2019-20

Freedom may be the greatest of American values. But it also has a long history, a dizzying variety of meanings, and a huge literature. This course will be an introduction to critical thinking on freedom (primarily political freedom) with an emphasis on Greco-Roman texts. The first half of the class will focus on Greek authors, including Herodotus, Euripides, and Aristotle. The second half will focus on Roman authors, from Cicero to Livy to Tacitus. The ancient texts will be supplemented by modern literature on freedom, such as John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin.

The city of Rome was central to European culture in terms both of its material reality and the models of political and sacred authority that it provided. Students on this course will receive an introduction to the archaeology and history of the city from the Iron Age to the early medieval period (ca. 850 BCE–850 CE) and an overview of the range of different intellectual and scientific approaches by which scholars have engaged with the city and its legacy. Students will encounter a broad range of sources, both textual and material, from each period that show how the city physically developed and transformed within shifting historical and cultural contexts. We will consider how various social and power dynamics contributed to the formation and use of Rome's urban space, including how neighborhoods and residential space developed beyond the city's more famous monumental areas. Our main theme will be how Rome in any period was, and still is, a product of both its present and past and how its human and material legacies were constantly shaping and reshaping the city's use and space in later periods.

This course examines aspects of death and disease in the Greco-Roman world through a wide range of evidence and historical approaches. We will focus on the major problems of individual and public health in these cultures, how they understood health philosophically, scientifically, and culturally and what measures they took to ensure it (or not). Topics will range from bacterial infections to environmental pollutants to personal hygiene. We will also examination how many aspects of ancient medicine were practiced and theorized. Later in the quarter we will consider various aspects of death: logistical and practical, cultural and religious

Late antiquity witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of peoples in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Vandals, Arabs, Goths, Huns, Franks, and Iranians, among numerous others, took shape as political communities within the Roman and Iranian empires or along their peripheries. Recent scholarship has undone the traditional image of these groups as previously undocumented communities of "barbarians" entering history. Ethnic communities emerge from the literature as political constructions dependent on the very malleability of identities, on specific acts of textual and artistic production, on particular religious traditions, and, not least, on the imperial or postimperial regimes sustaining their claims to sovereignty. The colloquium will debate the origin, nature, and roles of ethno-political identities and communities comparatively across West Asia, from the Western Mediterranean to the Eurasian steppes, on the basis of recent contributions. As a historiographical colloquium, the course will address the contemporary cultural and political concerns—especially nationalism—that have often shaped historical accounts of ethnogenesis in the period as well as bio-historical approaches—such as genetic history—that sometimes sit uneasily with the recent advances of historians.  PQ: Open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

The comedies of Aristophanes are as uproarious, biting, and ribald today as they were more than 2,400 years ago. But they also offer a unique window onto the societal norms, expectations, and concerns as well as the more mundane experiences of Athenians in the fifth century BCE. This course will examine closely all eleven of Aristophanes’ extant plays (in translation) in order to address topics such as the performative, ritual, and political contexts of Attic comedy, the constituency of audiences, the relationship of comedy to satire, the use of dramatic stereotypes, freedom of speech, and the limits of dissent. Please note that this course is rated MA for adult themes and language.

This course examines one of the most captivating bodies of portrait art in the Western tradition. Captivating because they are at once disquietingly familiar and strange: familiar in their realism and psychological presence, yet foreign in their temporal remoteness. For well over a century, the study of Roman portraiture, an essentially German subfield of classical archaeology, has largely confined itself to forensic problems of dating and identification. More recent work has focused on social and political topics ranging from site-specific issues of context and display, patronage and power, gender, and the ideological stakes of recarving and reuse. Additionally, we will consider the historiographical and media-archaeological contexts that have profoundly shaped and framed our understanding of these objects, both in antiquity and modernity: e.g., the production (and reproduction) of wax and plaster death masks in Roman funerary custom; ancient theories in the domain of optics that were used to explain the phenomenon of portraits whose eyes appear to follow a beholder in space; how the stylistic category of “veristic” portraiture in the Roman Republic has its origins not in antiquity (despite the Latin etymology), but rather in the painting and photography of the Neue Sachlichkeit in Weimar Germany; and how the contemporary use of digital craniofacial anthropometry to study the recarving and reuse of Roman portraits relates to Sir Francis Galton’s criminological apparatus for creating composite photographic images using portraits from ancient coins as early as 1885.

