Many of the world’s great ancient civilizations flourished on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea: the Egyptians, the Minoans and Mycenaeans, the Greeks and Romans, just to name a few. In this course, we will focus on the ways that archaeologists recover and interpret the material traces of the past, working alongside natural scientists, historians and art historians, epigraphers and philologists, and many others.  Archaeological sites and themes from over 2000 years of Mediterranean history will be presented.  Guest lectures by experts and meetings at the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology will enhance the intellectual experience. This course is a non-technical introduction that assumes no prior knowledge of archaeology.

Although many of us feel that we can recognize tragic stories, films, and eve
individuals, we would probably be hard-pressed to come up with a definition o
tragedy itself. In this course, we will be exploring the definitions and use
of Greco-Roman tragedy within western literary and intellectual history. In
particular, we will focus on the subject of the individual in tragedy:
representations of the rational and irrational mind and the relationship
between violence and the tragic body. We will see how the ancient texts
formulate these notions and examine the place of tragedy in later theories of
the self and civilization. In addition to a number of "classic" tragedies by
authors such as Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca, we will be reading works by
later (philosopher-) thinkers such as Aristotle, E. R. Dodds, Antonin
Artaud, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Constitutionmaking reemerged as an urgent issue in the Twentieth Century with the transformation of colonial empires after World War II and the collapse of the Soviet empire near the end of the century.  Constitutionmaking issues have made themselves felt also in the constitutionally more mature nations.  Even in the British Isles, for example, nationalist movements have prompted new constitutional arrangements.  And in the Twenty-First Century, as competition for control of Central Asia and the Middle East has reintensified, the written constitution has been hailed by some as the vehicle for changing long established cultures.  The most striking feature of constitutionmaking in the last two centuries may be its uneven success when it comes to reforming if not improving customs, character, habits, and actions.  Is an explanation to be found by going back to what appear to be the roots of constitutionmaking?

This course builds on contemporary scholarship to reconstruct what we may call the constitutiomaking tradition as it develops in the main ancient texts, which are read in English translations.  The ancient texts are taken from Herodotus, the Pseudo-Xenophon, Diodorus Siculus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, the author of the Aristotelian Athenian Constitution, Aristotle himself, Polybius, Cicero, Plutarch, Augustine, and the codifiers of Roman law.  The course traces this tradition through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the classically trained thinkers of the Seventeenth Century, following linguistic and other clues that carry one up to Madison and put the work of the U.S. Constitutional Convention in a somewhat new light; and it continues through Nineteenth Century and Twentieth Century constitutionmaking into today’s constitutionmaking efforts in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe itself. 

The Greeks are often extolled for making great advancements in  rational thinking.  Their contributions to philosophy, architecture,  medicine, and other fields argue that they surely did advance  rational thought.  However, this view gives us an incomplete  picture.  Many Greeks, including well-educated, prominent Greeks,  also found use for casting spells, fashioning voodoo dolls, toting  magical amulets, ingesting magic potions, and protecting their cities  from evil with apotropaic statues.  In this course you will learn how  to make people fall in love with you, bring harm to your enemies,  lock up success in business, win fame and respect of your peers, and  also some more general things about Greek and Roman society and  religion -- you will also learn what "apotropaic" means.

Love might seem like a universal human experience, as well as a deeply personal one. But our understanding and even our experience of desire is shaped by cultural tradition. This course will introduce you to some central texts in the western tradition of love poetry, by writers such as Sappho, Catullus, Ovid, Petrarch and Shakespeare. We will talk about whether ancient Greek and Roman literature about desire is different from later love poetry, and discuss the ways later writers have adopted, adapted and transformed their classical models. All readings will be in English. The course is open to anyone with an interest in poetry; no previous experience in classical studies is required.

Intensive Latin reading course for students in the Postbac program. This semester the emphasis will be on eloquentia from a variety of perspectives. Readings will include Cicero’s De imperio Cn. Pompei (all) and De oratore (selections), Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (selections), Tacitus’ Dialogus (all), and Apuleius’ Florida (selections).

Grave Circles A and B at Mycenae, with their new funerary architecture and their rich offerings to the deceased, offer scholars one of the most dramatic pieces of evidence for the rise of the Mycenaean culture. The information they preserve continues to be the focus of a considerable amount of scholarship, and many aspects of their interpretation are controversial and hotly debated. Their importance cannot be overestimated, and all studies of the rise of the high cultures of the Late Bronze Age Aegean must consider them carefully. This seminar will include lectures and discussions as well as student presentations by the members of the class. Many student presentations will be oriented toward specific problems, with students presenting alternate interpretations by different scholars, setting the stage for class discussions. Grades are based on student presentations, class participation, and a research paper.

This semester we shall read Demosthenes' On the Crown. This speech, one of the masterpieces of Greek oratory, was delivered in 330 BC towards the end of Demosthenes' career. It has long been used as a valuable source of information on social, religious and political history, but it is also a pleasure to read for its clarity and vigour.

The teachers, rhetoricians, and philosophers of 5th-century Athens known collectively as the Sophists were controversial in their own time, and they have occupied a controversial place in intellectual and cultural history ever since.  Plato polemicized against them, Aristophanes satirized them, Aristotle refuted them, and generations of rhetorical theorists in Greek and Latin attempted to differentiate their art from the supposedly debased model of sophistic rhetoric. All this despite the fact that in their day many of them could be considered foundational thinkers in areas we would call anthropology, linguistics, psychology and cultural studies. Sophistic thought found its way indirectly but powerfully into the Middle Ages, where it represented both a despised falsification of philosophical argument and a dangerously attractive logic of paradoxes and insolubilia.  Culturally the (spectral) figure of the Sophist served as image of both the familiar and the outsider, linked intimately with academic identity but also with the falsifier and heretic.  As in Antiquity, so in later periods the Sophist came to embody anxieties about persuasive discourse and negation.  But in the thought of Hegel and then Nietzsche, the Sophists were recovered and “rehabilitated” as a crucial moment in the history of philosophy, and among modern intellectual historians (Untersteiner, Jaeger, de Romilly) as well as philosophers (Heidegger, Derrida) their contributions have been reevaluated.

In this course, taught jointly by medievalist Rita Copeland and classicist Ralph Rosen, we study the Sophists in classical antiquity and in and their post-classical reception.  We will begin by getting as close as possible to them through the fragmentary records that remain of their own ideas and arguments, and then we will look at how they were represented philosophically by Plato and Aristotle as well as culturally by Aristophanes.  We will study their afterlife in Late Antiquity and especially the Middle Ages, in both Latin and vernacular contexts, with special attention to the seductions of “sophistic” as a form of logic and to the ways that the Sophist defined heresy debates in England.  We will consider the central role that they came to play in Hegel’s understanding of the history of philosophy and in Nietzsche’s antifoundationalist thought.  Throughout the semester we will also be considering twentieth-century philosophical and historical reassessments of their importance.

The readings for the course will all be available in English for students who do not read Greek or Latin.

The translation and interpretation of Latin poetry.

Survey of Latin prose from the archaic period to Augustine.  Consideration will be given to cultural context, genre, and style.