Past Courses

Spring 2008 Graduate Courses

Latin 450:  ADVANCED READINGS
Dr. Chiara Sulprizio

CLAS 499: LAW AND SOCIETY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS      [NEW COURSE!]
Prof. Susan Lape

This course examines the interface between law and society in democratic Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.  The primary focus throughout will be on investigating law as a source for social and cultural history.  Topics to be covered include: murder, justified homicide, slavery, the legal regulation of sexual conduct (prostitution, adultery, seduction, rape), inheritance fraud and bastardy, and citizenship and naturalization.  To investigate these questions, we will be reading a variety of tragedies, comedies, forensic texts, and select secondary sources.

CORE 499:  PERFORMING WISDOM                                        [NEW COURSE!]
Dr. James Collins, Dept. of Classics 

Fundamental to Greek and Roman philosophy is the concept of the ‘art of living’ which maintains that living a good life is at heart a public performance, and thus entails particular modes of action, engagement, and self-presentation and stylization.  Both philosophical theory and practice, both thoughts and deeds—what one believes and how one lives as a result of holding those beliefs—are inextricably bound, and together contribute to the philosophical art of constructing, performing, and becoming the right sort of character.  In addition to reading philosophy with an eye to how the ancients variously embodied and performed their wisdom, we will explore techniques drawn from contemporary performance theory in highly performative, experimental, and collaborative learning environments in order to develop an appreciation for this particular sort of philosophical activity.  We aim primarily at developing this craft for our own efforts at self-examination and presentation.  No previous dramatic or formal philosophical experience is required; only a willingness to try new things on your feet while cultivating both a supportive environment and oneself. 

CLAS 575: CITYSCAPES AND LATE ANTIQUITY
Prof. A. M. Yasin

This course investigates the uses, appearance and impact of urban architecture in the Roman Empire over the course of the second to seventh centuries CE.  It explores the relationship between transformations in the built environment and the social, economic, religious and political structures of the period.  The course strives, in other words, to produce a greater understanding of the ways in which buildings and cities were produced by as well as worked to shape social relationships, both real and desired, between individuals, groups and generations.  It draws on material evidence of cities and social theories of urban space to consider such topics as public monuments and commemoration, spectacle and procession, and political display and conflict.  Our approach to material evidence will consider not only the architectural form of buildings but also their presentation of monumental writing and imagery.  The two imperial capitals, Rome and Constantinople, will serve as foundation points of historical and historiographical significance, but critical emphasis will also be placed on the wide range of evidence from provincial cities of the Greek East and Latin West.

Spring 2007 Graduate Courses

Graduate CoursesLTN 450: Readings in Latin Literature: The Early Empire (Boyle)
The course focuses on the close reading and analysis of selected imperial Latin texts, with attention to the particularities and semiotics of their language and structures and to their dynamic interaction with their contemporary cultural and material context and the evolving Latin literary system.

CLAS 490: Old Persian Culture and Language (Van Bladel)
This course is an introduction to the culture and language of the Achaemenid dynasty, who conquered Western Asia and ruled, from Greece and Egypt to India, from the mid-6th century BCE until the Macedonian invasion under Alexander in the 330s BCE.

CLAS 565: Sacred Space and Religious Architecture in Late Antiquity (Yasin)
Early Christian writers frequently denied the possibility of containing God within physical temple structures. By contrast, the construction of monumental churches, relic veneration and pilgrimage journeys, all of which begin in earnest only in the fourth century, appear to be manifestations of a radically new (and some would say pagan-influenced) notion of sacred space. By looking at evidence from a range of Roman and late antique religious traditions, this course investigates the cultural contexts for these apparently novel early Christian developments. Drawing especially on methodological approaches from anthropology, social geography and ritual studies, we will analyze problems of identifying and interpreting material evidence related to a wide range of late antique cult activity and cult places: How do we identify sacred places and cult objects? How do the architectural spaces of cult activity—the built environment and its decoration—condition the ancient visitor's response to or relationship with the divine, and with other members of the community? Informed by a range of inter-disciplinary approaches to sacred space and ritual, the seminar focuses primarily on the analysis of the physical evidence of sacred space: cult buildings, and the material and visual culture associated with them. To that end, our weekly meetings will feature a series of case studies designed to situate late antique monuments within a broader analysis of ancient and late ancient cultural, religious and architectural production.

Fall 2006 Graduate Courses

CLAS 485: Comparative Historical Grammar of Greek and Latin (Van Bladel)
An introduction to the inner workings and prehistory of ancient Greek and Latin and other related languages, a course in Indo-European linguistics with emphasis on practical applications for readers of classical Greek and Latin.

CLAS 555: Ethnicity, Culture, & Authority in the Post-Classical Greek World (Richter)
This seminar investigates how birth (Greek: genos; Latin: natio, gens) functions as a criterion of identity among the ethnically, religiously, linguistically and culturally diverse intelligentsia of the Hellenistic and Roman Empires. Recent studies of identity in the ancient Mediterranean have persuasively argued that discursive constructions of ethnicity, loosely analogous to modern notions of race, were ideologically prior to all other criteria of belonging in the archaic and classical periods. We will ask to what extent classical notions of ethnicity lost much of their persuasive power in the post-classical world bequeathed by Alexander. We will examine how ethnically diverse intellectuals (Syrians, Libyans, Romans, Spaniards, Gauls, etc.) explicitly debunk the importance of ethnicity in their (Greek and Latin) writing. We will also consider the highly self-conscious ways in which these same authors elaborate other modes of defining identity in terms of religion, language and, ultimately, culture. More generally, this seminar will examine notions of authority in early imperial literature (almost exclusively Greek). We will be thinking about where participants in the agonistic intellectual culture of the early Empire located the sources of authority: e.g. language, ethnicity, class, gender, etc. In addition to close readings of a range of texts, we will try to understand how these texts functioned in the world(s) in which they were produced.

CLAS 560: Seminar in Republican Latin (Moatti)
The debate on the nature of Politics in Republican Rome has been one of the most important and controversial during these thirty last years, especially in Anglo-saxon and German historiography. Was Rome a democracy or an oligarchy? Who really ruled? What was the definition of the elite? What were the relations between plebs and nobiles? The aim of the course is to analyze the ancient practice of politics in the late Republic and its analysis by the recent historiography, and then, in a second part, to read Cicero’s de republica and de legibus in relation to his time.

GRK 450: Readings in Ancient Greek Literature (Prince)
This course aims to improve agility in reading Ancient Greek and appreciating the nuances of style; it also aims to prepare you for your translation exams. Within these parameters, I am offering a course in Ancient Literary Criticism, looking at Plato and Aristotle’s writings on poets and poetics. While the primary goal is to read these texts in ancient Greek, I invite you to join me in thinking about the types of questions ancient critics asked of literary texts, and how they answered them. We will read Plato’s Ion and selections from Republic 2, 3, and 10; these texts are now handily gathered in Penelope Murray’s Plato on Poetry volume. We will then turn to Aristotle, whose Poetics remains a cornerstone of Western literary criticism; we will read the extant first book of the Poetics, and, at the end of term, consider Janko’s reconstruction of Poetics II based on the Tractatus Coislinianus.