A Classical Education: The Stuff You Wish You'd Been Taught at School [Kindle Edition]

The author of I Used To Know That returns with a guide to all things classical, including Latin and Greek phrases and nuggets of ancient philosophy and classical literature. --Bookseller, March 6, 2009

This book aims to fill you in on 'the stuff you wish you'd been taught at school --The Times, June 17, 2009

See if you can tell your Tantalus from your Tacitus --The Daily Telegraph, August 20, 2009

a cutely old-fashioned volume covered in Roman centurions' helmets. --Yorkshire Post, June 19, 2009

If you...wished you'd paid more attention at school, then this is the book for you. Fascinating! --Good Book Guide, July, 2009

How many times have you wished that you'd been taught Latin at school? Or that your history stretched all the way back to Greek and Roman myths and legends? Or perhaps you wish you knew all about the great inventions and medical developments that have made our world what it is today? "A Classical Education" provides all of these classical facts that modern schooling leaves out and many more. Perfect for parents who wish to teach their children and for those who would like to learn or relearn the facts themselves, "A Classical Education" is informative and educational, but in a completely accessible way, including: Latin and Greek; logic and philosophy; natural sciences; art and architecture; poetry and drama; and, history and classical literature. Also including suggestions for further reading and entertaining tit-bits of information on the classics, "A Classical Education" is a must for anyone feeling let down by modern schooling.

Why `a classical education'? Who cares? Those were the questions I had to answer when I sat down to write this book. And what I came up with was this.

The Greeks and the Romans certainly didn't invent civilisation - the Chinese, the Babylonians, the Egyptians were all there long before them - but they did have an amazing influence on Western civilisation at we now know it. What we call classical architecture - the buildings in many of our city centres that look solid and reliable - derives from the Greeks. The principles of a logical argument were laid down by Aristotle; the science we learn in school was helped along by Archimedes leaping out of the bath-tub. Even if we have never studied classical mythology, we talk about the Midas touch or a Herculean task. We've heard of Homer, Sophocles and Cicero without actually having read their stuff; we remember that Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants although we are a bit vague on who Hannibal was; and we know that Julius Caesar was supposed to beware the Ides of March even if we haven't a clue when the Ides were.

Let's not forget the language, either. About half of modern English derives from Latin, and much of that originally came from Greek. This means that knowing a bit of Latin will greatly enrich your vocabulary. Lots of our day-to-day, ordinary words come from Anglo-Saxon, but the fancier ones tend to be from Latin. So yes, of course, you can describe somebody as loud, but every now and then - just for the fun of it - you might want to say that they were vociferous.

And `just for the fun of it' is really what this book is about. The classics are all around us, and this book aims to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge about them - with, I hope, a few laughs along the way.