Bonus Content
Literature and History has a lot of Bonus Content. There are six sequences of five episodes each – these include Before Yahweh, The Astounding Apocrypha, Rad Greek Myths, More Greek Plays, Christianity’s Roots, and The Rejected Scriptures. You can buy bonus sequences, or individual episodes, or just Buy All Episodes. There’s also a free bonus episode on the thirteenth book of the Aeneid you can check out. If you’re uncertain of how to download MP3 files and listen to them on your device, please visit the podcast’s Test Download Page. There, you can download some small files for free and make sure everything works for you before spending any actual money.
 | $9.99 |
Before Yahweh, Vols. 1-5
Running Time: 7:30:00
Download Specs: 411 MB; 1 Zipped File Containing 5 MP3 Files
The five episodes of Literature and History’s Before Yahweh bonus series take us deep into the world of Bronze Age religious texts. The texts covered in this series predated the rise and institutionalization of Yahwistic monotheism that archaeology and Biblical scholarship now generally associate with the reforms of King Hezekiah of Jerusalem around 700 BCE. While the main show covered Gilgamesh, the Enuma Elish, the Atrahasis, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and other ancient Egyptian literature, Before Yahweh goes deeper into the religious writings of the 2000s and 1000s BCE. Texts covered include the writings of Enheduanna of Ur, three tales from Bronze Age Egypt, the Kumarbi cycle of Ancient Turkey, the epic of Inanna and Dumuzi, and the Baal cycle. Altogether, the 7.5 hours of Before Yahweh help us understand the milieu out of which Judaism’s earliest religious writings grew. From modern day Egypt to Iraq to Turkey and Syria, the five programs that make up this series are a long, detailed, and often surprisingly fun immersion into the earliest recorded developments of Eurasian religion, and show us how people in the ancient Fertile Crescent thought about the world and themselves, before Yahweh. More information about individual episodes of this series (priced at $1.99 each) is available below.
×
Price: $1.99
Earth’s First Author
Running Time: 1:38:41
Price: $1.99
No one knew her name for thousands of years. Yet the earliest literate civilizations of humankind – Uruk, Ur, Lagash and Nippur widely circulated and read her work. Enheduanna, daughter of the conqueror Sargon the Great, is history’s first known author. She was active some time between about 2300 and 2250 BCE in the Mesopotamian city of Ur. A multiligual poet who grew up in the cosmopolitan city of Akkad, Enheduanna was her father’s figurehead with the old Sumerian regime that he’d unseated. Her biography, as well as her poetry, show a deep and rich intelligence, great cultural sensitivity, and a hauntingly modern sense of self. Two hundred years after her death, Enheduanna’s poetry was scattered all over the civilized hubs of Mesopotamia, and it is not improbable that, considering how early she came along, she was the most influential author in literary history.
×
Price: $1.99
Dark Tales of Ancient Egypt
Running Time: 1:26:50
Price: $1.99
Ancient Egypt had its own version of The Odyssey, together with numerous stories involving black magic and blood and thunder revenge. Ancient Egyptian fiction is unique even within the culturally unfamiliar world of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. In this show, we look at “The Wax Crocodile” (c. 1600 BCE), “The Story of Sinuhe” (c. 1900 BCE) and “The Tale of Two Brothers” (c. 1200 BCE). While these tree tales are fun to read in their own right, they are easily connected to much more famous works, not the least of which are the Book of Genesis, the Homeric epics, and the work of Euripides. This bonus episode will take you deep into the consciousness of Ancient Egypt – into the exotic polytheism of its temples, the surprising multiculturalism of its cities, and the austere, and rather dark way that the literate classes of the Bronze Age Nile thought about the world.
×
Price: $1.99
The Greatest Hittites
Running Time: 1:39:41
Price: $1.99
A bizarre male pregnancy. The seduction of sea monsters and rocks. Talking fetuses. The great Kumarbi Cycle of ancient Turkey, while it has dozens of parallels to contemporaneous myth cycles, also has some unique quirks that make reading it a huge amount of fun. In the mid 1300s, the Hittites, based in modern day Turkey, were one of the two most powerful empires in the ancient world, clashing swords with Egypt for control of the eastern part of the Fertile Crescent. Their culture, partly Indo-European and partly native Anatolian, has come to light only recently, as the Hittite language has been deciphered for less than a hundred years. Although the Hittites sat squarely between Ancient Egypt, Mycenaean Greece, and Mesopotamia, their literature and theology are still, surprisingly, quite understudied. In this program, we’ll read the full Kumarbi Cycle – the most important and extensive religious tale of the Hittites, together with some older native Anatolian stories about disappearing gods.
×
Price: $1.99
Beer. Sex. 2000 B.C.
Running Time: 1:50:07
Price: $1.99
The goddess known as Inanna, who later became Ishtar, was a central figure in Mesopotamian religion for 2,500 years. The deity of war and passion, Inanna’s tales are violent, lurid, and exciting, and in this show we will read the full epic of Inanna and Dumuzi, dated some time to the 2,000s BCE. The story, complete with beer, a huge amount of sex, monsters, a journey to the underworld, and an enigmatic act of revenge, is a riot to read. And in the ancient epic of Inanna/Ishtar, we can also see a whole host of theological and literary tropes surfacing for the first time – generations of gods, a trip to the underworld, a fertility deity who departs and leaves the world fallow, and many others. The Epic of Inanna/Ishtar, however, also shows us ancient Sumer’s uniqueness – its penchant for female deities, and a certain beer-soaked insouciance that’s unlike anything else in ancient literature.
