CLA 101-8 First-Year Writing Seminar: Endless Exile: Home and Homelessness in the Ancient Mediterranean World
The topic of exile—the forced abandonment of the place and world one calls home—captured the imagination of peoples across the ancient Mediterranean. The Greek Odyssey and Roman Aeneid, famous accounts of the predicaments of classical exile, were by no means isolated instances. These renowned poems were in conversation with narratives that circulated widely among neighboring Egyptian, Hebrew, Babylonian, Phoenician, and other ancient communities, in stories which not only produced echoes among themselves, but very likely borrowed from each other. In this seminar, we will read and discuss representative accounts of exile from the ancient Mediterranean world, highlighting their historical and geographical specificity but also reflecting on their treatment of common concerns and themes—such as homelessness and hospitality, longing and belonging, identity and otherness, hosts and guests, refugees and havens, pain and nostalgia, presence and absence, etc. While the seminar will highlight the historical and archaeological coordinates of those narratives, we will also reflect upon their relevance in discussing the very current reality of exilic life in today’s world.
As a first-year seminar, this course is meant to hone your abilities in the practice of academic writing. The activities for the seminar address this goal by implementing peer-review processes and exploring different writing techniques and sequences.
CLA 211 Greek History and Culture: From Homer to Alexander the Great
This course will serve as an introduction to the history, culture, and peoples of the Ancient Greek world between the age of Homer (c. 7th century BCE) and the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE). Our emphasis will be on social, political, artistic, and intellectual developments across the period. We will pay special attention to the unique nature of ancient Athenian democracy as well as the politics and culture of other city-states, including Sparta. Our primary sources will be literary, but we will also for unique insights into ancient people's lives, ideas, and values.
CLA 250 / CLS 201 Literatures of the Ancient World: Love Scripts: from Sappho to Taylor Swift
Romantic love, although a personal and intimate experience, unfolds amid social norms that guide or regulate many of its aspects, from the identification of a desirable partner to expectations about the outcome of the relationship. The “scripts” to be studied in this course refer both to the material traces of love songs transmitted from antiquity to the present on papyri, calf skin, or medieval manuscripts, and to the social protocols implied in and through those texts. As we read poems originating from ancient Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome—including homoerotic poems sung at drinking parties and sophisticated love elegies addressed to mysterious and probably fictional addressees—we will draw on the resources of literary analysis to explore the narratives and poetic images through which love has been reimagined over time; we will historicize social constructions of the interplay of love, sex, and reproduction; and we will analyze the rhetorical construction of erotic bodies and partners’ roles.
This course provides an overview of the multicultural and transhistorical phenomenon of ancient Greek mythology. We will pay close attention to the literary and narrative aspects of the mythological corpus (stories, characters, themes, perspectives, etc.) while interrogating their various material and historical implications. Along these lines, we will consider myths as indicative of Mediterranean intercultural transactions; as ornamental and symbolic presences in everyday artifacts and urban monuments; as symptomatic of or allusive to major military tensions among kingdoms, leagues, and city-states; as religious, ritualistic, and philosophical meditations; as performative tools for dramatic and oratory practices; and as mechanisms to negotiate questions of identity in the messy geopolitical scenario of ancient Greece from the late Bronze Age through the Classical period. By using those premises to explore the heterogenous array of textual and non-textual sources that have served to preserve and transmit the tales, we will foreground the importance of integrating archeological findings, historiographic methods, and socio-political and cultural analyses in the discussion of ancient Greek mythology.
CLA 314 Topics in Ancient Science and Technology: Ancient Medicine
We will study the theory and practice of Greek and Roman medicine, looking at ancient texts in translation, ancient artifacts and materials, and some modern scholarship. As a term project, students will learn to think like ancient physicians, diagnosing and prescribing treatments for patients from the Hippocratic case studies. During class discussion, we will engage critically with primary sources and examine the differences between ancient and modern science from a balanced historical perspective. We will also investigate the social, cultural, and economic forces that have affected the development of western medicine throughout its history.
It is perhaps unsurprising that our time - obsessed as it is with GDP growth, the ups and downs of the stock market, inflation rates, the trade deficit - produces scholarship that studies the ancient Roman economy. This scholarship has made us increasingly aware of how different Rome was from the modern world. This course will focus on what that difference means for the realities of everyday life, both past and present. Questions to be addressed are: What did economic growth mean for the economy of the Romans? Can we even measure it? What role did energy consumption play in economic performance? What was the role of social class in business? What was the influence of a demographic regime with low life expectancy? How was trade conducted over long distances without fast means of communication and transportation? What was the role of technology and technological progress in the economy?
