Robert Garland

The funeral procession was the most important ceremony performed in ancient Athens. Pericles's funeral speech, delivered over the war dead, as captured by Thucydides, is one of the most striking pieces of prose to survive from that time. Witness the structure of the funeral ceremony and unpack Pericles's great speech.

The past comes alive when you consider the imaginary lives of ordinary people - the citizens, soldiers, and slaves who lived on the other side of history. In this course, you'll ask questions that many textbooks never ask.

There are obvious correlations and differences between Athenian democracy and democracy today; and, now it's time to draw conclusions based on the comparison. In this final lecture, consider what the Athenians might have made of our democracy today and what democracy really means in the modern world, and whether it is as secure as we sometimes assume.

Mummies. The Book of the Dead. Tomb robbers. Death was big business in ancient Egypt, and in this lecture you'll discover Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife and the journey from this world to the next. You'll learn how to make a mummy and how to get past Osiris at the gates to the afterlife.

Unpack the term "Crusade" and situate it in its cultural context. When Pope Urban said it was the Christians' duty to take up arms against the "infidels," ordinary people were swept up in the idea that they were fighting to save Christianity and their own souls against the advance of Islam.

Celebrity is not a modern phenomenon. Politicians, criminals, actors, and even ordinary citizens in ancient Rome strove for recognition. Here you'll chart the lives of some of Rome's celebrities, including gladiators, charioteers, and the emperor Nero. You'll also look at women who knew how to hog the limelight, including Cleopatra and Theodora.

Professor Garland takes you deep inside the lives of an ordinary Egyptian family, from marriage, fertility, and the rights of its women, to social gatherings a couple might host or attend. You'll experience the house, its furniture, and even the cosmetics - all the elements of everyday life.

An ancient Greek faced death head on. You would die in the home, surrounded by family, and afterward women would tend to your body and sing dirges in your honor. Your corpse would be tainted with miasma - pollution - and would be buried outside the city. Meanwhile, your spirit would be carried across the River Styx to Hades, where life among the shades of the dead awaited you.

From the Magna Carta, which granted rights to ordinary citizens, to the rise of vernacular English, as evidenced by The Canterbury Tales, the Middle Ages marked a turning point for the "other side" of history. Find out what influenced life for ordinary people, from the control of the church to the horrors of the infamous Black Death.