I see the world through this split view of post neo classical (post enlightenment Greek/Roman) stance on everything. I see everything as it relates contextually to either philosophy, government, or religion from these two power houses. I’d like to expand that to minoan and phoenician influence, but they are hard to get at as they have no written record. But what I try to understand are the basic names, dates, places, and titles and major ideas and wars of these two entities. Doing so gives me a wide breadth of understanding of culture, but far beyond merely understanding medieval society. I see everything that the Enlightenment appreciated from the classical period but on a far grander scale. I mean like 600+ book scale.
Point is I’m trying and because of that I see the world almost as if a post apocalyptic version of classical times.
The biggest takeaway is I now start to see archetypes and how they exist in society today through images of saints and ideals. By reading so far into our shared collective past (western society), especially pre abrahamic faiths pretty much. Is I see an anthropological social psychological sub structure as it exists today, a zeitgeist if you will.
It’s no more different than reading a fantasy campaign from TSR in the 90’s (e.g. DragonLance), it’s just I built my own modules by building my own classics library. Arguably it’s Raistlin who I got this post apocalyptic pov from. Because in the books he was cursed with seeing everything as dead (as post dead, decayed). I carried this forward as when reading about these rich full ancient times, I understand where they are today and what’s transpired and how they affect us now and how no one else knows or sees. Everyone just sees the present.
My library mainly focuses on high level summaries of ideas along with some base level material by the big names (Plato, Aristotle, Pre-Socratics, Plotinus). Else I want extract/summaries of ideas, mainly Neoplatonism.