Trivium Home School · Language Games
From Thales in a harbour city to the schools of Athens and Alexandria: what the ancient philosophers asked, what they answered, and how we know, when so many of their books are lost, told by Sophia with Philo, Marcos and Demetria, with grammar at every level and a gamebook for each part.
Every part labels what survives: complete works, fragments in the philosopher’s own words, or only reports by others, often written centuries later, and sometimes by enemies. Like the History of the Ancient World, it asks the same questions of every tradition, compares Greek thought with India, China, Egypt, Babylon and the Jewish wisdom books, and includes the uncomfortable parts too.
Complete works, fragments, reports and lost libraries.
Complete works, fragments and reports, enemies who preserved, and scrolls back from the dead.
From Miletus to the atom: the thinkers before Socrates.
Water, the boundless and air: the first philosophers, and the olive presses of Thales.
A secret brotherhood, beans and souls, music and number, and the theorem the Babylonians knew first.
If oxen could draw, their gods would be oxen: the poet who questioned the gods we make.
Fire, the river, the logos and the unity of opposites: the riddles of the obscure one.
What is, is: the goddess’s argument, Achilles and the tortoise, and the arrow that never moves.
Four roots, Love and Strife, the water clock, and a philosopher who called himself a god.
Mind, a stone from the sky, a sun bigger than the Peloponnese, and a trial for impiety.
Uncuttable bodies in empty space: sweet and bitter by convention, atoms and void in reality.
The Sophists, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
Man is the measure, the defence of Helen, nature against law, and the art of persuasion.
The oracle, the gadfly, the trial and the hemlock, and three portraits of one man.
The Euthyphro dilemma, the Apology, the speaking Laws of the Crito, and the slave boy of the Meno.
The ring of Gyges, the noble lie, the cave, the split humans and Diotima’s ladder of love.
Atlantis, the craftsman god, time as an image of eternity, and the elements built from triangles.
The syllogism, the lagoon of Lesbos, the octopus he got right and the teeth he got wrong.
Virtue as the mean, friendship, 158 constitutions, and the defence of slavery.
The four causes, potential and actual, the unmoved mover, and the books in the cellar.
How to live: four answers.
The jar, the lamp, the plucked chicken, “stand out of my sun”, and Hipparchia.
Bread, water and a pot of cheese: pleasure, friendship, and why death is nothing to us.
A shipwreck, the Painted Porch, 705 lost books, and what is in our power.
Pyrrho’s calm pig, Carneades for and against justice, and the ten modes of doubt.
Philosophy in Latin, in Philo’s Alexandria, and far to the east.
Atoms in Latin verse, honey on the cup, and Cicero teaching Latin to speak Greek.
Our own Philo: Moses read through Plato, the Logos, the embassy to Caligula, and who kept his books.
A rich adviser, a freed slave and an emperor on campaign: three Stoics to come.
The One, light pouring from the sun, and the life and death of Hypatia in our own city.
Salt in water, the Middle Way, the butterfly dream, and a Greek king who questioned a monk.