle metaphysical worldview first, which is incredibly helpful since Aquinas builds on it, I recommend the fairly short book Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy. The book is only 200 pages and is written by Mortimer Adler, a renowned polymath and professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago (who actually ended up becoming Catholic before he died).

In fact, while u/Suppa-time recommends Feser's Aquinas, which is an absolutely great recommendation, I found reading Aristotle for Everybody first was enormously helpful and that I was able to hit the ground running when I picked up Feser's book.

I think you will learn the most by reading five textbooks, such as A History of Philosophy, volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5; or something like Metaphysics: The Fundamentals, The Fundamentals of Ethics, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, and An Introduction to Political Philosophy.

If what you have in mind is more of a "Great Books" program to get your feet wet with some classic works that are not too difficult, you could do a lot worse than:

• Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, often published together under the title The Trial and Death of Socrates. Socrates is so important that we lump together all Greek philosophers before him as "the Presocratics," and this cycle of dialogues is a great window on who he was and what he is famous for.
  
• The Basic Works of Aristotle. "The philosopher of common sense" is not a particularly easy read. Cicero compared his writing style to "a flowing river of gold," but all the works he prepared for publication are gone, and what we have is an unauthorised collection of lecture notes written in a terse, cramped style that admits of multiple interpretations. Even so, one can find in Aristotle a very attractive system of metaphysics and ethics which played a major role in the history of philosophy, and holds up well even today.
  
• René Descartes, Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes is called the father of modern philosophy, not so much because modern philosophers have widely followed his particular positions (they haven't) but because he set the agenda, in a way, with his introduction of methodological scepticism.
  
• David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. I think Elizabeth Anscombe had it right in judging Hume a "mere brilliant sophist", in that his arguments are ultimately flawed, but there is great insight to be derived from teasing out why they are wrong.
  
• If I can cheat just a little more, I will lump together three short, important treatises on ethics: Immanuel Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, and Anscombe's paper "Modern Moral Philosophy".

Hmmm...so many recommendations. First, you need to have a basic grasp of philosophy (particularly Aristotelian philosophy, which leads to Thomistic thought).

• Aristotle for Everybody is very handy for getting a very basic grasp of philosophy as it pertains to the four causes and natural law.
  
  
• Handbook of Catholic Apologetics: Reasoned Answers to Questions of Faith uses a lot of natural philosophy and Thomistic thought to give "reasoned answers to questions of Faith."
  
  
• Transformation in Christ: On the Christian Attitude is a very dense, philosophical tome on Catholic philosophical thought. Very insightful and...really a work of art.
  
  
• Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio is a beautiful work from John Paul II explaining how the Church uses faith and reason together to defend Her claims.
  
  There are...so many more recommendations I could give, but working your way through these will take some time.
  
  >My dislike more from the fact that Catholics seem to think that these views should be encoded in society's laws rather than that they hold them.
  
  All of civil law ought to find its root cause in natural moral law. The Church uses not simply faith alone to defend Her claims, but also natural law. As such, there are certain Truths present (and observable) in natural law that should be reflected in our everyday behavior and legislated by the civil authority.
  
  We believe in an objective right and an objective wrong: a defined good and a defined evil. The difficulty, I think, is getting people to see the same thing!

Since you mention wanting to learn about other neo pagan belief systems, I'll speak up for Helenic polytheism, which is the modern worship of the Greek gods, usually with an emphasis on reconstructing what the ancients really practiced.

Kharis: Hellenic Polytheism Explored https://www.amazon.com/dp/143823192X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_b7E6BbE517CQB. This is the book I recommend giving to relatives who want to know who we are and what we practice in the modern age.

Greek Religion https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674362810/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_c8E6Bb542VQ1W. This is an academic text on religion in ancient Greece that is very useful both in learning what the ancients did and believed as well as a source book used by many modern practitioners as they adapt ancient beliefs and practices to modern life.

For a scholarly but interesting book about ancient Greek religious practices, check out Burkert's Greek Religion. For Norse religion, I'd just jump in and start reading the Poetic Edda.

Fortunately, there's still a wealth of original sources available regarding Greek and Roman religion, as well as Norse to a slightly lesser extent. Sadly, much of what's known today about pre-Christian Celtic religions comes from secondhand accounts of invading armies, or from the archaeological record, so it's not nearly as complete.