×
Price: $1.99
The Prince of Hell
Running Time: 1:43:21
Price: $1.99
No other deity in the Old Testament gets maligned as much as Baal, an ancient Canaanite god who dates back to the Middle Bronze Age. Demonologist Collin de Plancy remarked that Baal was a devil, with a dominion “broad and deep in hell.” And yet since the 1930s, with the uncovering of the ruins of the ancient Canaanite city of Ugarit, we’ve learned quite a bit about Baal. The library at Ugarit, with its thousands of clay tablets, was one of the great archaeological discoveries of the 20th century. In this show, we take a look at the Baal Cycle, an epic story about this Ugaritic storm god, dated to the mid 1300s BCE. Baal, his violent sister Anat, and their progenitors El and Asherah all come up throughout the Old Testament, and together, these figures will help complete our picture of what Ancient Near Eastern theology looked like, before Yahweh.
| $9.99 |
The Astounding Apocrypha, Vols. 1-5
Running Time: 8:07:00
Download Specs: 445 MB; 1 Zipped File Containing 5 MP3 Files
The Old Testament was written over the course of perhaps a thousand years, under the shadows of some very diverse world empires – Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks, to name the most pivotal ones. As early Judaism saw these imperial evolutions, the religion slowly evolved. From the sacrificial prescriptions of Leviticus to the languid philosophizing of Ecclesiastes to the fully Greek stoicism evident in 4 Maccabees, Judaism evolved along with other Iron Age religions. The Astounding Apocrypha bonus series, beginning in the Persian Period (539-330) and moving through Hellenistic history to the end of the Hasmonean dynasty (63 BCE), tells the story of Judaism’s evolution up to just before the birth of Christ. These centuries produced the books of Esther, Tobit, Daniel, Maccabees, and Judith – five writings that are either partially or entirely apocryphal to Jewish and Protestant bibles. By reading these five books very thoroughly and in their historical seedbeds, the series explores not only the evolution of Iron Age Judaism, but also the general developments of Hellenistic religion and culture right up to the death of the Roman Republic. More information about individual episodes of this series (priced at $1.99 each)is available below.
×
Price: $1.99
Esther: The Director’s Cut
Running Time: 1:31:35
Price: $1.99
Esther, the compromised heroine, part concubine, part schemer, and part savior, has been a source of fascination to readers for thousands of years. Her story is one of the great tales of an diasporic immigrant – an immigrant locked into an alien world and forced to do what she has to in order to survive. In this episode, we look at the two different versions of the Book of Esther – both the stripped down narrative in Hebrew and Protestant bibles, as well as the considerably lengthier variant in Catholic, Greek, and other bibles. In comparing these two versions, we can learn about how and why Esther has been so divisive over the past two thousand years, and how the prejudices and imperatives of specific historical periods drove additions and redactions to the biblical canon.
×
Price: $1.99
The Book of Tobit
Running Time: 1:27:59
Price: $1.99
Join Tobit, and his son Tobias, for a journey through modern day Iraq and Iran – a tale complete with angels, a demonic curse, a perilous wedding night, a loyal pet dog, and the most famous injury ever to be caused by bird poop. The gentle, seriocomic tale of Tobit is one of the best stories of Second Temple Judaism. With its inclusion of Raphael, and seven angels, and the demon Asmodeus, the Book of Tobit unmistakably shows the influence of Zoroastrianism, the Achaemenid Persian religion that the Jews lived alongside for 200 years. But beyond its fascinating theology, Tobit is a fun yarn to read, and certainly one of the kinder of the Bible’s tales about Jews making their way abroad in a larger world. In this show we first explore the charming story told in this book before considering Tobit’s theology alongside the Zoroastrian Avesta.
×
Price: $1.99
Daniel: The Director’s Cut
Running Time: 2:04:01
Price: $1.99
A courtroom drama revolving around sex and blackmail. Bloodthirsty Babylonian kings. Prophetic visions of monsters. Honest young men, tossed into furnaces and lions’ dens. And to some, a clear prophecy about the coming of Christ. There are many reasons to read the Book of Daniel, the youngest book in the Hebrew Bible, probably produced during the 160s BCE in Jerusalem. But it’s also an exceptionally difficult book. In this episode, we begin with some history, laying out what was happening to Jerusalem during the kingship of the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV, and how this situation came about. Then, we read the Book of Daniel, explore its colorful prophecies, and go through the fascinating additions to Daniel – the Prayer of Azariah and the Three Jews, Bel and the Dragon, and the inimitable Book of Susanna. Pound for pound, Daniel is the most important and rich of all the Prophetic Books.
×
Price: $1.99
All the Maccabees
Running Time: 1:49:59
Price: $1.99
Judas Maccabeus, whose nickname means “hammer,” is the war hero at the center of the great cycle of the Maccabees, a story about a small, controversial sect who fought an aggressive Greek regime in Jerusalem in the 160s, and won. There are four books of the Maccabees, and they range from mostly history (1 Maccabees) to propagandistic history (2 Maccabees) to historical fiction (3 Maccabees) to grisly martyr stories (4 Maccabees). In this show, we first review the historical context of the Maccabees, and then explore the four books in detail, considering reasons for their canonization, and lack thereof, in certain religions. While the books of Maccabees are titanic in scope, they are built around a core set of themes, and culminate in the same pivotal moment – one of the greatest triumphs in Jewish history. If you listen to this program, next time someone asks you the history of Hanukkah, you’ll be able to tell them a long, thrilling yarn.
