The School of Human Inquiry · philosophy, history & belief
Ancient & Classical History
From the first cities to the last legions: what the ancient world built, argued, and left behind.
The first cities, the first writing, the first laws — where recorded history starts.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~16 hours
Unit I — The Invention of the City
Farming and surplus · Uruk and the first writing · Temples, kings, and scribes
Unit II — Mesopotamian Powers
Sargon's empire · Hammurabi's laws · Assyria and Babylon
Unit III — The Gift of the Nile
The Old Kingdom and the pyramids · Pharaoh as god and administrator · Everyday life from tomb paintings
Unit IV — Contact and Collapse
Trade across the Fertile Crescent · The Bronze Age collapse · What the tablets tell us
The small, quarrelsome cities that invented democracy, tragedy, and the examined life.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~20 hours
Unit I — Archaic Greece
Dark Age to city-state · Homer as history, and not · Colonies and hoplites
Unit II — Athens and Sparta
Athenian democracy in practice · Spartan discipline · The Persian Wars
Unit III — The Classical Moment
Pericles and the building program · Tragedy and the festival · The Peloponnesian War
Unit IV — Alexander and After
Macedon rises · The conquests · The Hellenistic world
How a republic won the Mediterranean, lost itself, and became an empire that still frames our law.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~22 hours
Unit I — The Republic
Foundation stories versus archaeology · Senate, consuls, and tribunes · The Punic Wars
Unit II — The Republic Breaks
The Gracchi · Marius and Sulla · Caesar and the crossing of the Rubicon
Unit III — The Empire
Augustus and the settlement · The Pax Romana · Cities, roads, and law
Unit IV — Transformation
The third-century crisis · Constantine and Christianity · The fall in the West, and what 'fall' means
Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus — the first historians, read with a critic's pencil.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~18 hours
Unit I — Herodotus
Inquiry as a genre · The Persian Wars retold · Marvels, sources, and method
Unit II — Thucydides
Evidence and invented speeches · The plague and the Melian dialogue · Realism's first draft
Unit III — Roman Voices
Livy's moral history · Tacitus on tyranny · Plutarch's parallel lives
Unit IV — Weighing Testimony
Bias and intended audience · Archaeology as a check on the texts · How a lost source is reconstructed
Bread, school, work, and festivals — the ancient Mediterranean at street level.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~12 hours
Unit I — Home and Family
Houses in Athens, Rome, and Thebes · Childhood and school · Meals and markets
Unit II — Work
Farmers and the seasons · Craft workshops · Slavery and how widespread it was
Unit III — Play and Belief
Festivals and games · Baths and theaters · Household gods and funerals