This course studies the contacts between Greeks and Persians, from Cyrus II to Alexander the Great (560-330 BCE). Through diverse types of primary documents (literary, epigraphic, and visual), students examine military, political, and cultural interactions.
This course examines the phenomenon of war in ancient Greece, with particular emphasis on its social impact, concentrating on the late Archaic and Classical periods (650-338 BC).
A reading of select works of Latin satire in the ORIGINAL LATIN.
This course studies the life of Alexander the Great. It seeks to set his achievements within the context of Greek, Macedonian and Near Eastern history, and to disentangle the truth about him from the often unreliable and conflicting sources.
A reading of selections from Apuleius, Metamorphoses and/or Petronius, Satyrica in the ORIGINAL LATIN.
This course studies selected ancient Greek novels in English translation., the social and literary currents which shape their narratives, and their role in the cultural politics of their era.
"The five surviving Greek romance-novels, which date to the period between the first century AD and perhaps the later fourth century, all belong to the Greek literature of the Roman Empire. Curiously none of these texts makes reference to Rome; instead, they tend to fix their gaze in temporal terms on a distant, classical past, […]
Examines the practice of letter-writing in the classical world.
"Rhetoric originated in ancient Greece as the art of speaking in public - in the law courts, in political assemblies, and wherever persuasion and eloquence were valued. For more than two thousand years rhetoric was a fundamental part of the Western education system; it became the basic training for writers such as Shakespeare and James […]
Thist course examines the social, cultural, economic, and political world of the Roman empire, as revealed in Apuleius' Latin novel, Metamorphoses.