This course will serve as an Introduction to the history of Ancient Greece from the age of Homer (c. 7^th century BCE) to the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE). We will focus primarily on literary sources, with emphasis on the social, political, and intellectual concerns that arose throughout the periods in question, but in particular in democratic Athens in the fifth century BCE. 

This course is the first in an accelerated 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 to a wide range of genres from the classical and post-classical periods, including ancient Greek history, poetry, philosophy, drama, and more.

This course will serve as an introduction to the language, style, and scholarly issues concerning the material conventionally called Greek “lyric” poetry. We will principally read material from the archaic and early classical periods. We will consider a range of important scholarly topics and focus particularly on the issue of lyric author vs. persona and the relationship between lyric and other genres of performance poetry, especially epic. Since the readings for this class will showcase a number of Greek dialects, this course will also serve as an introduction to Greek dialectology. 

In this course we will be reading Latin inscriptions, with a special emphasis on the epigraphic record of Roman Campania. The focus will not only be on texts but also on context. Some epigraphic texts were private, like words written on domestic implements, roof tiles and lead pipes. However, most were public, especially the lengthier and more complex ones. Stone inscriptions were physical objects meant to be seen, and in interpreting such texts the question of audience is critical: who might have seen them, read them and understood them? A subcategory of inscription that will also receive attention is documents on wax tablets, a type of writing of which the Vesuvian cities have produced a relative abundance. For the most part, these texts are legal contracts and receipts for sales, providing rare evidence for Roman socioeconomic life. Although they present some of the same challenges as inscriptions on stone, they require a different contextual approach.