Cultural Artifacts with Mandi Gerth

Register for my CiRCE Pre-Conference on Classroom Liturgies

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Learn more about Michealangelo’s Pieta

Ulysses and the Sirens by John William Waterhouse

In this episode, we contemplate the beauty of the first twelve lines, or the Proem, of the Odyssey by Homer. Mandi reads from the introduction to Emily Wilson’s translation so that you get an idea of the movement of this epic while also becoming familiar with its three main characters: Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus. It is hard to overstate the importance of reading both the Homeric epics if you teach in a classical school or if you have begun to homeschool your children classically. These two poems—the Iliad and the Odyssey—find their way into every corner of a classical curriculum because they are so central to the Western tradition. Enjoy!

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Cultural Artifacts and Homer

00:52 The Significance of the Odyssey

06:29 Character Analysis: Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus

11:32 Themes and Teaching Strategies in the Odyssey

Resources Mentioned:

Purchase Fagles’ Translation of the Odyssey.

Listen to Claire Danes read The Odyssey on Audible

Subscribe to Mrs. Gerth Teaches.

Learn more about Thoroughness & Charm.

Attend Repairing the Ruins. June 25-27, Atlanta, GA

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Today, we delve into Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, a piece that began its journey in 1804 and premiered in December 1808. This symphony, famous for its iconic first four notes, has earned the nickname “Fate Symphony” due to its powerful thematic elements that resonate with the concept of fate knocking at the door.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5

00:49 Beethoven’s Personal Struggles and Artistic Calling

01:20 Musical Themes and Variations in the Symphony

02:36 Beethoven’s Innovation in Musical Composition

03:33 Listening to Classical Music with Intent

04:29 Understanding the Movements as a Developing Story

05:23 The First Movement and Its Themes

06:33 The Role of the Finale and Instrumentation

07:31 The Significance of the Symphony’s Ending

08:19 Resources for Deeper Exploration

09:25 Engaging with Classical Music in Education

Resources Mentioned:

Listen to a performance by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Gardiner on YouTube:

Dr. Laura Eidt, Affiliate Assistant Professor Of Modern Languages

Essay on Symphony Number Five from the Eastman School of Music

Davies Owens asked me to come back on Base Camp Live recently to talk about how parents can ask better questions in conversations with their children. The full episode will launch soon, but here’s a sneak peek. Enjoy!

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/December-25/washington-crosses-the-delaware

https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/the-revolutionary-war/washingtons-revolutionary-war-battles/the-trenton-princeton-campaign/10-facts-about-washingtons-crossing-of-the-delaware-river

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emanuel-Leutze

https://youtu.be/1brjwUcz1cA?si=nDHe3PnmxWM4M4Sv

His Excellency General Washington by Phillis Wheatley

https://poets.org/poem/his-excellency-general-washington

The letter which accompanied her poem:

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0222-0001

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/December-25/washington-crosses-the-delaware

https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/the-revolutionary-war/washingtons-revolutionary-war-battles/the-trenton-princeton-campaign/10-facts-about-washingtons-crossing-of-the-delaware-river

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emanuel-Leutze

https://youtu.be/1brjwUcz1cA?si=nDHe3PnmxWM4M4Sv

His Excellency General Washington by Phillis Wheatley

https://poets.org/poem/his-excellency-general-washington

The letter which accompanied her poem:

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0222-0001

The Darkling Thrush

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44325/the-darkling-thrush

Biography on Thomas Hardy

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thomas-hardy

Critical Essays

SIMPSON, MATT. “MILLENNIAL THOUGHTS — HARDY’S ‘THE DARKLING THRUSH.’” The Thomas Hardy Journal, vol. 15, no. 3, 1999, pp. 80–84. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45274455. Accessed 24 Jan. 2026.

SWIER, SUSAN. “‘SOME BLESSED HOPE’: HARDY’S DARKLING THRUSH.” The Hardy Society Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, 2010, pp. 75–81. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48561986. Accessed 24 Jan. 2026.

Today we are looking at the poem Birches, written by Robert Frost. A poem in blank verse that contemplates the loss of youth and the importance of nature to provide perspective when we are “weary of considerations, / and life is too much like a pathless wood.”

Information on Robert Frost from Britannica.

Critical Essay by George Monteiro

Read the poem on Poetry Foundation.

Hear Robert Frost read Birches on YouTube.

I had the privilege of recording a few of Louise’s lectures on tragedy for the Association of Classical Christian Schools earlier this fall. A clip from those courses is linked above.

Tonight via Google Meet, Dr. Bainard Cowan and I begin teaching a class on Louise Cowan and Greek Tragedy. We will begin by looking at Louise’s essay in Tragic Abyss and Fergusson’s introduction to Aristotle’s Poetics. We will then go on over the course of four more sessions to hear from Louise on: Prometheus, Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus, Medea, Trojan Women, and the Bacchae. (We will be using The Greek Plays.) The reading will clip along at a swift pace—all the better for appropriating and grasping, as Louise encourages below.

“Tragedy is primarily an experience, not simply a knowledge—an experience of seeing beyond our daily lives into the impenetrable and unchanging laws that govern existence,” she says. “It is not about good and evil. In it one sees, as Nietzsche has written, beyond good and evil, for none of the laws that govern the universe are evil. But tragedy shows us the way in which these laws, which in and of themselves are good, may be in conflict, so that if this conflict is played out, and not somehow redirected, the human enterprise will be rent from top to bottom, and that destiny to which the human race is called will be harmed…

So one of the things we must school ourselves in when we approach Greek tragedy is the temptation to assign blame. We ought not take sides, ought not label a character as wicked, for the grand Greek discovery is of these conflicting goods, as we might call them. We need to school ourselves then to look at all the issues sympathetically” (lecture to DIHC 2003, Cowan Archives).

“The task you and I have in reading these tragedies—that come to us from another continent and another epoch, so far away in time and space as to be virtually inaccessible as history—the task is to appropriate them, to grasp them, (and that means to experience them, to approach them with the willing suspension of disbelief and hence not so much to absorb them as to be absorbed) to go on to a few mappings, without, however, thinking that we are getting at the final meaning. Nor, without a lifetime of study as a classical scholar, should we think we are approaching the original meaning (what the Greeks thought of them, or what their significance was in their own culture). As serious readers of literature, as disseminators of the literary tradition, we have no hope of apprehending these Greek dramas except in the light of their universal qualities. It is the miracle of the work of art that it speaks across the ages: that, in fact, we know in principle that we may see more in it than those of the culture out of which it came” (Lecture on the Bacchae, Cowan Archives).

Please subscribe to the Cowan Archives Substack for more of Louise’s essays delivered to your inbox.

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Articles about Bruegel: 

https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/pieter-bruegel-the-elder-ca-1525-1569

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pieter-Bruegel-the-Elder

https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/hunters-in-the-snow-winter-pieter-bruegel-the-elder/WgFmzFNNN74nUg?hl=en

A BBC News Program on Bruegel: 

https://youtu.be/c5BOzhwaWeM?si=WQ0VxrPb9CozOwFq