Ancient Studies

Greek art from Lysippus to the end of the 1st century B.C.E.  Development of the Hellenistic style, its regional variants, principal monuments, and major themes.

Italians, Etruscans, and the development of Roman art from the Republic to the Early Empire.

Roman art from Trajan to Constantine.

Required for the Ancient Studies major.  The topic changes from year to year, but is always broad enough to accommodate students in the languages, as well as those in the interdisciplinary major. Past topics include: love, dining, slavery, space, and power.

Ancient Romans sacrificed animals to their gods (in ways not for the faint of heart) and scrutinized chickens as they pecked at food in order to ascertain the gods' will (with occasionally hilarious results). This course will introduce students to the religious life of ancient Rome as it expanded from city-state to Mediterranean empire. In our study of the rich but complex source material -- literary, epigraphic, archaeological, and numismatic -- we will address questions of practice and belief (did the Romans really believe in a goddess of mowing?), method (how do we relate all the bits and scraps of evidence together?), and reception (how has the concept of 'Roman religion' been formulated and studied over the centuries?) Students will study the history of religious activity in the Roman Republic and Empire (6th c. BCE-5th c. CE).

Thanks to the pyramids of Giza, the treasure of Tutankhamun, and other remains of royal activity, pharaonic Egypt is justly famous for its monuments and material culture. Equally fascinating, if less well known, however, are the towns, fortresses, cultic centers, domestic spaces, and non-elite cemeteries that have been excavated over the past 200 years or so. The archaeology of Nubia is also little known but fascinating on many levels. This course will focus on what archaeology can reveal about life as it was experienced by individuals of all social classes. Through a combination of broad surveys and case studies of some of Egypt and Nubia’s most culturally indicative and intriguing sites, we will explore issues such as the origins of inequality, state formation and its effects, the uneasy mix of state-planned settlements and village life, urbanism, domestic and community worship, gendered spaces, ethnicity and colonialism, religious revolution and evolution, bureaucracy, private enterprise, and the effects of governmental collapse on life and death in ancient Egypt and Nubia.

Examines the role of women in ancient Greek and Latin literature; the portrayal of women in literature as opposed to their actual social status; male and female in ancient Mediterranean cosmologies; readings from ancient epics, lyric drama, history, historical documents, medical texts, oratory, and philosophy, as well as from contemporary sociological and anthropological works that help to analyze the origins of the Western attitude toward women.

Considers cinematic representations of the ancient Mediterranean world, from early silent films to movies from the present day. Explores films that purport to represent historical events (such as Gladiator) and cinematic versions of ancient texts (Pasolini's Medea). Readings include ancient literature and modern criticism.

The assigned readings provide an overview of the archaeological character of numerous periods and will serve as a basis for common discussion.  In addition, however, each participant will also track the archaeology of a particular region as it evolved over time.  By focusing attention on micro-regions (specific valleys, wadis, mountain ranges, desert edges, or coastal plains), we will attempt to get as variegated a picture as possible of life in the Southern Levant.  While the legacy of the Bible and fraught political relations in modern times will, of course, be discussed as relevant, they are not the focus of the course.  Rather, each region and each period will be approached with equal interest and on its own terms.  

In this class, we will read and analyze excerpts from one of the most overlooked bodies of ancient literature: texts written by Jewish authors in the Greek language.  This literature raises many questions, literary and historical.  Why did some Jews in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods choose to expres themselves in these ways, while others continued to use Hebrew and Aramaic?  For what audiences and purposes were these texts intended?  Readings include selections from the Septuagint, Philo of Alexandria, and Josephus.  The texts will be read in English stranslation, but classics majors and other Greek readers will be expected to read selections of the material in the original.

This course introduces students to the material and cultural circumstances of the creation, transmission, circulation and consumption of written literature in cultures around the world from antiquity to the twenty-first century.  Students will consider the following questions: What is a book? What role does it play in connecting cultures' pasts with their futures, and cultures with each other?  Is it possible to tell a global history of the book?  How does the material form of a book relate to its status as a "classic"?

