Bruce S Thornton: 7 books

A concise introduction to the literature of Greece and Rome. Bruce Thornton’s crisp and informative Student’s Guide to Classics provides readers with an overview of each of the major poets, dramatists, philosophers, and historians of ancient Greece and Rome. Including short bios of major...

Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality is a controversial book that lays bare the meanings Greeks gave to sex. Contrary to the romantic idealization of sex dominating our culture, the Greeks saw eros as a powerful force of nature, potentially dangerous and in need of control by society: Eros the...

By democracy we usually mean a government comprising popular rule, individual human rights and freedom, and a free-market economy. Yet the flaws in traditional Athenian democracy can instruct us on the weaknesses of that first element of modern democracies shared with Athens: rule by all citizens...

A stirring and sobering diagnosis of the challenges that confront anyone laboring to renew America’s tradition of ordered liberty. Classicist Bruce Thornton’s Plagues of the Mind is a forceful vindication of the West’s tradition of rational, critical inquiry—a legacy now largely jettisoned...

With humor, lucidity, and unflinching rigor, the acclaimed authors of Who Killed Homer? and Plagues of the Mind unsparingly document the degeneration of a central, if beleaguered, discipline—classics—and reveal the root causes of its decline. Hanson, Heath, and Thornton point to academics...

The long-simmering crises challenging the European Union have worsened with the 2008 financial crisis, the influx of Middle East refugees in 2015, several bloody terrorist attacks, and England’s departure from the E.U. in 2016. Yet these are all the wages of persistent flaws in the idea of the Union...

Wages of Appeasement explores the reasons why a powerful state gives in to aggressors. It tells the story of three historical examples of appeasement: the greek city-states of the fourth century b.c., which lost their freedom to Philip II of Macedon; England in the twenties and thirties, and the failure...