AP/HIST 2100 6.00

ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME

This course offers a general introduction to the history of ancient Greece and Rome. It surveys the ancient world from the Greek Bronze Age in the second millennium B.C. until the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. Specific periods are studied with emphasis on the social, economic, and political history of each. Extensive use is made of primary sources (in translation), with special attention devoted to the evaluation of literary, archaeological, and documentary evidence.
Among the areas covered are Homeric society, the development of the polis in archaic and classical Greece, Athenian society in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the rise of Rome, politics and society in late Republican Rome, and the society, economy, and political structure of the Roman Empire. Texts, read in translation, typically include a selection of the following: Homer, Odyssey; the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides; selected Greek plays, law-court orations, and documentary inscriptions; Plutarch's lives of eminent Romans; speeches of Cicero; the historical works of Sallust and Tacitus; Petronius, Satyricon and letters of Pliny.