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).

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).

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.

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.

This course explore the Hellenistic world (not to be confused with the “Hellenic world”)— the spaces and communities in the Mediterranean, Africa and Western Asia, in the centuries following the destruction of the Achaimenid empire. The themes studied include the formation of large tributary empires, and their strategies for implementing control; local political agency; cultural interaction, within frameworks of imperial power, between Greek and non-Greek; social relations; economic history; and more. This world seems created by a historical accident, but might equally be described as the result of deep structural features (the convergence of polis institutions, the rise of a connected economy, the spread of Greek cultural forms). The interpretation of this extraordinary period has been influenced by a number of factors, some intrinsic to the field (the availability of rich documentary evidence), some extrinsic (the rise and fall of European colonialism); it also has been characterised by paradigm shifts (from decline to vitality to diversities). This course will offer the occasion to test paradigms of “globalization” across many ancient contexts. It will do so by close reading of courses, broader surveys, and constant engagement with historical problems. Its main focus will be on the third and early second centuries BCE (“high Hellenistic period”), with some attention paid to the following century. The historian Polybios (ca. 200 BCE-after 118 BCE) will serve as a guide for both periods, especially his narrative of the year 217 BCE which culminates in the narrative of the battle of Raphia (as well as the arrival of the Roman Republic on the political scene of the Eastern Mediterranean).

The course aims to achieve the following goals. First, to impart familiarity with events in a crucial period of ancient history. Second,  to impart with the physical, historical, and human geographies of the area covered by the “Hellenistic world”— in the longue durée. This means spaces and regions from Spain to Central Asia: ancient Afro-Eurasia.Thirdly, to learn how to read fragmentary or indirect sources, often documentary, and in conjunction with material and visual evidence. Fourthly, to read historical studies by modern scholars, evaluate academic argument (notably in the deployment of evidence but also of theoretical models), and to produce historical argument in exams and paper. Fifthly, to evaluate the history of the Hellenistic age from a number of angles: power and politics; pre-modern economic history; forms of “globalization” and “glocalization”; contacts between cultures under conditions shaped by political power and material forces.

Discussion Sections for CLCV UN3069

Discussion Sections for CLCV UN3069

Discussion Sections for CLCV UN3069

This course looks at the long history of the “Egyptian” cults (cults of Isis, Osiris, Anubis, Sarapis, and Harpocrates) mainly outside of Egypt and in periods much later than the Pharaonic heyday of Ancient Egypt, that is, the Hellenistic and the Roman empire. By looking at and closely reading primary documents in translation, visual evidence, and archaeological remains, we aim to explore critical issues in the study of ancient polytheism, such as sacred space, the role of priests, religious sociology problems, forms of religious, ritual dynamics, construction of emotions religious and the sense of self and community. An issue of particular interest is the relationship between religious ethos and economic life and the relationship with various forms of power. Questions of gender will be central to the problematique. In addition to the seminar, there will be frequent visits to the Met, individually or as a group.

Proseminar is designed to offer beginning MA and PhD students an overview of (i) the major sub-disciplinary areas that are gathered under the umbrella term ‘classics’, making it a fundamentally interdisciplinary field of enquiry, and (ii) the diverse methodologies that are standardly applied in many subfields of classical research and publication.

Proseminar is designed to offer beginning MA and PhD students an overview of (i) the major sub-disciplinary areas that are gathered under the umbrella term ‘classics’, making it a fundamentally interdisciplinary field of enquiry, and (ii) the diverse methodologies that are standardly applied in many subfields of classical research and publication.

This course examines various literary, artistic, and cultural traditions that respond to some of the most recognizable Greek motifs in myth, theater, and politics, with the aim of understanding both what these motifs might be offering specifically to these traditions in particular social-historical contexts and, at the same time, what these traditions in turn bring to our conventional understanding of these motifs, how they reconceptualize them and how they alter them. The overall impetus is framed by a prismatic inquiry of how conditions of modernity, postcoloniality, and globality fashion themselves in engagement with certain persistent imaginaries of antiquity.

Moving between different languages and alphabets is a constitutive aspect of the diasporic experience. To remember or forget the mother tongue, to mix up two or more languages, to transcribe one writing system onto another are all modes of negotiating geographical displacement. This course introduces students to literature about and by Greeks of the diaspora in Europe, the Balkans and America over the past two centuries exploring questions of migration, translation and gender with particular attention to the look and sound of different alphabets and foreign accents – “It’s all Greek to me!” Authors include Benjamin, Broumas, Chaplin, Chow, Conan Doyle, Kafka, Kazan, Morrison, Papadiamantis, Queen, Valtinos and Venuti. 

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Topics chosen in consultation between members of the staff and students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Topics chosen in consultation between members of the staff and students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Topics chosen in consultation between members of the staff and students.