CLA 340 Greek and Roman Drama: Athenian Tragedy, Then and Now
The scripts and fragments from plays produced in fifth-century BCE Athens in honor of Dionysos, god of wine and theater, are among the most enduring and powerful legacies of ancient Greek culture. Since their rediscovery in the early modern period, directors, translators, and adapters have repeatedly turned to the poetry of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to reflect on political, ethical, social, and theological issues of their time. Most recently, the plays have proved fertile ground for directors eager to imagine alternative ways of thinking about race, gender, and class. We will read a selection of Athenian tragedies, with special emphasis on their form, ancient performance context, and themes, as well as select examples of contemporary adaptations. All readings will be in translation, and students will be encouraged to work in groups to perform and develop creative responses to individual scenes.
CLA 395 Research Seminar: Classics Research Methodology
The course will provide students with fundamental research skills through hands-on learning and in-class work on an individual project. Students will learn how to use reference tools and online databases allowing them to search, analyze and interpret ancient evidence ranging from literary texts to inscriptions, papyri and visual material. The course is designed to reflect current developments in the field of Classics. It therefore emphasizes digital approaches, including electronic tools for the study of ancient evidence as well as search engines that employ advanced computational methods.
GREEK 115-1 Accelerated Elementary Ancient and Biblical Greek
This course is the first in a two-quarter series designed to teach students to read ancient Greek, making accessible much of the world's most influential literature, from the biblical New Testament to Homeric poetry and Platonic philosophy. Since this is an ancient language there will be no spoken component and we will move swiftly through the grammar and basic vocabulary required to read actual texts. These two quarters will, in fact, teach all the fundamentals of the language and lead students directly into second-year courses in the New Testament, classical Greek oratory, and Homeric epic. Thereafter students will be able to progress even further to a wide range of genres from the classical and post-classical periods, including ancient Greek history, poetry, philosophy, drama, and more.
GREEK 201-2 Introduction to Greek Literature: Classical Prose
This course is the second of the second-year Greek series, designed to solidify the grammatical concepts learned in first-year while introducing students to the study of actual ancient literary texts. In this course we will focus on ancient Attic prose by reading from Lysias on the Murder of Eratosthenes and Plato's Crito. We will pay close attention to grammar and style, but we will also gain insight into the complexities of ancient Athenian law and politics.
Elementary Latin is a year-long course designed to provide students with the basic skills for reading, understanding, and translating both Latin prose and poetry.In the second quarter of the sequence students continue to acquire knowledge of the grammar and syntax of the Latin language and Latin vocabulary, and to develop an ability to read, understand, and translate passages in both adapted and unadapted Latin.
In addition to the exercises and readings included in the textbooks, students will see and read Latin as it appeared on ancient monuments, walls, coins, and everyday objects. By uniting the study of language and culture, this course provides unique insight into the daily life of the people who spoke Latin in the Roman world.
LATIN 201-2-2 Introduction to Latin Literature: Vergil's Aeneid
Latin 201-2 is designed to improve students’ understanding of the Latin language by close reading of major poetic texts, with special attention to grammar, vocabulary, and style. Class activities will include careful reading and translation of Virgil's Aeneid combined with literary discussion and interpretation of the poem and its composition. The course also provides a systematic introduction to the dactylic hexameter and the basic rules of scansion.
LATIN 201-2-2 Introduction to Latin Literature: Vergil's Aeneid
Latin 201-2 is designed to improve students’ understanding of the Latin language by close reading of major poetic texts, with special attention to grammar, vocabulary, and style. Class activities will include careful reading and translation of Virgil's Aeneid combined with literary discussion and interpretation of the poem and its composition. The course also provides a systematic introduction to the dactylic hexameter and the basic rules of scansion.
LATIN 310 Readings in Latin Literature: The Pumpkinification of the Emperor Claudius
On October 13, 54 CE, the Roman emperor Claudius died, allegedly poisoned by his wife Agrippina. His death was kept silent until she had made arrangements for her son Nero to succeed to Claudius. He was buried with regal pomp and accorded divine honors. What happened next "in heaven" is narrated in the only surviving example of prose-and-verse satire from the Roman world.
This course focuses on the relationship between literature and power in the age of the emperor Nero. The primary materials will consist of a close reading of the "Apocolocyntosis", a satirical pamphlet attributed to Lucius Annaeus Seneca lampooning the death and deification of the emperor Claudius, along with selected passages from Seneca’s "De Clementia", a treatise written by Nero’s tutor and advisor with the stated aim of depicting the ideal ruler for the recently acclaimed young emperor. While conducting a literary and historical analysis of these texts, we will address questions of genre, political ideology, and dissent. Students enrolled in the class will work collaboratively to produce a translation suitable for a staged reading of the "Apocolocyntosis", the most mordant political satire on a Roman Emperor that has come down to us from the Early Empire and one of the funniest and most baffling products of the Neronian age.
