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For over a decade I have been working on a lecture series about the mind of the ancient Greeks.    I have gone through several titles--The Greek Mind, The Greek Conservative Mind, The Aboriginal Greeks--and have not yet settled on one of them.

The overall point is that the Greeks, as they are revealed in their writings from Homer to Plutarch ( at least) are quite different from the caricatures presented by the 19th classical liberals  who shaped the older textbook version of a people who liberated themselves from family, religion, and tradition, and radically different from the grotesque creations of Marxists and feminists that are all too common these days.

The overall series will be broken into courses.  The first course, 8 roughly half hour lectures, takes up the Homeric mind; the second is devoted to the comparatively obscure speakers of one or another branch of the Aeolic Greek dialect--Thessalians, Boeotians, and Lesbians (Alcaeus and Sappho); the third takes up the Ionians; the fourth will present the stories and mind of the Dorians in Corinth, Argos, Sparta, and Syracuse...

As you see, one of the distinctive features is the attempt to let the different Greek ethnicities present themselves without making the entire civilization focused upon Athens.

Where I seek guidance is in format.  I had originally conceived of this series as audio podcasts, with a section on the website that would contain bibliography, maps, timelines, texts, and photographs.  When I have discussed it with a few friends, some have suggested that an audio-visual presentation would be more useful.  If we went that route, it would still be basically a filmed lecture with relevant slides for illustration, though we would still have the section on the website.  We have also considered doing the entire series as a podcast but picking a few to dress up with video.

These lectures have taken many hundreds of hours of work.  Tentatively, we intend to open the course up to non-subscribers who are willing to pay a fee but make it  free to charter subscribers.  Subscribers at lower levels will be charged a much reduced fee.

Please tell us what you think.  Are you at all interested?  Would you prefer audio-visual or simply  audio?  I am thinking of putting up the first one or two as tests in audio form.

 

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Thomas Fleming

Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina

16 Responses

  1. Gregory Fogg says:

    Although video would probably help clarify things to me. I would be interested to finding out what an audio only lesson could impart.

  2. Dom says:

    Visual aids can be helpful, but I am usually not by a screen when I listen to lectures here. Plain audio would be perfectly fine for me.

  3. Allen Wilson says:

    This is hard to answer. Audio podcasts with material on the website probably would work for me, but then there are other people who might want some video. I have have heard of people who would not use the Pimsleur language courses because they were audio only, whereas they wanted some kind of interactive computer software or online bells and whistles. That was back before Pimsleur started offering website based material and apps.

    Video lectures with slides might add clarity in some cases, but they may not be necessary in all.

    Maybe try making just one video lecture and see how it compares to the audio version?

  4. Joshua Smith says:

    My opinion is the visual will increase the product in the mind of the audience not already familiar with the Foundation. It will be similar to a Great Courses or Institute of Catholic Culture format, with which many will already be familiar. Standing up or seated in your office lecturing will be much classier than a video pod cast format.

  5. Michael Strenk says:

    I think that it would best be run as both audio and visual with an option of audio only (same lecture, just rendered as an audio file) for those who will only listen in their cars. I’ve seen many well done videos that were essentially lectures with maps, videos, photos, charts etc. running during the talk. I feel that this would help hold the attention of an audience better and will be a better introduction to those who know little to nothing of the subject matter. A good videographer can really dress up a lecture to increase its effectiveness. Might I suggest that you could film at least parts of lectures while in Greece on your proposed upcoming trips to be cut into the lectures themselves where relevant.

    I am looking forward to seeing this project come to fruition. When I realized that the Rockford institute was being euthanized and Chronicles was to be changed radically, I tried to buy The Greek Conservative Mind tapes (something that I had put off for too long), but Cindy Link got word that the new masters were no longer interested in distributing them.

  6. Ben says:

    Same as Dom. Audio please.

  7. Vince Cornell says:

    I second Mr. Strenk’s comment – good, clean audio can always be extracted from the video lecture and also made available as a podcast for very little additional work (Rex could probably do the whole series before breakfast). And, after having gone through the video lectures, one can easily listen again to the audio later to help with retention (I always buy the audio downloads of the Summer Schools so I can listen to the lectures all over again while driving or walking or whatnot).

