Course Description: This course is devoted to the legends and lore of ancient Greece and Rome. Readings in primary sources of classical mythology (e.g. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Ovid's Metamorphoses) provide material for lectures and discussion of the great heroic tradition of the classical world: the stories of Achilles and Hector before Troy; Perseus, Andromeda, and the slaying of Medusa; Jason and the Argonauts on the quest for the Golden Fleece; Aeneas, Romulus, and the founding of Rome. This course is an introduction, too, to the discipline of Classics and the world of classical antiquity. (Group III)
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Course Description: This Classics course may focus on the lives of women (both mortal and immortal) in ancient Greece and Rome, with special consideration of the surviving literary and historical evidence. The women of imperial Rome (especially of the Julio-Claudian dynasty): Livia, Antonia Augusta, Agrippina the Younger and Elder, and Messalina, may provide a particular focus; depictions of women in tragic poetry (especially of Sophocles and Euripides), as well as epic (especially Virgil's Dido and Camilla), lyric (Sappho and Horace), and elegiac verse (especially Propertius and Ovid) may also provide a suitable direction for inquiry. Readings in primary sources in translation will be supplemented by secondary works that explore depictions of the feminine in ancient Greek and Roman authors. (Group III)
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Course Description: This Classics course considers the literature of the ancient Greeks, from the early poetry of Hesiod and Homer through the literary works produced in the Greek world under Roman imperial domination. From the great narrative and didactic epics of the archaic period and the stirring account of the Persian Wars by Herodotus we move to the fifth century B.C. at Athens and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as the lyric poetry of Pindar. Consideration will also be given to Thucydides' account of the war between Sparta and the Athenian Empire, and certain masterworks of Plato (especially the Republic and the Phaedrus). From the so-called Hellenistic Age after the death of Alexander the Great we consider the poetic corpus of Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes, especially the latter's account of the voyage of the Argo. F. (Group III)
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