Need help choosing Greek/Roman authors

[Pyrrho]

One more thing about Russell: He is a better philosopher than most (maybe everyone?) who have written such books, so he is right more often than most. But that also is a danger, as it can lead one to trust him too much, and be led astray for any mistake he may have made. I think he is right most of the time, and more often than he is often given credit for being, but I do not think he is inerrant.

[Rev. Rye]

Pre-socratics: Heraclitus and Thucydides.
Plato: Phaedrus (not a fan, BTW)
Aristotle: poetics and Nicomachean Ethics
Greek: Sophocles, Epicurus
Roman: Tacitus, Seneca
Romans who wrote in Greek: Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus
Cicero: On Old Age

One of the relatively few benefits of a Catholic education: an appreciation for the classics.

[Mudhammam]

One more thing about Russell: He is a better philosopher than most (maybe everyone?) who have written such books, so he is right more often than most. But that also is a danger, as it can lead one to trust him too much, and be led astray for any mistake he may have made. I think he is right most of the time, and more often than he is often given credit for being, but I do not think he is inerrant.

"In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held. Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second." - Russell, from his chapter on "Heraclitus."

[Pyrrho]

Pre-socratics: Heraclitus and Thucydides.
Plato: Phaedrus (not a fan, BTW)
Aristotle: poetics and Nicomachean Ethics
Greek: Sophocles, Epicurus
Roman: Tacitus, Seneca
Romans who wrote in Greek: Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus
Cicero: On Old Age

One of the relatively few benefits of a Catholic education: an appreciation for the classics.

Oh yes, Seneca. I love his letters 70 and 77 on suicide. They are the most poetic and beautiful works I have ever read on the subject. I still prefer Hume's essay "Of Suicide," as it is more suitable for a modern audience, and gives more reasoning on the topic, but Seneca is unsurpassed in the beauty of his writing on this, at least among the things I have read. And I think he is pretty much right.

[Mudhammam]

I'll refrain from further comment on the works I am still reading until I have completed them. This brings me to Robert Fagles' translation of Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. I'd like to think that my attraction to both of these works is due to the genius of Homer rather than Fagles' award-winning translations, but I haven't read any other versions, and in comparison to other ancient works, I'm still starting to think it is Fagles' renditions that really makes them shine. Then again, Homer was sacred to the ancients and perhaps the responsibility for creating works so timeless, in that they seem contemporary to every age, really does fall upon Homer. The Illiad is one long battle-struggle, such as one you might read in a Tolkien epic, and Homer has this masterly technique of using everyday metaphors in the heat of blood and death---something like, "the arrow flew... like the wind over a harvest crop when the summer day draws to an end and the farmer's tools are cast down... so too was so-and-so cast down, breathing his last, when the arrow pierced his brains, splattering them all over the red earth"---Homer (through Fagles) does it much better though. The Illiad is almost perfect; the one criticism I have is that it at times feels repetitive. Even still, it continually surprised me and kept my attention the entire time.

What The Iliad is to something like The Return of the King, The Odyssey is to The Hobbit. It's an adventure and a metaphor for the ups and downs of life's journey, following Odysseus (who fights at Troy in The Iliad) as he returns home but gets into a few troubles along the way that result in two decades of delay. The story is told from a number of perspectives, but it is all constructed wonderfully to captivate the reader's attention throughout. Also, both epics by Homer have a number of memorable scenes that cut to Zeus' Olympian Halls and depicts the gods arguing over how certain human affairs should play out. It's quite possible that Homer was mocking the way that people viewed the gods but whether or not this is the case, they are often hilarious.

I must recommend everybody read both Homerian epics. As Bernard Knox puts it in the introduction to Fagles' translation, "One ancient critic, the author of the treatise On the Sublime, thought that the Odyssey was the product of Homer's old age, of 'a mind in decline; it was a work that could be compared to the setting sun---the size remained, without the force.' He did, however, temper the harshness of that judgment by adding: 'I am speaking of old age---but it is the old age of Homer.'"

The Presocratic Philosophers by G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield is a great selection if you want a work that contains the source documents for all of the major Presocratics and their views on cosmogony, theogony, man, being, mind, etc. It gives a satisfactory overview of all the known philosophers and is in the end a fairly exhaustive study, with one provision: on the one hand, there's not a lot of material on many of these figures that we can trust, so "exhaustive" is somewhat relative, and on the other hand, if you want an in-depth study on a particular character and his influence on later philosophers, this work probably only scratches the surface. Still, I do recommend it if your interest lies principally in thinkers preceding Plato and Xenophon and their accounts of Socrates.

Alicia Stallings' translation of Lucretius' The Nature of Things - I read this last summer. It was a fascinating read as it was my first real taste of ancient poetry outside of the Bible, and a perfect entry for this reason: it's a very modern translation, and feels like you're reading contemporary poetry by an American author. That's also the worst part about it because I think it would have been better to own a translation that conveys the scholarly tone typically given in updates of works from antiquity. I recommend it for anyone that is new to the ancients; but a more seasoned student will probably find her translation frustrating; if I remember correctly, she even changes some of the imagery that Lucretius uses, for example, instead of shooting an arrow she says gun or something to that effect. That annoyed me a bit. In terms of Lucretius himself, this work is a masterpiece and is unique as basically a philosophical treatise (the epicurean school) in the form of poetry, and I thoroughly enjoyed it as I often find epicureanism to be very close to my heart.