I utterly adore Libraries of the Ancient World. It's a brilliant book, very well written. I haven't read anything else, so, that's my only recommendation...

The "Tao of Seneca" just uses the public domain Richard Mott Gummere translation, which can be found for free on Wikisource, along with the rest of Seneca's writings.

A YouTuber who goes by the name The Rugged Pyrrhus has recorded all of the letters using the Gummere translation, and I think he does a better job than what I've heard of the "Tao of Seneca" audiobook.

In general, I think it's always good to have multiple translations in order to compare. The Wikisource version includes Gummere's footnotes, which can be helpful, so I would reference that one. Unlike the Penguin edition, Wikisource also has all of Seneca's letters. The only modern translation that I know of that has all of the letters is Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca) translated by Margaret Graver, but I don't own it and can't comment on the quality (other than what the Amazon reviews say).

So you are probably fine with Penguin and Wikisource, but if you want a modern translation of all the letters, Margaret Graver's book might be the one to buy.

Edit: If you don't care about having a modern translation of all the letters and you enjoy Seneca, perhaps look into getting Dialogues and Essays (Oxford World's Classics), which you can supplement with the public domain Wikisource translations for comparison. Unlike the Oxford World Classics edition, the Margaret Graver book has all of Seneca's essays, but it is a bit more expensive.

May I recommend the following book

Its absolutely essential reading for all questions of movement and supply.

I would say though that for a warband (assuming something Viking-esque) that 20-40 miles per day sounds reasonable (depending on terrain and availability of supplies obviously). 20 miles standard, up to 40 miles if they are really, really pushing it (and don't assume they can keep it up for long).

I am assuming they are on foot. On horse it's a different story. Different breeds of horse have different levels of stamina. But the average horse is generally more delicate than the average human. If your warband ride their horses for 40 miles in a day they are likely to have a lot of dead horses.

I've heard a figure quoted of about 12-15 miles per day with horses - if you want to keep them fit and healthy.

Yes, yes, I know various horse nomads could do more than that. As I said, different breeds of horses.

Also one book I've been curious is this

http://www.amazon.com/Greek-Religion-Walter-Burkert/dp/0674362810/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463239850&sr=8-1&keywords=greek+religion

it says it's good, but it was written in the seventies. Has there been any great development since then?

reddit.com/r/Stoicism

The philosophy she's advocating sounds a great deal like the teachings of Epictetus the Stoic. I highly recommend his work.

Do you want to stick with Roman stuff? Because Thucydides (history of the Peloponnesian War) is amazing. It is dealing with Greece centuries before the Romans got going, but really fascinating. This is a great way to read it as well, with lots of maps and diagrams and such.

If you want to stick with Roman: Caesar Civil Wars is ok, but I think you find it less compelling than Gallic Wars. You might enjoy the early books of Livy, about the beginnings of Rome. The Roman historian Sallust also has two different monographs: one of the War with Catiline and one about the Jugurthine War in Africa. The latter one might be of interest to you. link

I've also heard of this book which might interest the OP. But yeah, if you're looking for a good book on Thomism, you can't go wrong with Feser.

My favorite books by him include How to Read a Book and Aristotle for Everybody.

I would highly recommend this author for anyone looking to study Thomas Aquinas - or for anyone who simply would like an introduction to philosophy.

If you have the time I highly recommend you check out this book.
https://www.amazon.com/Trial-Socrates-I-F-Stone/dp/0385260326

It's not long, it's a easy read and I found it fun. It doesn't take an 'anti' stance, he's just putting together the larger picture. He looks at what the primary sources have to say and then puts that into the wider picture of what was happening in Athens (and Greece) at the time. I'm no expert on Greek history or philosophy, though I do love reading about both and I found it assessable and insightful.

I started to reread it two years ago and left the damn thing at an airport bar. Hopefully someone found it and gave it a read. The only way a book should go.

There is a book [Sailing From Byzantium] (http://www.amazon.com/Sailing-Byzantium-Empire-Shaped-World/dp/055338273X) by Colin Wells that is about this very subject. It is a fantastic read. I would highly recommend it. It talks about the legacy of the Empire in the West, Middle East, and in the Slavic world.

