Classics

This course examines the period from the fall of the empires of the Bronze Age Near East (ca. 1150 BCE) until the time when the city of Rome began to expand its power into the Mediterranean (ca. 31 BCE), as well as exploring the eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt, and the Near East. Students enrolled in this course undertake only the fall semester (semester 1) of the year-long course.

This course offers a study of the politics, society, and culture of the Roman Empire-- the first union of the European world under a single order, a single language, and a single law. 

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? Why did the Greeks and Romans worship many gods, believe in oracles, or perform animal sacrifice? This course is an introduction to the major myths and religions of the classical world using the full range of primary source material: literary, artistic and archaeological. The course CLU11200 is only available to full-year visiting students. 

This course examines how the tragic worldview is expressed in the great dramas of Greek antiquity, such as Aeschylus’ Prometheus, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and Antigone and Euripides’ Bacchae.  Attention is paid – through the study of the Old Testament book of Job and Marlowe’s Faust – to the continuing importance of the tragic worldview in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Finally, after exploring the political and philosophical conditions that caused the ever-decreasing importance of tragic modes of thought in modern times, the course turns to the remarkable new meaning the tragic legacy of the Greeks took on at the end of the nineteenth century. Through Friedrich Nietzsche’s mightily influential The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music and a series of important works it inspired, it will be shown how the tragic worldview of the Greeks inspired artists to reject the dogmatism of reason and to find beauty, happiness, and truth in the irrational, subconscious and at times dark recesses of the human soul.

This course examines the classical mythology of the ancient Greeks and Romans. It looks at the ways myths found their way into the art and literature of the ancient world and their intersections with other ancient oral genres such as legend and folktale, and with the mythological systems of nearby cultures such as the Persians and Egyptians.

The course is an introduction to the study of ancient historiography, itself a crucial element of the study of history, past and present. I.e. the course encourages students to analyse a good number of ancient historians and histories, especially the key figures and key texts in the development of the practice we call history, including Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Livy, Cassius Dio, Tacitus, Ammianus Marcellinus, and others. The selection of authors to be studied in any one year depends on the research expertise of staff teaching the course so as to allow maximum scope for cutting-edge teaching based on new research undertaken by staff at Edinburgh.