One of the benefits of your local or base library is the world it opens to you in the form of courses on CD. It transforms your commute or work-out into an educational experience inside some of America’s and Great Britain’s finest college-level classrooms.

If you are thinking about attending university consider listening to these recorded lectures on history, politics, economics, science and a myriad of topics. Each lecture is 30 - 40 minutes long. The subject of this review is the lectures of George Washington University’s (GWU) Associate Professor Eric Cline and his condensed semester on the history of Ancient Greece. Cline is a former Fulbright Scholar, and holds the GWU chair in Semitic and ancient languages. Among the family of Semitic languages is Arabic.

The CDs open with the evolution towards the Golden Age of Greece, beginning 1,700 BC with the Mycenaeans, to the late Bronze Age and the times of Homer’s Iliad and the stories of the Trojan War. You will learn the debate among academics as to whether the Trojan War actually happened. Greece would regress into a dark age that lasted three centuries where a series of migrations from the Balkans into Greece and from Greece to modern day Turkey would usher in a Greek Renaissance.

Lecture six is the rise of the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta and the struggle between tyranny, order and law would lead a law-giver named Dracon to pass harsh measures. He survives in our language when we refer to laws or rules as Draconian. Another lawgiver Solon would revise Dracon’s laws and set Greece towards the path of democracy, but not without enduring another bout of tyrants like the infamous Pisistratus who used a ruse to seize government by force using city-funded bodyguards. One mechanism to curb the excesses of power was the exile of popular leaders through a voting process using the shards of pottery called ostracon, where we get the word ostracism.

The latter part of the course contains material dear to the hearts of those officers who completed their War College requirements, the historian Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian Wars. But before Cline discusses this, he un-packages the Persian Wars that brought us the famous Battles of Marathon and Thermopylae from 490 to 480 BC (with the 300 Spartans who held off a great Persian army of 25,000 in a narrow pass). Then there was the naval version of Thermopylae, the Battle of Salamis.

We study the Peloponnesian Wars because they contain all elements of the use and abuse of national power, the Athenian democracy versus the totalitarian Spartans. It has strategy, diplomacy, disease and shifting alliances including Athens dominating and then overreaching, leading to its defeat by the Spartans in the 75 year-long struggle between the two city-states from 479 to 404 BC.

Cline reminds the listener that the struggle between the United States and the former Soviet Union lasted over seven decades as well. The CD ends with Alexander and his generals.

Editor’s Note: Aboul-Enein writes a regular book review column in several military base papers in the Washington, D.C., area. He speaks several dialects of Arabic and lectures deploying units on the history of the Middle East and the evolution of militant Islamist groups.