CLAS

This course examines how family was conceptualized and manifested in the Greek and Roman world. In this class, we will begin by examining key terms related to family (household, kinship, ancestors, descendants) and scholarly approaches to familial studies under the light of different theoretical perspectives. Through the examination of written sources (literary texts, inscriptions, and papyri) and archaeological evidence, we will adopt a thematic approach exploring the ways in which family intersected with several fields of public and domestic life, such as law, adoption, heirship, religion, rituals, education, politics, and public honors.

This course offers a hands-on introduction to the field of digital humanities with a special focus on ancient Greek and Roman antiquity. We will explore concepts and methods such as digital presentation of text with markup languages, text analysis with programmatic manipulation, map visualization, 3D modeling, and network analysis. Throughout the course, we will take a critical view of the existing online digital resources for Greek and Roman antiquity. The course will include weekly readings and assignments and conclude with a final research project.

Without the tractive force and accelerated motion afforded by horses much of what humans have achieved, for good or ill, would have been impossible. The horse has also been a steady economic, military, artistic, and literary reference, and linguists and historians have even begun accounts of human civilization with the horse.  The course will trace the various forms of “symbiosis” that have united humans and horses since their first fateful linkage in Central Asia some 4,000 years ago, down to the rapid and almost complete de-coupling of the past 100 years. 

The corpus of Greek literature transmitted in medieval manuscripts presents a notable lacuna in the field of poetry. However, the discovery of the Egyptian papyri in the 19th century and after have provided a new entry to this lost literary corpus. These discoveries open interesting questions about the formation of the canon and about how we have understood and misunderstood ancient literature. This course will approach the corpus of lost and found Greek poetry from two points of view: on the one hand, that of its textual and material transmission, and on the other, that of its literary value. It will include technical training in papyrology, a general overview of textual tradition, and discussions of specific poetic and scholarly traditions, including (potentially) that of Homer, Archilochus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Simonides, Timotheus, Menander, Bacchylides, Callimachus and Posidippus.

The corpus of Greek literature transmitted in medieval manuscripts presents a notable lacuna in the field of poetry. However, the discovery of the Egyptian papyri in the 19th century and after have provided a new entry to this lost literary corpus. These discoveries open interesting questions about the formation of the canon and about how we have understood and misunderstood ancient literature. This course will approach the corpus of lost and found Greek poetry from two points of view: on the one hand, that of its textual and material transmission, and on the other, that of its literary value. It will include technical training in papyrology, a general overview of textual tradition, and discussions of specific poetic and scholarly traditions, including (potentially) that of Homer, Archilochus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Simonides, Timotheus, Menander, Bacchylides, Callimachus and Posidippus.  

This two-quarter seminar introduces students to key debates and challenges in the study of ancient Mediterranean societies outside or elliptical to the boundaries of the city-state. In the first half, readings and discussions will interrogate Greek and Roman concepts of territoriality and border-making, frontiers and hinterlands, and political community, as well as assess limitations in method and evidence for studying the material histories of nonurban social formations. The course takes a broad approach by exploring diverse regional and chronological case studies. In the second quarter, students will write a major research paper. Non-Classics students may enroll for just the first quarter by arrangement with the instructors. C. Kearns/C. Ando.  Winter.

This two-quarter seminar introduces students to key debates and challenges in the study of ancient Mediterranean societies outside or elliptical to the boundaries of the city-state. In the first half, readings and discussions will interrogate Greek and Roman concepts of territoriality and border-making, frontiers and hinterlands, and political community, as well as assess limitations in method and evidence for studying the material histories of nonurban social formations. The course takes a broad approach by exploring diverse regional and chronological case studies. In the second quarter, students will write a major research paper. Non-Classics students may enroll for just the first quarter by arrangement with the instructors.

This course will introduce undergraduates to the Greco-Roman sources of a key tension that has shaped contemporary humanities: the debate between philosophy and rhetoric, between ideals of truth and powers of persuasion. Beginning with an in-depth examination of Plato’s scathing attack on rhetoric in the Gorgias, a deeply ambiguous text in which Socrates’ championing of philosophy actually seems to fail, we will examine Plato’s rehabilitation of rhetoric in the Phaedrus as a means of leading souls towards truth, Cicero’s attempt to combine rhetoric and philosophy in Book III of his dialogue On the Orator, and Quintilian’s effort to inspire moral commitment in the readers of his rhetorical treatise On the Education of the Orator.  In the latter part of the course, we will encounter new voices entering the debate and adding their own unique concerns: Augustine’s conflicted feelings towards his rhetorical education in the Confessions, Isotta Nogarola’s spirited entrance into a tradition of rhetorical and philosophical debate defined and dominated by men, and Petrus Ramus’ attack on the unity of rhetoric and morality that dramatically altered the shape of humanistic studies.  We will conclude the course with Danielle Allen’s chapter “Rhetoric, a Good Thing” in Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education,  which engages in this debate via Aristotle and frames rhetoric as a useful tool for forging civic bonds in troubled political times.  

This class is an in-depth study of central Anatolia's most important archaeological site during the early first millennium BCE: Gordion, the capital city of the kingdom of Phrygia. In addition to learning the archaeology of this site in great detail, we will also use it as a foundation to explore neighboring excavations in the region, including the Iron Age levels of Hattusha, Kaman-Kalehöyük, Kınık Höyük, and others

What happens when we consider the cultures, histories, and politics of the ancient Greek world from outside its Aegean ecumene? From Homeric ethnographies to Hellenistic expansion, the borders and peripheries of Greek life became rich spaces for both imagining and constructing Greek identity and civilization through interactions with myriad “others”: barbarians, allies, kings, and monsters. And in recent decades, interdisciplinary research has examined what life was like on these peripheries, at the intersections of Greek colonization, trade, religion, and the state. In this course we examine the concept of peripheries (and cores) and question the methodologies that historians and archaeologists use to consider the dynamic spaces around the edges of the Aegean sea: colonial settlements, sites of pilgrimage, industrial districts, and exotic fringes, among others. Using textual and material evidence, and taking a broad approach by exploring case studies from Iberia to India, we consider the practices through which diverse peripheries became intertwined with Greek culture (or not), and how current postcolonial approaches are decentering the study of ancient Greek culture.