Classics

What is myth? How do myths deal with fundamental human concerns about who we are and the world we live in? What is the relationship between myth and religion? This course is an introduction to the major myths of the classical world using the full range of primary source material: literary, artistic, and archaeological. This course is offered in semester 1, and the course GREEK AND ROMAN RELIGION taught in semester 2 builds on it. Both can also be taken as a year-long course. 

This course introduces students to the Greek and Latin literary tradition. It is for students without any background knowledge of ancient literature and offers a chronologically laid out, broad survey of periods, genres, and best known authors of Greek and Roman literature. Although the broad conceptual categories of “socio-cultural context” and generic expectations define the overall intellectual tone of this course, judiciously chosen extracts from the texts themselves (all in English translation) are strategically woven into lectures. Major thematic stops of this course include early Greek epic and lyric poetry; fifth-century Athenian drama; classical historiography; fourth century oratory; Plato and Aristotle; Hellenistic poetry; imperial Greek literature; the literature of early and late Republican Rome; highlights from Augustan literature; Stoicism and Epicureanism in Roman literature and thought; early imperial literature and historiography; the Roman satirical tradition; and the literature of the Late Empire.

This course is an exploration of the history of Greek and Roman ideas, which formed the modern world. In the first half of the sessions focuses on Greek ideas like democracy, philosophy, hospitality, fair play, athletics, drama, eros and love and how these ideas have been generated through specific Greek cultural systems or artistic modes of representation (literature, painting, sculpture, theatre). How were these ideas born and what is their influence in the modern world? How does Greek literature relate to these ideas? And more generally, what is the relationship between these ideas and the Greek life and thought? In the second half of the sessions, students examine Roman ideas, and the course focuses on ideas like fame, liberty, virtue, justice, epicureanism, stoicism, citizenship, republicanism, imperialism, public order, and how they have been generated through specific Roman cultural systems or artistic modes of representation (literature, painting, sculpture, theatre). The sessions then examine the relevance of these ideas to modern politics and society.