IIRC I. F. Stone's thesis was that Socrates had actually fomented rebellion. There had been some sort of coup (or attempted coup) and there was speculation that he'd actually been an instigator.

I have no idea at this point whether that's actually plausible given the historical data, but it's interesting to contemplate.

Plato's account obviously lauds Socrates and makes his trial out to be pure persecution of free thought, but we should take that with a grain of salt, right?

For those interested:

• The Little Prince
  
• Eating Animals
  
• The Hero With A Thousand Faces
  
• The Illustrated World's Religions
  
• Jihad vs. McWorld
  
• Collapse
  
• Just And Unjust Wars
  
• Descent Into Chaos
  
• The Landmark Thucydides
  
• A People's History of the United States

My favorite is Karl Kerenyi: The Gods of the Greeks and The Heroes of the Greeks.

I'd recommend this:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Alexander-Great-Logistics-Macedonian-Army/dp/0520042727

Its a great introduction to the nature of logistics and is relevant for any pre-vehicle period as frankly, the equations don't change.

Alexander is tremendously well known for his logistical expertise. Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army is one of the go-to texts about military logistics in the ancient world.

http://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Great-Logistics-Macedonian-Army/dp/0520042727

Some from my shelf

Arsenals of Folly

The Cold War

On China

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

NATO's Return to Europe

On War

Bonus: The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War

Around 8 pages of The Landmark Thycydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War. It is a very dense read, but I am enjoying it.

Penguin Classics is the most recommended. I finished it a few months ago and loved it.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Discourses-Selected-Writings-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140449469

I flick between Robert Dobbin's and Robin Hard's, but spend more time with Dobbin's. It feels a bit more immediate and impactful for me:

https://www.amazon.com/Discourses-Selected-Writings-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140449469

If you can afford it, get them both - they're both fantastic.

I can't recommend this book enough:

The Classical World by Robin Lane Fox

Also very good:

Oxford History of the Classical World: Greece and the Hellenistic Period

Translations I highly recommend:

Plato's Republic and commentary by Allan Bloom

The Landmark Thucydides by Strassler, Crawley et al.

Personally, I liked the Hays translation of Meditations better than others, the translation is more up-to-date with modern English. I did not read meditations like I would read a novel. I used it as a daily reflections book, I would read a few passages at the beginning of the day and process it throughout my day. Some of it is very dry, yes, but there are some real gems in there. It's just a matter of finding them (I marked them with stars in the margins!)

Another recommendation is Letters on Ethics: To Lucillius

Apart from the wikisource translations, the only full translation of Seneca's letters is the University of Chicago Press Translation by Margaret Graver and A.A. Long (https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Ethics-Lucilius-Complete-Annaeus/dp/022626517X).

The book can be expensive but it is worth it, the most modern translation I believe. I'd highly recommend it.

I read this variant, which (translation aside) is usefully augmented by copious maps and side notes. I am not good enough to be able to judge various translations.

(Where do I recommend Thucydides? I don't doubt that I do, I just don't remember doing so.)

I'm guessing it's this one (pretty much the only thing google comes up with):
Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army

What's your thoughts on "Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army" by Donald Engels?

https://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Great-Logistics-Macedonian-Army/dp/0520042727

This is an entirely appropriate subreddit! Let nobody discourage you from asking for sources here.

There are AskHistorians book lists. The Europe mentions Byzantine books in two sections, so you might be best served by doing a search for "Byz" (Well, three sections, except that one section mentions only Herrin, J. Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, which I assume is the Herrin book you were referring to.)

AskHistorians has a podcast. Episodes 20 and 21 are "Byzantines: Macedonian and Komnenian Dynasties".

I can recommend Judith Herrin's very readable Byzantium - The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire.

For Thucydides and Xenophon I cannot recommend the Landmark series of books highly enough. They are lathered in detailed maps and explanatory footnotes, and come with a wealth of appendixes on everything from Athenian finances to naval warfare to historiography (the study of the sources themselves and how reliable etc. they are). These and all of the books I mentioned are easily and cheaply available on Amazon.

Thucydides - http://www.amazon.com/Landmark-Thucydides-Comprehensive-Guide-Peloponnesian/dp/0684827905

Xenophon - http://www.amazon.com/Landmark-Xenophons-Hellenika-Xenophon/dp/0375422552

This is a version that includes copious explanatory notes and maps to help you along. Each paragraph is summarized in the margins, even.