×
Price: $1.99
Judith
Running Time: 1:23:30
Price: $1.99
The bible has a number of female heroines – patient and attentive Ruth, resilient Esther, honest Susanna, and before them all the judge Deborah and her lieutenant Jael. But more than any of these, Judith, heroine of her eponymous apocryphal book in the Old Testament, acts with a confidence, cunning, and savage violence that has few analogs in any of the biblical canons. In this episode, we begin by hearing the story of the Book of Judith and the responses it has elicited. Then, we explore Judith in the context of the Hasmonean kingdom of 140-63 BCE – the volatile period during which Judith’s story was liklely written, when for a short, violent period riven by sectarian conflicts and succession disputes, Jews ruled an independent kingdom in and around Jerusalem. While there are many underdog stories in the Bible, the story of Judith, with its aggressive, active heroine and its decisive martial victory, certainly bears the marks of the exciting period of history that produced it.
| $9.99 |
Rad Greek Myths, Vols. 1-5
Running Time: 15:14:00
Download Specs: 875 MB; 1 Zipped File Containing 100 MP3 Files Organized in Subfolders
This 15 hour audiobook takes ten of the most famous Greek myths and weaves them into a seamless anthology of original adaptations. From Perseus to Typhoios, Rad Greek Myths is based on careful attention to ancient sources like Hesiod, Apollodorus, Pindar, Ovid, the Homeric Hymns, and many more. The stories feature original symphonic and ambient music composed and performed specifically for the Rad Greek Myths series. The compilation is as diverse as the ancient tales on which it’s based, including everything from heroic quests, to romances, monsters, seductions, funny misunderstandings, great journeys, tragic partings, dark mysteries, and a dozen other plot elements as entertaining today as they were 2,500 years ago. Featured in this collection are adaptations of the tales of Perseus, Theseus, Daedalus and Icarus, Persephone and Hades, Orpheus and Eurydice, Baucis and Philemon, Bellerophon and Pegasus, Iphigenia, Arachne, and the great monster Typhoios. Full track listing here. Please note that these are original fictional adaptations, and not done in Literature and History’s traditional format of Introduction – Summary – Analysis. For more information about individual episodes (priced at $1.99 each), see the information below.
×
Price: $1.99
Heroes
Running Time: 4:07:39
Download Specs: 239 MB; 1 Zipped File Containing 31 MP3 Files
Price: $1.99
Volume 1 of Rad Greek Myths includes more than four hours of epic battles and adventures. Perseus and Theseus, aside from Heracles, were the most famous heroes in Ancient Greek mythology, and this volume tells all of their famous stories. Perseus, one of the earliest heroes of Greek mythology, was cast out to sea with his mother Danae while still a baby boy. Although the two found safety with a fisherman named Dictys, soon Perseus was sent on a dreadful quest by a cruel king called Polydectes – a quest that would see him facing off against Medusa, and a Kraken, with many other adventures along the way before returning back home to save his mother. Theseus, a very different kind of hero, is a darker and more ambiguous figure in Greek mythology, beating the minotaur of Crete but also committing blasphemies and crimes that led him to be feared as much as he was adored. Please note that these are original fictional adaptations, and not done in L&H’s usual format of introduction-summary-analysis. Track listing here.
×
Price: $1.99
Parents and Children
Running Time: 3:27:39
Download Specs: 201 MB; 1 Zipped File Containing 28 MP3 Files
Price: $1.99
Volume 2 of Rad Greek Myths includes the tales of Daedalus and Icarus, and Demeter and Persephone, parents and children whose love and connections with one another enable them to do extraordinary things. Daedalus’ story, up first, is a full account of the most famous engineer in Greek mythology, an Athenian exiled to Crete after a dreadful mistake, and forced to work on the baleful labyrinth of King Minos. The story of Daedalus’ great project, and his spectacular escape and revenge is at its core the tale of a brilliant and loving father. Along the same lines, the story of Demeter and Persephone, which inspired the Eleusinian Mysteries, is the tale of a beautiful young woman dragged down to Hades, and a mother who would challenge Zeus itself to get her back. From its earliest scenes of Persephone picking hyacinths, to its climax in the depths of Hades, this story influenced generations of ancient Greek artists. Please note that these are original fictional adaptations, and not done in L&H’s usual format of introduction-summary-analysis. Track listing here.
×
Price: $1.99
Lovers
Running Time: 2:02:26
Download Specs: 115 MB; 1 Zipped File Containing 10 MP3 Files
Price: $1.99
Volume 3 of Rad Greek Myths tells the tales of two very different pairs of lovers – Orpheus and Eurydice, and then Baucis and Philemon. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice tells of Greece’s most famous lyre player – his early adventures with the Argonauts, his great musical ability, his pivotal romance with a woman very different from him, and what happened afterward. Featuring sirens, the Cerberus, ghosts, and Hades himself, Orpheus’ story has both great joy as well as hellish anguish, but the tale of Baucis and Philemon is much lighter fare. A comic, rustic story about an elderly couple, Baucis and Philemon’s tale in its full version is a cautionary narrative about kindness, neighborliness, and – though mythographers sometimes underplay this – the depth and profundity of marriage. Please note that these are original fictional adaptations, and not done in L&H’s usual format of introduction-summary-analysis. Track listing here.
