Winter

Cleopatra is one of the most notorious women in history. The quintessential femme fatale, she has permeated Western cultural imagination for more than 2,000 years. Born of a bastard king, she rose to power in one of the most turbulent times in human history – Rome was waging bloody civil war, the empires of Alexander the Great’s legacy were falling, and Egypt was in revolt and uprising. Her story is one of political intrigue, sex, power, murder, war, and suicide. But her story was never her story alone. Once the asp took its fatal bite, Cleopatra’s story was coopted by her enemies and her legacy was built at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race over the last two millennia.
This course has two main objectives: 1. to strip back the Western, male gaze of Cleopatra’s legacy and evaluate Cleopatra’s reign within its own context; and 2. to interrogate Cleopatra’s constructed identities and the role they have played and still play in society. In this course, students will take a critical look at the life and legacy of Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt, through a wide-array of primary source materials and a selection of her vast reception, including Roman, Arabic, and Renaissance literature; Shakespeare; Afrocentric art, literature, and pop culture; film; comedy; advertising; and popular music. 

How do hymns make use of myth in its various guises to develop their religious and literary programs? What is the functional difference between embedded narrative and indirect allusion? How do ideologies give shape to literary forms in different context of religious performance? These are some of the questions that will animate this course, which provides an introduction to the comparative skills useful in the study of poetics, myth, and religion in ancient literatures. Taking as our focus several of the major branches of the Indo-European language family, we will address the political and academic limitations and implications of the genealogical method (that is historically favored in the relevant scholarship) before moving onto newer methods, such as those of descriptive typology, that are both more ethical and more translatable to the study of literature more broadly. Students will be taught how to work intuitively with unfamiliar primary sources by relying on close-readings, discovering comparanda in unusual places, and generally learning to propose fresh interpretive solutions to ancient questions.

Objects from Classical antiquity that have survived into the modern era have enticed, inspired, and haunted those who encountered or possessed them. Collectors, in turn, have charged ancient objects with emotional, spiritual, and temporal power, enrolling them in all aspects of their lives, from questions of politics and religion to those of race and sexuality. This course explores intimate histories of private ownership of antiquities as they appear within literature, visual art, theater, aesthetics, and collecting practices. Focusing on the sensorial, material and affective dimensions of collecting, we will survey histories of modern classicism that span from the 18th century to the present, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Historical sources will include the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Emma Hamilton, Vernon Lee, and Sigmund Freud, among others, while secondary source scholarship will draw from the fields of gender studies, history of race, history of art, and the history of emotions. We will supplement our readings with occasional museum visits and film screenings. This course is team taught as an interdisciplinary course, and we welcome students from all backgrounds, with no previous experience in ancient art or modern history required. 

This quarter 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 is upon the dynamism and adaptability of Roman society, as it moved from a monarchy to a republic to an empire, and the implications of these political changes for structures of competition and cooperation within the community.

Substantial selections are read from Cato, Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Seneca, and Tacitus at a rapid pace, with attention paid to their use of resources of the Latin language and their role in the development of Latin style. S. Bartsch-Zimmer. Winter.

Tertullian was the first to attribute the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews to Barnabas, and that ascription found favor with no less an ancient figure as Jerome, and even with notable scholars of the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries, such as Albrecht Ritschl and Friedrich Blass. Although no one can know who wrote it, there are fruitful literary and thematic parallels between the Epistle that bears the name Barnabas and the canonical Hebrews, including their critique of Judaism and their interpretatio Christiana of the Hebrew Bible, with particular regard to Levitical institutions and the temple. We will read thoroughly the Greek text of each treatise with focus on the language and style of the two texts, their relation to Hellenistic Judaism, and their respective treatments of Hebrew Bible/Septuagintal themes. D. Martinez.  Winter.

In this course we will read book 1 of Thucydides, his description of the run-up to the Peloponnesian War, in Greek. We will pay attention to Thucydides' style and approach to historiography, sinking our teeth into this difficult but endlessly fascinating text.

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