[Brian37]

Pre-socratics: Heraclitus and Thucydides.
Plato: Phaedrus (not a fan, BTW)
Aristotle: poetics and Nicomachean Ethics
Greek: Sophocles, Epicurus
Roman: Tacitus, Seneca
Romans who wrote in Greek: Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus
Cicero: On Old Age

One of the relatively few benefits of a Catholic education: an appreciation for the classics.

Whatever initial brainstorming ideas humans came up with have been surpassed by labs, scientific method, testing and falsification and peer review. They are good to know as far as history, but still outdated even if some principles apply.

The biggest flaw all of them had was lack of modern scientific knowledge. We cant put all our weight on their ideas. The Greeks came up with the word "atom", but that was not a modern scientific description. It was more of a idea of thinking about the smallest indivisible thing they could imagine. They had no way of knowing about protons, neutrons, electrons or the Higgs Bolson particle.

They came up with some axioms, yes. But making an observation does not mean you understand what you observe. This is a flaw in our species. When we make guesses at things we over conflate in retrospect the things prior societies got right by luck, and attach too much weight to what amounts to a lucky guess.

I once ran into an idiot who claimed that Aquinas knew about Quantum Mechanics. When I asked him about his math, all he could do was quote and ambiguous quote. Much like theists do in pointing to their holy books to claim they match science. It is retrofitting after the fact.

Yes they added to school of thought, but even the ancient Greeks got things wrong and with what they did get right, it wasn't that they had any way of knowing scientifically why they were onto something.

I hate philosophy in general, because we have improved way past the point that what they came up with is horse and buggy compared to our cell phone and Mars rover knowledge today.

I may have mentioned it in this thread before. But Dawkins places much of the blame of our religious and political dogmatism on Plato's idea that if you simply thought about something you could find it's "essence". That idea of finding perfection has allowed humans to cling to their patterns at all costs, rather than question with testing. Plato's idea of questioning lacked modern control groups. His idea of questioning was unfortunately a way to justify a position, rather than test the position. The word "apology" stems from that.

There is a huge difference for making a "justification" which is nothing more than making an excuse to hold a position, and quality control which leads you to evidence, not where you want it to go. Plato had no concept of what quality control was.

I still think for example, Epicurus's problem with evil I think still stands the test of time, not as scientific evidence debunking a god claim, but debunking the idea that an "all powerful" god can be called moral. But even that to me is not the best reason to reject a god claim. It is only good to show the contradictions of the claimed attribute vs what we see in reality.

[Mudhammam]

I think you might credit philosophy more if you acknowledged that science attempts to make sense of the world we experience whereas philosophy attempts to make sense of the world as it is.

[Brian37]

I think you might credit philosophy more if you acknowledged that science attempts to make sense of the world we experience whereas philosophy attempts to make sense of the world as it is.

Philosophy is not complete like scientific method is, and even science constantly adapts to changing data.

The problem with the word "philosophy" itself is that unfortunately anything can be a "philosophy", from economic views( which compete and the different followers can become dogmatic and fight over them). Religion also does the same thing.

Our pattern seeking and grouping is evolutionary, that part will not go away. Our diversity also will not go away. But again, the most pragmatic thing humans can do to be more civil is to put our common problems that overlap first, and shift our priorities to that rather than our personal patterns we create clubs we call nations and economic views and religions.

Not saying we have to be emotionless robots, but our tribalism is simply way to divisive especially now that our entire planet is being affected by our actions.

We have to be a planet of problem solvers, not a planet full of competing gangs. There is no more room to conquest, the world is much smaller. The more humans who understand Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech, and the more we accept we are the same species, the more civil and manageable the world can be.

[Cato]

Nestor,
I understand your quest to be straight philosophy or history; however, I'll recommend some of the more well known playwrights. I've always found that fiction of a period can provide historical insight, particularly regarding political and social moods.

Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Plautus and Terence. Seneca also wrote plays, but has already been mentioned for his other work.

[Brian37]

Nestor,
I understand your quest to be straight philosophy or history; however, I'll recommend some of the more well known playwrights. I've always found that fiction of a period can provide historical insight, particularly regarding political and social moods.

Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Plautus and Terence. Seneca also wrote plays, but has already been mentioned for his other work.

Yes, and that is fine, I only get a lip twitch when people try to treat these things as gospels. There really are no axioms that are unique to our existence. Our language always reflects our reactions to what we think good behavior is or what bad behavior is. We put them in everything, fiction, religion, political views and economic views, but it still amounts to making justifications for our own desires.

I think the more humans realize this, and accept that their is no monopoly to the planet and that no one group or individual is the center of the universe, we will make better ground in extending our finite ride.

History is important to know, but it is equally important to adapt to improve and be willing to give up on bad ideas.