2021-22

The goal of this course is to pick up habits from introductory Greek class: producing Attic Greek sentences and longer pieces. The most obvious benefits of this exercise will be thorough review of basic morphology and syntax as well as fine-tuning our grasp of the more subtle nuances of the language, which should pay off when we go back to reading the ancient Greek texts themselves — or teach them! While this is a graduate level course, undergraduates are welcome to petition to take it.

A study of the creation of the canonical Greek prose style in the 5th and 4th centuries. Rapid reading and translation exercises.

This course will cover the long life of ancient Greek poetry, touching on many genres in their first forms: epic and hymns, didactic, theogonic, iambic, elegiac, lyric, epinician, tragic, comedic, pastoral, dithyrambic poetry, and poems that are practically unclassifiable. We will seek to discuss key moments, passages, and poems that give entry to larger literary questions and themes. We will pay particular attention to details of genre, dialect, and meter, while also being attentive to the history of scholarship that attends on these traditions. We will read some secondary literature and a lot of Greek. 

These two orators were fierce rivals in Athens; the luck of textual transmission allows us to read both of them smearing the other, and to explore what apparently passed for valid argument in the Athenian lawcourts. Demosthenes produced his finest work in attacking Aeschines; in this class we will explore both men’s writings in depth. 

In this course we will read Iliad 12, 15, 16, and portions of 18 in Greek, focusing on how the poem depicts allies on the battlefield. We will explore the diversity of motivations among Homeric fighters and the heroic standards set by the Trojan allies Sarpedon and Glaukos. Our aim will be to evaluate the poem’s many answers to the question “why do men fight?” with an eye to relationality and heroic excellence. 

This course will examine instances of Greek lyric genres throughout the archaic and classical periods, focusing on the structure, themes and sounds of the poetry and investigating their performative and historical contexts. Readings will include Alcman, Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Ibycus, Alcaeus, Simonides, Bacchylides, Pindar and Timotheus. In Greek.

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. 

The course will emphasize the development of Latin handwriting, primarily as book scripts, from its origins to the waning of the Carolingian minuscule, ca. AD 1100. By mastering the foundational types of writing, the students will develop skills for reading all Latin-based scripts, including those used for vernacular languages and the subsequent Gothics and their derivatives down to the sixteenth century.

We will read selections of Lucretius' magisterial account of a universe composed of atoms. The focus of our inquiry is: how did Lucretius convert a seemingly dry philosophical doctrine about the physical composition of the universe into a gripping message of personal salvation? The selections include Lucretius' vision of an infinite universe, of heaven, and of the hell that humans have created for themselves on earth.

Plautus' Pseudolus is read in Latin, along with secondary readings that explain the social context and the theatrical conventions of Roman comedy. Class meetings are devoted less to translation than to study of the language, plot construction, and stage techniques at work in the Pseudolus.