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.

Following the conquest of Alexander, Greek became the language of power all over the Near East and up to central Asia and India (for a while). Even the fall of the various Greek kingdoms at the end of the Hellenistic period did not mark the end of the habit of writing in Greek. Inscriptions in Greek coming from those regions are still to be found in significant number up to the third century CE. This class will cover all types of inscriptions, from slave manumissions to civic decrees or royal letters, and from  modest epitaphs to sophisticated verse epigrams. It will illustrate the vitality and prestige of Greek culture well beyond the regions close to the Mediterranean Sea.  A good level in Greek is required. A. Bresson.  Winter.

In the Iliad, Andromache famously appealed to her husband Hector to take pity on herself and her infant son, and not go out to fight the Greeks; Hector took pity, but said no. What happened to pity since Homer? Aristotle recognized as an essential feature of tragedy, along with fear. Surprisingly, however, it did not enter Greco-Roman political theory except for one short, little noticed mention: Lucretius placed pity for the weak at the foundation of the Epicurean view of justice. This course will delve into the notion of pity from antiquity to Schopenhauer, with attention to Greeks, Romans, Christians, the period of the Enlightenment, and the Romantics. We will ask: can pity serve as the foundation of morality, as Schopenhauer proposed; or is it shameful, or self-serving?  E. Asmis. Winter.