Examination of the ways in which gender and sexuality are constructed in ancient Greek society and represented in literature and art, with attention to scientific theory, ritual practice, and philosophical speculation. Topics include conceptions of the body, erotic and homoerotic literature and practice, legal constraints, pornography, rape, and prostitution.

This class provides an introduction to philosophical texts and practices of Rome's classical era (1st century BC to 2nd century AD). Why study Roman philosophy? While Romans in the early and middle Republic seem to have been satisfied with the moral code inherited from their ancestors (known as the mos maiorum), from the time of Cicero until the high Empire, Roman intellectuals wrestled with the problem of combining these traditional values with the range of philosophical texts and practices they encountered in the contemporary Greek world. Even though few ancient Romans qualify as original philosophical thinkers, philosophy played an important role in Roman culture, and knowledge of philosophical discourses is thus indispensable to our understanding of Roman society, history, and literature. Furthermore, owing to the vagaries of textual transmission, the majority of our sources for Hellenistic philosophy (most notably, Epicureanism and Stoicism) happen to be Roman, with the result that this important chapter of the history of philosophy cannot be studied without detailed attention to the Roman material. And finally, philosophical texts account for some of the most important and attractive works of Latin—and indeed world—literature. Readings will be in English translation and include works by Lucretius, Cicero, Horace, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and others.

Human mobility in the Greek context covers a wide range of practices and historical experiences: labor immigration, diaspora, political exile, mandatory expulsions, repatriation and, more recently, migrations and diasporas from Eastern Europe and non-European countries to and via Greece. In this course, we will study various cases of population movements though the Greek national and other European borders. Our particular points of interest will include: a. the connection between human mobility and notions of Europeaness, b. the impact of human mobility on politics and culture and c. the impact of migrations and diasporas on the historical development of notions of self, nationhood, community and civil and human rights. Students will be invited to approach these issues through the exploration of specific case-studies, the study of bibliography and the use of a variety of primary sources (legal texts, autobiographical narratives, literature, films, artistic creation, performative arts etc.).

Hip-hop, a form of oral poetry and a performative practice, presents literary scholars and cultural critics with particular challenges, especially when emerging in a country like Greece, where poetry and performance have been the two major forms of artistic expression. The class will study the history of hip-hop globally, engage with the study of Modern Greek, primarily oral, rhymed, and folk, poetry--its themes, style and techniques. Students will think critically about the ramifications of hip-hop culture and the historical and political contexts in which hip-hop culture took, and continues to take, shape. Particular attention is paid to questions of race, gender, class, and globalization. The class will consider questions of orality, textuality and performativity: What is the relation of poetry and hip-hop? What traditions influence poetry and what hip-hop? Who writes poetry and who does hip-hop? Students will be asked to engage in creative projects such as, create a piece of Hip Hop art, write Hip Hop journalism, translate poetry from Greek to English, organize a poetry night or poetry slam contest, present a local performer in the form of an open interview in class.

This course introduces students to key aspects of Modern Greek culture as well as to faculty at Columbia working on Greece in different departments. Readings focus on moments when Greece's position at the crossroads between East and West become  comparatively relevant to particular disciplines. Students study works by poets, novelists, filmmakers, literary critics, historians, anthropologists and architects; Columbia faculty and invited guests then discuss their own scholarship in these fields. Texts are available in both English and Greek.  The course can be taken with a one-credit extra hour tutorial for advanced students reading materials in Greek.

Overview of Greek and Roman literature. Close analysis of selected texts from the major genres accompanied by lectures on literary history. Topics include the context out of which the genres arose, the suitability of various modern critical approaches to the ancient texts, the problem of translation, and the transmission of the classical authors and their influence on modern literature.

Topics chosen in consultation between members of the staff and students.

The study of the development of Greek prose style through practice in composition.

The purpose of this seminar is to examine and ultimately to challenge the fundamental premises underlying the way Herodotus has been read through much of the Twentieth Century. This course will analyse the ways in which Herodotus' ostensibly archaic history constitutes also a commentary on later times, as an account which performs a critique not only of the political situation of Herodotus' day, but also the philosophical and intellectual trends that are part and parcel of any historical phenomenon, and here in particular are included such trends as Protagorean relativism, Hippocratic medicine, and indeed historiography itself. Through close examination of key sections of the Histories, we will reevaluate the text of the Histories in its own time, considering questions of genre and focusing on the context in which it was performed, written and circulated, and its contribution to theoretical and practical political debates and discussions dominant in its time. At the same time we will engage critically with the scholarly approaches which have been dominant in reading and misreading this sophisticated author, and what they themselves reveal about Herodotus' modern readers.

