Classics

This course introduces students into the riches of the Latin literary tradition. It is designed in such a way as to cater primarily for the immediate needs of students coming up to university without any background knowledge of ancient literature and aims to offer a chronologically laid out, broad survey of periods, genres and best known authors of Roman literature and thought.

The Greek myths of gods, heroes, and heroines have played a crucial role in the history of Western art, literature, and music. This course examines Greek myths as found in Greek literary sources and provides students with an introduction to the study of Greek mythology in its literary, social, historical, and philosophical context.

Every object has stories –shaped by human uses– to tell. This course explores how visual and material culture offers a distinctive window for understanding the past by choosing specific artefacts from the ancient Mediterranean, reconstructing their "biographies" and using them as a prism for thinking about wider social issues. Using both iconic and lesser-known objects, the course focuses on themes such as image and text; religion, power and ideology; warfare; funerary rituals; daily life and its fictions; and gender and sexuality.

This course offers an introductory survey of the development and major artistic achievements of Roman art and architecture from the early Republic to the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian in the early 2nd century AD. The course places art and architecture in its social, political, and cultural context. It explores themes such as the representation of the human form, the use of narrative and mythology in art, urbanization, and the development of architectural forms such as temples, commemorative monuments, and buildings for spectacle and leisure with attention to some of the iconic buildings and sites of the ancient world, such as the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and Pompeii.