Previous Seasons
The summaries below should give newcomers to the podcast a sense of where the show has been, and what it’s currently covering. Previous seasons of Literature and History offer a lengthy introduction to Bronze and Archaic Greek literature, the Tanakh or Old Testament, Classical and Hellenistic Greece, Roman literature, the New Testament, and Late Antiquity. Our approach to ancient history essentially combines the academic work of three university departments – Assyriology, Religious Studies, and Classics, with modest forays into Egyptology and archaeology. As a result, the podcast’s previous seasons have shown some curious connections – between the Old Testament and cuneiform texts of Nineveh; between Plato and Saint Paul, and between Hellenistic period cult religions and the Gospels, to name a few of the more memorable ones.An interdepartmental approach to these subjects, again and again, has demonstrated that the way we silo academic departments today isn’t always ideal for an understanding of the past. In 400 BCE, theology and philosophy were hardly separate subjects. Religion was a set of civic and public actions as much as private beliefs. The gods in poetry were to be gawked and laughed at, though they adorned tympanums and received sacrifices and ablutions. And while past episodes have demonstrated some shortcomings of compartmentalized approaches to ancient history, they have also, more simply, been a lot of fun. It doesn’t take an advanced degree to enjoy Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It’s easy enough enjoy a series of episodes on the most famous plays of ancient Greek theater, and though the Old Testament is dense, a careful approach, steeped in history, makes it a very accessible, human book. Below is a summary of where we’ve been, so far.
Season 1: Ancient Literature (Episodes 1-14) (18:05:00)
Most Literature and History listeners start with Episode 1, as the podcast moves forward chronologically from there. The Bronze Age, which ended in the twelfth century BCE, was a time of extraordinary cultural and economic productivity in the Fertile Crescent. Long before the Old Testament, intercontinental trade flourished, empires stretched across the Ancient Near East, and a great deal of lyric and epic poetry was produced that has been recovered and translated. Literature and History’s first season covers this period, beginning with Sumerian Proto-Cuneiform in 3,100 BCE, and then exploring the Enuma Elish, Epic of Gilgamesh, ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, and short fiction and wisdom literature from Ancient Egypt, before moving on to a series of eight episodes on the great works of the Archaic Greek poets Hesiod and Homer – Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony, and then Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. As Samuel Noah Kramer put it, “History begins at Sumer,” and in this season of the podcast, we learn how Ancient Near Eastern culture, science, and technology, though interrupted by the Bronze Age Collapse of the 1100s, were formative to the Iron Age city states of the Mediterranean, and how ancient Greek and Hebrew literature and theology evolved from Bronze Age Egypt and Mesopotamia. Full summary here.
Season 2: The Old Testament (Episodes 15-24) (16:11:00)
The numerous versions of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Tanakh, and then the Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Slavonic, and Tewahedo Old Testaments, to name the major ones) were produced mostly between the 600s and 100s BCE. During this 500-year period, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek speaking Jews lived under very different empires – beneath Assyrians, Babylonians, Achaemenid Persians, and Hellenistic Greeks. Judaism, and the theology of the Old Testament change profoundly from the older books to the younger ones, with the harsh and unsophisticated narratives of Numbers and Deuteronomy giving way to the gentler worldviews and more novelistic prose of Esther, Tobit, Jonah, and Ruth. Season 2 of Literature and History, beginning with a long primer on Biblical archaeology, explores the Old Testament from a historical perspective, introducing modern historicist approaches to the text, and studying the ideological and cultural evolutions that the various Old Testaments contain. Though this season of the podcast digs substantially into contemporary biblical scholarship and ancient history, it also assumes no knowledge whatsoever of the Bible, aiming to present the text to those of us who might be approaching it for the first time, in addition to Jews and Christians of various backgrounds who’d like to learn a bit more about Biblical history and archaeology. Full summary here.
Season 3: Classical and Hellenistic Greece (Episodes 25-41) (29:19:00)
The Classical (~508-323 BCE) and Hellenistic (323-31 BCE) periods of Ancient Greek history produced most of what we think of when we think of Ancient Greece. Being a literature podcast, our main focus during this season is on literature, rather than ancient Greek philosophy and military history. Thus, Season 3, following introductory episodes on Greek lyric poets like Sappho and Pindar, and a primer on Ancient Greek theater, offers multiple programs each on Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Apollonius of Rhodes, whose Argonautica is a tremendous but understudied epic from Ptolemaic Egypt. We’ll also study the c. 315 BCE play Dyskolos by Menander, a text that shows how Greek language playwrights were adapting theatrical works to entertain more cosmopolitan audiences, and learn about the style called New Comedy, which flourished in the Roman republic under Plautus and Terrance, and eventually flowered into the ancient Greek novel. The climax of the season is a final episode exploring how Alexander’s conquests (336-323 BCE) changed the cultural history of the Mediterranean, Ancient Near East, and Central Asia. With the works of Hesiod and Homer under our belts from Season 1, Season 3’s coverage of Classical and Hellenistic literature is both is accessible, information-packed, and a lot of fun. Full summary here.
Season 4: Roman Literature (Episodes 42-75) (64:20:00)
There has been a misconception, for a thousand and a half years, that the Romans were brutes – competent engineers at best – who borrowed the best of what they were from Greece. Anyone who has studied Latin literature, whether from the republican or imperial period, knows that the eight-hundred-year story of Roman literature is not summed up so easily. Season 4 of Literature and History, a sprawling 33-episode sequence (itself the length of Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome), covers the earliest fragmentary Latin literature, and then goes on to offer programs on Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Propertius, Ovid, Seneca, Statius, Petronius, Juvenal, Apuleius, and Marcus Aurelius, most of whom receive multiple episodes. Latin literature – and not Greek – was the primary influence on the early European Renaissance, with Petrarch far more influenced by Ovid, and Shakespeare by Seneca, than either author was by Greek sources, many of which remained obscure and untranslated until the eighteenth century. While studying Roman literature and history helps us understand the roots of the Renaissance, much more immediately, these subjects help us understand how Christianity came to exist and prosper increasingly during the Roman Empire’s final few centuries. Full summary here.
Season 5: The New Testament and Early Christianity (Episodes 76-85) (21:46:00)
Christianity’s early history is far more complex than is commonly understood. Its roots lay in Second Temple Jewish apocalypticism, and the salvific cult religions of the final century BCE – those of Isis, Cybele, Dionysus, and Adonis. Its apostles, most prominently Paul and Peter, had significantly different ideas about how the religion ought to be practiced. Its Gospels, most prominently Mark and John, portray Christ in radically different ways. The ideology was, during the first few centuries heterogeneous, evolving into Gnosticism, Ebionism, Marcionism, Montanism, Manichaeism, and most consequentially, Arianism, all before the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. Following the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library and Manichaean texts at Turpan, we know far more than ever about early Christianity. Literature and History’s fifth season, following a primer on the Herodian dynasty and late Second Temple Judaism, goes through the Gospels, Acts, spends a long time with the Epistles, and then Revelation. Rather than stopping there, however, the podcast also includes long episodes on Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism, and how these three ideologies are an (often ignored) part of early Christianity’s evolution before it hardened into Roman Catholicism under Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and others around 400 CE. Full summary here.
