Winter

This is a course for intermediate and post-intermediate Greek students who are interested in exploring a less canonical genre and in developing their reading skills further. The novels give us glimpses of the Greek world and the wider Mediterranean that we do not often get elsewhere. What can we say about the world view of these authors and their audiences? We will read extensively in the various works (in Greek and in translation) and explore the scholarship around them. Student presentations should range widely from cosmopolitanism to gender roles, narratology, and the conventions of this emerging genre.

This course includes analysis and translation of the Greek text, discussion of Sophoclean language and dramatic technique, and relevant trends in fifth-century Athenian intellectual history.

This course continues the study of basic 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 complex sentences, and often to combine them into larger units of meaning.

The corpus of Greek literature transmitted in medieval manuscripts presents a notable lacuna in the field of poetry. However, the discovery of the Egyptian papyri in the 19th century and after have provided a new entry to this lost literary corpus. These discoveries open interesting questions about the formation of the canon and about how we have understood and misunderstood ancient literature. This course will approach the corpus of lost and found Greek poetry from two points of view: on the one hand, that of its textual and material transmission, and on the other, that of its literary value. It will include technical training in papyrology, a general overview of textual tradition, and discussions of specific poetic and scholarly traditions, including (potentially) that of Homer, Archilochus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Simonides, Timotheus, Menander, Bacchylides, Callimachus and Posidippus.

This course will examine some of the ancient Greek roots of early Christianity. We will focus on affinities between Christianity and the classical tradition as well as ways in which the Christian faith may be considered radically different from it. Some of the more important issues that we will analyze are: "The spell of Homer." How the Homeric poems exerted immeasurable influence on the religious attitudes and practices of the Greeks. The theme of creation in Greek and Roman authors such as Hesiod and Ovid. The Orphic account of human origins. The early Christian theme of Christ as Creator/Savior. Greek, specifically Homeric conceptions of the afterlife. The response to the Homeric orientation in the form of the great mystery cults of Demeter, Dionysus, and Orpheus. The views of the philosophers (esp. Plato) of the immortality of the soul compared with the New Testament conception of resurrection of the body. Ancient Greek conceptions of sacrifice and the crucifixion of Christ as archetypal sacrifice. The attempted synthesis of Jewish and Greek philosophic thought by Philo of Alexandria and its importance for early Christianity. 

The five continents of the Modern World are multilingual areas, some countries even have more than one official language. Individuals in different communities use daily two or three languages to communicate at home and in society. The same was true in the Ancient World. The Mediterranean, the Roman Empire, Africa, Asia, the Ancient Americas, were the stage of different cultures and languages, many of them lost forever, others surviving in written sources and transmitted literature. In this class we will explore the types of sources we have for the study of ancient languages, methods to study them, the decipherment of lost languages and writing systems, and the application of modern linguistics to dead languages. We will also study the approach that the ancients had to their own languages and the languages of the other, and the different sociolinguistic situations of multilingual spaces in Antiquity, with a special emphasis on the Mediterranean.

Corpus research used to mean collecting data by hand by copying examples from texts onto index cards, or consulting indices to particular authors and works to collect examples. Digital text corpora allow us to query large corpora, and to develop our own corpora to suit our particular research questions. This course introduces students to Digital Philology in the Classics, arguably the most flourishing sector of the Digital Humanities. Students will do a combination of readings from secondary literature, ‘lab work’ to suit their own research interests, and present a final project. This course is open to undergraduates and graduates.

Ralph Ellison’s landmark 1952 Invisible Man won an American Book Award and entered discussions about the Great American Novel, and it was also steeped in Greek heroic myth and epic poetry. In this course, we begin with Invisible Man as a watershed in contemporary deployment of classical texts and images. We read these texts (the novel, its classical counterparts) and seek to understand their significance in the lives of writers, artists, and everyday people. We read the scholarship of classical reception studies as a global phenomenon impacting our understanding of the classics in the contemporary world. Reading in English, course culminates in research paper. No prerequisite required.

Part II surveys the social, economic, and political history of Rome, from its prehistoric beginnings in the twelfth century BCE to the end of the Severan dynasty in 235 CE. Throughout, the focus will be upon the dynamism and adaptability of Roman society, as it moved from a monarchy to a republic to an empire. The course will also cover the questions of social organization (free and unfree people, foreigners), gender relations, religion, and specific forms of the way of life of the Romans. It will be based both on lectures and on discussions of textual or archaeological documents in smaller discussion groups.

From Herodotos to Hitler, ancient Sparta has continued to fascinate for its supposedly balanced constitution, its military superiority, its totalitarian ideology and its brutality. Yet the image we possess of the most important state of the Peloponnese is largely the projection of outside observers for whom the objectification of Sparta could serve either as a model for emulation or as a paradigm of "otherness." This course will examine the extant evidence for Sparta from its origins through to its repackaging in Roman times and beyond and will serve as a case-study in discussing the writing of history and in attempting to gauge the viability of a non-Athenocentric Greek history. Assignments: short papers.