Spring

Late antiquity witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of peoples in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Vandals, Arabs, Goths, Huns, Franks, and Iranians, among numerous others, took shape as political communities within the Roman and Iranian empires or along their peripheries. Recent scholarship has undone the traditional image of these groups as previously undocumented communities of "barbarians" entering history. Ethnic communities emerge from the literature as political constructions dependent on the very malleability of identities, on specific acts of textual and artistic production, on particular religious traditions, and, not least, on the imperial or postimperial regimes sustaining their claims to sovereignty. The colloquium will debate the origin, nature, and roles of ethno-political identities and communities comparatively across West Asia, from the Western Mediterranean to the Eurasian steppes, on the basis of recent contributions. As a historiographical colloquium, the course will address the contemporary cultural and political concerns—especially nationalism—that have often shaped historical accounts of ethnogenesis in the period as well as bio-historical approaches—such as genetic history—that sometimes sit uneasily with the recent advances of historians.  PQ: Open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

This course examines one of the most captivating bodies of portrait art in the Western tradition. Captivating because they are at once disquietingly familiar and strange: familiar in their realism and psychological presence, yet foreign in their temporal remoteness. For well over a century, the study of Roman portraiture, an essentially German subfield of classical archaeology, has largely confined itself to forensic problems of dating and identification. More recent work has focused on social and political topics ranging from site-specific issues of context and display, patronage and power, gender, and the ideological stakes of recarving and reuse. Additionally, we will consider the historiographical and media-archaeological contexts that have profoundly shaped and framed our understanding of these objects, both in antiquity and modernity: e.g., the production (and reproduction) of wax and plaster death masks in Roman funerary custom; ancient theories in the domain of optics that were used to explain the phenomenon of portraits whose eyes appear to follow a beholder in space; how the stylistic category of “veristic” portraiture in the Roman Republic has its origins not in antiquity (despite the Latin etymology), but rather in the painting and photography of the Neue Sachlichkeit in Weimar Germany; and how the contemporary use of digital craniofacial anthropometry to study the recarving and reuse of Roman portraits relates to Sir Francis Galton’s criminological apparatus for creating composite photographic images using portraits from ancient coins as early as 1885.

Many think of Anatolia, modern Turkey, as lying at the crossroads of civilizations, the meeting-place of East and West. The metaphor holds because it is partially true: Anatolian locales and individuals appear in both Greek and Near Eastern sources, almost as soon as written traditions themselves exist; likewise, the archaeological evidence from Anatolia increasingly suggests a web of long-distance connections extending east and west from time immemorial. But this language of betweenness serves another purpose: from the ‘topless towers’ of Troy to the golden halls of King Midas, the archaeological sites of modern Turkey play a starring role in Greco-Roman foundation myths, making them—or the narratives we have built up around them, the parts of them we choose to claim—essential to constructions of ‘western’ identity.

Taking our cue from a close reading of Said’s Orientalism, in this course we will bring a critical eye to the prevailing narratives of Anatolian history, disentangling textual and archaeological evidence and their corresponding interpretive frameworks at four key sites: Troy, Gordion, Sardis, and Karatepe in Cilicia. More than just text vs. archaeology, this is a course that gets at the heart of the historical method—the confusing, contradictory, often messy process of interpreting what remains to us of the past as it has built up over time. Through presentations, research assignments, and exercises with primary evidence, students will build skills in creative problem-solving and critical thinking. In addition, students will gain basic familiarity with ArcGIS, culminating in a summative, team-built StoryMap that will place the building blocks of Anatolian history in clear spatial and chronological context.

While the words “devil,” “demon,” and “Satan” usually conjure the image of a horned and hoofed archfiend, this has not always been the case. Students in this course will discover both the origins of and complications to dominant popular images of “the Devil” by engaging ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean texts, including Mesopotamian literature, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and other early Christian and Jewish texts. We will discuss Satan’s origins as the biblical god Yahweh’s henchman, Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman conceptions of subordinate divine entities, Hellenistic and Roman-period tendencies towards cosmic dualism, and much more. Students will also have the opportunity to explore pop culture and political discourse to examine how Biblical and other ancient demons productively recur in such contexts. A guiding question will be why the category of “demon” has proven so productive and necessary to diverse religious worldviews and what the common features and actions of these figures reveal about persistent human anxieties.

The Romans did not invent political strife, far from it, but they named the concept. Civil war (bellum civile) is technically formal war among citizens. Since antiquity, the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE, which brought the Roman Republic to the point of collapse, have been paradigmatic not only for the modern conceptualization of political discord, but for its narration. As Marx said of various stages of the French Revolution, it was fought in Roman garb, first of the Roman Republic, then of the Roman Empire. Despite the formal definition, ancient and modern tales of civil war typically turn on discord within the family, among the sexes, and in the cosmic order. Civil war comes to stand for pervasive social collapse. Beginning with Thucydides’ famous description of stasis on Corcyra, readings will encompass selections from Roman history (Caesar, Sallust, Velleius Paterculus, Tacitus), biography (Plutarch, Suetonius), Latin poetry (Horace, Propertius, Vergil, Seneca, Lucan), modern novels on civil war with Roman resonances (Victor Hugo, Michel Houellebecq), and articles on civil war from political science and conceptual history. Central questions will be repetition in history, whether civil war can ever come to an end, and whether its ghastly horror is constitutive of the political order and, if so, of what kind.

This course is a practical introduction to the styles of classical Latin prose. After a brief and systematic review of Latin syntax, we combine regular exercises in composition with readings from a variety of prose stylists. Our goal is to increase the students' awareness of the classical artists' skill and also their own command of Latin idiom and sentence structure. M. Lowrie. Spring.

We shall read extensively in Latin from the Satires of Juvenal.  We shall focus on language, poetic technique, and understanding the text (also with the help of early Latin-language commentaries).  M. Allen. Spring.

We will read in Greek substantial parts of three of Aristophanes‘ plays and two of Menander’s. We will discuss and analyze various aspects of the evolution of Greek comedy, textual tradition, the language of comedy and its political background. Coursework will include translation as well as secondary readings. S. Torallas Tovar. Spring

I shall discuss Leo Strauss’s “Notes on Lucretius” (1968) and Lucretius’ De rerum natura with a special focus on the relation of philosophy and poetry. H. Meier. Spring.

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.  D. Martinez. Spring.