Aeschylus

Ancient Warrior Culture, Slavery, Concubines, Ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel
History

Ancient Warrior Culture, Blog 1, War, Slaves, and Concubines in Ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel

Bruce Strom 10

The Greeks were the most formidable fighting force in the Near East. The mighty Persian empire loaded their army on ships to fight what they thought would be an easy victory, but were decisively defeated by Athens and Sparta and their allies both on land and on sea in two separate wars. This established the reputation of the Greeks, later a Persian prince, Cyrus the Younger, hired a Greek hoplite infantry army to fight for the crown of Persia. The Greeks dominated the battle, but Cyrus was killed in the fighting. Losing their patron, the Greeks were forced to fight their way through the Persian Empire back to the Black Sea and then to Greece. This showed that the mighty Persians were vulnerable, later Alexander the Great of Macedon would conquer all of Persia and some of India also.

The Greeks may have been the founders of Western Civilization, but they were first and foremost a warrior society. If the Greeks weren’t formidable warriors they would have been conquered by the mighty Persian Empire, which means that there would be no Socrates, no Plato, no Xenophon, the Greeks would not have been able to leave us a cultural legacy. […]

Summary of Greco-Persian Wars, Herodotus, Plutarch and Aeschylus Celebrate Greek Victory
Greek and Roman History

Summary of Greco-Persian Wars, Ancient Historians Herodotus, Plutarch and Aeschylus Celebrate Greek Victory

Bruce Strom 1

The wars between Greek city-states, and Persian influence in these wars, continued after a short peace, and lasted another generation, exhausting the Greek city-states, leading to their subjection of Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great. The lesson that Alexander learned from of all these wars, starting with the Greco-Persian Wars, and from Xenophon’s leading the Greek mercenary armies from the heart of the Persian Empire, Babylon, back to Greek territory, was that the Greek hoplite armies were vastly superior to the Persian fighting forces. This meant for Alexander the Great that the Persian Empire was ripe for the taking. […]

Greek and Roman History

Summary of the Peloponnesian Wars Between Athens and Sparta

Bruce Strom 4

Why study the Peloponnesian wars? One main reason is: You cannot understand the Platonic dialogues without first understanding the history of the Peloponnesian Wars, because so many of the leading figures of this period are referenced in the Platonic dialogues, and we can learn many moral lessons from the war, which changed the Greek city-states forever.
The history of the war includes many interesting personalities, including Pericles, the founder of the radical democracy of Athens who died in the first years of the war, and Alcibiades, the ladies’ man and charismatic personality who was a leader of all three sides of the antagonists of the war, and we have the Spartan general Lysander who spared Athens from destruction when she lost the war. […]

Book Reviews and Miscellaneous

On Learning Attic and Koine Greek, Classical Latin, and Biblical Hebrew

Bruce Strom 0

You would only want to learn these ancient languages if you are truly a serious student, and want to read the Scriptures and classics in their original language, and so you will not miss the word plays and puns that you can only catch in the original language. When reading epic poems of Homer and the Greek playwrights, or the Psalms in Old Testament, or the elegant works of Cicero, you can experience the rhymes and rhythms of the original language, as poetry can be incredibly difficult to translate. When we cut the video for a play by Aeschylus on the Battle of Salamis in the Persian Wars, the various translations we encountered were RADICALLY different. Personally, I am tempted not to read any more Greek plays until I learn how to read Attic Greek. […]