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Join the hosts of New Humanists and founders of the Ancient Language Institute, Jonathan Roberts and Ryan Hammill, on their quest to discover what a renewed humanism looks like for the modern world. The Ancient Language Institute is an online language school and think tank, dedicated to changing the way ancient languages are taught.
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Send us a text What do you think of laryngeals? How should we refer to the Anatolian languages? Where do you stand on Gimbutas and Renfrew? In this episode of New Humanists, Dr. Colin Gorrie helps guide us through the Indo-European family tree. We follow the various branches as they spread out across Europe and Asia: Anatolian, Tocharian, Celtic, Germanic, Italic, and more. This episode covers the second half of Laura Spinney's introduction to the field of Indo-European studies, Proto. Laur...
Send us a text Supposedly, about half of the world population speaks languages that all come from one root language: Proto-Indo-European. How do we know, and where did "PIE" come from? Ukraine, Anatolia, or somewhere else? Did the Indo-Europeans spread out in a massive, peaceful migration of farmers? Or as small bands of shepherds, stealing livestock and killing anyone standing in the way? How do we even know what a prehistoric language sounded like if we don't have any record of their langua...
Send us a text The classical education revival movement began in the 1980s as a DIY, grassroots attempt to recover the medieval liberal arts, most notably the Trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. However, the classical ed movement also frequently drapes itself in the garb of Plato: leading students out of the cave, employing Socratic techniques in the classroom, and ensuring its students do not lead unexamined lives. But what if classical education, both in its love for the Trivium (and Q...
Send us a text What is liberal education? It's the prompt that has launched one thousand essays, and in a 1959 lecture at the University of Chicago, the (in)famous Leo Strauss gave his answer. Despite fleeing Nazi Germany and coming to the United States, Strauss wasn't afraid of criticizing the positivism, historicism, and relativism of the American academy. And as is evident in reading his lecture "What is Liberal Education?" neither was he afraid of calling into question the value and feasi...
Send us a text In celebration of the 100th episode of New Humanists, we do an extended episode that is a retrospective, discussing the history of the Ancient Language Institute and the New Humanists podcast, has some updates on what we're up to at the moment, and a peek behind the curtain so listeners can find out what is upcoming at ALI and on the podcast. We also welcome both Colin Gorrie and Luke Ranieri to the show to discuss Ekho: The Ancient Language Streaming App. Alan Jacobs’s The Y...
Send us a text Socrates taught his students contempt for the gods, how to defraud creditors, and useless trivialities about flea-jumping. Or at least, that's how Socrates appears in the comedy Clouds. If you want to understand something of the Athenian hostility to the great philosopher which eventually reached its climax in sentencing Socrates to death, it helps to see how he was lampooned in front of Athenian audiences by his contemporary, the comedian playwright Aristophanes. But Clouds is...
Send us a text In the 4th century AD, two Christian friends - Basil and Gregory - travelled from Cappadocia to Athens to go study Greek literature with Libanius, the leading rhetorician of the time. While there, these two young and wealthy Cappadocians befriended a fellow student named Julian, the nephew of the Emperor Constantine. There in Athens, the three young Christians mastered Greek philosophy and rhetoric at Libanius' feet. Later on, Basil went on to become the bishop of Caesarea, one...
Send us a text We tend to think of the Athenians as philosophers, architects, and mathematicians. But their highest devotion was rather to sports and to music. These priorities are evident from their system of education, in which young Greek men were trained to compete in the Olympics as well as to sing and dance in the chorus. They were jocks. Think of the tragic playwright Aeschylus, who despite his literary accomplishments was remembered in his epitaph merely as a warrior at the Battle of ...
Send us a text Everyone knows "The Lost Tools of Learning." But did you know Dorothy Sayers delivered another, longer, and even more interesting lecture on education, all about learning Latin? Sayers recalls beginning Latin lessons with her father at the tender age of 6, but laments that after 20 years of study, she was left barely able to read a line of Latin - and not for lack of trying or talent. Sayers contrasts this with her success in learning French, and concludes that what she needed ...
Send us a text "Παιδεία found its realization in παιδεραστία." This is how Henri-Irénée Marrou characterizes the relationship between paideia and pederasty. The latter fulfilles the former. Indeed, few things were so distinctively Greek as their love for boys. Thus a close relationship between an older man and an adolescent was, for centuries, the definitive form of education in Greece. Xenophon and Plutarch famously protested that in Sparta, sexual touch between men and boys was forbidden, b...
