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CLAS 201 -- Greek Life & Culture

Expanded course description

If ever there were a people to think outside of the box it was the Greeks. Though they owe their debts to the surrounding peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, they transformed and remade what they received with astonishing imagination and insight. We live with many of their innovations today. This course, then, is an introduction to ancient Greek civilization and its legacy. The subject of our study is the origin of modernity and the intellectual starting-point for one of the world's greatest and most powerful civilizations. We shall be studying the ways in which the Greeks have influenced our present-day view of the world. I shall discuss the important features of Greek life necessary to understand the culture, and lead the class in discussion of important texts. We shall read the Odyssey, Hesiod, some tragedy, the philosophy of the preSocratics and Plato, the historians Thucydides and Herodotos. We shall also look at the riches of Greek art. We shall consider the quest for immortality and unchanging perfection which motivated so much of the Greek imagination. In sum, we shall consider in what ways the Greeks are and in what ways the Greeks are not modern.

Revised 11-14-06 Jose Gonzales

While many nineteenth-century intellectuals would have agreed with Shelley that, culturally, "we [Westerners] are all Greeks," scholars in the last fifty years have been busy exploring the many ways in which the ancient Greeks are not like us. And yet the contribution that Greek civilization made to the amalgam that is our increasingly global culture is undeniable. Learning to appreciate the ties that bind and separate us from our Greek 'forebears' is the goal of this course. We will explore ancient Greece from its bronze-age beginnings to the times of Alexander the Great. We will study not only historical witnesses but also the public and private spheres of life. Both the written (documentary and literary) and material records (archaeological and artistic) will be considered.

Group: A&L

Offered 200602.

Syllabus

Although syllabi can change from term to term, a syllabus may provide further information about typical instances of this course.

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