The Foundations of Western Civilization

These three seemingly simple words demand reflection. Where is the West? Who is Western? If civilization means cities, where do those come from? And when we look at history, how do we tell what is truly foundational from what may be merely famous? What is the difference between celebrity and distinction?

Borrowing our title from a famous book by S. N. Kramer, we look at why this small slice of what is now southern Iraq became—along with Egypt—one of the two foundations of Western civilization.

As Sumer was the gift of the Tigris and Euphrates, so Egypt—a ribbon of fertile floodplain 750 miles long but not much more than 15 miles wide—has been called "the gift of the Nile." But the differences between Egypt and Mesopotamia tell us as much as the similarities.

Israel, built by the descendants of Abraham, was one of the small states that arose after the Egyptian Empire fell (c. 700 BCE). Unified and independent only from 1200–900 BCE, it bequeathed to the West crucial religious ideas.

The peoples holding sway over the ancient Near East included the cruel Assyrians, the Medes, the Neo-Babylonians who overthrew the Assyrians around 600 BCE, and the Persians, who along with the Medes would build the largest empire the world had seen to that time.

Why is it important for you to grasp the archaeological record of the period from 1500–1200 BCE in order to understand "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey"—two poems composed 500 years later?

What unique circumstance—unknown before or since in human history—made the Greek Dark Ages so "dark"? And how do we "do" the history of a time and place that is so obscured from our view? Surprisingly, we know a good deal.

Spartan society was harsh and peculiar, yet many observers at the time and since have found "the Spartan way" strangely compelling. After all, they won the war against Athens, and their victory moved Plato to re-imagine Athenian society in "The Republic". What were the main features of this system, and why did the Spartans embrace it?

Lurching from crisis to crisis, the Athenians accidentally created one of the world's most freewheeling democracies—at least for adult male citizens—even as they were building an empire. How did the whole thing work, and what finally brought it down?

Can you list the key public buildings of an ancient Greek city? How did they combine beautiful and functional forms with deep ideological meanings? What made drama (including comedy) the public art par excellence?

What does it mean to say that the Greeks, while certainly not the first people to reflect on the past, nonetheless "invented" history? How did Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, each in his own unforgettable way, contribute to this basic turning of the Western mind?

How did the Greeks begin moving from religious to more philosophical views of the world, and why did these views first arise in a particular part of the Greek world called Ionia? Who were the Sophists, what did they teach, and why did Socrates oppose them?

The goal of this episode is to explain why Raphael's famous painting, "The School of Athens," has Plato pointing up and Aristotle pointing down, and why both are defending and extending the work of Socrates.

Why couldn't thinkers as brilliant as Plato and Aristotle conceive of a non-imaginary alternative to the polis, and why does the career of one of Aristotle's students mean that in the end, such a shortcoming may not have mattered anyway?

The world after Alexander was cosmopolitan, prosperous, and dominated by Greeks and Macedonians all over the Mediterranean and far out into the old Persian Empire. Literature, science, and new philosophies flourished.

This lecture is about the foundations on which Roman history rests, including the geography of Italy and the two centuries or so of monarchical rule—ending, tradition says, in 509 BCE—that the republic overthrew.

What does it mean to speak of the "constitution" of the Roman republic? What are the essential offices, procedures, and ideals involved, and how did the whole thing really work?

By the time the republic found that it didn't merely possess but was an empire, Roman rule extended from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia, and from the North Sea to the Sahara Desert. How and why did this happen?

The Romans "did" more than war and politics. They created a distinctive culture that flowered in magnificent lyric and epic poetry, assimilated profound Greek influences, and gave us Cicero as Rome's greatest booster and toughest critic.

The 200 often-turbulent years between the murdered reformers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus and the rise of Octavian saw the old Roman system drown amid overwhelming temptations and tensions brought on by Rome's very conquests.

When Octavian became Augustus princeps—"First Citizen"—in 31 B.C., he was inaugurating a 200-year period of security, prosperity, and wise rule that Tacitus would nonetheless wryly label "a desert [that we] called peace." Was Tacitus right?

To understand how culturally creative and important the principate was, you need only reflect that what today strikes the popular imagination as quintessentially "Roman" is a product of this period (republican Rome was a city of wood).

No well-informed observer in the time of Augustus and his successors would have predicted that a world-changing movement would arise in a small, poor, and insignificant region of Palestine. But that is what happened.

The word "church" (ekklesia) occurs only twice in only one of the Gospels (Matthew). Yet Paul, whose letters predate the Gospels, uses the word routinely. This intriguing fact is your gateway to the fascinating history of early Christianity.