Send us a text What if we find Norse myth or Greco-Roman myth more aesthetically pleasing than Christianity? Should we believe in the pagan gods instead? Is the Bible actually good art? Is Christian theology beautiful? Do Christians find their religion beautiful just because they believe it is true? In a 1944 lecture before Oxford's Socratic Club, C.S. Lewis asks and answers these questions - and more. Jonathan and Ryan follow along as Lewis asks, and answers, the question the Socratic Club p...
Send us a text THIS IS SPARTA. Xenophon said that, even in his day, the rest of the Greeks thought Sparta's laws wholly strange: "all men praise such institutions, but no state chooses to imitate them." Foremost among these strange laws, of course, were the ones concerned with the rearing and education of children. And these laws, he said, were in their own turn developed not by imitating others, but came from the mind of a single great lawgiver: Lycurgus. It should come as no surprise, then,...
Send us a text We think of Sparta as a grim place, more of a military barracks with some civilians attached than an actual city. Its inhumane marriage laws, nauseating eugenics program, brutal educational system, obsession with military training, and paranoid suspicion of non-Spartans all led French historian Henri-Irénée Marrou to label Classical Sparta as an ancient fascist state. But there was a time, as Marrou argues in his history of ancient education, when Sparta was the cultural center...
Send us a text Plato called Homer "the educator of all Greece." But what is a Homeric education? What were the Greeks learning from their supreme bard? Furthermore, the phrase "Homeric education" contains within it a second meaning as well. What kind of education were Homer's heroes getting? In other words, how did Achilles become Achilles? In this episode, we take a close look at Chapter One of A History of Education in Antiquity, in which Henri-Irénée Marrou describes the character of Homer...
Send us a text Why study history? To understand ourselves? To pass on the tradition of our ancestors to our progeny? To build something new? Jonathan and Ryan compare Richard M. Gamble's and Henri-Irénée Marrou's attempts to answer these questions. They look at Gamble's introduction to his anthology The Great Tradition, and then at Marrou's introduction to his scholarly masterpiece A History of Education in Antiquity. Richard M. Gamble's The Great Tradition: https://amzn.to/3Q4lRnO Evelyn...
Send us a text The wise man, like Abraham, does not spurn Hagar. For she is merely preparatory to Sarah. This is the analogy that the great Jewish Platonist, Philo of Alexandria, makes when discussing an education in the liberal arts versus the life of philosophy. While the liberal arts have the dignity only of the concubine, Philo says, education in the liberal arts is nevertheless a necessary step before one can ascend the ladder to Sarah, i.e. philosophic contemplation. Jonathan and Ryan d...
Send us a text Clement of Alexandria was one of the many luminaries of the Catechectical School of Alexandria, one of the early church's most distinguished centers of learning and theology. His argument that all truth, whether found in the Bible or in Greek philosophy, issues from a single source, namely Christ, potentially marks him as one of the earliest exemplars of "Christian humanism." But Clement is not without some controversy, including in his attempt to appropriate the label "gnostic...
Send us a text Niccolo Machiavelli is often held up as the paradigmatic political philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. But as James Hankins argued in an earlier book, Virtue Politics, Machiavelli in fact repudiates the framework common to many of the humanists of the Renaissance. Machiavelli is an outlier. Who then can replace him as the Renaissance's paradigmatic political philosopher? In his new book, Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy, Hankins proposes the little-known Francesco...
Send us a text In his lifetime, John Chrysostom witnessed the true beginning of Christendom: the Emperor Theodosius confirmed the public standing of Christianity over that of paganism and delivered a final knockout blow to Arian heresy in favor of Nicene orthodoxy. But a religion on the upswing can attract opportunistic and ill-informed converts. Jonathan and Ryan look at Chrysostom's advice on the bringing-up of children, and the ways in which the Greek Father uses pagan tropes - Greco-Roman...
Send us a text Can Christians read and appreciate pagan literature? The vexed relationship between the Church and a world that hates it has generated many different responses. The most popular recent proposal is Rod Dreher's "Benedict option" - Dreher counsels Christian retrenchment and quasi-monastic self-sufficiency. But the great saint of late antiquity and compiler of the Vulgate, Jerome (aka Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus), proposes a different option, drawn from the Mosaic Law. Jonathan...
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