How have so many people come to live in cities today? About 10,000 years ago, most of the world was populated by several million relatively mobile foragers, yet the handful of people who lived in more permanent settlements steadily multiplied and expanded over the most fertile lands. From a modern perspective, the advantages of living in an urbanized society might seem obvious, but archaeological and ethnographic evidence suggests that many of those who first abandoned foraging for farming accepted much toil and hardship while gaining relatively little.

Concentrating on the cultures around the Mediterranean sea and Mesopotamia from prehistoric through Roman times, we will examine the origins and development of urban life from the archaeological evidence. Major sites from Italy to Mesopotamia will include Çatal Höyük, Memphis, Ur, Troy, Knossos, Athens, and Rome.

We will follow the emergence of important technologies which sustained populations in towns, from small-scale household production of pottery to monumental building projects involving large crews of skilled artisans. Students will become familiar with archaeologists’ methods for interpreting excavated finds from settlements–in bulk the remains of fallen buildings and broken pottery. We will have many opportunities to examine the evidence up close by using the extensive collection of antiquities at the University Museum.

An introduction to the major philosophical thinkers and schools of ancient Greece and Rome (The Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics). Topics to be covered include: nature of the universe, the relation between knowledge and reality, and the nature of morality and the good life. We will also examine some of the ways in which non-philosophical writers (e.g., Homer, Hesiod, Aristophanes, and Thucydides) treat the issues discussed by the philosophers.

RECITATION SECTIONS:
CLST 103 402 F 11:00-12:00 pm
CLST 103 403 F 11:00-12:00 pm
CLST 103 404 F 1:00-2:00 pm
CLST 103 405 F 12:00-1:00 pm

Rome once ruled the entire Mediterranean world, and its legacy looms large in western civilization. Many aspects of Roman architecture, art, engineering, religion, and law persist today. This course will examine Roman civilization and accomplishments through the lens of their great monuments and achievements: the Coliseum, the Circus Maximus, the city of Pompeii, villas, baths, and aqueducts, among others. Primary sources in translation, slides, and video will assist in our examination of the splendor of Rome.

Many of the world’s great ancient civilizations flourished on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea: the Egyptians, the Minoans and Mycenaeans, the Greeks and Romans, just to name a few. In this course, we will focus on the ways that archaeologists recover and interpret the material traces of the past, working alongside natural scientists, historians and art historians, epigraphers and philologists, and many others.  Archaeological sites and themes from over 2000 years of Mediterranean history will be presented. This course is a non-technical introduction that assumes no prior knowledge of archaeology.

This course surveys Greek art and architecture, from Sicily to the Black Sea, between the 10th and 2nd centuries BCE (Dark Age to Hellenistic). In Greek city-states and kingdoms, their civic, religious, and domestic buildings and spaces were intimately connected with images large and small. These range from public sculpture and painting on and around grand buildings and gardens, to domestic luxury arts like jewelry, cups and vases, mosaic floors. Art and architecture addressed heroic epic, religious and political themes, and also every-day life and emotions. Current themes include Greek ways of discussing and looking at art and space, and their ideas of invention and progress; the role of monuments, makers and patrons in Greek society; and connections with the other cultures who inspired and made use of Greek artists and styles. The course will exploit the University Museum, and regional museums where possible.No prerequisites. WATU option.

ARTH/AAMW 620. RECITATION SECTIONS:
CLST 220.402 T 12:00-1:00 Staff
CLST 220.403 R 1:30-2:30 Staff
CLST 220.404 F 10:00-11:00 Staff
CLST 220.405 W 11:00-12:00 Staff

As an epic account of wandering, survival, and homecoming, Homer's Odyssey has been a constant source of inspiration for modern readers and writers as they contend with the nature of heroism, the sources of identity, and the challenge of finding a place in the world.

This course will begin with a close reading of the Odyssey in translation, with attention to Odysseus as a post-Trojan War hero; to the roles of women, especially Odysseus' faithful and brilliant wife Penelope; and to the uses of poetry and story-telling in creating individual and cultural identities.  We will then consider how later poets, novelists, and filmmakers have drawn on the Odyssey to construct their own visions, looking at works, or parts of works, by Virgil, Dante, Tennyson, Joyce, Derek Walcott, Louise Glück, Margaret Atwood, and the Coen brothers.

The life of Nero is one of Rome’s most fertile myths about culture and power. What darker fantasies of and about the ancient Romans have made such myth-making both possible and desirable? In this course we will focus on the way in which different interpreters, from ancient drama to modern film, have added to the story, and we will seek to devise a theory that can account for the imagining of “Nero”.

