#611 overall
Virgil's Aeneid (Susanna Braund)
Stanford University
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2021 · score 0.8
A Stanford University lecture course on Virgil's Aeneid taught by Susanna Braund, distributed as a podcast and through iTunes U. One commenter reports that the iTunesU version has been truncated to a few seconds and is no longer usable.
Commenters call it a really good course on the Aeneid, and one remembers it as brilliant.
Humanities & Social Scienceintermediatefreevideo lectures#virgil#aeneid#classics#epic poetry#stanford#braund
Recommendations by year
20062026
Start with the Iliad and I recommend the Lattimore translation although Fagles is good too. You may want to read the first book (chapter) a few times to get the flow. You may also want the backstory, the Judgment of Paris and the Golden Apple. This kind of explains why the Achaeans are there at Troy.
BTW, watch Troy with Brad Pitt. It's got its points but it really deemphasizes the gods. It takes liberties but it's fun.
Then read the Odyssey. The Odyssey is a little stranger because it's kind of told backwards.
Then Virgil's Aeneid. Virgil is 'plagiarizing' Homer and steals a minor character Aeneas; so it helps to know the Iliad+Odyssey to get the homage. There is a really good course/podcast on the Aeneid by Susanna Braund from Stanford.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/virgils-aeneid/id38423...
There is also the Harvard class, the Ancient Greek Hero, which may help.
https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/ancient-greek-her...
Thucydides The Peloponnesian War has great parallels and lessons. In the middle of the war, some idiots ( Alcibiades) decide to attack Sicily because it was going to be easy and the war will pay for itself; they get their asses kicked. You can read this as an allegory for Iraq, an expensive pointless distraction led by idiots. There's also the Siege of Melos.
Yale has a good course by Donald Kagan (Project for a New American Century Donald Kagan) that has background for all this.
https://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205
The Stanford iTunesU classes have been truncated to a few seconds. So Susanna Braund's Aeneid course (which was brilliant) is gone. Same thing with their Hannibal course. I don't know that they're available elsewhere. Apple dropped iTunesU (2021?) and Stanford didn't have a backup.