CLCV

Myth is essential to how humans make sense of the world: our foundational stories explain the nature of the world; they justify and explore social and sexual difference; they teach and test the limits of human agency. The course will survey contexts and uses of myth-making in the ancient Mediterranean world. We will also explore the many traditions of critique and anxiety about myth-making among philosophers, literary critics, and religious authorities.

To an observer steeped in the classical tradition, Modern Greece is a layer cake of survivals, revivals, and innovations. To Greeks today, antiquity is only one element of a vastly more complex cultural heritage. This course, originally designed for Study Abroad, will investigate contemporary Greece in multidisciplinary fashion, with readings from history (narratives as well as primary texts), art history, theology, philosophy, music, and poetry, as well as film. Topics to be covered range from the late-antique iconoclasm controversies to the contemporary financial crisis. We will compensate for the lack of field trips with virtual visits from professionals in Greece and elsewhere. Knowledge of Greek (classical or modern) is not required, though we will often be pausing to examine the effects of language hybridity and change.

Julius Caesar is a captivating figure in the Western political and literary imaginary. Consummate general, admired stylist, lover of Cleopatra, winner of the civil war against Pompey, and dictator for life, Caesar seems to have it all until his assassination by some of his closest friends. Did he have the ambition to control the state from the beginning or did he react in response to provocation? Did he have a just cause for waging civil war? Was he a figure of consummate cruelty or did he do atrocious things to forward a progressive political agenda? How are we to interpret his vaunted clemency? To address these questions, we will read Julius Caesar’s extant works and examine the rich variety of representations of this charismatic figure in imperial Greek and Roman literature (Appian, Plutarch, Suetonius, Lucan) and beyond (Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Handel’s Giulio Cesare, Richard Nelson’s 2008 play, Conversations in Tusculum).

To an observer steeped in the classical tradition, Modern Greece is a layer cake of survivals, revivals, and innovations. To Greeks today, antiquity is only one element of a vastly more complex cultural heritage. This course, originally designed for Study Abroad, will investigate contemporary Greece in multidisciplinary fashion, with readings from history (narratives as well as primary texts), art history, theology, philosophy, music, and poetry, as well as film. Topics to be covered range from the late-antique iconoclasm controversies to the contemporary financial crisis. We will compensate for the lack of field trips with virtual visits from professionals in Greece and elsewhere. Knowledge of Greek (classical or modern) is not required, though we will often be pausing to examine the effects of language hybridity and change.

M/W/F 10:20 - 11:10

This course will examine the application of ancient Greek political philosophy to practical activity and individual cases through the study of a number of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, along with a selection of Plutarch’s sources from philosophy, oratory, and historiography. Discussions will consider Plutarch’s treatment of questions such as “what is justice?”, “do the means justify the ends?” and “what kind of knowledge is required for political virtue?” Readings will fall into three main segments: first, Plutarch’s analysis of the good and the truth with an eye to his reading of Plato and its application to practical politics; second, his account of virtue, especially in relation to Aristotle; and third, his assessment of the Athenian and Spartan regimes, with comparisons of his thought and the writings of Xenophon and Thucydides. In writing assignments, students will engage in the careful interpretation of Plutarch’s text, and reflect on the possibilities and shortcomings of his methods. Interested students may attend translation sessions on selections from course readings in Greek or Latin. K.Weeda. Autumn.

Cicero famously called history the “schoolmistress of life.” This course explores how ancient and early modern authors – in particular, Livy, Plutarch and Machiavelli – used the lives and actions of great individuals from the Greek and Roman past to establish models of political behavior for their own day and for posterity. Such figures include Romulus, Brutus, Camillus, Agathocles, Nabis, Cleomenes, Fabius Maximus, Scipio Africanus, Julius Caesar, and Augustus. We will consider how their actions are submitted to praise or blame, presented as examples for imitation or avoidance, and examine how the comparisons and contrasts established among the different historical individuals allow new models and norms to emerge. No one figure can provide a definitive model. Illustrious individuals help define values even when we mere mortals cannot aspire to reach their level of virtue or depravity. Course open to undergraduates and graduate students. Readings will be in English. Students wishing to read Latin, Greek, or Italian will receive support from the professors. M. Lowrie, J. McCormick. Winter

This course centers the objects of the ancient Greek world, from prehistory to the Hellenistic period, as avenues for exploring the practice, history, and motivations of the discipline of Greek archaeology. From the mundane to the spectacular, we will closely consider twenty things – pots, statues, coins, knives, bones, inscriptions, among others – whose compelling if fragmentary biographies reveal how archaeologists reconstruct and explain ancient social lives. Discussions will interrogate histories of object analysis, identification, and interpretation; schemes of periodization and categorization; theories of gender, class, economy, politics, and religion; developments in technologies and aesthetics; the intersections of artifact discovery and museum or market acquisitions; and the making of Greek archaeology within the wider discipline.  C. Kearns. Winter.

This course explores the historic development and dynamics of the ancient Greek countryside (oikoumene, chora) alongside the emergence of the city (polis). Recent historical analyses of demography and economy, archaeological fieldwork, and research on the cultural lens of town/country are revealing a highly complex world surrounding the city walls. What are the benefits and potential interpretive challenges of investigating these places and their constituent actors? Discussions will question the construction of urban vs. non-urban categories of ancient life, agropastoral economies and markets, political and social boundaries, rural sanctuaries, diachronic change, and methods and theories for examining the countryside through material culture and textual evidence. C. Kearns. Autumn.

The course will explore the human adaptation to a climatic phenomenon and its transformative impacts on the littoral societies of the Indian Ocean, circa 1000 BCE–1000 CE. Monsoon means season, a time and space in which favorable winds made possible the efficient, rapid crossing of thousands of miles of ocean. Its discovery—at different times in different places—resulted in communication and commerce across vast distances at speeds more commonly associated with the industrial than the preindustrial era, as merchants, sailors, religious specialists, and scholars made monsoon crossings. The course will consider the participation of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East African actors in the making of monsoon worlds and their relations to the Indian Ocean societies they encountered; the course is based on literary and archaeological sources, with attention to recent comparative historiography on oceanic, climatic, and global histories. R. Payne. Autumn.

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.  D. Martinez. Spring.