Winter

This two-quarter seminar, which fulfills the seminar requirement for graduates in History and Classics, seeks to explore how we might reconstruct the religious experience of the ancient Greeks through texts in translation (especially hymns), inscriptions, and material culture, paying particular attention to issues of methodology. The first quarter will be devoted to guided reading and discussion, focused on individual sanctuary sites, while the second quarter will be reserved for writing a major research paper. C. Faraone. J. Hall. Winter.

The anachronism of the course title constitutes our program: to what extent can Plato’s thinking about artworks, images, poets in the polis, beauty, the visual world, the senses, subjectivity and criticism be viewed coherently as an aesthetic theory? Does his style and dramatic mode of writing interact significantly with these views? How have they been received, and to what extent are they right?  A. Pop. Winter.

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.

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.