Description

Don’t read self-help books when you can learn the timeless wisdom of the Antiquities. We are splitting this into ten distinct semesters, each beginning with a human problem, and the lesson derived from our Ancient teachers and their lasting wisdom.

Semester I — Know Yourself

Question: Who am I, and how easily can I deceive myself?

Teacher	Material	Lesson
Plato	Apology	Intellectual humility; the examined life; knowing what you don't know.
Sophocles	Oedipus Rex	The terrifying gap between who we think we are and who we actually are.
St. Augustine	Confessions	Examining memory, desire, motivation, guilt, and identity from within.
Montaigne	Essays (selected)	Observe yourself without pretending that human beings are tidy or consistent.
Shakespeare	Hamlet	Self-consciousness, indecision, rationalization, authenticity and action.

Semester II — Govern Yourself

Question: How do I stop being ruled by appetite, emotion, fear, and circumstance?

Teacher	Material	Lesson
Epictetus	Discourses & Enchiridion	Separate what belongs to you from what doesn't.
Seneca	Letters from a Stoic	Wealth, anger, fear, friendship, adversity and mortality as daily practices.
Marcus Aurelius	Meditations	Continually return your mind to what matters.
N/A	Bhagavad Gita	Act wholeheartedly without becoming psychologically enslaved to outcomes.
Laozi	Tao Te Ching	Sometimes mastery comes through relinquishing force rather than increasing it.

Semester III — Build Character

Question: How do I actually become good rather than merely know what goodness is?

Teacher	Material	Lesson
Aristotle	Nicomachean Ethics	Character becomes habitual: we become courageous by practicing courage.
Plutarch	Lives	Watch virtues and defects play themselves out in actual lives.
Cicero	On Duties	What obligations accompany one's roles in society?
Xenophon	Memorabilia	Socrates as a practical teacher of character and self-mastery.
N/A	The Book of Proverbs	Wisdom compressed into practical observations about speech, work, pride, money, anger, friendship, and restraint.

Semester IV — Master Desire

Question: What is actually worth wanting?

Teacher	Material	Lesson
Plato	Symposium	Desire can ascend from possession of beautiful things toward Beauty itself.
Epicurus	Letter to Menoeceus & Principal Doctrines	Happiness may require eliminating unnecessary desires rather than satisfying them.
N/A	Ecclesiastes	Achievement, wealth, pleasure and status cannot bear the weight of ultimate meaning.
St. Augustine	Confessions	Our desires reveal what we worship.
Goethe	Faust	What happens when a person refuses to say, Enough?

Semester V — Suffer Well

Question: What do I do when life refuses to cooperate?

Teacher	Material	Lesson
N/A	Book of Job	Suffering doesn't always provide the tidy moral explanation we want.
Aeschylus	Oresteia	Suffering, vengeance, justice and breaking inherited cycles.
Boethius	Consolation of Philosophy	Fortune gives and Fortune takes; don't build identity upon her gifts.
Sophocles	Oedipus at Colonus	What becomes of a person after catastrophe?
Dante	Inferno	Suffering can reveal what our choices and attachments have made us.

Semester VI — Love, Friendship & Other People

Question: How should I live among other human beings?

Teacher	Material	Lesson
Aristotle	Nicomachean Ethics, VIII–IX	Friendship of pleasure, utility and virtue.
Cicero	On Friendship	Friendship as moral companionship rather than transaction.
Plato	Symposium	Love as desire for beauty, immortality and transcendence.
Shakespeare	King Lear	The inability to distinguish genuine love from flattering performance.
Virgil	Aeneid	The conflict between private desire and obligations extending beyond oneself.

Semester VII — Ambition, Power & Leadership

Question: What happens when I become powerful?

Teacher	Material	Lesson
Plutarch	Lives	Greatness, ambition, character and their costs.
Thucydides	History of the Peloponnesian War	Fear, interest, honor and power between human groups.
Shakespeare	Macbeth	Ambition becomes pathological when achievement becomes identity.
Shakespeare	Julius Caesar	Power, loyalty, rhetoric, idealism and unintended consequences.
Machiavelli	The Prince	Politics examined partly through effectiveness rather than conventional moral ideals.

Semester VIII — Find Your Place in the World

Question: What is my duty, and what should I do with my life?

Teacher	Material	Lesson
Homer	Odyssey	Identity, temptation, endurance and returning home transformed.
N/A	Bhagavad Gita	Dharma: fulfill your particular responsibility without attachment to reward.
Virgil	Aeneid	Personal desire versus historical responsibility.
Dante	Purgatorio	Human desire doesn't merely need suppression; it needs proper orientation.
Dante	Paradiso	Individual flourishing as finding one's proper relationship to a greater whole.

Semester IX — Confront Death

Question: How should knowing that I will die change how I live?

Teacher	Material	Lesson
Plato	Phaedo	Philosophy as preparation for death.
Seneca	On the Shortness of Life	We don't necessarily have too little time; we waste too much of it.
Marcus Aurelius	Meditations	Impermanence destroys the illusion that reputation and possession can secure us.
N/A	The Epic of Gilgamesh	Perhaps humanity's oldest great confrontation with mortality.
Tolstoy	The Death of Ivan Ilyich	What if you reach death and realize you have been living according to the wrong values?

Semester X — Become

Question: Having inherited all this wisdom, what kind of human being will I choose to become?

Teacher	Material	Lesson
Dante	Divine Comedy	Lose yourself, descend, understand your disorder, purify desire, ascend.
Goethe	Faust	The modern human being who cannot stop striving, knowing, experiencing and becoming.
Nietzsche	Thus Spoke Zarathustra	Don't merely inherit values. Become capable of creating and embodying them.
Nietzsche	On the Genealogy of Morality	Investigate where your moral convictions came from before assuming they're eternal truths.
Hermann Hesse	Siddhartha	After teachers, doctrines, books and philosophies, wisdom must finally become lived experience.

The Classical Self-Education Curriculum