Foundations of Western Civilization

Beginning with the Renaissance, the culture of the West exploded. Over the next 600 years, rapid innovations in philosophy, technology, economics, military affairs, and politics allowed what had once been a cultural backwater left by the collapse of the Roman Empire to dominate the world.

What is Western civilization? According to Professor Noble, it is "much more than human and political geography," encompassing myriad forms of political and institutional structures - from monarchies to participatory republics - and its own traditions of political discourse. It involves choices about who gets to participate in any given society and the ways in which societies have resolved the tension between individual self-interest and the common good.

Our purpose in this course will be to examine the foundations of Western Civilization in antiquity. We will look at the culture of the ancient Hebrews, of the ancient Greeks, and of the Romans, and we will likewise look at how these cultures interacted with each other, sometimes happily, sometimes not. In the process we will focus on how the questions they addressed and the answers they found live among us and continue to shape our lives to this very day. For in a very real sense we are all of us, as participants in Western culture, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans still.

We will for the most part be paying attention to events taking place and ideas coming to birth in the Mediterranean basin, the fundamental homeland, or cultural hearth of Western Civilization from about 1200 BCE, before the Common Era, to about 600 CE: that is to say, from about the time of the events memorialized as the Trojan War and the Exodus to the end of Antiquity, when the Western Roman Empire, if not the Eastern, was a cherished memory, but little more.

* Why study the foundations of Western Civilization, as opposed to the foundations of other civilizations, such as Japanese, Inca, or Hausa, as the case may be?
* Studying the foundations of Western culture is a way of coming to know not only where we come from, but who we are.
* How did the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans contribute to Western Civilization?
* The Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, both in their lives and in their writings, wrestled with questions none of us can avoid. How should we live? Does the world finally make sense, or are things finally and irrevocably random? Where are we going and what is our purpose?
* What distinguishes Western Civilization (or Civilizations) from other Civilizations?

So much of our historical knowledge is rooted in Western civilization, from the stories of ancient Greece and Rome to the intellectual developments of the Renaissance. But this history tells only part of the story of our global world. Eastern civilization has its own fascinating story, with consequences that matter deeply to our lives today.