Many think of Anatolia, modern Turkey, as lying at the crossroads of civilizations, the meeting-place of East and West. The metaphor holds because it is partially true: Anatolian locales and individuals appear in both Greek and Near Eastern sources, almost as soon as written traditions themselves exist; likewise, the archaeological evidence from Anatolia increasingly suggests a web of long-distance connections extending east and west from time immemorial. But this language of betweenness serves another purpose: from the ‘topless towers’ of Troy to the golden halls of King Midas, the archaeological sites of modern Turkey play a starring role in Greco-Roman foundation myths, making them—or the narratives we have built up around them, the parts of them we choose to claim—essential to constructions of ‘western’ identity.

Taking our cue from a close reading of Said’s Orientalism, in this course we will bring a critical eye to the prevailing narratives of Anatolian history, disentangling textual and archaeological evidence and their corresponding interpretive frameworks at four key sites: Troy, Gordion, Sardis, and Karatepe in Cilicia. More than just text vs. archaeology, this is a course that gets at the heart of the historical method—the confusing, contradictory, often messy process of interpreting what remains to us of the past as it has built up over time. Through presentations, research assignments, and exercises with primary evidence, students will build skills in creative problem-solving and critical thinking. In addition, students will gain basic familiarity with ArcGIS, culminating in a summative, team-built StoryMap that will place the building blocks of Anatolian history in clear spatial and chronological context.

Cleopatra is one of the most notorious women in history. The quintessential femme fatale, she has permeated Western cultural imagination for more than 2,000 years. Born of a bastard king, she rose to power in one of the most turbulent times in human history – Rome was waging bloody civil war, the empires of Alexander the Great’s legacy were falling, and Egypt was in revolt and uprising. Her story is one of political intrigue, sex, power, murder, war, and suicide. But her story was never her story alone. Once the asp took its fatal bite, Cleopatra’s story was coopted by her enemies and her legacy was built at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race over the last two millennia.
This course has two main objectives: 1. to strip back the Western, male gaze of Cleopatra’s legacy and evaluate Cleopatra’s reign within its own context; and 2. to interrogate Cleopatra’s constructed identities and the role they have played and still play in society. In this course, students will take a critical look at the life and legacy of Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt, through a wide-array of primary source materials and a selection of her vast reception, including Roman, Arabic, and Renaissance literature; Shakespeare; Afrocentric art, literature, and pop culture; film; comedy; advertising; and popular music. 

How do hymns make use of myth in its various guises to develop their religious and literary programs? What is the functional difference between embedded narrative and indirect allusion? How do ideologies give shape to literary forms in different context of religious performance? These are some of the questions that will animate this course, which provides an introduction to the comparative skills useful in the study of poetics, myth, and religion in ancient literatures. Taking as our focus several of the major branches of the Indo-European language family, we will address the political and academic limitations and implications of the genealogical method (that is historically favored in the relevant scholarship) before moving onto newer methods, such as those of descriptive typology, that are both more ethical and more translatable to the study of literature more broadly. Students will be taught how to work intuitively with unfamiliar primary sources by relying on close-readings, discovering comparanda in unusual places, and generally learning to propose fresh interpretive solutions to ancient questions.

While the words “devil,” “demon,” and “Satan” usually conjure the image of a horned and hoofed archfiend, this has not always been the case. Students in this course will discover both the origins of and complications to dominant popular images of “the Devil” by engaging ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean texts, including Mesopotamian literature, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and other early Christian and Jewish texts. We will discuss Satan’s origins as the biblical god Yahweh’s henchman, Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman conceptions of subordinate divine entities, Hellenistic and Roman-period tendencies towards cosmic dualism, and much more. Students will also have the opportunity to explore pop culture and political discourse to examine how Biblical and other ancient demons productively recur in such contexts. A guiding question will be why the category of “demon” has proven so productive and necessary to diverse religious worldviews and what the common features and actions of these figures reveal about persistent human anxieties.