The Sarah Lawrence College classics program emphasizes the study of the languages and literature of Ancient Greece and Rome. Greek and Latin constitute an essential component of any humanistic education, enabling students to examine the foundations of Western culture and explore timeless questions concerning the nature of the world, the place of human beings in it, and the components of a life well lived. In studying the literature, history, philosophy, and society of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, students come to appreciate them for themselves, examine the continuity between the ancient and modern worlds, and, perhaps, discover “a place to stand”—an objective vantage point for assessing modern culture.
2020-2021 Courses
Greek (Ancient)
Readings in Intermediate Greek: Herodotus and Thucydides
Intermediate , Seminar—Year
This course will review grammar concepts, as necessary, while reading—in Greek—selected passages of Herodotus and Thucydides.
Faculty
Related Latin Courses
Beginning Latin
Open , Seminar—Year
This course provides 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 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 semester, while continuing to develop and refine their knowledge of Latin grammar and vocabulary, students will read selections from the Aeneid in Latin.
Faculty
Related Literature Courses
The Perils of Passion: Ancient Greek Wisdom for Today’s Troubled Times
Open , Lecture—Year
With the permission of the instructor, qualified students may opt to take this course as Intermediate Greek and read selected portions of the text in Greek.
Are we unwittingly reliving the past? Authoritarianism, magical thinking, and tribalism are beginning to characterize the 21st century as they characterized archaic Greece. Over centuries, however, the ancient Greeks experienced a movement in the opposite direction: They began to prioritize reality, condemn tyranny, and experiment with broader forms of political participation. During the late sixth through fifth centuries BCE, ancient Athenians devised, simultaneously, the concepts of democracy and history. As the Athenians were experimenting with the world’s first-ever democratic political institutions, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides distinguished history from myth and offered examples of behaviors to emulate or to avoid. Today, those early historians can help us analyze facts, identify causes and consequences, and avoid the pitfalls of the past. Students will read, in English translation, Herodotus’ Histories and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, as well as selected works by Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristotle, and Ps.-Xenophon.
Faculty
Interrogating God: Tragedy and Divinity
Open , Seminar—Fall
The Greek gods attended the performances at the ancient theater of Dionysos, which both recognized and challenged their participation in human affairs. The immediacy of divine presence enabled a civic body, the city, to enter into conversation with a cosmic one, a conversation whose subject was a shared story about the nature of experience and its possible significance: tragedy. Divinity is less congenial about playgoing in later periods, but it seems to have lent tragedy both a power to be reborn and a determination to address the universe even as Christianity, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Industrial Age reimagine it. In this course, we shall read essential Western texts in which the constant of human suffering is confronted and the gods are called into question even as they shift their shape. Among our authors are Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Ibsen, Beckett, Susan Glaspell, and August Wilson.
Faculty
Related Philosophy Courses
The Philosophy of Tragedy: Electras
Open , Seminar—Fall
There is only one story about which tragedies exist by all three of the great Greek tragic poets: the murder of Clytemnestra to avenge her murder of Agamemnon. We will read all three plays: Aeschylus' Libation Bearers, Sophocles' Electra, and Euripides' Electra—with special attention to the relation between Electra and Orestes as co-conspirators in the plot against Clytemnestra. Each play is concerned with the question of justice in its relation to a political life. Insofar as its principle is justice, political life points toward universality. Insofar as its existence depends on excluding some from its borders, it must assert its particularity. Political life involves treating fellow citizens according to universal principles because they are like family. We want our polis to be good, but we want it to be good because it is ours. In Greek tragedy, this problematic togetherness of the good and one's own is repeatedly represented as the tension between the polis and the family—which is, in turn, expressed as a tension between male and female principles. All of these issues are present in all three plays but in quite different ways. We will read them with a view to understanding the importance of those differences.
Faculty
Ancient Philosophy (Plato)
Intermediate , Seminar—Spring
This course will be devoted to a careful reading of one text. The goal of the course is twofold. First, it is designed to acquaint students with perhaps the seminal figure in the philosophical tradition in more than a superficial way. (The 20th-century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, once remarked that the “safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.) This will force us to slow our usual pace of reading, to read almost painfully carefully, with a view to understanding Plato as he wrote and as he understood himself and not as a stage in a historical development. The second part of the goal of the course will be to introduce and encourage this kind of careful reading. The text for spring 2021 will be Plato’s Protagoras.