Undergraduate

We read Plato's text with a view to understanding both the grammatical constructions and the artistry of the language. We also give attention to the dramatic qualities of the dialogue. Grammatical exercises reinforce the learning of syntax.

This course continues the study of basic Ancient Greek. Course work involves reading practice, presentational writing, and formal study of grammar and vocabulary. Throughout the course, students will encounter authentic Ancient Greek text. Students who complete this course will be able to track ideas across at least a paragraph of text, and will be ready to move into the intermediate sequence (GREK 20100-20200-20300).  

This course continues the study of basic Ancient Greek. Course work involves reading practice, presentational writing, and formal study of grammar and vocabulary. Throughout the course, students will encounter authentic Ancient Greek text. Students who complete this course will be able to understand complex sentences, and often to combine them into larger units of meaning.

This course introduces the basic rules of Ancient Greek.  Course work involves reading practice, presentational writing, and formal study of grammar and vocabulary. Throughout the course, students will encounter authentic Ancient Greek text. Students who complete this course will be able to understand simple sentences, and often to combine them into larger units of meaning.  

How are democracies established and maintained? What are their advantages and disadvantages with respect to stability, security, liberty, equality, and justice? Why do democracies decline and die? This course addresses these questions by examining democracies, republics, and popular governments in Ancient and Medieval/ Renaissance Europe. We will read and discuss primary texts from, and social scientific analyses of, Athenian democracy, the Roman Republic, and the Florentine commune. 

In this course we will mainly focus on the magical rituals (e.g. curses, necromancy, erotic spells, amulets, and divination) practiced in the ancient Mediterranean beginning with the Greeks in archaic times and ending with the fall of the Roman Empire.  Course requirements include a midterm and final, both with essay questions. 

This course will examine some of the ancient Greek roots of early Christianity. We will focus on affinities between Christianity and the classical tradition as well as ways in which the Christian faith may be considered radically different from it. Some of the more important issues that we will analyze are: "The spell of Homer." How the Homeric poems exerted immeasurable influence on the religious attitudes and practices of the Greeks. The theme of creation in Greek and Roman authors such as Hesiod and Ovid. The Orphic account of human origins. The early Christian theme of Christ as Creator/Savior. Greek, specifically Homeric conceptions of the afterlife. The response to the Homeric orientation in the form of the great mystery cults of Demeter, Dionysus, and Orpheus. The views of the philosophers (esp. Plato) of the immortality of the soul compared with the New Testament conception of resurrection of the body. Ancient Greek conceptions of sacrifice and the crucifixion of Christ as archetypal sacrifice. The attempted synthesis of Jewish and Greek philosophic thought by Philo of Alexandria and its importance for early Christianity. 

The five continents of the Modern World are multilingual areas, some countries even have more than one official language. Individuals in different communities use daily two or three languages to communicate at home and in society. The same was true in the Ancient World. The Mediterranean, the Roman Empire, Africa, Asia, the Ancient Americas, were the stage of different cultures and languages, many of them lost forever, others surviving in written sources and transmitted literature. In this class we will explore the types of sources we have for the study of ancient languages, methods to study them, the decipherment of lost languages and writing systems, and the application of modern linguistics to dead languages. We will also study the approach that the ancients had to their own languages and the languages of the other, and the different sociolinguistic situations of multilingual spaces in Antiquity, with a special emphasis on the Mediterranean.

Corpus research used to mean collecting data by hand by copying examples from texts onto index cards, or consulting indices to particular authors and works to collect examples. Digital text corpora allow us to query large corpora, and to develop our own corpora to suit our particular research questions. This course introduces students to Digital Philology in the Classics, arguably the most flourishing sector of the Digital Humanities. Students will do a combination of readings from secondary literature, ‘lab work’ to suit their own research interests, and present a final project. This course is open to undergraduates and graduates.

Ralph Ellison’s landmark 1952 Invisible Man won an American Book Award and entered discussions about the Great American Novel, and it was also steeped in Greek heroic myth and epic poetry. In this course, we begin with Invisible Man as a watershed in contemporary deployment of classical texts and images. We read these texts (the novel, its classical counterparts) and seek to understand their significance in the lives of writers, artists, and everyday people. We read the scholarship of classical reception studies as a global phenomenon impacting our understanding of the classics in the contemporary world. Reading in English, course culminates in research paper. No prerequisite required.