The curriculum

Latin is taught as a language people use: read aloud, spoken in seminar, and written. Grammar stays close to the texts it helps you read.

The proposed sequence starts with grammar and syntax, moves through Caesar and the Vulgate, and then reaches Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, Augustine, and Aquinas, read in the original where preparation allows.

Latin opens two thousand years of writing, from the speeches of the Roman Senate and the Aeneid to the Scholastics and the scientific work of Newton and Gauss.

Greek is taught the same way: read aloud, spoken, and composed. The framework covers Homeric Greek for epic, Attic for philosophy and tragedy, and Koine for the Septuagint and the Gospels.

A period of intensive grammar prepares readers for selections from Homer’s Iliad, Plato’s Symposium, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Thucydides, and the Gospel of John, all in Greek.

Reading Plato in Greek means following the argument in the words he chose.

Grammar studies how language carries thought. Logic studies sound reasoning and how to tell a valid argument from a weak one. Rhetoric is the art of speaking and writing well enough to persuade.

These arts trained readers from Augustine to C.S. Lewis. Aeterna teaches them as working methods for reading and argument.

The Quadrivium completes the seven liberal arts. Arithmetic studies number itself, geometry number in space, music number in time, and astronomy number in motion. Its premise is that the cosmos is ordered and can be understood.

The proposed course pairs Euclid’s Elements, proved in the ancient manner, with the ratios of the Pythagorean scale. It reads the heavens as Plato did in the Timaeus, and as Kepler did when he called astronomy a hymn to the Creator.

The Great Books are the center of study. They are read in full, discussed in the Socratic manner, and set beside their original languages where possible.

The seminar works from the primary text, with no summaries or textbooks in between. A text, a facilitator, and a group of readers meet around one serious question.

A proposition is examined by elenchus, the cross-examination that brings its assumptions into view. A contradiction may lead to aporia, an honest admission of not knowing, and the account is then revised.

Aeterna’s seminars are planned to run this way. The facilitator asks, participants answer, and the group works slowly toward a better account than the one it started with.