From the Book - First edition.
PART ONE: ANCIENT GREECE. The birth of the polis ; Sparta and Athens ; Reason, the irrational, and the danger of hubris ; Hesiod and the cosmic origin of the world ; The heroic ideal ; Greek art : reason versus passion ; From mythology to philosophy ; Pythagoras : the divine reason and the immortal soul ; The myth of the rational West versus the irrational East ; Splendor and contradiction of the classical age ; The achievements of theatre, rhetoric, and philosophy ; From Plato to Aristotle : the empowering wisdom of philosophy ; The Hellenistic era
PART TWO: ANCIENT ROME. The Roman Republic : history and myth ; Augustus and the Empire : the theatre of politics and power ; Augustus's successors ; The decline of the Empire and the rise of Christianity ; Augustine's tale of two cities
PART THREE: THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. The triumph of Christianity and the demise of the rational mind ; The symbolic discourse of art ; The new vocabulary of faith and spirituality ; Latin West versus Greek East ; The monastic experience ; From the iconoclastic revolt to the splendor of Byzantine art ; Charlemagne and feudalism
PART FOUR: THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. Church authority versus state authority : a difficult balance of power ; Cities and universities : the dawn of a new cultural era ; A new art for a new sensibility ; The crusades ; Wealth and power versus poverty and humility : the two faces of Christianity ; The rehabilitation of man within the ordered universe of God ; The gradual secularization of culture ; Dante's summa : the Divine Comedy
PART FIVE: HUMANISM AND THE RENAISSANCE. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries : the historical context ; The Italian city-states ; Petrarch's literary humanism ; Political humanism ; Florence : the city of splendor ; Lorenzo the Magnificent and his court ; The gathering clouds of disenchantment and cynicism ; The Roman Renaissance : glory and ambiguity ; The Protestant Reformation and the sack of Rome ; The Last Judgment.
