The Foundations of Western Civilization

These three seemingly simple words demand reflection. Where is the West? Who is Western? If civilization means cities, where do those come from? And when we look at history, how do we tell what is truly foundational from what may be merely famous? What is the difference between celebrity and distinction?

Borrowing our title from a famous book by S. N. Kramer, we look at why this small slice of what is now southern Iraq became;along with Egypt; one of the two foundations of Western civilization.

As Sumer was the gift of the Tigris and Euphrates, so Egypt; a ribbon of fertile floodplain 750 miles long but not much more than 15 miles wide; has been called the gift of the Nile. But the differences between Egypt and Mesopotamia tell us as much as the similarities.

Israel, built by the descendants of Abraham, was one of the small states that arose after the Egyptian Empire fell (c. 700 B.C.). Unified and independent only from 1200 - 900 B.C., it bequeathed to the West crucial religious ideas.

The peoples holding sway over the ancient Near East included the cruel Assyrians, the Medes, the Neo-Babylonians who overthrew the Assyrians around 600 B.C., and the Persians, who along with the Medes would build the largest empire the world had seen to that time.

Why is it important for you to grasp the archaeological record of the period from 1500 - 1200 B.C. in order to understand The Iliad and The Odyssey, ;two poems composed 500 years later?

What unique circumstance, unknown before or since in human history, made the Greek Dark Ages so dark? And how do we do the history of a time and place that is so obscured from our view? Surprisingly, we know a good deal.

Spartan society was harsh and peculiar, yet many observers at the time and since have found the Spartan way strangely compelling. After all, they won the war against Athens, and their victory moved Plato to re-imagine Athenian society in The Republic. What were the main features of this system, and why did the Spartans embrace it?

Lurching from crisis to crisis, the Athenians accidentally created one of the world's most freewheeling democracies, at least for adult male citizens, even as they were building an empire. How did the whole thing work, and what finally brought it down?

Can you list the key public buildings of an ancient Greek city? How did they combine beautiful and functional forms with deep ideological meanings? What made drama (including comedy) the public art par excellence

What does it mean to say that the Greeks, while certainly not the first people to reflect on the past, nonetheless invented history? How did Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, each in his own unforgettable way, contribute to this basic turning of the Western mind?

How did the Greeks begin moving from religious to more philosophical views of the world, and why did these views first arise in a particular part of the Greek world called Ionia? Who were the Sophists, what did they teach, and why did Socrates oppose them?

The goal of this lecture is to explain why Raphael's famous painting, The School of Athens,has Plato pointing up and Aristotle pointing down, and why both are defending and extending the work of Socrates.

Why couldn't thinkers as brilliant as Plato and Aristotle conceive of a non-imaginary alternative to the polis, and why does the career of one of Aristotle's students mean that in the end, such a shortcoming may not have mattered anyway?

The world after Alexander was cosmopolitan, prosperous, and dominated by Greeks and Macedonians all over the Mediterranean and far out into the old Persian Empire. Literature, science, and new philosophies flourished.

This lecture is about the foundations on which Roman history rests, including the geography of Italy and the two centuries or so of monarchical rule (ending, tradition says, in 509 B.C), that the republic overthrew.

What does it mean to speak of the constitution of the Roman republic? What are the essential offices, procedures, and ideals involved, and how did the whole thing really work?

By the time the republic found that it didn't merely possess but was an empire, Roman rule extended from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia, and from the North Sea to the Sahara Desert. How and why did this happen?

The Romans did more than war and politics. They created a distinctive culture that flowered in magnificent lyric and epic poetry, assimilated profound Greek influences, and gave us Cicero as Rome's greatest booster and toughest critic.

The 200 often-turbulent years between the murdered reformers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus and the rise of Octavian saw the old Roman system drown amid overwhelming temptations and tensions brought on by Rome's very conquests.

When Octavian became Augustus, First Citizen, in 31 B.C., he was inaugurating a 200-year period of security, prosperity, and wise rule that Tacitus would nonetheless wryly label "a desert [that we] called peace." Was Tacitus right?

To understand how culturally creative and important the principate was, you need only reflect that what today strikes the popular imagination as quintessentially Roman is a product of this period (republican Rome was a city of wood).

No well-informed observer in the time of Augustus and his successors would have predicted that a world-changing movement would arise in a small, poor, and insignificant region of Palestine. But that is what happened.

