Classics: Greek (CLSG)

This is an intensive introduction to the ancient Greek language. By the end of the year, students will have been introduced to all basic Attic Greek syntax and grammar and will be able to read texts in the original, with the aid of a dictionary.

A continued intensive introduction to the ancient Greek language with primary emphasis on the acquisition of reading skills. Drills in grammar and syntax. Programmed reading selections from a variety of ancient authors.

This course will consolidate students' knowledge of Ancient Greek grammar and syntax, as well as introducing them to Attic literature through two of its most brilliant and influential authors, Plato and Euripides. This course is suitable for students who have taken two semesters of Ancient Greek at the college level, or have permission of the instructor. Satisfies COL language requirement.

For advanced students of Greek only. Students read selected books of Homer’s Iliad and engage this archaic poem on numerous levels: the Homeric dialect and the performative pressures from which it emerged, the heroic themes and poetics of the poem; the archaic dactylic hexameter; and significant threads in modern scholarship on Homeric epic.

This course explores the genre(s) of Hellenistic literary epigram through the lens of the multiple other literary forms with which it engaged. Students will examine the multiple ways in which Hellenistic writers transformed the conventions of (subliterary) anonymous inscribed sepulchral and dedicatory epigrams into a canvas for vibrant experimentation with genre, voice, and perspective; in so doing, these poets created a form of poetry whose successors remain popular into modernity. Students will also read widely poems from a variety of other genres, especially lyric and elegy. Particular attention will be paid to the way in which Hellenistic poets engaged with these earlier forms to create meaning.

Why and how did Roman literature develop? The earliest Latin literary texts surviving intact are the comedies of Plautus (late 3rd- early 2nd centuries BCE). In this course, we will become familiar with the unique style and diction of early Latin by reading Plautus’ Mostellaria, in which a wayward son takes advantage of his father’s absence to throw a monumental house party, and Amphitruo, a send-up of the gods and romantic jealousies that Plautus referred to as a “tragicomedy.” We will consider issues of meter and performance, as well as the engagement of Roman comic playwrights with their Greek predecessors.

This class focuses on Athenian Old Comedy as exemplified by the extant plays of Aristophanes. Two plays, Wasps and Women of the Thesmophoria, will be read in Greek, with other primary and secondary sources studied in English. Aristophanes' plays, aside being tremendously funny, provide fascinating windows into Athenian cultural and political life. Among the themes to be explored are the playwright's representation of women, democratic institutions, and the plays of other writers, including Euripides. Some attention will also be paid to later generations of comic writers, especially Menander.

For students of advanced Greek only, in this course students read two of Euripides’ most admired tragedies, Hippolytus and Bacchae, and engage these ancient texts on numerous levels. Each play offers students an opportunity, while improving their ability to read ancient poetic Greek, to learn how to interpret tragedy in its cultural setting, the fifth-century Athenian polis. Tragedy was staged during a most important religious festival, the Greater Dionysia, and thus serves as a prism that refracted complicated layers within Athenians’ understanding of themselves, their gods, and their past. Students will also study fundamental technical aspects of the ancient Greek tragic genre, including its highly refined poetic language and its stichic meters as well as the stylized structure of an ancient tragedy with its lyric choruses. By reading significant works of modern scholarship relevant to the Hippolytus and the Bacchae, students will gain an understanding of the most important interpretive issues surrounding each play; they will also learn to think and write about tragic drama in intellectually sophisticated ways.

For students with an advanced knowledge of Ancient Greek. This course reads two tragedies by the Athenian playwright Aeschylus, the Agamemnon and the Persae. Special attention will be paid to the language and meter of these plays, as well as to broader thematic issues, including human morality and theodicy, and to the particular sociocultural resonance of the plays in their original context.

For students of advanced Greek only, this course examines the three ancient tragedies with Heracles, the greatest of all Greek heroes, as a major character: Sophocles’ Trachiniae (Women of Trachis), Euripides’ Alcestis and Heracles Mainomenos (Heracles in Madness). Students read Trachiniae and Alcestis in the original and study Heracles Mainomenos in English. Each of these tragedies dramatizes the hero’s confrontation with death, but from very different perspectives, and it is through these differences that we examine how Sophocles and Euripides dramatize questions of life and death. These plays offer students an opportunity, while improving their ability to read ancient poetic Greek, to learn how to interpret tragedy in its cultural setting, the fifth-century Athenian polis. We study fundamental technical aspects of the ancient Greek tragic genre, including its highly refined poetic language and its stichic meters as well as the stylized structure of an ancient tragedy with its lyric choruses. By reading significant works of modern scholarship relevant to all three plays, students gain an understanding of the most important interpretive issues surrounding each play.

This course introduces advanced students to the dramatic art of Sophocles through two of his plays, Ajax and Oedipus Tyrannus. We will read the entirety of both works in Greek. Ajax tells the story of a mighty warrior who turns against his commanders and ultimately takes his own life; Oedipus depicts a king whose famed wisdom is no match for the riddle of his own identity. What do these tragedies teach us about fate, free will, and the limits of heroism? In discussing these plays, we will examine the formal conventions of tragedy; the social, economic, and political context of theater in Athens; costume, mask, and set design; music and dance; textual transmission; the art of translation; and the continuing relevance of tragedy today. Students should expect to come away with improved fluency in reading Greek verse and a synoptic view of ancient tragedy in its historical context.

