Ancient Studies

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. Program of readings in some aspect of ancient studies, supervised by an appropriate faculty member chosen from the departments offering courses in the program in Ancient Studies. Evaluation by a series of essays, one long paper, or oral or written examination(s).

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. Program of readings in some aspect of ancient studies, supervised by an appropriate faculty member chosen from the departments offering courses in the program in Ancient Studies. Evaluation by a series of essays, one long paper, or oral or written examination(s).

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. Program of readings in some aspect of ancient studies, supervised by an appropriate faculty member chosen from the departments offering courses in the program in Ancient Studies. Evaluation by a series of essays, one long paper, or oral or written examination(s).

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. Program of readings in some aspect of ancient studies, supervised by an appropriate faculty member chosen from the departments offering courses in the program in Ancient Studies. Evaluation by a series of essays, one long paper, or oral or written examination(s).

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. Program of readings in some aspect of ancient studies, supervised by an appropriate faculty member chosen from the departments offering courses in the program in Ancient Studies. Evaluation by a series of essays, one long paper, or oral or written examination(s).

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. Program of readings in some aspect of ancient studies, supervised by an appropriate faculty member chosen from the departments offering courses in the program in Ancient Studies. Evaluation by a series of essays, one long paper, or oral or written examination(s).

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. Program of readings in some aspect of ancient studies, supervised by an appropriate faculty member chosen from the departments offering courses in the program in Ancient Studies. Evaluation by a series of essays, one long paper, or oral or written examination(s).

The stories of the Greek and Roman gods and heroes are at the root of countless works of art, philosophy, literature, and film, from antiquity to the present. Many familiar phrases from the English language also derive from myth: an Achilles heel (and Achilles tendon!), a Trojan horse, Pandora’s box, and so forth. This course will introduce you to the broad range of tales that make up the complex and interconnected network of Greek and Roman mythology.

This class tracks Egypt’s entanglement in the Greco-Roman world from the country’s initial welcoming of Greek merchants and mercenaries to the point at which Justinian shuttered its last remaining temple. In examining archaeological, textual, and artistic evidence, we’ll pay close attention to the flashpoints that divided society along ethnic lines (viz. Egyptian, Nubian, Levantine, Greek, and Roman inhabitants) and according to religious belief (among polytheists of Egyptian and Greek heritage, Jewish Egyptians, and Christians) as well as to syncretism, mixed marriages, and other integrative aspects of society.

The reign of the first Roman emperor, Augustus (27bce-14ce), has been seen as a Roman revolution, both political and cultural. Rome had for centuries been governed as a Republic, but a series of increasingly divisive civil wars allowed Augustus to create a new political system in which he exercised sole rule as the ‘first citizen’ within a ‘Restored Republic’. Augustus’ reign lasted more than 40 years, and established a model of autocratic rule that would last for four centuries. During this time there were profound changes in the political, social, and cultural structures of Rome. In this course, you will examine the nature of these changes, Augustus’ political strategies, military activities, and religious initiatives through his own writing, the accounts of (often hostile) historians and a range of literary and archaeological sources, including Roman poetry. Ultimately, we will address the question: how did Augustus achieve the seemingly paradoxical feat of becoming a monarch within a republican system?

This course aims to identify, analyze, and discuss ancient Greek and Roman medical theories, observations, methodologies for diagnosis and treatment, and the philosophical and professional disputes that arose around them. This course is arranged thematically and focuses on common methodologies, such as reasoning from first causes, in contrast to epistemic observation and experience. Other broad themes include the relationship between medicine and natural history, and the connection between medical treatments and the rise of herbals as ostensibly reliable sources of information. By focusing on such general themes and methodologies, and by reading the original Greek and Latin texts in translation, this course will aim to provide an answer to the following questions: in what exactly did ancient Greek and Roman medicine consist and how did the field’s practitioners and theorists perform medical work, in their own words? There are no prerequisites for this course, nor does it require knowledge of Greek or Latin. It is equally suited to premed students, individuals with an interest in medical humanities, and Classics students.

In this seminar we seek, quite literally, to map out the influence of environment on culture and history in the ancient Mediterranean. Students will learn to create custom maps in QGIS (a free and open-source cross-platform geographic information system application) that will engage with themes discussed in seminar. Areas of interest include the various ways in which different types of human societies (e.g., pastoralists, autonomous villages, cities, colonists, kingdoms, empires, and insurrectionists) have sought to exploit specific environmental niches for their own purposes. So, too, we’ll be attuned to the ways in which the natural world remained ungovernable and exerted its own agency via storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, diseases, droughts, floods, and fires. Some familiarity with either the premodern Mediterranean world or QGIS is recommended but not required.

In this course, we will explore the material and visual culture of the Mediterranean lands and beyond, that is Greece, Italy, Spain, North Africa, Asia Minor, Ancient Near East etc. Of course, facing the immensity of the topic and the bibliography we will be necessarily selective and experimental. We will alternate between reading ancient classical sources, secondary treatments, theoretical and conceptual readings, excavation reports, archaeological guides, and actual artifacts and images. The goal is to familiarize Classics students with trends in the study of material culture and to apply interdisciplinarity in research. We will aim to hold every other session in a museum in the New York region (Metropolitan Museum, Brooklyn museum, etc). The selection of artifacts below is chose to complement and complicate the readings, but other choices are perfectly possible according to student interests and the evolution of our discussions.