The word church (ekklesia) occurs only twice in only one of the Gospels (Matthew). Yet Paul, whose letters predate the Gospels, uses the word routinely. This intriguing fact is your gateway to the fascinating history of early Christianity.

For 100 years after the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180, the Romans put up almost no great public structures, a sign of severe trouble. What lay behind this crisis, and how did Diocletian (who became emperor in 284) and his successor Constantine successfully respond?

Although the notion that Rome somehow 'fell' remains pervasive, scholars of late antiquity (c.300 to 700) have no use for the idea. More intriguing still, there weren't any barbarian invasions as usually understood.

Once Rome stopped persecuting its adherents, the new Christian faith spread through the Roman world in the form of a large, hierarchical organization. Still, achieving a catholic (i.e., universal) definition of key beliefs proved difficult.

How and why did it matter that Christianity triumphed in the Roman world? Church Fathers, the lives of monks and nuns, and the interaction of Christian faith with a host of day-to-day issues hold the answer.

As with ancient Israel or 1st-century Palestine, no one could have predicted that 7th-century Arabia would become the cradle of a world-changing new religion. Yet new as it was in many ways, Islam had important ties to Greece and Rome as well as the scriptural traditions of the West.

When he rebuilt an old Greek town in about 330 and named it after himself, what did the Emperor Constantine think he was doing? (Hint: It wasn't founding something called 'Byzantium.') What was the result, over the centuries, of Constantine's vision?

Within and without the old Roman frontiers, the world of the West became a world of small Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic kingdoms. What were they like, and how does understanding them prepare you to grasp the history of the West properly?

How could Charlemagne have achieved so much? He ruled more of Europe than anyone else between the times of the Romans and Napoleon. Yet his Carolingian empire survived him by barely more than a generation.

Since 1839, scholars have been associating the Carolingians with a renaissance. Why? What is Carolingian culture's distinctive contribution to the West, and how does it set them apart from their Muslim and Byzantine contemporaries?

Despite being battered by centuries of Muslim, Magyar, and Viking attacks and invasions, Europe was able by 1095 to begin striking east and south in a series of Crusades that would span two centuries. It was one of history's great reversals. How did it happen?

The three-part medieval scheme of fighting men, praying men, and working men is worth pondering, but so are all those whom it omits.

What are the two words that best sum up the national achievements of England and France during the Middle Ages? Why do medieval historians now avoid the term 'feudalism'?

European history as commonly taught centres tightly on England and France as the key nations of Europe at this time. This lecture will explain why you ought to challenge that view.

The great Scholastics; Anselm, Abelard, and Aquinas were brilliant, often eccentric thinkers who came out of the Latin-speaking clerical and academic world that gave the West one of its greatest intellectual and institutional patrimonies: the university.

The years from 900 onward saw an explosion of vernacular (i.e. non-Latin) writings. Why did people begin creating formal written works in their native tongues? Does knowing this literature bring us closer to the people of medieval Europe?

To understand the Renaissance, you must know the political, religious, and social context in which it took place. The age was one that Dickens might have called "the worst of times". The Renaissance was a response to grave challenges.

So, what's the problem? Actually, there are four; or at least one problem with four sides. Here are two clues: How did a movement that began in Italy wind up with a French name? And how can a rebirth be something new?

How to capture a sense of the Renaissance? With cultural biographies of Boccaccio, Petrarch, Lorenzo de' Medici, Pope Pius II, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and others.

What happened when the Renaissance and its new learning crossed the Alps? Humanists could be found on both sides of the mountains, but they turned to different sources north and south, with fateful results.

The Reformation (if indeed there was only one) is not as obvious a historical phenomenon as you might think. To penetrate its meaning, you will find it helpful to begin with the first of its magisterial figures, Martin Luther.

Why is seeing the Reformation as Protestants versus Catholics such a serious mistake, and what view makes better sense? To answer those questions, you will consider other major Protestant figures besides Luther, especially John Calvin.

Beginning around 1550, the Catholic Church undertook a reformation of its own, founding new institutions and launching new religious orders. At the same time, confessional lines were hardening on the religious map of a permanently divided Europe.

In purely material terms (population, natural resources, etc.) the peninsular appendage of Asia that is Europe should not have been the one among all world civilizations to span the globe. But starting in the latter decades of the 15th century, that is what happened.

You leave the West in 1600, on the cusp of the Age of Empire, the Scientific Revolution, and the Baroque Period. It's a long way from those mud-walled villages in Mesopotamia to the threshold of its modern era, but certain patterns, problems, and possibilities endure to make the West what it is.