×
Price: $1.99
Adventures
Running Time: 3:23:06
Download Specs: 192 MB; 1 Zipped File Containing 19 MP3 Files
Price: $1.99
Volume 4 of Rad Greek Myths includes the stories of Bellerophon and Pegasus, and then Iphigenia. Bellerophon, a tragic figure, was a Corinthian prince who lost his father to a horrific accident, and his brother soon thereafter. An angry, irreligious man, Bellerophon’s only solace was his flying horse, the Pegasus, on whose back he explored the vast hill country of Anatolia and eventually, in the rugged country of Lycia, fought the Chimera. Bellerophon’s solitariness, his apostasy, and the end of his saga are a fascinating aberration to some of Greek mythology’s more conventional tales. Iphigenia is another spellbinding outcast – in some stories sacrificed at a beach at Aulis, but in others, escaping to the far off land of Tauris. In the tale of Iphigenia, we will follow this unwanted daughter of King Agamemnon and see how this wonderful, often understudied figure was the strongest and best scion of the house of Atreus. Please note that these are original fictional adaptations, and not done in L&H’s usual format of introduction-summary-analysis. Track listing here.
×
Price: $1.99
Monsters
Running Time: 2:12:45
Download Specs: 125 MB; 1 Zipped File Containing 12 MP3 Files
Price: $1.99
Volume 5 of Rad Greek Myths is about two of the more sinister monsters in Ancient Greek mythology. The story of Arachne, until Ovid’s treatment of it, was a traditional tale of a hubristic mortal challenging a deity and being punished as a result. But as Ovid tells it – and as we will hear it in this program, Arachne’s story is about the monstrousness of the gods themselves – a group who would bear down on an innocent peasant girl and, out of jealousy and cruelty, force her to make an agonizing transformation. The story of Typhoios, following on the heels of Arachne’s tale, is about the most powerful and destructive creature in all Greek mythology – the final monster to be born from Gaia, which, on the heels of the general war with the Titans, only Zeus stood to face. In the tale of Typhoios, we will learn not only of the epic battle between Zeus and his greatest opponent, but also what made Zeus the way he is. Please note that these are original fictional adaptations, and not done in L&H’s usual format of introduction-summary-analysis. Track listing here.
| $9.99 |
More Greek Plays, Vols. 1-5
Running Time: 9:21:08
Download Specs: 516 MB; 1 Zipped File Containing 5 MP3 Files
The five episodes of More Greek Plays cover (1) Aeschylus’ The Persians, (2) Prometheus Bound, (3) Sophocles’ Ajax, (4) Aristophanes’ The Birds, and (5) Euripides’ Ion, Iphigenia at Tauris, and Helen. These programs take us deeper into Ancient Greek theater than we went in the main series, with an additional play each from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, and also the play Prometheus Bound, now often thought to have been written by someone other than Classical Athens’ big four. On the whole, the series offers a look at five plays that are all magnificent, but are nonetheless a bit different than the famous titles we covered in Season 3. Aeschylus’ Persians is a piece of historical fiction starring the Persian king Xerxes and his mother Atossa, and Prometheus Bound a story about a god who suffered grievously for the benefit of mankind. Ajax is about the ultimate unsung hero of the Trojan War, and The Birds, two everyman anti-heroes who end up taking over the world. Finally, the Euripides plays Ion, Iphigenia at Tauris, and Helen show Euripides at a late point in his career pushing the conventions of comedy and tragedy into the genre now frequently called “Euripidean Romance,” a genre tremendously influential over the next few centuries of Ancient Mediterranean drama. All told, the 9+ hours of More Greek Plays offer full, quotation-rich summaries of all of these additional plays, together with introductions and historical backgrounds, and should greatly enhance your understanding of Ancient Greek theater beyond the headliners we covered in our main sequence.
×
Price: $1.99
East and West
Running Time: 1:47:17
Price: $1.99
Aeschylus’ play The Persians is the earliest full work of world theater. Being an Ancient Greek play, we might expect a piece about Heracles or Zeus, but The Persians is nothing so simple as this. Unlike the other surviving works of Ancient Greek tragedy, The Persians is a piece of historical fiction. Written in 472 BCE – just a few years after Aeschylus’ generation won the Greco-Persian Wars, The Persians imagines the Persian side of the war during its aftermath. In it, Aeschylus narrates how back home in Susa, the Persian queen mother Atossa breathlessly awaited the news of her son’s overseas efforts to finish his father’s efforts in the west, only to find that Xerxes the Great’s efforts had been in vain – even his famous bridge across the Hellespont that connected Europe and Asia. Aeschylus’ The Persians is not only the first work of world drama to survive. It’s also the first work of literature chronicling European perceptions of Central Asia, and various scholars, chief among them Edward Said, have carefully sought to puzzle out Aeschylus’ real attitude toward Persians, and whether they come across in the play as fundamentally normal people, exotic others, or something in between. In equal parts a puzzle and masterwork, Aeschylus’ Persians is a fitting introduction to the More Greek Plays series.
×
Price: $1.99
Defiance
Running Time: 1:47:28
Price: $1.99
The play Prometheus Bound was once attributed to Aeschylus, but increasingly a consensus has shifted to suggested that this enigmatic play may have been written by someone else. The play tells the grim story of the beginning of Prometheus’ incarceration – how after he brought fire and the gifts of civilization to humanity, he was shackled to a rock at the edge of the known world by a wrathful and jealous Zeus. Once part of a trilogy – though we’re not sure which part – Prometheus Bound has most often been thought of, following thinkers like Percy Shelly and Karl Marx, as a story about defiance – a daring titan who had the grit to oppose the might of the newly ascendant Zeus after the war between gods and titans. However, reading the play closely and considering it within the lost trilogy of which it was once a part tells us a more complex story. Prometheus in Prometheus Bound is no brawny and self-certain hero, but instead one capable of indecision and anguish – one whose signature ability to see into the future runs aground after he is confronted again and again by characters who, in a Job-like fashion, criticize him for standing up for himself during the persecutions of a cruel and insecure deity. With the very elements of the period table named after him (Prometheum and Titanium!), Prometheus is a figure everyone should know about, and Prometheus Bound is the longest story about him to survive from ancient literature.
