Agora, The Movie

I found out about an upcoming (December 2009) historical movie that looks interesting from N.S.Gill’s Ancient History Blog.

Go here to see a trailer and other related stuff.

Timeline of Ancient Greece

7250 BCE to 30 BCE

See the timeline here.

World’s Smallest Political Quiz

Take the Quiz now and find out where you fit on the political map!

Take the quiz here.

An Influential Philosopher Who Frowned on Democracy

Aristotle distinguished among three potentially good types of government — a kingdom, an aristocracy, and a free state. These degenerate, however, and a tyranny emerges from monarchy, oligarchy (by which Aristotle means rule by the wealthy) from an aristocracy (by which he means rule by the noble and virtuous), and democracy from a free state.

Now the corruptions attending each of these governments are these; a kingdom may degenerate into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy, and a state into a democracy. Now a tyranny is a monarchy where the good of one man only is the object of government, an oligarchy considers only the rich, and a democracy only the poor…

Read the article here.

Philosopher Profile: Thomas Hobbes

From the philosophersnet.com website:

When Thomas Hobbes died in 1679 at the age of 91 his reputation as an atheist in religion and an absolutist in politics not only rendered him highly disreputable but also served to shunt his political ideas into relative obscurity for the next three hundred years. He was undoubtedly ahead of his time and his contribution to political philosophy has only been fully recognised more recently in the huge range of scholarship devoted to his most enduring work, Leviathan (1651).

Read the rest of the article here.

Additional info on Hobbes at Wikipedia here.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s grave under threat from search for brown coal

Friedrich Nietzsche declared famously that “God is dead!” so it is probably safe to assume that he did not much care what happened to his skeleton.

Which may be just as well as bulldozers prepare to turn over the philosopher’s grave and his birthplace in search of brown coal.

The village of Röcken, south of Leipzig, is plastered with posters bearing quotes from Nietzsche’s masterpiece, Thus Spake Zarathustra, announcing “Be true to the soil!” in a desperate attempt to prevent an energy company from turning the region into a lunar landscape.

Ralf Eichberg, head of the Nietzsche Society, said: “We have Nietzsche’s birthplace, the church where he was baptised and where his father preached, the orchard where he played, the school where he learnt to read and write, and the graves; his, that of his sister Elisabeth, his parents.”

Digging the village up — as has happened to 25 east German communities targeted by mining companies since the Second World War — would destroy most of the physical traces of the 19th-century thinker. Röcken, with barely 600 inhabitants, used to be in East Germany and the Communist authorities considered Nietzsche dangerous; a supplier of ideas to the Nazis because his concept of a “Super-man” could be applied to Nordic German heroes.

Read the rest of the article here.