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. Knowledge of Greek not required.
Dreams belong to the universals of human existence as human beings have always dreamt and will continue to dream across time and cultures. The questions where do dreams come from and how to unravel a dream have always preoccupied the human mind. In this course we will focus on dreams in the Greco-Roman and Greco-Egyptian cultural environments. We will cover dreams from three complementary perspectives: dreams as experience, dream interpretation and dream theory. The reading materials will include: (a) a selection of dream narratives from different sources, literary texts as well as documentary accounts of dreams; (b) texts which document the forms and contexts of dream interpretation in the Greco-Roman and Greco-Egyptian cultures and (c) texts which represent attempts to approach dreams from a more general perspective by among others explaining their genesis and defining dream-types.
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.
This course surveys the social, economic, and political history of Greece from prehistory to the Hellenistic period. The main topics considered include the development of the institutions of the Greek city-state, the Persian Wars and the rivalry of Athens and Sparta, the social and economic consequences of the Peloponnesian War, and the eclipse and defeat of the city-states by the Macedonians.
Empire was the dominant form of regional state in the ancient Mediterranean. We will investigate the nature of imperial government, strategies of administration, and relations between metropole and regional powers in Persia, Athens, the Seleucid empire, and Rome.
This course provides an introduction to the role of the human body in ancient Greek art. We will examine, on the one hand, the various ways in which Greek artists represented the body, and consider how forms of bodily identity such as gender and sexuality were constructed and articulated through artistic practice. But we will also consider the ways in which works of art themselves — statues, paintings, vessels — could function like bodies or in place of bodies, expanding the notion of what it means to be a living being. Readings will range from primary texts — ancient literature in translation — to more theoretical writing on embodiment, gender, and sexuality.
Is the market system a new invention linked to the recent development of modern European societies? Is the market the hero or the villain of the story? Is everything marketable? Is the market the driver for economic development? We will address these and other questions in a deliberately comparative way, focusing on the cases of ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Greece and Rome, as well as medieval and early modern Europe. We will read excerpts from Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Braudel, Wallerstein, Geertz, Horden, and Purcell. We will examine the controversies in which these scholars were involved and the echoes they still have in our own contemporary debates.
Course Requirements: two papers, two quizzes
Note: History Gateways are introductory courses meant to appeal to 1st- through 3rd-yr students who may not have done previous course work on the topic of the course; topics cover the globe and span the ages.
This course will travel through the great dramas of ancient Greece, including works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Moreover, it will show how the history of contemporary thought has been shaped by reflection on Greek tragedy, starting from the philosophy of Hegel and Nietzsche, the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, the feminist critiques of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, works of structuralism and poststructuralism, and finally the recent material and affective turns in scholarship. Along the way, we will draw insights on modern movements of the performance arts from adaptations, including those in dance (Martha Graham), in film (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lars von Trier), and in drama itself (Anne Carson). As this course will demonstrate, there is hardly an intellectual or artistic movement of recent history that has not taken its cue from Greek drama. All reading will be in English.
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.
