Please refer to the class schedule or consult the department for further information about courses and schedules. All courses are offered in the late afternoon and evening.

Introduction to Classical Studies
G27.1001  4 points.
Survey of tools and methods used in classical philology; papyrology; paleography; stemmatization of manuscripts; editing of texts; source criticism (reconstruction of lost works, disentangling of diverse traditions); historiographical use of literary material.

Proseminar in Classical Archaeology
G27.1002  4 points.
Methods and problems of classics research as they pertain to the archaeological sciences; bibliographical resources and problems involving the interpretation and evaluation of evidence from epigraphy, numismatics, art, and architecture. Typical archaeological sites are surveyed and analyzed.

Latin Literature: Origins, Republic
G27.1003  4 points.
Extensive reading in Latin prose and poetry of the republican period. Texts are studied in chronological sequence, and major themes of republican intellectual history are explored. Readings include selections from the archaic laws, songs, Livius, Naevius, Ennius, Accius, Pacuvius, Plautus, Terence, Caecilius, Cato, Lucilius, Cicero, Sallust, Lucretius, Catullus, Varro, Varro of Atax, Cinna, and Calvus.

Latin Literature: Imperial Period
G27.1005  4 points.
Extensive reading in Latin prose and poetry of the Augustan and imperial periods. Texts are studied in chronological sequence, and major themes of early imperial intellectual history are explored. Readings focus on literature of the golden and silver ages in a variety of genres, including epic, pastoral, tragic drama, satire, epigram, letters, and historical writings.

Greek Literature from Homer to the End of the Peloponnesian War
G27.1009  4 points.
Extensive reading in Greek prose and poetry of the archaic and classical periods. Texts are studied in chronological sequence, and major themes of Greek cultural and intellectual history such as the rise of the polis are explored. Readings range from Homer to Thucydides and include both major and minor authors.

Greek Literature from the End of the Peloponnesian War to the Christian Era
G27.1010  4 points.
Extensive reading in Greek prose and poetry of the later classical, Hellenistic, and imperial periods. Texts are studied in chronological sequence, and major themes of contemporary intellectual history are explored. Readings include selections from Plato and Aristotle, Demosthenes, Hellenistic poetry, Hellenistic historians, Plutarch, Lucian, the Greek novel, Hellenistic philosophy or Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists, Clement of Alexandria, and the New Testament.

Greek Rhetoric and Stylistics: A Survey
G27.1011  4 points.
The development of Greek rhetoric and prose style. A review of morphology and syntax is followed by intensive close reading of selections from authors in chronological sequence. Emphasis is on close translation and syntactical and stylistic analysis.

Latin Rhetoric and Stylistics: A Survey
G27.1012  4 points.
The development of Latin rhetoric and prose style. A review of morphology and syntax is followed by close reading of selections with emphasis on translation and syntactical and stylistic analysis.

Greek Poetry from Homer Through the Hellenistic Period: A Survey
G27.1013  4 points.
Archaic, classical, and Hellenistic poetry, including selections from Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, classical drama, and the poetry of Alexandria. Texts are studied in chronological sequence, and attention is paid to Greek intellectual and social history as well as to questions of style and genre.

Survey of Latin Poetry
G27.1014  4 points.
Focuses on the shaping of Latin poetics from Livius Andronicus through the silver age, through lectures and directed readings in the original texts. Attention is given to epos, lyric, elegy, satire, and drama. Roman social and intellectual history, as well as questions of genre and style, are considered.

Introduction to Ancient Studies
G27.1040  4 points.
Introduction to the methods and approaches used to uncover the ancient past and to the categories of evidence available in this quest. Develops a sense of how to apply various methods to the study of a given corpus of data. Deals with the means of transmission of ancient evidence to modern scholarship and culture and provides a sense of ancient studies as a whole.

Introduction to Greek Palaeography
G27.2541  4 points.
Introduction to medieval and Renaissance Greek literary hands in majuscule and minuscule scripts, dating of manuscripts, codicology, stemmatics, and textual criticism. Preparation of a specimen critical edition of a selected passage of Greek literature from manuscript facsimiles.

Sallust
G27.2812  4 points.
Reading of one or both of the monographs and the major fragments of the Historiae. Attention is paid to Sallust’s contribution to the canonical style and aims of Latin historiography and to the development of the historical monograph as a narrative form.

Caesar and Lucan
G27.2814  4 points.
Considers the writing of the Roman civil war from the perspectives of the victorious dictator and of the opposition poet. Questions of literary influence, political perspective, propaganda, and style are investigated. (In a given term, this course may concentrate more on one of the two texts than the other.)