  8. Jerry Brock says:

    I concur with Mr Strenk’s and Mr Cornell’s explanation, giving the listener a choice of audio only or video. Comparing previous podcasts on the FF website with a YouTube video of Dr Fleming presenting a paper at an Abbeville Institute event leads me to believe that both presentation methods would be beneficial.

  9. Avatar photo Thomas Fleming says:

    It seems only eight people are interested in the series.

  10. Jacob Johnson says:

    I find an audio format to be sufficient. I find when there is a download feature rather than only the option of streaming from a device to be much more helpful as it allows me to put it on my 20 year old, luddite technology and listen on the go, which I usually am. However, video appeals to a broader audience, and I think such an important/worthy subject should have a broader audience.

  11. D.A.Demopoulos says:

    Audio would be sufficient.

  12. Cody Nicholson says:

    I am also interested in this series. I would appreciate both audio and video if that is practical.

  13. Avatar photo Thomas Fleming says:

    So far, I conclude, about half will be content with audio but have no objection to video, several are either are indifferent or want both–which, if we start with video is not a problem–and there is perhaps a bit more support for audio, especially from those who think it will attract more people.

    The present state of our planning, then, is to guarantee the audio and see how well we can produce audio-visual. Let me give you all here a small example of how video would be an improvement: This is a passage from Lecture II:

    {6 Map Bronze Age Greeks} The Bronze Age kingdoms of the Mycenaean Greeks existed in the second millennium, and were destroyed some time between 1200 and 1100 BC, in other words during the period that followed the Trojan War. The centers of Mycenaean power lay in the Argolid {10 MAP } in the Peloponnesus, the almost-island that is Southern Greece.
    Like their Minoan predecessors, Mycenaean Greeks—the Achaeans—had a primitive writing system based on characters that stood for syllables. It was used, so far as we know, only for keeping records of the palaces’ economic activity. The linear-B tablets speak of two classes of rulers: an inferior ruler known as /J/ basileus, which would become classical Greek for king, and a higher ruler called the /King/ wanax. Since the w-sound, represented in some Greek dialects by the f-shaped letter digamma, disappears from most Greek dialects, the Wanax of the tablets is Homer’s anax, a term that classical Greeks applied typically only to gods. Homer, however, applies it typically to the greatest rulers among the Achaeans, Agamemnon of Mycenae and Idomeneus the ruler of Crete.

    the {} indicates a slide of map, / / indicates a term that needs attention, either because it is unfamiliar or a place name etc. Without audio, one can look them up in a dedicated space on the website or print out the pages you need.

    On the whole, I don’t like audio-visual and NEVER NEVER NEVER watch lectures on screen or on television–except I did watch John Rohmer’s series on Egypt but Rohmer is a major Egyptologist and he filmed onsite. On the other hand, the combination of audio plus web page is awfully clumsy. On the third hand, the AV is so much more work to do it correctly. It also means cleaning up my study, but it is due for the biennial tidying.

    Has anyone been involved in any similar project and might suggest hardware and software? I know there are socalled AI programs for integrating visual aids.

  14. Allen Wilson says:

    I might suggest a downloadable pdf or several of them instead of webpage but I’m not sure if it would really be an improvement. It just seems that a pdf might work better with downloadable audio since it can be accessed offline. A printed book might actually be better, but more expensive and more difficult to publish, and some people wouldn’t like it because they want more bells and whistles.

    I don’t usually download video courses unless they are only available in video or unless it’s necessary because of the subject matter, such as a course on Greek and Roman architecture which I have never gotten around to watching anyway.

    As for video editing software, I have only ever edited one very short video and that was with a primitive software years ago.

    Perhaps it would help to find out what the best you tubers use nowadays.

    This may or may not be helpful, assuming that you haven’t already seen it:

    https://photography.tutsplus.com/articles/what-video-editing-software-do-youtubers-use-best-for-2024–cms-108123

  15. Allen Wilson says:

    I forgot to add: ditto for hardware. It’s amazing what some you tubers can do nowadays with little in the way of equipment, sometime just an i-phone.

  16. Vince Cornell says:

    I don’t know about any AI programs, but have a loose association with some folks who might know something about the options available. I’ll ask and see what they say.

    And in addition to me I know at least 3 of the kids are interested, and the others will be firmly told they are interested when they get a bit older.