Any translation of Thucydides is going to have readability issues; he's tough to get through even in the original language and the process of translation only exacerbates that issue.

Judith Herrin's Byzantium: the Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire is probably the most accessible one I've read. It's fun enough that I'd recommend it to someone who doesn't study history academically, but it's not just airport bookstore fare either.

There's a decent book that covers Socrates and the impact he had on his contemporaries, The Trial of Socrates. If you're really interested in how he impacted his surroundings, I think reading it will give you some answers.

Answering how much of an impact he would have had without his students is hard to answer, maybe there would have been other people writing about him, but then perhaps they would be seen as students of his as well.

http://www.amazon.ca/Aristotle-Everybody-Mortimer-J-Adler/dp/0684838230

is a good book containing the essence of Aristotle. It's not too difficult for young people to understand.

I absorbed my ethics from parents, school and the surrounding society, initially unquestioningly. But as I matured I re-examined them in the light of experience and cold logic (which is common among Atheists), and I retain those that make sense.

Alexander and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army is an enlightening book.

Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy: Mortimer J. Adler.

https://www.amazon.com/Aristotle-Everybody-Difficult-Thought-Made/dp/0684838230

I've had this book for over 20 years and have read it at least 3 times, highly recommend.

I also recommend the Landmark Thucydides, if you are willing to branch out into ancient Greek classics; it's a certainty that Caesar was familiar with him. This book was another of the texts for my college course, and has maps of the ancient landscape so you can follow along with his description of the Peloponnesian War on an accurate map of the landscape of the time. Without these maps, it would be a wall of text, but being able to trace the movements of the armies with your finger eases the litany of troop deployments amidst unfamiliar geography.

I’m not 100% confident in my response as I’m trying to recall from memory ... I don’t have my books with me now.

The Enchiridion is just the handbook and really good summary of his Discourses. It is a book on its own. It is included in the Penguin classics addition of Discourses and selected writings: https://www.amazon.com/Discourses-Selected-Writings-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140449469/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?keywords=epictitus&qid=1551101547&s=gateway&sr=8-2

I will add too that if you are looking to buy this book, I would suggest you go with the Oxford World Classics edition. Penguin leaves out whole chapters in Discourses, while Oxford has all of them: https://www.amazon.com/Discourses-Fragments-Handbook-Oxford-Classics/dp/0199595186/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?keywords=epictitus&qid=1551101610&s=gateway&sr=8-4

USN war college uses this as a textbook:
https://www.amazon.com/Landmark-Thucydides-Comprehensive-Guide-Peloponnesian/dp/0684827905

For a surprisingly good overview of history generally, I recommend https://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-History-Universe-Volumes-1-7/dp/0385265204

• Currently reading The Discourses of Epictetus. (Philosophy, Greek Stoicism)
  
  
• Last book I read was The First Heretic by Aaron Dembski-Bowden. (war, gore and testosterone that takes place in the year 40,000)
  
  
• Emergency book to be always kept in the car until I finish it is The Living Dead. (zombie anthology)
  
• Toilet book Whitman: Poetry and Prose. (my favorite poet)
  
  I'm kind of all over the place it seems.

u/HideousRabbit is right: this is not a philosophical question. That said, a classic in the field you describe is Walter Burkert's Greek Religion (German original 1977, English translation 1985). A more recent work is Daniel Ogden’s Companion to Greek Religion from 2007.

Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens.

I'm a nerd.

Myths and religion aren't the same thing. This book does a good job unpacking them, but cultic practice diverged from the literary stories of the gods, and belief was a whole separate ball of wax.

Well the thing they are always complaining about is the kind of myth that post-Rome was a terrible Dark Age with no progress. Things were still being done in terms of philosophy and research during that time.

Also, Rome didn't exactly fall with Attila- there were a number of invasions into Western Rome and its difficult to draw a precise line on where "Rome" as an idea stopped and started to be "Byzantium."

If you're at all interested in History, I suggest Sailing From Byzantium to see about how things still flourished in the so-called Dark Ages, and really just browsing through Wikipedia a bit here should get you well acquainted with the truth.