×
Price: $1.99
Second Best
Running Time: 1:43:06
Price: $1.99
Ajax the Great, or Telamonian Ajax, is in many ways the most overwhelming fighter in the Homeric epics. He beats the Trojan champion Hector multiple times. He is the center of the Greek defense and offense for nearly twenty books of the Iliad as Achilles sits out. He not only does not receive, but pointedly refuses divine aid, fighting with the strength of his own arms all of the others in his echelon – most notably Hector and Achilles, receive lavish amounts of help from the gods. And yet – as we learn in Ovid and other ancient sources, after Achilles died and a debate for his armor was held, Odysseus was awarded the armaments, and Ajax – even though he needed new armor and a new shield, an even though Achilles was his cousin – was spurned. Sophocles’ play Ajax tells of what happened next. It’s a play about the awful dusk of the Trojan War, but also about a historical evolution that the Athenians who watched it had lived through – an evolution from tribal warrior bands to waterborne consortiums of city states. A tale of an individual hero, then, but also a lament for a fading past, Ajax is one of the most tragic and powerful stories of Ancient Greek drama, and one definitely worth experiencing.
×
Price: $1.99
Cloud Cuckooland
Running Time: 1:53:05
Price: $1.99
In this signature work of Old Comedy, a couple of schmucks from Athens take over the universe. Of all of Aristophanes’ plays, The Birds might have the most extravagant plot, being the story of a pair of unexceptional Athenian vagabonds who befriend the bird kingdom and then enjoy an astonishing rise in power and fortune. Originally a musical with unusually high production values, The Birds once chirped and pirouetted with gorgeous song and dance, but even reading its script today, we still find a marvelous story. The Birds may be little more than a fun fairytale written as escapist fiction for wartime Athens while the Sicilian Expedition was abroad, but, as we learn in this bonus episode, various readers have read various political and historical agendas into this play – a lampoon of the hawkish Alcibiades, for instance, or a satire of orthodox religion, or a parody of unscrupulous Athenian entrepreneurs. Whatever we make of it, The Birds is the longest and one of the most popular plays Aristophanes ever wrote, and a journey to Cloud Cuckooland ought to be a part of everyone’s experience of Ancient Greek Drama.
×
Price: $1.99
Beyond Comedy and Tragedy
Running Time: 2:10:10
Price: $1.99
This final installment in the More Greek Plays bonus sequence focuses on Euripides’ play Ion, though it also covers his plays Iphigenia at Tauris and Helen. This trio of late Euripides’ plays had a profound influence on Greek new comedy and republican Roman drama, and eventually, the first surviving novels from literary history. Ion, Iphigenia at Tauris, and Helen are tragicomic pieces about young people bruised by the injustices of history, but ultimately rewarded for their steadfastness and virtue. Neither tragedies nor comedies, they are adventure stories apiece with Shakespeare’s Tempest or Cymbeline, more akin to a novel by Dickens or Jane Austen than the grinding, deterministic tragedies of Sophocles or the anarchic comedies of Aristophanes. At the root of a whole new genre of European literature, then – the romance – this trio of late Euripides plays marked a moment when golden age Athens produced yet another revolutionary creation – a novel third genre about innocent youths cast adrift, fated to suffer and be tested, but, in the end, granted safety, security, and often reunions with family, friends, and lovers, after a long series of trials.
| $9.99 |
Christianity’s Roots, Vols. 1-5
Running Time: 9:51:07
Download Specs: 543 MB; 1 Zipped File Containing 5 MP3 Files
The five installments of Literature and History’s Christianity’s Roots bonus series chronicle the theological origins of Early Christianity in the cult religions and philosophy of the Ancient Mediterranean. From virgin births, to savior deities who died or suffered for the benefit of mankind, to countless sons of gods, shared rites involving water, wine, and sacred food, ascendant prime movers, and an increasingly ubiquitous interest in posthumous salvation, some of the major components Christianity predate the life of Christ by centuries. This bonus sequence, over the course of nearly ten hours, explores some of the major religions of the Ancient Mediterranean that may have influenced the writing of the New Testament in the second half of the first century CE. Beginning with the Isis Cult in Episode 1, Episodes 2 and 3 then move through the Ancient Mediterranean’s mystery religions – most centrally the Eleusinian Mysteries, the cults of Cybele and Mithras, and then the Orphic and Pythagorean cults. The latter two cults, more intellectual and literary than comparable movements, lead us to Plato in Episode 4, whose philosophy has had a massive influence on Christianity for thousands of years. Finally, in Episode 5, we explore the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, three Jewish sects operating in modern day Israel during early Christianity’s formative period. As a unit, these five programs will give you a strong introduction to the pagan theological origins of Early Christianity and the New Testament. Information about individual episodes of the series (priced at $1.99 each) is available below.
×
Price: $1.99
Mothers of Gods
Running Time: 1:56:14
Price: $1.99
Isis, mother of Horus and wife of the tragically murdered Osiris, was one of the most popular deities in the Ancient Mediterranean, long before Old Testament was begun. Archaeological evidence and texts in the archive demonstrate that by the life of Jesus, her followers pervaded the Roman empire, worshipping a mother goddess whose most salient quality was agape, that same unconditional love we hear so often in the New Testament. Isis’ history extends back at least to the mid 2000s BCE, to those centuries during which Egyptian Old Kingdom pyramid and tomb inscriptions reveal a very early fascination with the afterlife. Gradually, over the 1000s and final millennium BCE, Isis came more and more to the forefront of the vast Ancient Egyptian pantheon. In this program, we dive into the surviving primary sources on the life of Isis and read them in detail, focusing particularly on the New Kingdom “Contendings of Horus and Set,” and Plutarch’s book On Isis and Osiris, culminating with the closure of the temple of Isis at Philae. Isiac religion, while by no means the single key to understanding Early Christianity, is a fascinating story in and unto itself, and an excellent introduction to the way that singular deities had begun to come forth with prominence in many pantheons by the first century BCE and beyond.
