Stanford Rolls Out Another Podcast Course and a New iTunes Look

Stan­ford re-launched its iTunes site last week, rolling out a new sleek look and a host of new pod­casts.

Among the new releas­es, you’ll find the lat­est in a series of full-fledged cours­es ready to be down­loaded to your iPod for free. (See the pre­vi­ous cours­es we’ve men­tioned here, here and here.) This time around, you can access a short course, Vir­gil’s Aeneid: Anato­my of a Clas­sic (get it on iTunes), which takes a close look at one of the cen­tral texts in the West­ern tra­di­tion.  (You can pur­chase a copy of the book ref­er­enced in the course here, or down­load free web ver­sions in Eng­lish or Latin, though they won’t fol­low the cor­rect pag­i­na­tion.) Pre­sent­ed by Susan­na Braund, a Stan­ford clas­sics pro­fes­sor, the course is divid­ed into 5 install­ments, each run­ning about two hours. For the moment, you can only down­load the first part. But rest assured that the remain­ing ones are set to be issued in the weeks to come. The course was orig­i­nal­ly pre­sent­ed in Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram. To learn more about the course, take a look at the course descrip­tion below.

“The cen­tral text in the canon of Latin lit­er­a­ture is Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic poem in twelve books com­posed more than two thou­sand years ago under the Roman emper­or Augus­tus. The poem was an instant hit. It became a school text imme­di­ate­ly and has remained cen­tral to stud­ies of Roman cul­ture to the present day. How can a poem cre­at­ed in such a remote lit­er­ary and social envi­ron­ment speak so elo­quent­ly to sub­se­quent ages? In this course we will dis­cov­er what kind of poem this is and what kind of hero Aeneas is. Our stud­ies will focus chiefly on the poem itself and on wider aspects of Roman cul­ture. It will be essen­tial to com­mit to read­ing the poem ahead of time, at a rate of about 100 pages per week. We will use the ener­getic trans­la­tion by Robert Fitzger­ald.”

Find many more Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­casts here.

See all of Open Cul­ture’s Pod­cast Col­lec­tions:

Arts & Cul­ture — Audio Books — For­eign Lan­guage Lessons — News & Infor­ma­tion — Sci­ence — Tech­nol­o­gy — Uni­ver­si­ty (Gen­er­al) — Uni­ver­si­ty (B‑School) — Pod­cast Primer