Spring

We can learn a lot about ancient societies through careful study of how they treated their dead. From the carrion picking over human corpses in the opening lines of the Iliad to the vast subterranean catacombs of Rome, ancient Mediterranean peoples have left us fascinating testimonies about death in literature, documents, objects, materials, and built environments that yield powerful clues to shifting values about personhood, belief, ritual, and family connections. In this seminar, we survey a range of evidence to explore how scholars study the practices of death and burial that operated across the Mediterranean in antiquity, and their connections to ways of dying, mourning, and commemoration in the Mediterranean present. Discussions will consider how fragmentary evidence can speak to a number of critical social themes: ritual and ideas of the afterlife, social bounding and othering, gender and bodily identity, demography and disease, wealth and status, and the persistent ways that dead bodies, tombs, and mortuary monuments shape social lives across generations.

What explains the diverse developments of social and economic inequality in the ancient world, and why are historians and archaeologists so interested in this question? In this seminar, we begin by thinking about key terms related to inequality – class, status, and wealth - and how scholars in ancient history and archaeology identify and distinguish evidence for these practices, analyze their data, and produce comparative analyses of past societies, using the Mediterranean as a case study. Readings will introduce important ideas from economic and sociological understandings of how value, and access to things of value and the means of making it, might have constructed and maintained forms of difference, power, and cultural capital. The course will explore evidence of inequality by sampling from a wide range of societies, from the Bronze Age to the Roman Empire, to assess how uneven practices of production, accumulation, and consumption shaped social lives.

Stoicism and Epicureanism became two major strands of philosophy after Aristotle and attracted many followers. They are fundamentally opposed. The Stoics believed in an immanent deity who issued moral laws to humans. They were also the first to develop a robust theory of cosmopolitanism and natural law. The Epicureans rejected divine governance, leaving it up to humans to achieve their own happiness by following the goal of pleasure. Much derided as hedonists, they sought to purify the quest for pleasure by understanding the height of pleasure as the absence of pain. Surprisingly, both groups discovered in time that had something in common. This course will examine their differences and interactions in Greek and Roman antiquity, as well as trace the impact of both philosophies in modern times.  

 From the strong, rapid fourteeners of Chapman’s Elizabethan English to the taut rhythms of Alice Oswald’s Memorial, Homer’s Iliad takes on new meaning and feel each time the poem is translated anew. This workshop-style course will engage the many English versions of Homeric poetry, attending to theme, image, word, line, paragraph, and meter; noting what is kept and what is changed. We will also consider the theory and practice of translation, especially as it has been understood by these poets over the last four centuries. No knowledge of Greek is required.

The course will study processes of democratic erosion and collapse in classical Athens and republican Rome. Assignments: in-class presentations and a long paper. 

Part III examines late antiquity, a period of paradox. The later Roman emperors established the most intensive, pervasive state structures of the ancient Mediterranean, yet yielded their northern and western territories to Goths, Huns, Vandals, and, ultimately, their Middle Eastern core to the Arab Muslims. Imperial Christianity united the populations of the Roman Mediterranean in the service of one God, but simultaneously divided them into competing sectarian factions. A novel culture of Christian asceticism coexisted with the consolidation of an aristocratic ruling class notable for its insatiable appetite for gold. The course will address these apparent contradictions while charting the profound transformations of the cultures, societies, economies, and political orders of the Mediterranean from the conversion of Constantine to the rise of Islam.

Augustus’ accession to power after decades of civil war was a moment of tremendous cultural and political change. Rome breathed a sigh of relief, but the price was virtual monarchy. We will examine contemporary painting, sculpture, and monuments, contemporary authors (Livy, Vergil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid), historical accounts (Velleius, Tacitus, Suetonius), Augustus’ own writings, the marriage legislation and legal reform to evaluate his claim to have restored politics and society. Topics include: empire and constitution; orientalism and gender norms; the power of the prince and that of writers.

This course will introduce undergraduates to the Greco-Roman sources of a key tension that has shaped contemporary humanities: the debate between philosophy and rhetoric, between ideals of truth and powers of persuasion. Beginning with an in-depth examination of Plato’s scathing attack on rhetoric in the Gorgias, a deeply ambiguous text in which Socrates’ championing of philosophy actually seems to fail, we will examine Plato’s rehabilitation of rhetoric in the Phaedrus as a means of leading souls towards truth, Cicero’s attempt to combine rhetoric and philosophy in Book III of his dialogue On the Orator, and Quintilian’s effort to inspire moral commitment in the readers of his rhetorical treatise On the Education of the Orator.  In the latter part of the course, we will encounter new voices entering the debate and adding their own unique concerns: Augustine’s conflicted feelings towards his rhetorical education in the Confessions, Isotta Nogarola’s spirited entrance into a tradition of rhetorical and philosophical debate defined and dominated by men, and Petrus Ramus’ attack on the unity of rhetoric and morality that dramatically altered the shape of humanistic studies.  We will conclude the course with Danielle Allen’s chapter “Rhetoric, a Good Thing” in Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education,  which engages in this debate via Aristotle and frames rhetoric as a useful tool for forging civic bonds in troubled political times.  

This course will introduce undergraduates to the Greco-Roman sources of a key tension that has shaped contemporary humanities: the debate between philosophy and rhetoric, between ideals of truth and powers of persuasion. Beginning with an in-depth examination of Plato’s scathing attack on rhetoric in the Gorgias, a deeply ambiguous text in which Socrates’ championing of philosophy actually seems to fail, we will examine Plato’s rehabilitation of rhetoric in the Phaedrus as a means of leading souls towards truth, Cicero’s attempt to combine rhetoric and philosophy in Book III of his dialogue On the Orator, and Quintilian’s effort to inspire moral commitment in the readers of his rhetorical treatise On the Education of the Orator.  In the latter part of the course, we will encounter new voices entering the debate and adding their own unique concerns: Augustine’s conflicted feelings towards his rhetorical education in the Confessions, Isotta Nogarola’s spirited entrance into a tradition of rhetorical and philosophical debate defined and dominated by men, and Petrus Ramus’ attack on the unity of rhetoric and morality that dramatically altered the shape of humanistic studies.  We will conclude the course with Danielle Allen’s chapter “Rhetoric, a Good Thing” in Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education,  which engages in this debate via Aristotle and frames rhetoric as a useful tool for forging civic bonds in troubled political times.  

The three texts are: Epicurus’ Letter to Menoeceus; Epictetus, Discourses; and Diogenes of Oenoanda, Inscription. What all have in common is an urgent desire to inspire the reader to do philosophy—not just any philosophy, but the sort that will make a person happy. The first text is designed to inspire young and old alike to learn the basic principles of Epicurean hedonism; it’s up to us—not the gods, or fate, or chance—to attain the goal of life, pleasure. The second is intended for young men, who have just finished their secondary education. They have been sent by their family to Epictetus’ school on the edge of the Adriatic Sea to be steeped in Stoic morality prior to starting a career. The third text is an inscription by Diogenes of Oenoanda, a prominent local citizen, who confesses he was moved by the dire suffering of his fellow humans to erect a very long wall, inscribed with Epicurean teachings. It is intended for any passerby. We will look closely at the Greek text to investigate both the medium and the message. Open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students.