CLAS 127: Greek and Latin Words in English
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): Steve Hays, William Owens
Course Schedule:
In this course we will explore the varied histories and meanings of words in the English language, concentrating especially on those derived from Greek and Latin roots. Having a large vocabulary is indispensable to success in almost any field, and this course will help you to build your vocabulary and to understand better the history of the English language.
CLAS 227: Greek and Latin Roots in Biological Terminology
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): Neil Bernstein, Steve Hays, William Owens
Course Schedule:
This course teaches students a vast number of Greek and Latin linguistic elements (bases, prefixes, suffixes, etc.) and basic linguistic principles useful to anticipating meanings of biomedical terminology via etymology.
CLAS 231: Human Aspirations Among the Greeks and Romans
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): Steve Hays
Course Schedule:
“Aspirations” are the desires that motivate human lives and determine individual and communal goals. This course is designed to introduce you to competing views of what humans should aspire to. One intention of the course is to liberate you from an unreflective conformity to the aspirations of your particular time and culture and to challenge you to develop informed and reasoned aspirationsТoth personal and communal. In this course you will be introduced to some influential human aspirations through the reading of English translations of classic Greek and Latin textsTopics will include: aspiring to personal security, money, power, and pleasure; aspiring to live honorably; aspiring to achieve wisdom; aspiring to improve civilization; aspiring to understand God and to conform one’s soul to divine expectations. In the process of studying these topics I hope to motivate you to trust and use your own intellect and imagination to formulate intelligent, complex aspirations for yourself and your society.In addition, I hope to help you discover and benefit from the ideas of long-dead people whose efforts to understand what it means to be human have survived more than 2000 years. Readings will include several hundred pages of ancient texts. Several short, thoughtful essays will be required.
CLAS 234: Classical Mythology
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): Jim Andrews, Tom Carpenter, Steve Hays, Bill Owens
Course Schedule:
This is an introductory course in the historical and artistic interpretation of Greek Mythology. After a discussion of necessary resources and method, we will concentrate on nine essential types of myths, one per week. Primary sources, literary and visual, will serve as texts.
CLAS 235-236-237: Classics in Translation
4 credit hours
Instructor(s):
Course Schedule:
Reading of Greek and Latin literature in English translation.
CLAS 252: Classical Athens
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): James A. Andrews, Tom Carpenter, William Owens
Course Schedule: Fall 2008
This course is about the people of the Greek city of Athens during an extraordinarily creative period of its history–the century and a half from 480 BC to 323 BC–when the Athenians undertook the world’s first democratic experiment. It uses archaeological and textual sources to gain access to those people and to their contributions to art, architecture, drama, government, literature, philosophy, and science. An underlying purpose of the course is to explore how the Athenians dealt with those fundamental questions about life that face all thinking humans in a democracy.
CLAS 253: Alexander and the Hellenistic World
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): Tom Carpenter. William Owens
Course Schedule:
We will focus first on Alexander himself, a man who became a myth even before his death. Next we will examine the Hellenistic world, the world that Alexander created out of his conquests. Alexander’s conquests helped spread Greek civilization over the whole of the eastern Mediterranean. Many of the intellectual and social challenges that people living in this world confronted are still relevant today. Among these challenges were the challenge of living in a society that was culturally and ethnically diverse, what it meant to assimilate a foreign culture, and the effect of autocracy on civic life.
CLAS 254: Rome Under The Caesars
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): Neil Bernstein, Tom Carpenter, Lynne Lancaster, William Owens
Course Schedule:
In this course we look at life and thought in ancient Rome from Augustus through Marcus Aurelius (27BC-AD180) based on archaeological, historical, and literary sources. It is a humanities course that examines across cultural boundaries the issue of what it mean to be human. The primary focus is on the inhabitants of Rome, how they lived and what they thought about fundamental issues such as: How should the demands of the common good be balanced with individual needs and desires? What is the role of religion in society? of education? of art? How does one deal with death? What ultimately make life worth living for an individual in Roman society? These issues are then compared with our own attitudes in modern America. We will also study the use of political propaganda in society, the rituals of daily life in ancient Rome, and the art and architecture that made up the environment in which these people lived.
CLAS 255: Pagan to Christian in Late Antiquity
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): Tom Carpenter
Course Schedule:
This is an interdisciplinary approach to the profound social and political changes that took place in the 4th through 6th Centuries of our era when the great span of the Roman Empire contracted and fragmented and Christianity became the official religion, replacing pagan beliefs that had been held by many for at least a millennium. The geographical foci are Rome and Constantinople. The sources are textual, artistic, and archaeological.
