CLAS

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.

Augustine’s City of God is a major work of history, politics, and religion. Written after Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, the work begins an apology (justification) of the Empire’s turn to Christianity and expands to offer a sweeping and deeply theological account of human history and society in terms of earth-bound versus heaven-centered community. Augustine’s citizenship and politics entails living out membership in either fellowship while commingled on earth with the other. Augustine analyzes Roman history and politics as well as the new religion first encouraged and eventually imposed in the wake of Constantine’s conversion.
We shall read the entire work in translation, attending to historical observations, political stances, and religious views. Augustine made arguments of his own but saved huge swaths of Varro and other otherwise lost sources to fashion his historical critique of Rome, social analysis, and many ultimately fresh views on matters like human sexuality in paradise and in heaven.
The class will meet once a week. A supplementary Latin reading group will also convene once a week for close reading of important and demanding selections in the original. There will be some invited international guest speakers.

There will be a weekly Latin reading group (F. afternoon, 90 minutes) for classics and other students who want to tackle Augustine's Latin.

This course traces the emergence of geographic thought in the Mediterranean world and the diachronic representations of space and place that became the foundations for the humanistic and social science of geography. Discussions will examine the practices that led to diverse modes and styles of spatial expression, travel and mapping, the tensions between the known world and the exotic imagined other, and the political, social, and cultural dimensions of geographic works and their historic contexts. Beyond our sustained focus on Strabo, writing under the Roman Empire, we will explore and interrogate both earlier and later traditions, from Hecataeus and Herodotus to Dionysius and Pausanias.

This course will explore how the poets and philosophers of archaic and classical Greece conceptualized “being alone,” particularly insofar as solitude occasioned both unparalleled achievements and unique dangers (both for the individual and the community.) We will read portions of Homer’s Iliad, Hesiod’s Theogony, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, together with excerpts of ancient philosophy, with an aim of thinking through the relationship between individual and community, which is fraught with tension in so many time periods and cultures. We will also reconsider our understanding of the ancient Greeks as primarily “public” in their motivations and values, in light of the array of possibilities offered by solitude in many of these texts. 

Aristotle called human beings “political animals,” suggesting an inherent connection between politics and the human propensity to live in cities. Using the city of Rome as its focus, this course aims to deepen our understanding of how urban spaces are not just backdrops to history but fundamentally shape political power. Focusing on the late Republic and early empire, in the first half of the class we will debate how the Roman forum, Campus Martius, and imperial fora altered the possibilities for political activity—from large public assemblies to restricted, autocratic displays focused on the emperor. We will also explore how “private” or seemingly “apolitical” spaces, such as houses and theaters, were used for the demonstration and negotiation of political and social power. This course will encourage students to use a variety of methodologies and source materials, from literary sources to digital archaeology, to construct arguments about the relationships between politics and space. We will also discuss how the lessons of Rome can be applied to battles over the landscapes of modern US cities. 

In recent decades, scholars of biblical and early Christian literature have examined the various ways literary sources constructed the relationship between “Jews” and “Christians” in Late Antiquity. These resources prove challenging for reconstructing the situation on the ground. This course will introduce students to the various models that scholars have advanced for making sense of the evidence and debated categories such as “Jewish-Christianity.” Against this backdrop, students will undertake a close reading of a select, representative examples to examine the development of adversus Iudaeos (“against the Jews”) literature. The readings will focus our attention on evidence from Greek- and Syriac-speaking Christians living within the multilingual and religiously diverse regions at the boundary of the Roman and Sassanian Persian Empires. Familiar sources such as the Pauline epistles, Apostolic Fathers, and John Chysostom will be accompanied by readings from the pseudo-Clementine literature, the Didascalia Apostolorum, poetry, and Persian Martyr Acts. We will explore how new discoveries within Syriac studies are currently reshaping our approaches to traditional questions. 

This course will examine both the historical record and the literary imagination in order to gain insight into the lives of women in ancient Greece and Rome. In both societies, women were a highly marginalized group, albeit in different ways. In this course, we will look at the forms of marginalization and the (male) anxieties that led to them, but we will give particular attention to the manner in which women were able to assert themselves and take agency in various social, civic, and religious spheres. Readings will all be in English, and will focus on both the everyday lives of women in the Greco-Roman world and on those of certain elite women.