Graduate

The Church Councils of late antiquity (fourth-seventh centuries) were huge conferences of bishops, priests, monks, secular officials, and emperors, who met to decide on the rules that would govern the Church and the doctrines that all Christians had to believe. They combined philosophical debate, criminal trials, committee meetings, and Senate procedure. Some were rowdy and acrimonious, while others were meticulously organized in advance, usually by the court. Some remain obscure, while others are the most thoroughly documented events in all ancient history and reveal in detail how the later Roman government operated. In this course we will read, in Greek, a number of fascinating narratives and official acts stemming from the most important Councils, including Nicaea I (325), Ephesos I (431), and Chalcedon (451). We will also discuss the Councils from a historical perspective to understand the complex negotiations that gave rise to Christian doctrine and canon law.

This course will examine instances of Greek lyric genres throughout the archaic, classical, and hellenistic periods, focusing on the structure, themes and sounds of the poetry and investigating their performative and historical contexts. Readings will include Alcman, Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Theognis, Alcaeus, Bacchylides, Pindar, and Anyte. In Greek.

Working together, we’ll try to produce an (at least partial) answer to why the western classical canon ended up taking the shape it has at present.  What were the historical, cultural, educational, political (etc) factors that gave us what we have today?  What has been lost, and why? Our goal will be to develop answers that take us beyond “imperialism.” The course’s final product will be a collaborative paper on the topic.  

Course readings include satires of Horace and Juvenal in Latin together with selections in English from the long tradition of their European reception history. 

Several months after the death of his beloved daughter and just two years before his own death in 43 BC, Cicero composed a dialog with an imaginary interlocutor arguing that death, pain, grief, and other perturbations were an unimportant part of the big picture.  A reading of this famous contribution to the genre of consolation literature (all of it to be read in English, selections in Latin) affords an opportunity to weigh his many examples and his arguments for ourselves.  

In this class we’ll read through the fascination second book of Livy’s history of Rome, the Ab Urbe Condita.  Book 2 covers Rome directly after the fall of the kings, including the foundational Roman accounts of Horatius Cocles and Coriolanus.  

Course readings include satires of Horace and Juvenal in Latin together with selections in English from the long tradition of their European reception history. 

Several months after the death of his beloved daughter and just two years before his own death in 43 BC, Cicero composed a dialog with an imaginary interlocutor arguing that death, pain, grief, and other perturbations were an unimportant part of the big picture.  A reading of this famous contribution to the genre of consolation literature (all of it to be read in English, selections in Latin) affords an opportunity to weigh his many examples and his arguments for ourselves.   

In this course we will read passages from Plato’s dialogues, especially the Republic, which explore the question of how bad men manage to manipulate others and rise to power. We will pay attention to the style and rhetoric of such men, as represented by Plato, and briefly digress into other contemporary authors who tackled the same problem.

This course will explore the history of the manuscript book: how it was made, papyrus and parchment, the different scripts used to copy texts and how they developed from the Roman Republic to the High Middle Ages. The class will meet in the Regenstein Library and students will be able to work with manuscripts there and in the Newberry Library, as well as with digitised manuscripts. By mastering the foundational types of writing, the students will develop skills for reading all Latin-based scripts, including those used for vernacular languages. In addition to learning how to transcribe different scripts we shall consider how to date scripts, who commissioned and copied manuscripts, and how they were read. What were the features of a manuscript culture and how was it different from our own experience of reading?