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

Prerequisites: GREK UN1101- GREK UN1102 or GREK UN1121 or the equivalent. 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.

The New Testament introduces us to a register, or rather registers, of Greek radically unlike those of the high canon of classical texts. In broad terms, all the texts in the collection possess features that link them to the documentary Greek used in early imperial papyri and inscriptions, for example, the obsolescence of the optative, the infrequency of certain particles, and the relative simplicity of the syntax. But there is remarkable variety within these broad constraints: Matthew straightforwardly imitates the language of the Greek Old Testament, Markan prose is pared down to the point of being gnomic, Luke/Acts has some generic markers of historiography without any meaningful indication that the classical historians served the author as a model, and the lively paraenetic/argumentative/hysterical style of the authentic Pauline Epistles resists facile classification. The existence of such texts reminds us of the need to break out of the Atticistic canon if we want to get a full picture of Imperial Greek. We need to determine who in socio-economic terms the writers and readers of such texts may have been and whether there may not have been many more like them. In this way we can complicate the facile view that draws an excessively close connection between the eastern Empire, Greekness and the Greek city, and the Second Sophistic. Not all Greek writing was a vehicle for the dissemination of an exclusivistic Greekness.  It will also not be ignored that these texts are important not only for literary scholars and Roman social historians, but also for historians of Christianity and Judaism, for reasons too obvious to require explication. But no texts analyze themselves: students will be introduced to the central problems raised by the texts and the main methodological and theoretical approaches used to solve them.

Prerequisites: GREK UN2101 - GREK UN2102 or the equivalent. Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit.

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.

This course provides a survey of Greek literature.  It aims to improve students’ reading skills, familiarize them with some of the most canonical works of Greek literature, afford them a sense of Greek literary history, and introduce them to modern methodological approaches.  Readings are drawn from the Classics Ph.D. reading list.

This seminar sets Homer's Iliad and Sappho's lyric poems in relation to each other around topics involving time – including narrative time, beginnings and endings, timeliness, and temporality, as well as rhythm and tempo, syncopation, bodily timing and performance, and chronotopic dynamics. It proposes to think as well about textual time, meaning both how different genres orchestrate time and tempo but also how these authors are treated in ancient and modern reception. We will read theoretical studies of time and temporality, the event, and periodicity, as well as those more focused on genre and occasional performance. Discussions will center around close attendance on specific images and dynamics in the ancient texts, as well as the ways in which theoretical frames may illuminate these. Thus, for instance, seminars juxtapose the epic punctuation of bodies in space with Sappho's female lovers on the move, with scholarly readings deployed to critique the epic-lyric divide around these dynamics. A central and recurrent figure in this scheme is Helen, who is presented in Homeric epic as the central catalyst for the violent unfolding of events (i.e., the Trojan War) and who functions in lyric poetry as a cathexis for the violent consequences of desire.

Prerequisites: GRKM UN1101 or the equivalent. Continuation of GRKM UN1101. Introduction to modern Greek language and culture. Emphasis on speaking, writing, basic grammar, syntax, and cross-cultural analysis.

Prerequisites: GRKM UN2101 or the equivalent. Continuation of GRKM UN2101. Students complete their knowledge of the fundamentals of Greek grammar and syntax while continuing to enrich their vocabulary.

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

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

Prerequisites: LATN UN1101 & UN1102 or LATN UN1121 or equivalent. Selections from Catullus and Cicero.

Prerequisites: LATN UN1101 & UN1102 or LATN UN1121 or equivalent. Selections from Catullus and Cicero.

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

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

Prerequisites: LATN W2202 or equivalent 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 Ciceros orations, with some readings form his rhetorical works.

Prerequisites: LATN UN2102 or the equivalent. Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit.

Prerequisites: LATN UN3012 or the equivalent. Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit.

This course provides a survey of Latin literature.  It aims to improve students’ reading skills, familiarize them with some of the most canonical works of Latin literature, afford them a sense of Latin literary history, and introduce them to modern methodological approaches.  Readings are drawn from the Classics Ph.D. reading list.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. This course covers various topics in Medieval Latin Literature.

Prerequisites: at least four semesters of Latin, or the equivalent. Intensive review of Latin syntax with translation of English sentences and paragraphs into Latin.

This course, designed for graduates and (with instructor’s permission) senior undergraduates, has the aims of (i) introducing students to the theoretical and practical complexities of dealing with the many fragmentary remains of Latin (and Greek) writers; (ii) exploring the problems inherent in defining what a ‘fragment’ actually is, in stabilizing its wording, and in coping with matters of attribution when authorship is uncertain; (iii) investigating how fragmentary quotation in a given author complicates the interpretation of that quoting author; (iv) surveying the difficulties involved in the scholarly editing and presenting of the alleged fragments of a given author; (v) asking how modern digital technologies can help and even transform our understanding of the fragmentary textual remains of the Greco-Roman past.