According to Hegel, modern subjectivity begins when Martin Luther, standing before the Diet at Worms, discovers that he "can do no other" than follow the dictates of his conscience. Others, such as Charles Taylor, have located the discovery of an inner self much earlier, in Augustine's Confessions. Our seminar will be devoted to exploring the ways, and the forms, in which questions of selfhood and autonomy - of what a person really is, and over what s/he has (and does not have) control - actually came to the fore well before Augustine, in a variety of writings in Greek from a variety of genres, during the Roman Imperial Period. We aim to explore a wide range of texts with such interests in mind, to see both the points of overlap, and the differences, and to consider the ways in which the conceptions of autonomy and selfhood evident in these texts might relate to political, social, and cultural phenomena of the Greek-speaking world in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. Readings may include: selections from the New Testament; philosophical works by Epictetus, Plotinus, and Porphyry; excerpts from prose fiction by Chariton, Heliodorus, and Xenophon of Ephesus; selected works by Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, Philostratus, and Athenaeus.

This course is designed as an exposure to central approaches in modern literary theory that have been influential in scholarship on ancient Greek literature. It addresses a perceived need in the department as well as the field to foster continued engagement with questions of methodology that do not merely treat philological or historical techniques as neutral and transparent. The course will analyze dominant theoretical trends, explore their backgrounds, and consider why scholars of ancient Greek literature have treated certain theories as more productive than others. Where relevant, it will also consider the similarities and the differences between ancient and modern theories of literature. Each component will extend over three classes and address a modern approach in relation to an ancient text and include readings in theory as well as its scholarly applications. Topics include narratology and Homeric Epic, semiotics of theater and Greek tragedy, performance theory and Greek comedy, and post-structuralism and Plato.

In this seminar, we will study selected fragments of comedies by Aristophanes, Cratinus, Eupolis, and other comic dramatists active in Athens during the classical period, in conjunction with ancient testimonia, material evidence such as vase paintings and terracotta figurines, the extant works of Aristophanes and Menander, and modern analysis, interpretations, and reconstruction.  The order in which we will consider the primary material will be guided by consideration of both chronological and thematic relationships among the fragments and the surviving plays.

Since the content of the course changes from year to year, it may be taken in consecutive years.

Readings in Greek literature from Homer to the 4th century B.C.

This seminar aims to provide students in the post-baccalaureate certificate program with opportunities 1) to (re-)familiarize themselves with a selection of major texts from classical antiquity, which will be read in English, 2) to become acquainted with scholarship on these texts and with scholarly writing in general, 3) to write analytically about these texts and the interpretations posed about them in contemporary scholarship, and 4) to read in the original language selected passages of one of the texts in small tutorial groups, which will meet every week for an additional hour with members of the faculty.

Selections from Attic prose.

Detailed grammatical and literary study of several books of the Iliad and introduction to the techniques or oral poetry, to the Homeric hexameter, and to the historical background of Homer.

This course is limited to students in the Postbaccalaureate program. The intensive reading of a series of Greek texts, both prose and verse, with special emphasis on detailed stylistic and grammatical analysis of the language.

An intensive review of Greek syntax with translation of English sentences and paragraphs into Attic Greek.

This course explores issues of memory and trauma, public history and testimony, colonialism and biopolitics, neoliberalism and governmentality, and crisis and kinship, all through the medium of Greek film. It brings the Greek cinema canon (Angelopoulos, Gavras, Cacoyiannis, Koundouros, et al.) into conversation with the work of contemporary artists, documentary filmmakers, and the recent “weird wave” and asks: what kind of lens does film offer onto the study of a society’s history and contemporary predicament? The viewing and discussion of films is facilitated through a consideration of a wide range of materials, including novels, criticism, archival footage, and interviews with directors. The course does not assume any background knowledge and all films will have English subtitles. An additional 1-credit bilingual option (meeting once per week at a time TBD) is offered for students who wish to read, view, and discuss materials in Greek.

