Getting Started with the Ancient Greeks. [Melissa Only!]

hey my name is Melissa this is the first
video that I have recorded solo I have appeared on my boyfriend's YouTube channel the channel name is about SEL but this is the first video on my own youtube channel which I am starting because I want to have something online that is a representation of myself that documents the struggles in my life documents what I'm going through and hopefully one day I can look back and see how much I've progressed maybe one day my kid can look at the YouTube channel and see what I was like back in the day so another reason why I thought I would start the channel is to make more connections with people not necessarily in real life though that would be great um I realized that the internet can connect you to people that you wouldn't have known otherwise I met my boyfriend my boyfriend through looking at his YouTube channel so you never know who you're gonna meet when you put yourself out there online so that's what I'm hoping with this YouTube channel and also for me it's always been easier for me to communicate with written language than spoken language I was an English major in college and I wrote many essays but to me it's always been a little bit of a struggle to express myself concisely so that's something that I want to challenge myself to do with this channel so I thought the first topic that I would bring up is my recent dabbling in reading ancient Greek literature so before this I had never read any ancient Greek literature I had heard of Socrates I had heard of Aristotle of course Greek mythology is mentioned in so many things in Western culture I know I knew vaguely about the Trojan War and yeah so there are some things that I knew about vaguely but this is the first time I actually went through the effort and read some of ancient Greek literature and for me I'm not quite through it but I want to go through each of the works probably one by one and make videos about them because to me I think there's a lot to discuss in each of them and they are really interesting and I don't know if there's so much on YouTube about these particular works I know that people have devoted their lives to scholarly pursuits specifically about ancient Greek literature but I don't know in the modern age if so many people really take the time to read them and I do think it's really important it's something that I have found valuable in my life I'm not sure I didn't I didn't keep a count when I was in college but I think I must have read at least at least a hundred novels and to me just reading these works I think has been more valuable you get way more bang for your buck when you read these than you would reading tons of literature so yeah I would really encourage anybody who sees this video to give it a shot um if for me I was given a background in this from my boyfriend he encouraged me to get into it so it was helpful when I was first reading these things to talk with him about the places and I think what was most challenging when I first started reading them was the place names the geography learning about the wars so you know just do some reading on Wikipedia what I did was look up each of the authors so I've been reading Plato I've been reading Aristotle I've been reading Xenophon and Thucydides so I went through each of their Wikipedia pages and read about them and each of the works too so for me I did I first get kind of hung up on the Greek mythology and some of the notes so some of the texts are more heavily and some of them have more footnotes than others and I was kind of getting booked on it first like oh do I do I need to really know about this Greek myth basically no like you mean you can still get the point of each of the works without being an expert in the history but yeah and also it was helpful to look up each of the wars that are kind of mentioned like the Trojan War the Persian War and I've been reading through city DS which is a documentation of the Peloponnesian War so reading a little bit about the Peloponnesian War and a concise Wikipedia page is helpful when you're first starting and I'm not quite through this as you can see but this is the longest work out of all the ones that I've read and it's yeah as you can see it's a pretty thin book um you really it's not like reading a novel though that's what I've encountered with reading this it's easy to skim or read a novel fast you know I'm a pretty fast reader with novels but with these it really requires patience and sometimes I will read what a passage three times to really get it but yeah like some are easier to get through than others this is actually a book with four works so it has Euthyphro apology Crito and clouds and each of them are pretty short so that is kind of cool about ancient Greek works at the time I am NOT an expert but at the time I know it was not so easy to write down stories and to document them just in terms of having availability of writing materials so yeah so they're pretty short um this one that I have read is has also also has four different works in within this book it's not that big so yeah and as I said quite a few of them are heavily annotated so like when you're looking at a page quite quite a bit of it is actually like notes so yeah I would really recommend anybody you know improve their knowledge by reading ancient Greek literature and to me like some of the ideas are so fresh and relevant it's amazing to me that it was written 2,000 years ago so yeah it's it's been pretty pretty awesome to read through these I wish I would have read them earlier you know I'm 25 years old so it took me a while to get to reading something of this caliber but you know um I guess I could say now I did I came from a family that didn't really put emphasis on independent reading or being an autodidact teaching yourself how to read not not how to read but like teaching yourself how to get into more ancient literature like this my dad doesn't read literally he doesn't read my mom just reads novels for the most part but not very often you know so yeah hmm yeah so that's kind of where I come from I did go you know I did go to university but how basically didn't get much of an education there to be honest so anyway I think that's all I'm gonna say today but like I said I would like to make youtube videos about each of the works kind of do a review of each of them and say what was meaningful and them to me so yeah I hope this first video was alright and I will see you soon