Courses

Entertaining, horrifying, thought-provoking – Greek myths have exercised a powerful fascination continuously from the ancient world to our own times. Recent years have seen a proliferation of modern re-tellings and adaptations of these stories: novels, television series, film, music, theater, video games, and more. This class will focus on a selection of these modern works along with some of the ancient material they are based on. We will explore what functions myth may have fulfilled for people in ancient Greek culture, as well as what meanings they can hold for us.

The course will allow us to explore different facets of Athens, the most famous city of Greece, during the Classical Era (5th century BCE), the time of Socrates and of the Parthenon: from tragedy to philosophy, from art to history, we will pretend to be a citizen living in Athens and see how it differs from our own modern experience.

This course provides a long-term view of the history, landscape, and material culture of Greece, from prehistory to the present day. While the monuments of ancient Greece are cultural touchstones, Greece has a remarkably diverse past, occupying a borderland between continents, empires, and cultures, both ancient and modern. Classroom study and on-site learning examine the wide range of sources that inform us about the Greek past (texts, archaeology, the environment), and focus especially on the stories told by places and things. Site visits in Athens and on trips throughout Greece highlight the importance of local and regional contexts in the “big histories” of the eastern Mediterranean.

Alexander the Great united the Greek states by force before waging a ten-year campaign that brought Greek influence all the way to India. In the aftermath of Alexander’s death, his generals divided the world into kingdoms that presided over an extraordinary flourishing of arts and science over the next 300 years. However, this period also saw these kingdoms continuously strive for domination over one another until they were in turn dominated by Rome. This class will explore one of the most exciting periods in ancient history, a time of great cultural achievements, larger than life characters, and devastating conflicts.

We need food to live, but food also plays a crucial cultural, social, and economic role in our lives. As such, the study of food and foodways offers a cornucopia of approaches and insights into the lives of ancient peoples. This seminar will explore what, why, and how food was consumed, produced, traded, and thought about in the ancient Mediterranean world. We will study archaeological and literary sources of ancient evidence alongside modern scholarship and theoretical frameworks. Topics in the second half of the course will be driven by student interests as they develop their own research and present it at the department Symposium.

Philoctetes is the Greek hero you would not expect to meet, but the one we deserve in the present times. Betrayed by his comrades and abandoned in all solitude on a deserted island, will he be able to return to his life and regain his heroic fame? Let's find it out together, while reading one of the most underrated plays of Greek theater (but no less interesting), the Philoctetes by Sophocles.

Homer is perhaps the foundational poet of the western canon, and his work has been justly admired since its emergence out of the oral tradition of bardic recitation in the eighth century BCE. This course will sample key events and passages from the Odyssey, exploring the fascinating linguistic and metrical features of the epic dialect, as well as the major thematic elements of this timeless story of homecoming.

What are the “rules” of friendship? Would you do anything for a friend? Anything? The ancient Romans were no strangers to the often paradoxical demands of friendship and love. The goal for Intermediate Latin Prose and Poetry is to gain experience in the three major modes of Latin expression most often encountered “in the wild”—prose, poetry, and inscriptions—while exploring the notion of friendship. By combining all three modes into this one course, we hope both to create a suitable closure to the language sequence and to provide a reasonable foundation for further exploration of Roman literature and culture.

The Roman Republic is in a deep crisis and there seems to be no coming back from it. Is there any recipe for salvation? Sallust tackles the challenge and offers his own interpretation on how to navigate these chaotic and tormented times. Will his advice be valuable even in the present time? We will find out together.

Two superlative Latin poets; two radically different epic poems. In this course we will read selections from the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses, focusing in particular on each poet's depiction of powerful emotions and their consequences. 

Poetry has always offered people a way to express their feelings and connect to their emotions, especially those related to love. From the thrill of new romance to the pain of heartbreak, poets find a haven in their art to declare their conflicting feelings and explore the ecstasy of mutual love or the torture of unrequited love. In this course, we will focus on Roman love/elegiac poetry (poems by Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid) in their original language and cultural context, while exploring themes and tropes that define the genre and still inspire modern love poetry and songs.