Homosexuality, as a term, might be a relatively recent invention in Western culture (1891) but bodies that acted and appeared queer(ly) existed long before that. This course will focus on acts, and not identities, in tracing the evolution of writing the queer body from antiquity until today. In doing so it will explore a number of multimodal materials – texts, vases, sculptures, paintings, photographs, movies etc. – in an effort to understand the evolution of the ways in which language (written, spoken or visual) registers these bodies in literature and culture. When we bring the dimension of the body into the way we view the past, we find that new questions and new ways of approaching old questions emerge. What did the ancient actually write about the male/female/trans* (homo)sexual body? Did they actually create gender non-binary statues? Can we find biographies of the lives of saints in drag in Byzantium? How did the Victorians change the way in which we read Antiquity? How is the queer body registered in Contemporary Literature and Culture? Can one write the history of homosexuality as a history of bodies? How are queer bodies constructed and erased by scholars? How can we disturb national archives by globalizing the queer canon of bodies through translation? These are some of the questions that we will examine during the semester.

The course surveys texts from Homer, Sappho, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, Theocritus, Ovid, Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symonds, Dinos Christianopoulos, Audre Lorde, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner etc., the work of artists such as Yiannis Tsarouchis, Robert Mapplethorpe, Dimitris Papaioannou, Cassils, movies such as 120 battements par minute, and popular TV shows such as Pose.

For students who have never studied Greek. An intensive study of grammar with reading and writing of simple Attic prose.

For students who have never studied Greek. An intensive study of grammar with reading and writing of simple Attic prose.

Prerequisites: GREK UN1101- GREK UN1102 or the equivalent. Selections from Attic prose.

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.

Prerequisites: junior standing. Required for all majors in classics and classical studies. 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, power.

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of reading in Greek literature, to be tested by a series of short papers, one long paper, or an oral or written examination.

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of reading in Greek literature, to be tested by a series of short papers, one long paper, or an oral or written examination.

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of reading in Greek literature, to be tested by a series of short papers, one long paper, or an oral or written examination.

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of reading in Greek literature, to be tested by a series of short papers, one long paper, or an oral or written examination.

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of reading in Greek literature, to be tested by a series of short papers, one long paper, or an oral or written examination.

Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. A program of reading in Greek literature, to be tested by a series of short papers, one long paper, or an oral or written examination.

Prerequisites: at least two terms of Greek at the 3000-level or higher. Greek literature of the 4th century B.C. and of the Hellenistic and Imperial Ages.

Prerequisites: at least four terms of Greek, or the equivalent. An intensive review of Greek syntax with translation of English sentences and paragraphs into Attic Greek.

By volume of surviving writing and importance especially as a historical source Josephus (37-c.100 CE) must count as a major Greek writer, yet his works have little or no place in classics curricula. This is to be sure to some extent the fate of Imperial Greek writers more generally, but Josephus has largely been excluded from the mainstream of Imperial Greek, too. This is not simply a matter of prejudice: the exclusion itself requires careful scholarly scrutiny. Meanwhile, though, Josephus’s writing is inevitable. Without him, we would know very little about the Hellenistic and early Roman Levant; centrally important topics in early Imperial history, such as ‘client kingship’, would be massively impoverished; we would lack our most detailed and accurate source for the assassination of Gaius and the accession of Claudius (Antiquities book 19); we would know of no provincial rebellion from the inside; Jewish history would be a blank and with it an opportunity to understand the costs of Roman rule for a population less privileged than the Greeks would be lost.

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 Greeces 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?

Prerequisites: LATN UN1101. A continuation of LATN UN1101, including a review of grammar and syntax for students whose study of Latin has been interrupted.

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Prerequisites: LATN UN1101-UN1102, or LATN UN1121, or the equivalent. Selections from Catullus and from Cicero or Caesar.

Prerequisites: LATN UN1101-UN1102, or LATN UN1121, or the equivalent. Selections from Catullus and from Cicero or Caesar.

This course condenses the second semester of Intermediate Latin (2102) into a sixweek summer session. Its goal is to further develop reading and interpretation skills in Classical Latin through engagement with Roman authors while continuing to review the essentials of Latin grammar. In the first half of the course, we cover selections from Ovid’s epic poem, the Metamorphoses; in the second, we take up the prose writings of Seneca the Younger including selections from his Epistulae Morales and the philosophical dialogue De vita beata.

Prerequisites: LATN UN2101 or the equivalent. Selections from Ovids Metamorphoses and from Sallust, Livy, Seneca, or Pliny.

Prerequisites: LATN UN2102 or the equivalent. Selections from Vergil and Horace. Combines literary analysis with work in grammar and metrics.

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.

Prerequisites: junior standing. Required for all majors in Classics and Classical Studies. 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, power.

Prerequisites: LATN V3012 or the equivalent. Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit.

Prerequisites: at least two terms of Latin at the 3000-level or higher. Latin literature from the beginning to early Augustan times.

Neo-Latin is in many ways a loose category of description that is problematic because the term scarcely captures anything like the full diversity of the modes, styles, and functions of the writings that it encompasses: it broadly denotes original works written in the Latin language from the dawn of the Renaissance down to approximately 1900. Specialists in Neo-Latin have of course long shed important light on many texts that have received renewed scrutiny, and even been ‘rediscovered,’ through this important area of research. In recent times classicists, too, have increasingly focused on the transformations of Greco-Roman literary, philosophical, and socio-political culture in many later historical epochs, literatures, and cultural settings across the globe; prominent among these areas of Reception Study is that devoted to Neo-Latin. Columbia University has long had a committed scholarly interest in Neo-Latin, especially of the Renaissance period, in which scholars such as Paul Oskar Kristeller and Eugene Rice commanded great international renown. The Columbia University Seminar in the Renaissance that was founded in 1945 by Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Herman Randall remains a thriving institution to this day.