Getting Started with Literature and History
This podcast moves forward chronologically through literary history, from 3,100 BCE onward. Accordingly, most listeners jump on board at the beginning, in Episode 1, and continue from there. There are significant advantages to moving forward chronologically. The Babylonian Atrahasis, for instance, very likely had some influence on the Book of Genesis, which itself has discernible ties to contemporary ancient Greek beast fables and the myth of Prometheus and Pandora. Literary and cultural history are a river, and even if we can’t pin down precise influences, we can still observe eddies and bends where a lot of similar things start happening around the same time.However, not everyone is interested in the Bronze Age, so let me offer a few words of advice on how to jump into the podcast at other junctures than the beginning.
- You can generally listen to any program on the All Episodes page without any prior background. If you’re interested in Marcus Aurelius, you can listen to the Marcus Aurelius episode. If you’re curious about the Book of Revelation, you can listen to the Revelation episode.
- Some episodes are in sequences (for instance, three connected programs on Cicero, four on Virgil’s Aeneid, and so on). In such cases, it’s advisable to begin at the outset of the sequence.
- Otherwise, below are a few good jumping-in points, if you’d prefer not to begin at the beginning, followed by all of the season summary pages.
Literature and History has a 6-episode sequence on the Iliad and the Odyssey, the most influential works of ancient Greek literature. Episode 9, assuming no prior knowledge, jumps into the Iliad, the epic about the Trojan War, certainly a literary work worth knowing. If you don’t know your Greeks from your Trojans, this is the place to start.
This podcast has an enormous amount of content Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, and it all starts in Episode 15: Canaan, an introduction to Biblical archaeology and history, and a primer on what was going on in and around modern-day Israel when much the Old Testament was being written.
This is a shorter (01:13:00) episode of the podcast on a very bloody, dark Roman play – Thyestes by Seneca. While the episode does explore Thyestes in the context of Seneca’s biography and philosophy, it’s overall a concise, standalone, representative introduction to Literature and History.
This episode begins our season on the New Testament and Early Christianity. The story of Herod the Great is the riveting saga of an energetic, paranoid, vicious, and occasionally very effective leader, and it sets the stage for Literature and History’s presentation of the New Testament.
