Books on Ancient Greece & Rome with no god or godesses?

How old are your children?  I’ll go dig through my shelves.

But I do have to mention–when writing/learning about the very ancient Greeks, you really can’t get around the false god issue.  If you don’t want to go there, then just don’t do it until your children are older or ready.  But you can’t really understand the ancient Greeks if you don’t understand what they believed.  I mean, these guys really truly thought they had to appease their gods, they truly thought they could tell the future with animal entrails, they made their choices based on the worldview they had, and it won’t make much sense to us if we do not also understand the worldview they are coming from.  The best Christian in the world could write a book about these people, and that person would still have to deal with this issue.  There’s no way around it–they were idol-worshippers.  They acted like idol-worshippers.  Their every act and deed was informed by what they believed. 

If you have very young children, then perhaps just skip it.  Do another time in history, OR just cover the Bible history and do some very light reading on Greece/Rome.  If you really want to address this and your children are a little older (say, 4th and 5th grades and up) then you might consider the Truthquest guides on these topics.  They are excellent in identifying the worldview of these people and how it affected their behavior.

Or, get some of the books listed and just skip the parts you don’t want to read.  You are going to have a hard time eliminating any mention of false gods.  Plutarch really isn’t going to fit your needs, because although there is history IN Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives are not history stories.  They are character/citizenship stories.  If you want history, I’d go elsewhere. 

I do have some books.  If I know how old your children are, I can tell you what we did at that age. 

I understand your concerns with not wanting to expand on Greek Gods and such. We chose to wait until our boys were in older grades to cover Egypt, Greek and Rome. We then used the TruthQuest History guides to help us see Gods hands in history in the midst of such pagan beliefs. TQ caused us to see just how their beliefs affected their decisions in more ways than one.

TQ is simply a list of living books with a commentary throughout to help you see Gods hand in history. You can view samples and find out more about it here http://www.truthquesthistory.com/  Its very CM friendly and designed to use with multiple children. Blessings to you and yours! Heather

we too limit exposure about false gods.  My children know about them, we discuss the beliefs of the Greeks and how they did not know the One True G-d, and I do not glorify those gods. 

My personal focus with my children as been biblical history as I want that to be my children’s foundation in history, in my house it is more important than American history, but that is us and what we believe.  You can’t teach biblical history w/o getting into false gods somewhat, its in there (Ex: the story of Moses), but knowing there were false gods and some of the beliefs of the Egyptians and getting into the “cool” factor and drawing pictures of them, creating art in their likeness, etc are two different things.  We don’t dig deep into it, don’t study them out, their ‘powers’, etc.  My children are elementary aged so that is what we’ve been doing.  When they are older it may be different, but this has been our approach to mythology so far and I don’t see us venturing too far off of this path.

Sanveann – we limit mythology because we do not believe it edifies the One True G-d, He has very strong words to say about this. Yes, our children need to understand idolatry existed and still exists and we talk about that, but it is one thing looking at something from a purely historical point of view, and immersing ourselves into the fantastical stories. 

At this point in time we don’t delve in deeply into other religions because my children are still establishing their own foundations.  We talk about other religions, but its not a study, IYKWIM.  We believe a solid grounding in the Bible is important FIRST, because if they see G-d’s heart and wisdom as He’s revealed Himself to us through His Word, and establish their own relationship with Him, my children can then easily discern falsehood from truth without me having to give long lessons on it.  At their age I don’t think its fruitful to pull them into all different kinds of directions with lots of falsehood, immerse them in Truth, then they can easily see falsehood.

Guide them in the way that they SHOULD go.

I believe I understand what you are talking about, I was a Latin nut, LOVED Latin, Roman history, culture, gods, etc, I was in deep, but I’m so grateful that the Lord stripped that from me.

Hope I explained that well, feeling kind of blubbery at the keyboard.

Blessings,

Ginnie

I wanted to say that the age of the children makes a big difference in my opinion. Studying world religions in college and memorizing the powers of all the Greek gods and goddesses (for example) in 1st grade are two different things.

I have experienced first hand how confusing it can be to little ones. My son (at age 6) was terrified by the stories I began to read to him from S.Bauer’s Story of the World. The Egyptian myths and stories that were meant as historical fiction really bothered him. He could not tell what was myth and what was fact. We stopped after a couple of days of trying to seperate the two and decided to use SCM’s Genesis-Deut. & Ancient Egypt. He was able to handle studying it then.

Enter 2nd grade….We began module 2 of SCM history but he confused some of the myths in Famous Men of Greece with the APOSTLES!! Not good! That happened because I tried to explain to them before we began that the Greeks worshipped idols like the Egyptians did and that the apostle Paul went to Greece to teach the people there about the One True GOD. He still got so confused that we had to stop using module 2 and skip to module 5 for some more American history.

His sister who is 2 years older did not have a problem with seeing the truth from the myth. However, she got so interested in the Greeks that she wanted to talk about the goddesses all the time, draw them, learn their powers, etc. We (my husband and I) did not think that it was good for her to be that engrossed in idolatry at age 9. So we really had issues with both children regarding idolatry and myths in history.

I plan to begin a chronological study of history next year when my children are in the 4th and 5th grades. I believe that they will be more able to discern truth from error then.

@9arrows4God, You still have another post a few messages above. However, you had posted two copies of it. I deleted one because it was an exact duplicate. I don’t see any other posts in the spam trap or anything like that.