Latin

Intermediate, 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 Greek.

Faculty

• Emily Anhalt

Open, Lecture—Fall

Without the literature of classical antiquity, William Shakespeare would not—and could not—have written some of his most beloved plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, The Comedy of Errors, and The Tempest—not to mention his two longer poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece—all owe much of their plot, style, form, and content to authors such as Ovid, Virgil, Plautus, and Lucan. This course will explore Shakespeare’s relationship with the literature of ancient Greece and Rome and the opportunities that literature afforded him for exploring ideas of gender, sexuality, politics, race, class, and the connection between past and present. Reading works like Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the plays of Plautus and Terence alongside Shakespeare’s plays and poems, students will explore the formation of literary canon and tradition, gain familiarity with some major works of classical antiquity, and discover Shakespeare’s complex, innovative approach to the authors who shaped his education and literary milieu. In your work for this course, students will chart Shakespeare’s transformation of classical works, learn to engage with and evaluate early modern printed books, and master not only Shakespeare’s English, but the ancient source material from which his most compelling drama springs. As we discuss Shakespeare’s relationship to his classical counterparts, we will gain a new understanding of the ways Shakespeare’s use of literature of the past came to define the social, sexual, and political structures of our present.

Faculty

• Katherine Horgan

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

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

In popular culture, Dante’s name is virtually synonymous with his Inferno and associations of fire and brimstone. Yet, in the Divine Comedy the point is to leave hell: to emerge from darkness into the light and steadily climb the mountain of Purgatorio in order to ascend to Paradiso, to experience the love that moves the sun and other stars, the divinity that underlies all things and is our true nature. Much more than of the diabolical, Dante is a poet of divine love: “I am one who when / Love breathes in me, I take note, and as / it dictates within, so I go signifying” (Purgatorio 24.52-4). For Dante, poetry becomes a vehicle of truth when it is itself moved by the love that is not merely a passing feeling, but the very ground of being. This course will be an exploration into the ways Dante is a poet and philosopher of love, truth, and being. In the fall, we will embark on a close reading of all three realms of the Comedy, paying particular attention to these themes, and the way Dante’s poetry is both profoundly philosophical and even more profoundly experiential. In writing the Comedy, Dante seeks to transform not only his life but also our own: he writes “to remove those living in this life from a state of misery and bring them into a state of happiness” (Letter to Can Grande XIII.39). So, to read the Comedy is to read our own lives into the poem and to read the poem into our own lives. In the spring, we will read Dante’s philosophical treatise, the Convivio (the Banquet), as well as selections from his treatise on language, On Eloquence in the Vernacular, and on politics, Monarchy. Alongside these texts, we will read Dante’s major philosophical sources, especially Aristotle, his Arabic commentators, and Thomas Aquinas. All the while, we will revisit selected cantos from the Comedy, grouped by philosophical themes such as the essence of human happiness, vice and virtue, and the prime mover—being, truth, and love.

Faculty

• Joseph Romano

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

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

Are we bodies? Are we souls? Are we some strange mixture of the two? In this seminar, we shall consider this problem by beginning with Plato’s Phaedo, which asks whether there is a soul that can separate from the body and live forever; Aristotle’s On the Soul, which denies that the individual soul can survive the body; Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, which argues that we are just matter and that the soul cannot survive the death of the body. We shall then leap ahead to Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, which seems to hold, first, that we are pure minds, second, that other people may just be machines, third, that we are souls intimately united with bodies—a very confusing combination of views—and ask why he puts forward all these apparently contradictory views. This will involve us in the objections to Descartes’ Meditations and his replies. Students will be expected to bring written questions on the reading to each class, and to present sections of the reading as assigned. Logs of questions and notes for presentations will be presented at the end of each semester. There will be two short papers assigned for the class in addition to the conference paper.

Faculty

• Abraham Anderson