×
Price: $1.99
The Mystery Religions
Running Time: 1:56:14
Price: $1.99
The mystery religions are so named for a reason – with exclusive membership, carefully enforced rules for keeping secrets, and often very few textual remnants, they remain largely enigmatic. However, through a survey of archaeological and textual information, we can nonetheless make some very compelling observations about what the mystery religions were, and what their adherents did. In this bonus program, beginning with the Eleusinian Mysteries – Ancient Greece’s most famous religious rite, we move forward through the worship of the Anatolian goddess Cybele, whom the Romans called the magna mater, or Great Mother. Finally, we study Mithraism, a movement contemporary with Early Christianity and often associated with it, before making a brief foray into the cult of Adonais. Collectively, these mystery religions demonstrate how agricultural rites held to celebrate the changing seasons slowly linked divine sacrifices with winter and divine resurrections with spring, personifiying the old agrarain rites with gods for new generations of believers, and how the all-important notion of posthumous salvation came into prominence over the course of this theological evolution.
×
Price: $1.99
Harmony
Running Time: 1:57:34
Price: $1.99
Throughout the 500s and 400s BCE, the Pythagorean and Orphic cults came into prominence, both influencing Plato, and thereafter, independently and through Platonic philosophy, having a broad base in the Mediterranean for nearly a thousand years after. Together, the cults promoted the ideas of resurrection, personal purity and asceticism, and the notion that one might escape from the cycle of earthly incarnation and into something more permanent. The Pythagoreans were distinguished by their confidence that numbers and ratios were the foundations of all reality. In this bonus program, a musical demonstration of Pythagorean harmonic theory will illustrate what philosophers were writing about music and mathematics around the time of Plato. More cryptically, the Orphics had a selection of sacred texts about the beginning of the universe and beyond – texts which gave a prominent role to the god Dionysus. In Orphism, perhaps, we may have one of the closest analogs to the Gospel story of Jesus – a version of the deity called Dionysus Zagreus who is killed by the earthly titans, and resurrected for the benefit of humanity, who is forever beholden to the god’s death. Together, Pythagoreanism and Orphism show a more intellectual and literary dimension of Ancient Mediterranean cult religion – a dimension that leads naturally to Plato and beyond.
×
Price: $1.99
Plato and Jesus
Running Time: 2:09:56
Price: $1.99
As we have observed from time to time in Literature and History, perhaps no one individual other than Saint Paul and Jesus himself had an influence on Christianity as important as Plato did. This program explores some of the details of why that is the case. While this bonus episode takes a wide look at many passages from the Platonic dialogues that support his theory of forms and the related doctrine of innate knowledge, four Platonic texts in particular were on the hearts of lips of early Christians like the gnostic contributors to the Nag Hammadi library. These were Timaeus, Phaedo, Phaedrus, and most of all the Myth of Er that closes Plato’s Republic. In the Greek speaking world that produced the texts of the New Testament, this selection of Platonic theology offered a core of ideas that were seemingly everywhere by 100 CE – that sensory and material reality were false, and lower than a higher absolute reality, that an ascendant force governed the cosmos, that people were rewarded or punished for their deeds on earth in an afterlife, and that salvation and true knowledge were available only to a select cadre who understood and did the correct things. When Plato wrote these texts in the early 300s, under the influence of the Pythagoreans and Orphics of his generation, he wired some of the core notions of Christianity into Ancient Mediterranean intellectual history, four full centuries before the writing of the New Testament.
×
Price: $1.99
Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes
Running Time: 1:55:12
Price: $1.99
Beginning around 160 BCE, we begin to have historical evidence of several splinter groups within Judaism. Several ancient sources, chiefly Josephus, tell us about how the Pharisees appeared in the 160s as a force within Judaism urging nativism and anti-assimilation around the time of the Maccabean revolt, and the Sadducees, wealthier and more amenable to Greek culture, around the same time. The theological history of these two sects, while sometimes compared to Orthodox and Reform Judaism, is more complicated than this, as the Pharisees had theologically progressive elements that the Sadducees lacked – elements that may have influenced Jesus himself and his apostles, however negatively the Pharisees are portrayed in the Gospels. Beyond the Pharisees and Sadducees, the Essenes were also a presence in modern day Israel and Palestine during the life of Christ. While culturally a less prominent force than the other two splinter groups, the Essenes usually get the credit for residing in the community at Qumran that left behind the Dead Sea Scrolls, a heterogeneous mass of religious text that show just how diverse Jewish theological activity was during the late Second Temple Period. Overall, this final installment of Christianity’s Roots introduces you to what we know about these three groups from primary sources, and should serve as excellent preparation for the main sequence’s programs on the New Testament.
