As any student who’s been on our Summer Study in Greece program can testify, visiting Athens at any time is a life changing experience. But it would be a dream to see it at the height of its glory, and luckily artist Dimitris Tsalkanis made that dream come true. Tsalkanis spent 13 years making a 3-D recreation of Athens as it looked from the Mycenaean period (1600 BCE) to the Early Modern period (AD 1833). Take a look for yourself, and imagine what it would be like to take a walk to the Piraeus with your good friends Socrates.
While writing this, a few of us struck up a conversation in the Core office about what it really meant to go down to the Piraeus in The Republic, and the significance of other characters going down in our curriculum. First there’s Odysseus, who descends into Hades using the same verb that Socrates uses to describe going down to the Piraeus. Dante also descends into Hell, but he also comes back up again. And plenty of other Core friends make similar climbs, from Petrarch reading St. Augustine on Mount Ventoux to Moses and Martin Luther King, Jr. on their mountaintops.
Just take for example this very real representation of Dante’s descent into Hell, as imagined by an animated princess and her demon cat friend. These ups and downs have captured the human imagination, not just those in Core. However, Core is absolutely full of them, with our heroes going from Hell to Earth to Heaven and back again. But unfortunately, this is just a blog, and I’m out of time to list every single one. So please, I invite you to continue the discussion in the comments below!
