DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS

The cities buried by Mt. Vesuvius hold an undying place in the modern imagination. Tourists marvel at the size of the sites and empathize with the plight of the towns’ inhabitants. However, Campania’s destroyed cities have much more to offer than the familiar story of the 79 AD earthquake. Rather than present a static picture of Campania’s towns as “frozen in time,” this course takes a diachronic approach to the rich archaeological material. Campania was not originally Roman territory and was conquered by force of arms. Pompeii, often presented as an archetypal Roman town, was not Roman at all for most of its existence. Still, at the time of the eruption Campania’s cities were thoroughly Romanized; they are now famous for the evidence they provide for Roman daily life. This course will survey key aspects of the evidence, which will include a discussion of current archaeological techniques and fieldwork. The course will also discuss the 18th- and 19th-century uncovering of Campania’s cities, which is a story in its own right.

During its long history, Byzantium interacted with different foreign civilizations which created their own images of it. Needless to say, those images differ among themselves to the same extent as those civilizations differ from each other. Not that these images are completely unrelated to the ‘reality’, but they reflect it fancifully, which lends an opportunity to think about mechanisms of image-creation.

In this course we will study, in chronological order, what was written about Byzantium from the 5th until the 15th century, by Germanic kings and Armenian scholars; by Arabic enemies and Bulgarian disciples; by Georgian monks and Scandinavian mercenaries; Rus’ pilgrims and Italian merchants; Roman popes and Spanish diplomats; Jewish travelers and Catholic Crusaders; French novelists and Muscovite princes.

In the mid-15th century, the millennium-old Byzantine empire finally collapsed. Its image, however, not only survived but acquired new facets, disentangled from mundane credibility. It was used or rather misused and abused by the European enlighteners, philosophers, politicians, but most actively by the Russian authorities, from the eighteenth-century Empress Catherine the Great to today’s President Vladimir Putin. We will look how Byzantium was depicted in literature, from Russia’s greatest poet Alexander Pushkin to contemporary Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco. We will analyze literary, political and mass media texts as well as movies (for instance, the Turkish 2012 film, Fetih) and architecture, including American ones: St. Louis Cathedral in St. Louis, Lakewood Memorial Church in Minneapolis, National Shrine of Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C., etc. Finally, we will deal with the most recent events: the Turkish President Recep Erdogan’s decision to reconvert Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Istanbul from a museum to a mosque—and the Moscow ideologues’ reconceptualization of the annexed Crimea.

This course, the final of the second-year Greek series, is designed to build fluency in reading Greek as students transition from the study of Greek grammar to Greek literature. This course will look closely at selections of the Iliad, but our goal will be to develop enough proficiency that students will be capable of reading Homeric epic on their own. The aim of this course is for students to reach the level of understanding of Greek and familiarize themselves with resources so that they can, in the future, read Greek literature independently.

The third quarter of second-year Latin combines literary analysis with mastery of grammar and syntax at the intermediate level. This is mainly a workshop course, with discussion focusing on questions to and from members of the course. Though translation will be a component in evaluation (through homework), it will be a relatively small criterion of success. The main topics of discussion will be how meaning and emphasis are communicated in the poetry of Catullus.Though Latin 201-3 concentrates on language skills, it also develops skills of analysis that are foundational for the future study of literature in any language.

A grade of C- or better in this course satisfies the WCAS language requirement.

Students will learn how to a) approach ancient texts in the original language; b) analyze Latin grammar and syntax; c) use a variety of tools (dictionaries, grammars) while reading Latin;

and d) evaluate our source materials and different linguistic interpretations of Latin texts and their composition.

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 “excremental” 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 portraying the ideal ruler for the recently acclaimed young emperor. While conducting a literary and historical analysis of these texts, students will address questions of genre, political ideology, and intellectual dissent. They will also work collaboratively to produce a translation suitable for a staged reading of the Apocolocyntosis, a text that continues to captivate scholars and students alike as the funniest and perhaps most baffling product of the Neronian age.