Ancient epics had a curious and rich afterlife in the Middle Ages.  The epics of Virgil and Statius were taught in schools, read for their moral content, and revered as philosophical teaching.  But their literary afterlife involved a remarkable shape-shifting into the genre romance:  narratives in which erotic love, individual quests, imaginary or exotic settings, and the unpredictability of adventure replace the epic emphasis on duty, collective warfare, history (including mythic history), and the determinacy of fate.  We will read Virgil’s Aeneid and Statius’ Thebaid, along with some late antique literary and philosophical treatments of classical epic, in order to set the stage for medieval receptions of the classical narratives.  Among medieval romances of pagan antiquity, we will read two important French texts (in English translation) from the twelfth century: the Roman d’Eneas (Romance of Aeneas) and the Roman de Thebes (indirectly based on Statius’ work). Then we will turn to some of the best known medieval English romances with classical themes or elements, including Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, and Chaucer’s own quasi-epic, the House of Fame. We will look especially closely at the treatment of the figure of Dido in medieval poetry and thought.

Course requirements: several short papers, a take-home final, and a research project on which you will report to the class.

(Permission required - Please complete attached permission form and see Department staff to register)  registration form

(Permission required - Please complete attached permission form and see Department staff to register) registration form

Intensive Greek reading course for students in the Post Baccalaureate Program in Classical Studies.  This semester will focus on the figure of Dionysos in literature. We will read all of Aristophanes' Frogs and then finish the semester with selections from Euripides' Bacchae.  Permission of the instructor required.

Intensive Latin reading course for students in the Postbac program. This semester the emphasis will be on Caesar and the Ciceros in 54 BC. The readings will include Marcus Cicero’s letters to his brother Quintus, who was serving under Caesar in Gaul in 54, and Caesar’s BG 5, which reports the campaigns of 54, in one of which Quintus figures prominently. There will be in-depth analysis of syntax and style.

(Permission required - Please complete attached permission form and see Department staff to register) registration form

Introductory graduate proseminar on the study of the ancient Greco-Roman world. Topics include: history of the discipline; textual scholarship; material culture; social, political, and intellectual history; relations between classical studies and other humanities disciplines.

Over the last three decades, the fields of literary and cultural studies have been reconfigured by a variety of theoretical and methodological developments. Bracing—and—often confrontational—dialogues between theoretical and political positions as varied as Deconstruction, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Queer Theory, Minority Discourse Theory, Colonial and Post-colonial Studies and Cultural Studies have, in particular, altered disciplinary agendas and intellectual priorities for students embarking on the /professional /study of literature. In this course, we will study key texts, statements and debates that define these issues, and will work towards a broad knowledge of the complex rewriting of the project of literary studies in process today. The reading list will keep in mind the Examination List in Comparative Literature—we will not work towards complete coverage but will ask how crucial contemporary theorists engage with the longer history and institutional practices of literary criticism.

There will be no examinations. Students will make one class presentation, which will then be reworked into a paper (1200-1500 words) to be submitted one week after the presentation. A second paper will be an annotated bibliography on a theoretical issue or issues that a student wishes to explore further. The bibliography will be developed in consultation with the instructor; it will typically include three or four books and six to eight articles or their equivalent. The annotated bibliography will be prefaced by a five or six page introduction; the whole will add up to between 5000 and 6000 words of prose. Students will prepare “position notes” each week, which will either be posted on a weblog or circulated in class.

An intensive examination of central and eastern Mediterranean  art and archaeology during the Geometric, Archaic, and Classical  periods, with a focus on Etruria, Phoenicia, Greece, and  Anatolia. The emphasis will be on cross-cultural contacts, with  topics that include funerary customs, trade and shipwrecks, and  sacred architecture/religion, among others. Students will make  extensive use of the collections in the University of  Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

This seminar is an intensive examination of the prehistory and protohistory of the northeastern Peloponnesos in Greece, including the Corinthia, the Argolid, and the southern Argolid, from the Early Bronze Age to the 8th century BC. The course will examine the interplay of the longue durée and historical contingency in the structural imperatives of agropastoralism, the oscillation between nucleation and dispersal, the emergence of phenomena such as the Early Bronze Age corridor houses and the Mycenaean palace states, and other topics. Emphasis is placed on critical reading of source data (excavations, surveys, environmental) and comparative approaches.

What are Greek sanctuaries and what do they look like?  How did they begin in the Greek world?  Where are they found?  As the physical manifestation of Greek religion, Greek sanctuaries played an important role in Greek society and Greek history.  What were the activities that took place in Greek sanctuaries?  How were Pan-Hellenic sanctuaries different from local sanctuaries?  How did Greek sanctuaries change over time and how did they come to an end? This course discusses the makeup of different kinds of Greek sanctuaries: urban, rural and mountain-top, and it discusses the activities that took place there, procession, sacrifice, feasting and competition and will focus on a few representative examples of Greek sanctuaries including the current Penn project at the Sanctuary of Zeus at Mt. Lykaion in Arcadia.  The course will be taught as a seminar.  Student participation will include oral reports and a research paper.

Selected topics from current research interests relating to early Judaism and
early Christianity.

(Permission required - Please see Department staff to register) For doctoral candidates.