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.

Students are introduced to the political, social, and economic history of ancient Greece during the the "Classical" period, c. 480-323 BC. This era spans from the Greco-Persian Wars to the death of Alexander the Great. This course explores sources and methods that modern historians use to study ancient Greek culture, including literary texts that are read in translation and artefacts from the ancient world.

This course explores the development of ancient science and technology and its interrelation with Greco-Roman societies and the environment. The course encompasses the ancient Mediterranean area and the Near and Middle East and range from the Bronze age to the early Middle Ages, with a focus on the Roman period. It takes a wide view of technology, ranging from primitive tools and agriculture to automata (robots), aquaducts, and catapults. The course uses texts and archaeological evidence, and incorporates field and museum learning experiences as well as explaining the latest scientific advances.

This course introduces students, especially those beginning the study of ancient history, to the politics, society, and economy of the Greek world and its relations with neighboring peoples in the archaic period (800-478 BC). The principal themes of the course are the emergence and character of the leading Greek city-states and their geographical spread throughout the Mediterranean world; the rise of powerful non-Greek neighbors, especially Persia, during the sixth century; and the interaction between them, culminating in the Persian Wars. Particular attention is paid to the nature of our evidence for the period: students study the first work of western historiography, THE HISTORIES of Herodotus; and the potential and problems of using other sorts of archaeological, documentary, and literary evidence to write the history of this period.

This course offers a study of the origins of theater in Greece as well as its literary aspects-- tragedy, comedy, and satirical drama-- from the archaic and classical periods. It explores the cultural, social, and religious functions of theater in Greece as well as the role of classical literature in the birth and configuration of European vernacular literature.