Livy
G27.2816  4 points.
Study of selected books of the Ab urbe condita. Topics include the nature of Roman historiography and Livy’s place in its tradition, narrative structures and strategies, the relation of style to content, and contemporary political issues and Livy’s response to them.

Tacitus
G27.2821  4 points.
Reading of either the minor works or parts of the Annales and Historiae. Tacitus and his writing are considered in the context of his times, when empire had clearly come to stay, but when its nature was under question. In such a world, what was the job of history, or of a historian? Could real history still be written? If so, how?

Lucretius
G27.2832  4 points.
Reading of the De rerum natura as a masterpiece of poetry and philosophy, concentrating on the struggle between the two. Topics include mastering the fear of death, whether poetry is merely a didactic tool, language as a model for physics, and theories of the origins of civilization.

Pliny
G27.2838  4 points.
Selections from Books I-IX of Pliny’s Epistles—with an eye especially to matters of history, culture, and society—reveal much about the life and interests of a member of the senatorial order. The correspondence between Pliny as governor of Pontus-Bithynia and the emperor Trajan (Book X) is examined as a unique specimen of such literature.

Cicero
G27.2843  4 points.
Reading of selected works, which may come from the oratorical, philosophical, or epistolary corpora. The focus of the course varies accordingly; in all, however, close reading is accompanied by a consideration of the orator/philosopher/citizen in his social and historical context.

Petronius and Apuleius
G27.2853  4 points.
Study of the Roman novel as a generic form based on selections from the Satyricon and the Golden Ass, with comparanda drawn from Greek novels.

Plautus and Terence
G27.2861  4 points.
Readings of selected plays. Topics include comic language as a reflection of “ordinary” language, the playwrights’ response to their Greek precursors, their influence on later literature (including satire and the orations of Cicero), and a comparative literary and dramaturgical study of the two authors.

Seneca
G27.2868  4 points.
Study of Senecan dramatic works vis-à-vis earlier Latin poets, such as Ovid, Horace, and Vergil, and Greek tragedy. (In alternate years, this course may concentrate instead on Senecan prose.)

Catullus
G27.2872  4 points.
The three major groups of the Catullan corpus—the polymetrics, the long poems, and the elegiacs—are examined as separate genres. Topics include what it meant to be a poeta novus in Republican Rome, Catullus’s polemical poetics, his Alexandrian and his Roman heritage, and the artifice of spontaneity.

Horace
G27.2873  4 points.
Study of the Odes and Epodes or the Satires and Epistles. With the Odes, topics include Horace’s focus on the “here and now” of the symposium versus his poetry’s claims to immortality, the rhetorical construction of lyric as communication with both addressee and reader, and Horace’s statements about poetry and his ambivalence about praising Augustus. In studying the hexameter poems, special attention is paid to the Satires about writing satire and to the literary Epistles, and especially to the self-ironizing poetic persona.

Latin Elegy
G27.2876  4 points.
Selections from Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus and the Tibullan corpus, and Ovid; later elegy may also be read. Topics include the role of the lover and the mistress, the self-referentiality of elegiac poetry, the tension between genre and content (particularly in Propertius), and the Ovidian codification of the elegiac form.

Roman Satire
G27.2878  4 points.
Study of the art form that the Romans claimed was entirely their own via a reading of selected poems of Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Topics include satire as a “mirror” of society, the satirist’s persona, and the language and literary form of the genre.

Vergil
G27.2882  4 points.
Study of the Eclogues and Georgics or the Aeneid. With the former, attention is paid to the symbolic function of the countryside as a moral space, poetic exchange as a model for society, poetry as political discourse, and Vergil’s modification of generic traditions. In the Aeneid, students examine an epic tradition that both embodies and questions traditional heroic values. Topics include the influence of non-epic genres, the new Roman hero, the sacrifice of private life, and the extent to which the Aeneid is a patriotic poem.

Ovid
G27.2887  4 points.
Overview of Ovid’s poetic output (including love, elegy, didactic, epistolary, and epic poetry); concentrates on a particular poem or related group of poems. Topics include Ovid’s reaction to Vergil, the influence of the declamatory schools, Ovid’s creation of a new narrative style for epic poetry, and the poet’s response to Augustus.

Herodotus
G27.2912  4 points.
Study of the “father of history,” focusing on the development of prose literature in fifth-century Greece, Herodotus’s relation to the scientific and scholarly tradition in Ionia, narrative structure and themes, history as self-definition, the barbarian, and Herodotus and tragedy.

Thucydides
G27.2914  4 points.
Thucydides’ place in the ancient historiographical tradition, particularly in relation to Herodotus, is considered. Topics may include the nature of evidence, Thucydides’ use of speeches and narrative, sophistic influence, and the effect of Thucydidean history on later writers.