This class is an introduction to Greek prose style. Students will read a variety of Greek prose writers from the earliest periods through the 4th century BCE, paying particular attention to the constitutive features of their style, including diction, degrees of abstraction, word order, and sentence structure. Students will also practice writing continuous Greek prose with the goal of learning to imitate the stylistic features of the authors they are reading.

In this course we will read portions of the text of Thucydides, starting with the opening 23 chapters of Book I. We will pay close attention to his syntax and methods of argument, as well as to his idiosyncratic approach to historiography. Thucydides has a reputation for writing quite difficult Greek, but in fact his narrative passages are generally clear and straightforward. We will start with them, then work up to some of his speeches, which are more complex and rhetorically sophisticated. We will not concentrate solely on translating and analyzing the Greek; we will talk about how Thucydides produces historical meaning, both explicit and implicit. We will have a lot of intellectual fun in this class.

An inscription recently found in Herodotus’ home town Halicarnassus calls him the “prose Homer of history”. Herodotus’ history of the Persian Wars of the fifth century BCE is epic in scale, and its style is unforgettable. In this course, we will read in Greek substantial selections from the Histories, focusing first on Croesus of Lydia and Cyrus, the founder of the Persian empire, in Book 1. After reading short selections from Books 2 and 3, we will proceed to the battle of Marathon and Xerxes’ expedition against Greece (Books 6-9). We will consider the text of Herodotus as a whole in English translation. In addition to quizzes and a final exam on translation, students will complete a short research exercise.

This course provides students with the basic skills needed to engage with Biblical literature in the Koiné Greek of the Hellenistic Age and Early Roman Empire. We will consider linguistic differences from Classical Greek, such as morphological simplification and influence from Hebrew and Aramaic. Beginning with selections from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, we will focus on the conceptual world of ancient Israel and its reflection in the Late Second Temple Period. In light of this context, we will proceed to selections from the New Testament, paying particular attention to the chronology of its constituent texts in relation to the historical development of Early Christianity.

“In Lesbos while hunting, in a grove of the Nymphs I saw a sight, the most beautiful of those I saw: a painting of a picture, a history of love.” So begins Longus’ novel Daphnis and Chloe about a boy and girl raised by shepherds who fall, unknowingly, into lovesickness. In this course for advanced students of ancient Greek, we will read Longus’ four-book novel in Greek alongside selections of texts to which he alludes, including by Sappho, Plato, and Theocritus. Topics to be discussed include allusion and intertextuality, ecphrasis, the nature-culture dichotomy, and the relationship of sexuality and violence.

Pirates, magic, shipwrecks, star-crossed lovers, human sacrifice, comedy, adventure, drama, romance: the Greek novel has it all. Five so-called novels, written in Greek, survive for us: Chariton's Callirhoe, Xenophon's Anthia and Habrocomes, Achilles Tatius's Leucippe and Clitophon, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, and Heliodorus’s Charicleia and Theagenes. This class will focus on reading one of these texts closely in the original, while reading selections from the others in translation to understand the connections across the genre. We will consider topics such as: the literary traditions the novels grew out of; narrative technique and fictionality; their readership and historical context; and their connection to our own familiar genre.

In this class we will read broadly in the corpus of Greek poetry from Byzantium, ranging from around AD 330 to AD 1453 — a vibrant and exciting thousand years of postclassical Greek. This long tradition is rich with various forms of verse partly borrowed from the classical tradition (epic, lyric) and partly invented afresh for a new historical context (hymnography, court poetry). We will concentrate on a series of exemplary poems, extending from the late antique poets Synesius and Nonnus (5th cent.), to the revolutionary Orthodox hymnography of Romanos the Melode (6th cent.), the epigrams of the high medieval masters (Theodore the Studite, John Mauropous), epic romance (Digenes Akritas), as well as satirical and defamatory poems from the later Byzantine world, including some vernacular texts. Our goals will be 1) to become acquainted with medieval Greek poetry in its diverse genres; 2) to develop an acquaintance for the unique lexicon and syntax of Byzantine Greek; and 3) to understand the high value of Byzantine poetry, including both its religious and secular arms, within Byzantine society as a whole. We will also read select scholarship on Byzantine poetics and transmission history, in an attempt to develop our critical reading skills. The course, taught in Greek, will be valuable to classicists, medievalists, and students of the Bible and Church history.

In this advanced course, students read several thousand lines of the Odyssey in Greek, especially Books 1, 5-7, 9-11, 19, 22, and 24. In the course of our reading, we will discuss the Homeric dialect, heroic themes, meter, and the oral tradition from which this great epic emerged.

The Phaedo is one of Plato's most important and magnificent dialogues. The dialogue recounts the death of Socrates, and in the course of the narrative about Socrates' final day, fundamental aspects of Platonic philosophy (including the immortality of the soul, expositions of the theory of Forms, and aspects of Platonic epistemology) are revealed. At the same time, the artistry of the dialogue is mesmerizing in its larger thematic interests (including heroism in the broader literary tradition) and its use of language. Students will develop an appreciation of Plato's contributions to philosophy as well as to the Greek language.

For advanced students of Greek only. Students read selected books of Homer’s Iliad and engage this archaic poem on numerous levels: the Homeric dialect and the performative pressures from which it emerged, the heroic themes and poetics of the poem; the archaic dactylic hexameter; and significant threads in modern scholarship on Homeric epic.

For advanced students of Greek only. Permission required.