This is the first semester of a year-long course designed for students wishing to learn Greek as it is written and spoken in Greece today. As well as learning the skills necessary to read texts of moderate difficulty and converse on a wide range of topics, students explore Modern Greece's cultural landscape from "parea" to poetry to politics. Special attention will be paid to Greek New York. How do "our", "American", "Greek-American" definitions of language and culture differ from "their", "Greek" ones?

This course explores the history and culture of modern Greece through film. It brings the Greek cinema canon (Angelopoulos, Ferris, Gavras, Cacoyiannis, Koundouros, et al.) into conversation with the work of contemporary artists, documentary filmmakers, and the recent “weird wave.” In doing so, the course addresses issues of memory and trauma, public history and testimony, colonialism and biopolitics, neoliberalism and governmentality, and crisis and kinship, and it asks: what kind of lens does film offer onto the study of a society’s history and contemporary predicament? The viewing and discussion of films is facilitated through a consideration of a wide range of materials, including novels, criticism, archival footage, and interviews with directors. The course does not assume any background knowledge and all films will have English subtitles. An additional 1-credit bilingual option (meeting once per week at a time TBD) is offered for students who wish to read, view, and discuss materials in Greek.

For students in GRKM V1201, but also open to students not enrolled in GRKM V1201, who wish to improve their spoken Modern Greek. For more information, contact Dr. Maria Hadjipolycarpou at mh3505@columbia.edu

For students in GRKM V1201, but also open to students not enrolled in GRKM V1201, who wish to improve their spoken Modern Greek. For more information, contact Dr. Maria Hadjipolycarpou at mh3505@columbia.edu

For students in GRKM V2102, but also open to students not enrolled in GRKM V2102, who wish to improve their spoken Modern Greek. For more information, contact Dr. Maria Hadjipolycarpou at mh3505@columbia.edu

By examining Cavafy's work in all its permutations (as criticism, translation, adaptation), this course introduces students to a wide range of critical approaches used in World Literature, Gender Studies, and Translation Studies.  The Cavafy case becomes an experimental ground for different kinds of comparative literature methods, those that engage social-historical issues such as sexuality, diaspora, postcoloniality as well as linguistic issues such as multilingualism, media and translation. How does this poet "at a slight angle to the universe" challenge contemporary theories of gender and literature as national institution? How can studying a canonical author open up our theories and practices of translation? Among the materials considered are translations by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, James Merrill, and Marguerite Yourcenar, commentary by E.M. Forster, C.M. Bowra, and Roman Jakobson, poems by W.H. Auden, Lawrence Durrell, and Joseph Brodsky, and visual art by David Hockney and Duane Michals. Though this course presupposes no knowledge of Greek, students wanting to read Cavafy in the original are encouraged to take the 1-credit directed reading tutorial offered simultaneously.

Does future have a history? What is the future’s impact on the past? Can we reconstruct the history of the future in the past? In other words, can we historicize the ways in which people think, feel and mediate their visions of the future? In this course, we will address these questions through the study of a selection of visions of the future that were developed throughout the twentieth century. Our exploration of the future will include utopian texts and frameworks, but also more popular visions of “a different world”. Ranging from literature, to film, architectural design and cultural criticism we will study the politics of the notion of the futurity through an analysis of textual and visual elaborations that crosscut the boundaries between intellectual production and popular culture.

This course will survey the history of Latin manuscript books and Latin scripts from late Antiquity to the early years of printing (4th -15th century). Students will study the questions that have driven the field of paleography since its inception, and the canonical history of the main scripts used in Western Europe through the end of the Middle Ages. We will consider the manuscript book as a physical artifact, in a codicological approach; and we will look at the production of books in their social and political settings. Students will develop practical skills in reading and transcription, and will begin to recognize the features that allow localization and dating of manuscripts. We will use original materials from the Rare Book and Manuscript Library whenever possible.

