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The Other Side Of History: Daily Life In The Ancient World (2013)

by Robert Garland(Favorite Author)

4.25 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

The Great Courses

series

The Great Courses

review 1: Early in the book, it suddenly dawned me. Nothing revolutionary that perhaps has not crossed minds of thousands over thousands of years. Still worth putting the thought here: it is possible to theorise, discuss, study, fictionalise, typify, imagine, criticise, be wonderstruck, be surprised, philosophise or profess any of the billions of individuals from any of the millions of vaguely defined groups over any of the millennia of human existence. In the hands of someone who speaks well, with the language control that generates vivid descriptions of strange environments, with an active investigative imagination that could help add the details and finally the authority to make the topic under discussion important, all of us are as history worthy as Alexander!The lecture series ... morehas frequent glorious moments when it would suddenly throw light on small, rarely discussed details that ended up significantly shaping human history like the war formations that made some more successful than others or poverty that made crusaders out of common men or the fascination of Greek art that drove the Roman political life. There are many more examples of this throughout the book.Yet, the series meanders as it takes 46 different yet "typical" individuals from the Mediterranean and then Medieval worlds with few large, new contexts. The book does succeed in imparting some messages: almost everyone was poor, highly superstitious, extremely biased, perpetually in mortal danger and living in squalid conditions never obvious in the movies or images of the times. Beyond this, the journey down this supposedly exotic subject-river appears more to gawk at the strange ways of ancient lives than to learn.
review 2: If you've ever listened to lectures from The Teaching Company, you know that instructors can be hit or miss. Their material may be good but their presentation is poor or vice versa. Rarely do the two meet except in this case. Prof. Garland looks at the micro and macro lens in examining the ordinary social climate of the ancient world. It is a fascinating and informative look to better examine our current social climate. One such observation was when Garland talks about the large temples and public buildings of the Greeks and Romans noting that people took considerable pride in their buildings. Their first concern was that the building was grand and moved them beyond their own space. We see these ostentatious temples and buildings and immediately our awe moves to think what a waste as we criticize the hypocrisy of the system. They could have helped others or improved their own homes, which is another way of forcing our Western mindset upon them. We are so focused on condemning the system because it helps us not look at our own excessive individualistic hypocrisy. less

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