I've pretty much read all the major works of the Greeks and Romans...

I've pretty much read all the major works of the Greeks and Romans. Where is the next logical place to go (both in terms of philosophy and fiction) ? Do I just skip straight to the middle ages?

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Read Beowulf, and some of the early British history that overlaps with Rome to cross into the middle ages

If you don't know Ancient Greek and Latin, then you didn't read them at all. Enjoy being a pleb reading in translation instead of interacting with the words actually written by the ancients.

read erotic fanfiction based on the greeks

No one has time to learn every single language in the world to read every single book written in a foreign language in its original. Even if you did bother to spend ages learning Latin or Greek, it wouldn't improve your understanding of the text by enough to justify the opportunity cost of learning the language. You are probably better off reading a translation by someone who has dedicated their life to the study of that language and translation, instead of making amateurish misunderstandings of the text based on your layman understanding of the language

If you had read them you would actually know.
This and read the bizantines and Arabs, etc etc

Christian Church Fathers

I learned Latin and Greek and it only took like 2 years. and it's fuckin worth it dude. You don't need to learn"every single language" but some of them really pay off

Read the Greeks again just to make sure you're starting with them

why not read other ancient sources? Try zhuangzi

>2 years
you made my point for me. Think about what you could have done in that time instead of learning a dead language. You could have completed the entire western canon, or mastered mathematics, or something actually useful in this world

>he actually fell for the 'start with the Greeks' meme

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End with the greeks.

life's not all about maximizing efficiency. not to mention 2 years is a blink of an eye. how old are you, 20? you've got lots of sets of 2 years. you're not going to do any of the things you've said in that amount of time, anyway. why not dedicate that time to something you're interested in accomplishing?

hey man, it's not like I didn't do anything else during those 2 years. I still had plenty of time to read other stuff, play instruments, socialize etc.

There's a reason that so many great men made it a priority to read dead languages

dude, for the next 2 years i wish i can get rid of a chronic pelvic disorder and have a gf. i couldn't care less about faggy dead languages that no one cares about, faggot. i'd much prefer to learn actual languages that would give me something useful. maybe some french for poetry and japanese for JAV. imagine larping as a speaker of latin and ancient greek. kys

2 years is a long time. You only have about 50 functional years (from 20-70) in which you could do this, so 2 years is 4% of your life. 4% of your life for something you will have to spend the rest of your life doing consistently just so you dont forget what you have learnt. If you dont attempt to maximise efficiency you will die with many more regrets. Even if I bothered, I probably wouldnt even read Plato in greek since it would take 10x longer to read his complete works in Greek than a proper translation by an expert. But each to their own I suppose

The Romantics and modernists.

okay

I actually admire the fact you learnt those languages, it's a major achievement and you should be proud. I just think that a lot of what classicists say to justify the relevance of their subject today is nonsense. Like this:
>There's a reason that so many great men made it a priority to read dead languages
A lot of them learnt it because it was the language of intelligent discourse during the middle ages. Once we all moved on to French and English it served no purpose anymore.

Thanks man. You're right about the middle ages, but a lot of geniuses of the renaissance and beyond thought it was important to learn these languages even when it wasn't so utilitarian to do so.

They're beautiful languages. You can really feel how fuckin old Greek is when you read it. The truth is that reading a translation, even a good one, is a watered-down version of reading the OG language. That's just the way it is. Some people are willing to compromise with the watered-down version, which is fine, but it will never do the Greeks and the Romans justice.

I had a gf the entire time I learned Greek and Latin my dude.
It's not like you spend 24 hours a day studying Greek. I spent 2 hours a day max. And I've read most of Plato in Greek, it doesn't take that long. Maybe a summer. It's especially easy now with online dictionaries for when you run into a word you don't know.

I would die with regrets if I didn't learn these languages

No you haven't

You go to the connecting work, the Bible