This course will consider ancient Roman Literature, from the Republican period to late antiquity, as an evidentiary base for the study of the ancient book.  This course is intended to expose students to the main body of evidence for the object and uses of the Roman book, which is crucial to any understanding of ancient literature qua literature.  Students will become familiar with a wide body of evidence, and encounter a diverse range of texts.  Students will also become conversant in important and current scholarly and methodological debates about the materiality of literature, and the nature of the book and literacy in antiquity, and the place of material studies in Classics.  Students will undertake an independent research paper which they will present to the classmates at the end of the semester.

The Epics of the Silver Period of Latin with an emphasis on close-reading.

A close analysis of Cicer's Brutus in its many contexts: as a responce to Caesar's dictatorship; as an account of oratory and rhetorical practices in Rome; as the first extant attempt to write an intellectual history of Rome, defining and defending Cicer both against the past and against the present.

The conflict of religions in the late fourth and early fifth centuries in its political and social context. Artistic and literary manifestations and documentary evidence.

Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE) was, without question, the most prolific as well as one of the most original Roman scholars: the author of some 75 scholarly works, 150 satires, poems, and dialogues of popular philosophy.  Of this vast output, what survives is one complete work, his treatise on agriculture (De re rustica) in three books, written near the end of his life, and a substantial portion (books 5-10) of his 25-book treatise on the Latin language.  In addition, there are several thousand fragments of his other works, including significant numbers from his Antiquities (the founding work of antiquarian research), his Disciplines (particularly On Philosophy), and his Menippean Satires.  There has been no attempt at a complete edition of the fragments since the sixteenth century. The goal of this course is to introduce graduate students to Varro, whose writings, though fragmentary, played a crucial role in later approaches to the early history of Rome, Roman literature, and the Latin language as well as providing an important foil to Augustine's Christian refutation of Roman ideals in City of God.  We intend to view him both within the history of the literary and scholarly genres he engaged with (and to some extent created) and in the context of his interaction with his intellectual contemporaries, in particular Cicero and Caesar.

Latin literature from the beginning to early Augustan times.

Latin literature from Augustus to 600 C.E.

This course is intended to complement Latin V3012: Augustan Poetry in providing students I a transition between the elementary, grammatical study of Latin texts to a more fluent understanding of complex literary style.  Latin V3013 will largely concentrate on different styles of writing, particularly narrative, invective, and argument.  Text will be drawn primarily from Cicero’s orations, with some readings form his rhetorical works.

This seminar aims to provide students in the post-baccalaureate certificate program with opportunities 1) to (re-)familiarize themselves with a selection of major texts from classical antiquity, which will be read in English, 2) to become acquainted with scholarship on these texts and with scholarly writing in general, 3) to write analytically about these texts and the interpretations posed about them in contemporary scholarship, and 4) to read in the original language selected passages of one of the texts in small tutorial groups, which will meet every week for an additional hour with members of the faculty.

Selections from Catullus and from Cicero or Caesar.

Selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses and from Sallust, Livy, Seneca, or Pliny.

This course is limited to students in the Postbaccalaureate program. The intensive reading of a series of Latin texts, both prose and verse, with special emphasis on detailed stylistic and grammatical analysis of the language.

This seminar aims to provide students in the post-baccalaureate certificate program with opportunities 1) to (re-)familiarize themselves with a selection of major texts from classical antiquity, which will be read in English, 2) to become acquainted with scholarship on these texts and with scholarly writing in general, 3) to write analytically about these texts and the interpretations posed about them in contemporary scholarship, and 4) to read in the original language selected passages of one of the texts in small tutorial groups, which will meet every week for an additional hour with members of the faculty.

Intensive review of Latin syntax with translation of English sentences and paragraphs into Latin.

The goal of this course is to improve students' knowledge of Latin style through reading of selected texts and exercises in imitation of the style of the various authors. The course assumes a very good reading knowledge of Latin.

A survey of early medieval biblical hermeneutics from the patristic age to Bede. The course will include both the theory of biblical interpretation (and especially its relation to classical grammar and rhetoric and to the debate about translation), as well as its literary practice. Readings from the works of Augustine, Jerome, Bede, Avitus, Proba, and others.