| $9.99 |
The Rejected Scriptures, Vols. 1-5
Running Time: 10:20:00
Download Specs: 565 MB; 1 Zipped File Containing 5 MP3 Files
The New Testament is a short book. A lot of what we think is canonical in Christian ideology – posthumous salvation, for instance, heaven and hell, the origins of Satan, and fallen angels – is either not in the Bible at all, or only there in scraps. This material first shows up, in the historical record, at least, in apocryphal Christian writings, and the Rejected Scriptures is journey of more than ten hours’ time into this largely ignored body of work – a gigantic body of texts crucial to the formation of Christianity that slipped into the shadows of the New Testament increasingly after the fourth century. The series opens in the second century BCE with two books – 1 Enoch and Jubilees, very important to early Christianity, but lost from most of the world until the 19th century – works known to the first century Christian world, but edged out of the canon after the fourth century. At the heart of the Rejected Scriptures series are three programs offering overviews of the apocryphal Gospel, Acts, and Apocalypse literature, and summaries of major surviving works. With dozens of apocryphal Gospels, Acts, and Apocalypses surviving in full or in part today, we can use these works to get a clearer picture of the development of early Christianity – which stories and ideas were born outside the canon that eventually became doctrine, and equally, what Medieval Catholicism eventually discarded at the end of Late Antiquity. Striking, strange, hauntingly beautiful and in equal parts disturbing, the apocryphal scriptures of Christianity are something anyone who wants to understand the history of the religion ought to learn about, and The Rejected Scriptures series will offer you a detailed introduction to the genres and major works of this body of writing.
×
Price: $1.99
Enoch
Running Time: 2:25:43
Price: $1.99
The book of 1 Enoch, produced between roughly 170 and 100 BCE, is quite possibly the most remarkable apocryphal scripture on Earth – apocryphal in all canons except for the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon, in which it survived for some 1,500 years before coming into wider circulation in the nineteenth century. A multi-part tale, 1 Enoch tells of dark angels called the Watchers who descended to couple with human females, of demon lords who ruled over these Watchers, and of the gigantic monsters produced by these unholy unions – a lost sequence of events that prompted the Biblical flood. 1 Enoch chronicles the revelations of the titular character – an antediluvian patriarch who sees visions of a bipartite afterlife never quite described in the Bible, then extensively foretelling the coming of a savior figure called the “Son of Man” and “Anointed One” – remarkably, a century and a half prior to the Book of Mark. 1 Enoch goes on offer more revelations of the architecture of the universe and offer a metaphorical alternate history of Israel. And while this bonus episode retells 1 Enoch in its entirety, the episode also offers full summaries of 2 Enoch (1st century CE) and 3 Enoch (c. 3-4th century CE), spectacular apocalyptic narratives chronicling dream visions and journeys to heaven that are important parts of Jewish and Christian history in their own right. As a whole, the Enochian canon should be requisite reading for anyone really interested in where the New Testament came from, and the roots of non-Biblical ideas central to Christianity. This bonus episode presents that canon in its entirety, also setting the stage for the rest of The Rejected Scriptures series.
×
Price: $1.99
Jubilees
Running Time: 1:45:30
Price: $1.99
Jewish and Christian sacred writings are full of revisions – Deuteronomy revises Leviticus, Chronicles revises Kings, and Matthew and Luke revise Mark. In the case of the Book of Jubilees, this text, likely a product of the Hasmonean Dynasty of the late 100s BCE, is a revision of the Book of Genesis. Lost to most of the world for some 1,500 years, Jubilees came back into broader circulation from the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Canon in the 19th century. Jubilees tells us a rather different story than Genesis does – a story in which Mosaic Law predates Moses himself. And while the text’s aim is to show Mosaic Law as unutterably ancient, the Book of Jubilees itself is a clear product of Jerusalem’s culture wars during the second century BCE. The Seleucid King Antiochus IV had profaned the Jerusalem temple, a Greek gymnasium had gone up in the city, and western cultural tendencies were sprouting all over the Levant. To some conservative Jews of the Maccabean and Hasmonean periods, the westernization of Jerusalem was, and always had been an anathema, and the Book of Jubilees is part of the pushback against the cultural diversity flowering in the old Jewish heartland. A work of revisionist history, then, the Book of Jubilees is paradoxically also a conservative rant – a long book whose distinctly second century theological oddities show it attempting to patch the boat of orthodoxy with patches made of heterodoxy. This bonus episode, in addition to offering a full summary of the Book of Jubilees and a revealing window into Hasmonean cultural history, will also teach you all about the Jubilee as a period of time, and how at least some ancient Jewish scribes dated the world back to the moment of creation.
×
Price: $1.99
All the Gospels
Running Time: 1:51:13
Price: $1.99
Saint Anne. Mary and Joseph. Nicodemus. Mary Magdalene. Pontius Pilate. Joseph of Arimathea. A pious thief and a wicked thief. The harrowing of hell. During and after the second century CE, Christian writers produced dozens, and likely hundreds, of apocryphal gospels, many of which survive in some form today. These additional Gospels offer countless add-on narratives about the life and times of Jesus and the people in his world – his parents and their generation, his Apostles, disciples, and friends, his trial and crucifixion, his resurrection, and even his apocryphal journey to hell. The contents of the apocryphal gospels range from humdrum and familiar to completely bizarre, and in this bonus episode, we review the major surviving apocryphal gospels while also tying together minor and fragmentary ones. Beginning with the ancient legends surrounding the Virgin Mary, her life and marriage to Joseph, the episode moves on to the nativity gospels, narratives about Jesus’ childhood, Jewish Christian and Gnostic gospels, and their takes on the events of Christ’s life, and finally a cluster of apocryphal legends about Jesus’ death and resurrection called the Pilate Literature. While some apocryphal gospels presented in this bonus program date to as late as the ninth century, the critical mass of were authored during the 100s, 200s, and 300s CE, making them a part of the body of early Christian writings prior to the Edict of Thessalonica in 380. Energetic, vibrant, charming, lovely, strange, and sometimes quite dark, the apocryphal gospels present an extraordinary range of material – material that’s only been anthologized and catalogued together in the past generation or so, making this a wonderful time to learn all about them.