Suggested reading:

https://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Great-Logistics-Macedonian-Army/dp/0520042727/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474593692&sr=8-1&keywords=Alexander+the+Great+and+the+Logistics+of+the+Macedonian+Army

So, what all you lads read this week? I finished this rather crazy book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Trial-Socrates-I-F-Stone/dp/0385260326

Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics.

Here are two reads that are accessible but still very informative.

https://www.amazon.com/Supplying-War-Logistics-Wallenstein-Patton/dp/0521546575/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1493824623&sr=1-5&keywords=military+logistics

https://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Great-Logistics-Macedonian-Army/dp/0520042727/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1493824623&sr=1-6&keywords=military+logistics

That book is such a pile of garbage. It's just poorly regurgitated highlights from Marcus' Meditations, Epictetus' Discourses, and Seneca's Letters. If anyone wants to get real stoic up in this bitch, here is a suggested reading list:

Letters

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140442103/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=dailystoic07-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0140442103&linkId=356514abc26783cd79c3131d8887a237

Discourses:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140449469/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=dailystoic07-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0140449469&linkId=cd19199bbf6d44bbbb5f053a7c4be1c3

Meditations:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FC1JAI/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=dailystoic07-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B000FC1JAI&linkId=c1e35fe3d0d0ba62fe71ddc9c42ada4f

Paperback version of Graver and Long's book is coming out in November.

It's generally thought that Plato's early dialogues run closer to Socrates' actual words/teachings. I would start with the 4 dialogues making up the saga of the Death of Socrates. Here's a link: https://www.amazon.com/Trial-Death-Socrates-Plato/dp/0872205541

Xenophon was also a student of Socrates and like Plato wrote a dialog on the Trial of Socrates.

Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy by Mortimer Adler.

https://www.amazon.com/Aristotle-Everybody-Difficult-Thought-Made/dp/0684838230

"The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War Paperback" by Robert B Strassler - > Esta é a melhor edição de todas em inglês, com o texto do Tucídides. Há outros livros, tipo o do Kagan, que também são muito bons, e explica o que se passou a partir de várias fontes (Tucídides incluído).

Se queres mesmo ler Tucídides em Português, opta pela edição da Gulbenkian, é a melhor (já não me lembro do preço, mas era um bocado caro), já foste ver se na Gulbenkian está disponível?

> Peloponnesian Wars

This for something lighter and this for something a bit drier. I think these two books are the standard recommendations when approaching the topic.

Stoicism and JBP's teachings go hand-in-hand from what I've seen and read.

Stoic's believe that life is fraught with suffering, which is why they detach themselves from almost everything apart from their thinking mind, including their physical body.

One of the only conflicts that I can see is that traditional stoics (Epictetus' teachings) do not advocate marriage and/or engaging with women. The die-hard stoics would rather be celibate, however they do teach with a lens that their students will have a family. E.G Marcus Aurelius is a famous Stoic who had a wife and plenty of kids.

This is one of my favourite passages from [Discourses and Selected Writings (Penguin Classics)] (https://www.amazon.com/Discourses-Selected-Writings-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140449469) which does a nice job of summing up Stoicism, and there's plenty of links to JBP's teachings:

> In the event that you are haled before someone wielding the reigns of power, remember that there is somebody else looking down from above, and you have to answer first to him. [2] So he examines you: ‘How did you categorize exile, imprisonment, chains, death and disgrace, when you were in school?’

>‘I said they were indifferent.’

>‘And what do you call them now? They haven’t changed, I presume?’

>‘No.’

>‘Well, have you changed?’

>‘No.’

>‘Then define for me now what the “indifferents” are.’

>‘Whatever things we cannot control.’

> ‘Tell me the upshot.’

> ‘They are nothing to me.’

>‘Remind me what you thought was good.’

>‘The will and the right use of impressions.’

>‘And the goal of life is what?’

>‘To follow God.’

>‘And do you stand by that now?’

>‘I say it even now.’

>‘Go, then, in confidence, holding fast to these convictions. You’ll see what it’s like to be a young person with an education, alongside people who have none. I promise that you will feel somewhat like this: “Why do we serve such a long and difficult apprenticeship – in preparation to face nonentities? Is this what ‘authority’ meant? Are the courtyards, the palace staff, the guards no more than this? Was this why I sat through so many lectures? It all amounts to nothing – and I was expecting to be overwhelmed.” ’