Greek

Open, Seminar—Year

This course will provide an intensive introduction to Latin grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, with a view toward reading the language as soon as possible. Close reading of Vergil’s Aeneid in English translation will accompany intensive language study in the fall. By mid-semester, students will be translating authentic excerpts of Latin poetry and prose. During the spring, while continuing to develop and refine their knowledge of Latin grammar and vocabulary, students will read selections of Vergil’s Aeneid in Latin. The course will be rigorous and time-consuming. Students are expected to spend a minimum of two hours per day, six days a week preparing for classes and conferences. If you enjoy the challenges and satisfactions of hard work (and have good tolerance for frustration), you will find Latin fun and extremely rewarding.

Faculty

• Emily Anhalt

Advanced, Small seminar—Year

When and why did the ancient Greeks and Romans begin to distinguish history from myth? Are we losing that distinction today? Examining selected ancient Greek and Roman texts, this course will assess the power of narratives to influence attitudes, values, and conduct. What models and counter models does ancient Greek and Roman literature offer us today to counter the rapidly increasing reach and power of digital misinformation, disinformation, and bald-faced lies? Fall readings will include excerpts of Homer and Herodotus, plus, in their entirety, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and books one through five of Livy’s History of Rome. Spring readings will include selected Greek tragedies, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and excerpts of Cicero, Horace, and Tacitus. In individual or group conferences, students will read selected texts in the original Latin.

Faculty

• Emily Anhalt

Open, Seminar—Year

When and why did the ancient Greeks and Romans begin to distinguish history from myth? Are we losing that distinction today? Examining selected ancient Greek and Roman texts, this course will assess the power of narratives to influence attitudes, values, and conduct. What models and counter models does ancient Greek and Roman literature offer us today to counter the rapidly increasing reach and power of digital misinformation, disinformation, and bald-faced lies? Fall readings will include excerpts of Homer and Herodotus, plus, in their entirety, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and books one through five of Livy’s History of Rome. Spring readings will include selected Greek tragedies, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and excerpts of Cicero, Horace, and Tacitus.

Faculty

• Emily Anhalt

Open, Seminar—Spring

Sappho has been famous for a very long time: born in the sixth century BCE (a couple hundred years after Homer), Sappho has been considered one of the greatest poets of the western canon for millennia, a writer whose poetry has influenced authors from Plato to Anne Carson. Sappho’s fame was such that it outlived even her poems: today, Sappho’s poetry survives only in 600 fragments, with only one complete poem remaining. This course will consider the reception of Sappho—as both a literary character and a corpus of poetry—over 2,600 years. Beginning with the composition of her poems, we will discuss the possible contexts of their creation, their critical reception, and their thematic material. We will also explore the formation of Sappho as a character, in plays, poems, and testimonia and her simultaneous characterization as the Tenth Muse, the gender-bending personification of queer erotic desire, and the self-destroying victim of cultural forces. As we chart the intertwined reception of both poems and character over two millennia—through Plato, Menander, Catullus, Horace, Boccaccio, Sidney, Donne, Katherine Philips, Swinburne, H.D., Woolf, Mary Barnard, Anne Carson, and many others—students will become familiar with the larger currents of Sappho’s long afterlife. We will gain experience applying a variety of theories and methodologies, including lyric theory, historicism, queer theory and historiography, book history, feminist theory, and reception theory. Through our reading, we will come to understand that the only question more interesting than who Sappho was is the question of what she has meant to people over time and what about her poetry, persona, and potential has kept us going back to her for more than 20 centuries.

Faculty

• Katherine Horgan

Open, Lecture—Spring

We will begin in Babel itself, the ancient site of Babylon, where archaeologists have discovered many tablets about music. Nearby sites have the earliest examples of musical notation, some dating as far back as 1400 BCE. We will learn some aspects of how their music worked and begin building a vocabulary for talking about and notating music in general. Across the course of the semester, we will learn many different musical languages, such as the music of Ancient Greece, the old court music of Japan, drum ensembles of central Africa, and the world of European classical music. We will also delve into many different modern musics, including the rise of sampling and turntablism in hip-hop, the theory of so-called “atonal” music, and the development of electronic sound. In short, the course will be devoted to learning a sampling of crucial aspects of the multitudinous vocabularies and grammars that pervade music across the world and across time. No prior study of nor the ability to read music is required. By the end of the semester, students will be able to read basic musical ideas in a few different notation systems and will have some understanding of important aspects of not only standard European music theories but also many others that are too-often learned only by specialists.

Faculty

• Patrick Muchmore

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

If philosophy had a Dream Team, its starting line-up would feature Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the three great philosophers of Greek antiquity. Representing three consecutive generations (Socrates was Plato’s mentor and Plato was Aristotle’s teacher), these three thinkers were the first to use the term “philosophy” as we do today, as a distinct form of practice with its own history, subject matter, and methods. The schools that Plato and Aristotle established in Athens (the Academy and the Lyceum, respectively) form not only the foundation of philosophy but also of the modern university and science, and much of the vocabulary and methods we still use. Reading a variety of texts by these authors, we will get to know some of their most enduring contributions to the history of ideas. These include, among others, the Socratic method of education; Plato’s “theory of forms” and his ideas on love and beauty; Aristotle’s virtue ethics and his theories of nature and God. We will consider both how these theories continue to inform and influence how we think and learn, and the ways they might still challenge us to live and think differently. This course can serve as an introduction to philosophy, as well as an opportunity for students with experience in philosophy to broaden and strengthen their philosophical education. Certainly, no philosophical education is complete without studying these classics.

Faculty

• Roy Ben-Shai

Open, Seminar—Fall

The Christian Apostle Paul has left a profound legacy to the history of Western thought. His theology is preserved for us in a handful of letters which are included in the canon of the Christian New Testament. We will study Paul in the context of the Hellenistic culture of which he was a part in order to better understand his ideas and appreciate their place in the emerging world of Christianity. This will include studying Greek Religion, the Mystery Cults and religious gender roles in ancient Greece. In this course we will learn to read ancient texts closely, practice exegesis, and exercise the hermeneutical art. How can a modern reader access the world of a writer separated by nearly two millennia, a writer whose thoughts have been continually reinterpreted and sown into the fabric of Western culture to such a degree that any reading necessarily embodies this complex interpretive tradition—blurring the world of the Apostle with the interests and agendas of the succeeding centuries?

Faculty

• Ron Afzal