×
Price: $1.99
The Apocryphal Acts
Running Time: 2:14:18
Price: $1.99
The canonical Acts of the Apostles is a tremendous part of the New Testament, but there were also many apocryphal acts books – Acts of John, Acts of Paul and Thecla, Acts of Peter, Acts of Thomas, and more. In this bonus program, we review four of the major surviving apocryphal acts books, culminating in the novel-length Acts of Thomas, in which the titular apostle travels all the way to India to proselytize. While these non-canonical narratives have their fair share of formulaic miracle stories, healings, and hearty Christian sermons, they are filled in equal parts with bizarre content largely forgotten by Christian posterity. It’s from the apocryphal acts literature, for instance, that we get the legendary story of Saint Peter being crucified upside-down, and Paul being martyred via decapitation in the court of Nero. But this literature is also a wild and overgrown body of adventure fiction and penny dreadful narratives, with brave heroes, churlish villains, exotic lands, with violence and sex never far from the picture. In fact, sex itself is a subject of utter obsession for the apocryphal Acts literature, with Jesus’ apostles, chaste and holy though they are, having the unique ability to magnetize virgins and beautiful wives to convert to Christianity, while fathers and husbands become enraged. At times beautifully composed, and at times as tacky as dime novels, the apocryphal Acts literature as it survives today is an extravagant and odd body of work, in which various apostles each get their own spin off narrative, Christian virgins are pursued by lusty men and women, death by execution lurks around every corner, and ultimately pagans are no match for the doughty devotees of the new religion.
×
Price: $1.99
The Apocryphal Apocalpyses
Running Time: 2:03:05
Price: $1.99
There is one apocalypse in the New Testament. But Revelation lacks much of what we expect to find in the Bible – Revelation’s doctrine of salvation is by works, rather than faith, its judgment day depicts a corporeal resurrection, and neither Revelation nor anything in Bible explains posthumous individual sentencing to heaven or hell, and how this works. And while Satan makes an appearance in Revelation, we’re not told what he is, or why a being never mentioned in the Old Testament is suddenly fighting on the opposing side at Armageddon. The apocryphal apocalypse literature tells us all of this, and there’s a lot of it. In the roughly second and third century apocalypses of Peter and then Paul, we finally get clear, hierarchized and terraced visions of heaven and hell, and what leads people to go to either place. In the Questions of Bartholomew and Life of Adam and Eve, we finally find out who Satan is – a jealous fallen angel, furious at Yahweh’s creation of Christ and humanity, who tells his own story in two different ancient texts. But amazingly, the apocryphal apocalypse literature gives us far more than this. Because while second and third century Christian texts had begun offering detailed portraits of sinners ripped to bloody shreds, degraded in filth, and burned forever in hell, Christian apocalypses from these early centuries onward also express extreme discomfort with the idea of hell. In the Book of Job, the titular character wonders why evil is done to a good person while he’s alive. But in the apocryphal Apocalypse of Paul, Apocalypse of the Virgin, Book of 2 Esdras and Book of Sedrach, we see a powerful pushback against the notion of eternal damnation, and the question of the problem of evil explodes to the surface of Christian apocalyptic literature from roughly 70 CE onward. This bonus episode, then, reviews the major surviving apocryphal apocalypses, and then, moving into some especially obscure apocalyptic literature from Late Antiquity, explores a number of ancient Christian narratives skeptical that the kindly and forgiving deity of the Gospels would ever be behind eternal damnation.
| $49.99 |
All Bonus Episodes
Running Time: 60:24:10
Download Specs: 3385 MB; 1 Zipped File Containing 125 MP3 Files Organized in Subfolders
This massive bonus collection contains every full length bonus episode Literature and History has produced – the entire Before Yahweh series, together with the entirety of The Astounding Apocrypha, Rad Greek Myths, More Greek Plays, Christianity’s Roots, and The Rejected Scriptures. By purchasing this 60-hour bonus package, you gain access to a whole new world of information on some far-flung periods of literary history, and at the same time make a major contribution to literatureandhistory.com – one that allows us to keep our main sequence going out to the general public for free.
| $19.99 |
All The Songs
Running Time: 05:03:56
If you enjoy the comedy songs that end Literature and History, this is the collection for you! Containing every single track of Songs About Books, Volumes 1-5, this compilation is a trip down memory lane for your Literature and History experience, inviting you to revisit Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt and Israel, and some of the oddities and curios of Ancient Greece and Rome. Whether you use them as a pedagogical tool or just a lighthearted distraction, this bundle of over 70 tunes is a fun way to brighten up your day!
The Aeneid, Book 13
Running Time: 48:00
Download Specs: 45 MB; 1 MP3 File
This free bonus episode is on Maffeo Vegio’s 1428 addition to Virgil’s Aeneid. Vegio’s addendum, in true Renaissance epic style, adds eulogies for Turnus, growing amity between the Trojans and Italians in the days after the war’s end, a romance between Lavinia and Aeneas, and, finally tells of how Venus deified her son at the end of his life. The story of how and why Maffeo Vegio wrote his thirteenth book of the Aeneid is a wonderful case study of how Greco-Roman texts began to circulate in Europe in the fifteenth century in unprecedented numbers, and, moreover how Renaissance humanism began in earnest. Click ADD TO CART and then Checkout to download the MP3. You’ll need to enter your email address and then you can download the file onto your device.If you’ve never downloaded MP3 files onto a device before, use this to give it a try for free with no risk. The files will likely be in the DOWNLOADS folder of your device – here’s Apple’s Help Page on getting to the Downloads folder of an iPhone.