Winter

This course continues the study of basic Latin. Course work involves reading Latin, translating from Latin into English and vice versa, and study of grammar and vocabulary. Throughout the course, students will encounter authentic Latin text. Students who complete this course will be able to understand complex sentences, and often to combine them into larger units of meaning.

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.

In this course we will read as much as possible of Vergil’s Aeneid in the original, and the rest in translation. Our focus will be on the way the poem interrogates some of its most basic claims about empire, piety, heroism, and history, but we will try to avoid falling into the binary trap of “positive” and “negative” readings of the epic’s relationship to its Roman imperial context.  Requirements: Class presentation; 10 page paper; final.

This seminar questions the prerogatives of disciplines in framing and explaining social change via mobility. Following earlier theories of diffusion to understand diachronic cultural change, and the subsequent contextual critiques that privilege historical contingencies and human agency, advances in identifying past human movement through techniques like ancient DNA genome testing have increasingly led to the revival of migration as a subject of focus and explanation. As growing interest in contemporary refugee and forced migration studies is showing, migration represents not just a wide-ranging practice of different types, but is a semantically charged and ambiguous term whose recent applications provide new opportunities to assess its interpretive advantages and limitations. Is the new empirical emphasis on migration re-racializing antiquity? What do we gain by studying concepts of diasporas, transnationalism, and border crossings in the premodern world? Why does migration matter? Divided into two parts, the course covers the conceptual and theoretical work in current literature on migration as well as applications to specific historical problems from ancient and modern Eurasia. (Meeting Fridays from 1:30-4:20pm in JRL TBA Enrollment Limit: 18)

A close literary and philological analysis of one of the most remarkable and perplexing of all Greek tragedies. While this has traditionally been one of the most neglected of Sophocles’ tragedies, it is a drama of extraordinary force and beauty and the issues that it explores – husband and wife, parents and child, sexual violence, myth and temporality, divinity and humanity, suffering and transcendence – are ones that are both of permanent interest and of particular relevance to our present concerns. The poetic text, in its many dimensions, will offer more than adequate material for classroom analysis and discussion, but some attention will also be directed to the reception of this play.

The goal of this course is to gain an understanding of the historical roots of the concept of nature (Greek physis), while being attentive to the diversity of ancient Greek thought about nature even in its early history. In the texts we will read, numerous notions of “nature” can be discerned: for instance, nature as the physical form of an individual, nature as an underlying reality of someone or something, nature as an autonomous thing distinct from human art and from the supernatural, nature as the all-encompassing natural order, or nature as the natural environment. The conceptual and ideological work done by these conceptions also varies wildly. Furthermore, the images associated with the concepts are similarly diverse, ranging from human bodies to magical plants and cosmic spheres, and with a comparable repertory of conceptual and ideological purposes. Yet discussions of the concept of nature typically deal almost exclusively in abstractions: this is true, for instance, of the standard study of physis written over a century ago as a U of C dissertation, which we will read in excerpt. Throughout this class, we will consider not only the explicit and abstract conceptualization of nature, but also a number of related images—especially in the form of metaphors, analogies and personifications—that ultimately fed into the literary and philosophical depictions of nature in the long traditions that have followed. 

Roman Asia Minor in the Imperial period provides an extraordinary case of religious plurality and creativity. Pagans, Jews, Christians, even already Christian heretics, interacted in the same space. The frontiers between Jewish and Christian communities were, at least at the beginning, more fluid than was long thought. But even the frontiers between paganism and Judaism or Christianity were certainly not as rigid as was later imagined. This does not mean, however, that there were no tensions between the various groups. This class will examine the various aspects of this religious diversity as well as the social and political factors that may explain the religious equilibrium prevailing at that time in Asia Minor. Course Requirements: two papers, two quizzes. 

This course examines aspects of death and disease in the Greco-Roman world through a wide range of evidence and historical approaches. We will focus on the major problems of individual and public health in these cultures, how they understood health philosophically, scientifically, and culturally and what measures they took to ensure it (or not). Topics will range from bacterial infections to environmental pollutants to personal hygiene. We will also examination how many aspects of ancient medicine were practiced and theorized. Later in the quarter we will consider various aspects of death: logistical and practical, cultural and religious

The comedies of Aristophanes are as uproarious, biting, and ribald today as they were more than 2,400 years ago. But they also offer a unique window onto the societal norms, expectations, and concerns as well as the more mundane experiences of Athenians in the fifth century BCE. This course will examine closely all eleven of Aristophanes’ extant plays (in translation) in order to address topics such as the performative, ritual, and political contexts of Attic comedy, the constituency of audiences, the relationship of comedy to satire, the use of dramatic stereotypes, freedom of speech, and the limits of dissent. Please note that this course is rated MA for adult themes and language.