Crowley County Combined Library

Witness the "works and wonders" of the ancient world through the eyes of its first great historian in this sparkling series of 24 lectures from a much-honored teacher and classical scholar. Herodotus (c. 484-420 B.C.E.) was a Greek who was born in what is now the modern Turkish resort town of Bodrum and who died, so tradition says, in the south of Italy. In between, his tirelessly inquiring mind took him from one corner of the known world to another....

"During the classical age of Greece, Herodotus wrote the first great prose epic and became known through the ages as "the father of history." But he was much more than that. He was also the world's first travel writer, a pioneering geographer, anthropologist, explorer, moralist, investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, and enlightened multiculturalist. He was at once a learned professor and a tabloid journalist, a man of great wit and wisdom...

The "Long Debate" on the nature of truth, the scale of real values, the life one should aspire to live, the character of justice, the sources of law, and the terms of civic and political life is encompassed by the name philosophy. Three persistent themes--understood as problems--are knowledge, conduct, and governance, on which there is a storehouse of insights, some so utterly persuasive as to have shaped thought itself. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle,...