CLAS 301: Love in Antiquity
4 credit hours
Instructor(s):Steve Hays
Course Schedule:
This course considers the way people in the ancient world talked about love. Most of the discussions we will concern ourselves with arose in the Greek tradition, though certain influential views are best represented in documents of the Latin and Hebrew tradition. In surviving literary documents people talk about how love feels to the individual, the joys and pains it brings; about how love affects families and political communities; about whether love is inherently a good or bad factor in human experience. In the course of reading and interpreting these texts we will pay considerable attention to the social conventions of the Classical Greek world, which was very different from our own. Nonetheless out methodology will be more humanities than social science oriented: the goal will be more to improve our understanding of the human experience of love than to gain a command of the evidence for elaborating the topics of romance and family in Greek social history.
CLAS 311: Gods and Heroes in Greek Epic
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): James A. Andrews, Lisa Carson, Steve Hays
Course Schedule: Fall 2008
The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer are not only two of the most important and influential ancient literary works, they are also the most enjoyable to read. In this course we will read and discuss them in all their aspects: as stories about the Greek gods and heroes, as windows into Greek culture and history, and especially as stories that have a lot to say to us about life and death, choices and consequences, family and home. Other readings will include
Hesiod Works and Days, Theogony, and Vergil’s Aeneid.
CLAS 312: Greek Tragedy
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): Tom Carpenter, William Owens, Ruth Palmer
Course Schedule:
A survey of Greek tragedy in English translation; extensive readings from the three great Attic tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The course will focus on the historical and social contexts of the plays and on the relevance of the tragedies to conflicts inherent in Greek public and private life. It will pay particular attention to the tragedians use of myth as a means of exploring the human condition.
CLAS 313: Greek Sophists and Orators
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): James A. Andrews
Course Schedule:
This is our only Greek literature course which is focused exclusively on prose literature. “Orators” of the title refers to the rhetores, the Athenian politicians and public figures who strove to define the political and cultural significance of past events and, as regards the future, strove to guide the Athenian citizenry with sound advice. “Sophists” refers to those who taught the art of persuasion, and who were criticized for showing greater concern for what an audience wanted to believe, or could be led to believe, than for the truth itself. Was it true, then, that Athens had been, from time immemorial, the city that brought safety and succour to the victims of injustice? Was it true that Athens would not survive a presumed Macedonian threat if it did not take prompt, aggressive measures against that state? Whose vision of the Athenian past, whose vision of the Athenian future, was correct? And who was wiser: the philosopher, the politician, the sophistАor the masses in their collective wisdom? To answer these questions, we turn principally to these authors: Herodotus, Thucydides, Lysias, Gorgias, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Plato, Aristotle.
CLAS 343: Women in the Ancient Mediterranean
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): Ruth Palmer
Course Schedule:
In this course, we will explore the main sources of information about women in the related Mediterranean cultures of Greece and Italy from the 9th century BCE to the 4th century CE. These cultures are all patriarchal societies with an agricultural base for the economy, where women were seen as inferior to men, and their roles were tied to reproduction and care of the household. The textual evidence we will consider includes economic and legal texts, epic, love poetry, drama, religious texts and funerary inscriptions, while the archaeological evidence includes sculpture and paintings. We will also focus upon the culturally defined gender biases in the sources, and on feminist methodologies devised to clarify and interpret these biases.
CLAS 351x: On-Site Survey of Greek History
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): Ruth Palmer
Course Schedule:
A survey of Greek history from Mycenaean to modern times, with particular attention to sites on the itinerary of the study abroad program in Greece.
CLAS 391: Colloquium in Classics
1 credit hour
Instructor(s): James A. Andrews, Lynne Lancaster
Course Schedule: Fall 2008
This course includes presentations by faculty members on the different disciplines included in the study of the ancient world, presentations by faculty of aspects of their own research, presentations by seniors of their research, and meetings with visiting scholars.
Prerequisites: Classics major, sophomore status or higher, or by permission.
CLAS 401: Life of the Romans
4 credit hours
Instructor(s): William Owens
Course Schedule:
An examination of Roman life from a number of perspectives emphasizing the Roman family, sexual attitudes, slavery, and the economy. Attention is given to the means by which classicists draw conclusions about ancient Roman life and social attitudes.