Greek and Roman Biography
G27.2918  4 points.
Reading of biographical prose to be selected from the following authors: Gorgias, Isocrates, Xenophon, Plutarch, Nepos, Tacitus, and Suetonius. Topics of study may include the development of the genre, encomium, portrayal of character as related to each author’s purpose, and the historical context.

Plato
G27.2932  4 points.
Study of selected dialogue(s). Readings and topics vary with the instructor; possible focus includes Plato’s portrayal of Socrates and the Socratic method, the construction of the ideal state, the relationship between poetry and philosophy, Plato and the Sophists, and the teaching of virtue.

Aristotle
G27.2936  4 points.
Selected work(s) of the fourth-century philosopher. Possible topics include Aristotle’s relationship to Plato, Aristotle’s natural science and its later influences, theories of the ideal constitution and different political entities, and ancient literary criticism.

Attic Orators
G27.2941  4 points.
Study of one or more of the Attic orators in terms of textual, stylistic, legal, social, and historical problems. The relationship of ancient rhetorical theory and practice may also be considered.

Demosthenes
G27.2944  4 points.
Study of one or more of the orations in terms of textual, stylistic, legal, social, and historical problems. Demosthenes’ influence on later oratory may also be considered.

Aeschylus
G27.2963  4 points.
Close reading of one of the seven extant plays. The peculiarities of Aeschylean language and, in the case of a play from the Oresteia, the relation of its plot to that of the trilogy as a whole is analyzed. The difficult dramaturgical and textual problems are sketched.

Sophocles
G27.2965  4 points.
Study of the most elusive and least easily characterized of the three Athenian tragedians through close reading of one or more of the extant tragedies. Topics include the Sophoclean hero, dramatic structure and experimentation, the myth of Oedipus, and the role of theatre in society.

Euripides
G27.2967  4 points.
Overview of Euripides’ career is followed by reading of selected tragedies. Particular attention is paid to the challenges he posed to the “proper” tragic form, the influence of Aeschylus and the relationship between Sophocles and Euripides, contemporary political and intellectual influences, and the role of ritual and the divine in Euripidean art.

Aristophanes G
27.2970  4 points.
Study of the structure and content of old comedy as represented by the surviving comedies of Aristophanes. Includes political invective and satire; literary parody; utopianism; comic language, gesture, and costume.

Greek Lyric Poetry
G27.2971  4 points.
Representative selections (as in Campbell’s edition) of lyric poetry from the beginning through Hellenistic times. The particular focus and readings vary; sample topics include the development and specialization of generic, dialect, and metrical conventions; the influence of Homer; and the personal versus the choral poetic voice.

Menander
G27.2973  4 points.
Study of recently discovered comedies of Menander in terms of dramaturgy, social setting, characterization, and Roman comedy.

Theocritus
G27.2976  4 points.
The writer of the Idylls situated in his literary and cultural milieu. Close attention is paid to the literary movements and controversies of the Alexandrian period, including the genre of bucolic poetry, its conventions, characters, and gestures, and Theocritus’s poems in praise of his Ptolemaic patrons.

Homer
G27.2981  4 points.
Either the Iliad or the Odyssey is read in its entirety. Topics include the conventions and development of oral poetry; the relationship of gods and man; narrative structure and design; the poems as a source for ancient historiography, tragedy, and later epic; the role of women, especially Helen and Penelope; and the education of Telemachus.

Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns
G27.2987  4 points.
Close reading of the Theogony and of the Homeric hymns; students may also read the Works and Days or the Batrachomyomachia and other poems in the Homeric corpus. Topics include the influence of Homeric epic, the conventions of didactic poetry, the form and structure of hymns, and the influence of Hesiod and the hymns on later Greek poets.

Seminar in Classical Studies
G27.3000  4 points.
Variable content.

Topics in Roman History
G27.3001 4 points.
Variable content.

Topics in Greek History
G27.3002  4 points.
Variable content.

Topics in Latin Literature
G27.3003  4 points.
Variable content.

Topics in Greek Literature
G27.3004  4 points.
Variable content.

Directed Reading in Latin Literature I, II
G27.3101, 3102  Prerequisite: permission of the director of graduate studies. Variable points.

Directed Reading in Greek Literature I, II
G27.3201, 3202  Prerequisite: permission of the director of graduate studies. Variable points.

Directed Reading in Roman History I, II
G27.3301, 3302  Prerequisite: permission of the director of graduate studies. Variable points.

Directed Reading in Greek History I, II
G27.3401, 3402  Prerequisite: permission of the director of graduate studies. Variable points.

Dissertation Research
G27.3998, 3999  4 points per term.

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