Tuesday Lectures
THE ROOTS OF OUR WORLD
TWe are in so many ways the sons and daughters of antiquity.
Our cities are filled with buildings that copy or echo those of Athens and Rome. Our galleries celebrate the myths, themes and history of the Greek and Roman worlds. Our debates - in Parliament, the law court and the papers - use the logic of Aristotle and the language of Plato to address issues that were first formulated in the agora and stoa of the Athenian state.
The theatre - drama, opera and ballet - the literary traditions of pastoral, lyric, satire and epic are the inventions of antiquity. Our very sense of the citizen and the state - Senate, Tyrant, Republic and orator - the very words come directly to us from the classical world.
To understand the vibrant, fascinating worlds of Greece and Rome is not only to discover their inherent artistic beauty and intellectual illumination - but also to enrich almost every aspect of our own world that we value and take seriously. And when we say “our world” we mean both the present, where post-modernism quotes the antique in its pediments and cornices in our streets and on our stages, and our more immediate past. How can we know what the Renaissance was - or Georgian London or Paris with its own Pantheon and (even) Birmingham with its Parthenon for a town hall - without understanding the antiquity on which each is based?
In this course we will study the development of the arts from the very beginning of Greece to the foundation of Constantinople in the 4th century A.D, the point at which
the Christian influence radically alters the basis of the culture and its development. The only one of the arts that remains unrepresented is music - although even here the descriptions of classical practice had a profound effect on the music of Europe.
Why Greece and Rome - apart from their being the two classical civilizations? What, in reality, do they have in common? The answer lies in the famous observation that although Rome conquered Greece the result was that the culture, arts and even language of Greece then overtook those of Rome itself. And just as Rome strove to educate and refine itself on the model of Greece, so too the Europe of the Renaissance saw and modelled itself by the light of the newly appreciated antiquity of Greece and Rome. In fact, as we shall find, the distinction was hardly made - or known - until relatively late in the 18th century when archaeology - and the chance find of Pompeii - enabled Europe to see what differences, continuities and adaptations between the two cultures there had been. We shall see the development of every aspect of the arts - architecture, painting (including depictions in mosaics and on ceramics), sculpture, drama, literature and the applied arts of pottery and jewellery. With these we shall look at the ground-breaking work in philosophy, the invention and practice of history, mathematics and engineering. All of this will be set against the turbulent and engrossing story of political and social history filled with the statesmen, soldiers, tyrants, martyrs and idealists who remain our own standards of heroism and achievement.
Home The Lecturer
Lectures
2011-2012 Seminars
2011-2012
Courses Notes
Future Lectures
Gallery Visits
Location
Fees Enrolment 2011
Contact Us