Spring 2018
Survey of Greek Literature CLASS-GA 1013, TBA, Adam Becker
Archaeologies of the Mediterranean Maritime World CLASS-GA 1002, M, 4:15-6:15, Joan Breton Connelly
How has archaeological investigation, both underwater and terrestrial, deepened our understanding of ancient seafaring, colonization, commerce, social interaction, pilgrimage, warfare, and piracy? How did connectivity among far-flung ports and coastal Greek cities contribute to the emergence of a Hellenic cultural identity? This seminar examines the maritime cultural landscape of the Mediterranean with special focus on material culture. From the Uluburun cargo to the Antikythera shipwreck, from Phoenician purple-dye production to late Roman fish tanks, we will consider the connectivity of maritime industries, economies, visual arts, and social practices. Special topics to be examined: climate, time-cycles, technological aspects of seafaring, ship construction, navigation, innovation, insularities, “maritime small worlds”, coastscapes, opportunistic ports, cabotage, and connections with the hinterland. Readings cover ancient authors (literature, histories, geographies); historiographic works (Braudel, Horden and Purcell, Abulafia, Broodbank); period- and region-specific works (Malkin, Tartaron, Leidwanger, Foley, Bass).
Latin Prose Composition CLASS-GA 1012, Th, 4-6, Matthew McGowan (at NYU)
This course offers an introduction to composition in Latin and a survey of prose styles from Cato the Elder to the Vulgate. Each week we will tackle a different author from D.A. Russell's Anthology of Latin Prose (Oxford) and review individual points of syntax and stylistics via practice exercises and free composition. It is hoped that by the end of the course students will have gained a deeper knowledge of Latin sentence structure and idiom and a greater appreciation for a broad range of prose styles. Weekly assignments (pensa) will include composition and reading from E.C. Woodcock's A New Latin Syntax and from other scholars analyzing a particular author's style. The scholarly essays will provide the background for the brief report (= breviarium) that every student will be asked to do at least once over the course of the semester.
Required Texts (all available on Amazon): D.A. Russell, Anthology of Latin Prose (Oxford), E.C. Woodcock, A New Latin Syntax, and Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar by B. Gildersleeve and G. Lodge. Please bring these books to class on the first day, Thursday, January 18, 2018. If you have any questions about the content or aims of the course, feel free to email me: mamcgowan@fordham.edu.
Herodotus CLASS-GA 2912, W, 4:15-6:15, Danielle Kellogg (CUNY Graduate Center)
This course will focus on Herodotos, one of the greatest prose authors of ancient Greece and a crucial figure in Greek intellectual and literary history. Herodotos’ Histories is one of the earliest lengthy prose narratives in Ionian Greek still extant and remains the primary (and often only) source for much information about the culture and history of numerous ancient Mediterranean cultures in the late Archaic and early Classical periods. Herodotos’ status as the ‘Father of History’ has been debated in the 2500 years since he set himself the task of recording the ‘great and wonderful deeds’ of the Greeks and Persians: while Herodotos’ investigation of these events set the precedent for all subsequent historical writings, his aims and methods have been controversial since antiquity (just witness the rather uncomplimentary opinions of his near contemporary, Thucydides). Herodotos wove a number of fabulous and entertaining anecdotes and tales into his historical narrative, leading some to refer to him the ‘Father of Lies’ and even to question his status as a historian at all. Current scholarly work, however, mostly treats Herodotos’ Histories both as a carefully crafted literary work in which the supposed ‘digressions’ link together many of Herodotos’ themes and ideas, and as a genuine attempt by the author to record and explain events of the past. The course will advance the students’ fluency in reading and translating Greek prose, while at the same time enriching their understanding of Greek civilization and history and exposing them to current trends in Herodotean scholarship.
Numismatics and the Ancient Economy CLASS-GA 3000.002, W, 3:30-6:00, Gilles Bransbourg and Peter van Alfen (both from the American Numismatic Society)
Coins are much more than just money. They are windows in the way people organize their politics, their societies, and, of course, their economies. Coins were first struck in the ancient Mediterranean world in the late 7th century BC and rapidly spread throughout Greece coinciding with the revolutionary changes that gave birth to the Greek city-state. Greek and Roman expansions led to increased monetization all across the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds, shaping political structures, fiscal regimes, domestic and international trade. This course begins by looking at archaic Greece before coinage, seeking to understand what money was before coinage, and how trade and wealth were organized. Thereafter, it focuses on the ways in which coinage altered these organizations and structures through Greco-Roman antiquity, leading to entirely new concepts like fiduciarity, exchange rate risk, and inflation. The course will cover the history, methods and theories of numismatics, and will include hands-on experience with ancient coins, while dealing with the impact that coinage had on ancient societies.
Late Latin Verse, CLASS-GA 3000, Th, 2:30-5:00, Marco Formisano (Fordham College Lincoln Center)
In this course we will read some of the most famous late Latin poems (Ausonius, Mosella; Claudian, De raptu Proserpinae; Rutilius Namatianus, De reditu suo), as well a selection of passages from other poetry by Ausonius, Proba, and Prudentius. While these texts are most often read intertextually with an almost exclusive focus on their relationships with models such as Vergil, Ovid, Horace and Statius, our aim is to study these poems on their own terms, namely as the products of late antique literary culture. Particular attention will be devoted to the concept of allegory, both as an ancient and late-antique textual phenomenon and as a topic of theorizing in twentieth-century literary criticism (e.g. Walter Benjamin, Paul De Man). On April 27, 2018 a workshop with external speakers on “Origins and Original Moments in Late Antique Literature” will take place at Fordham, and the participants in this class will be directly involved in the discussion.
Greek Sympotic Poetry, CLASS-GA 3002, W, 6:30-8:30, Lawrence Kowerski (CUNY Graduate Center)
Roman Novel, CLASS-GA 3003, T, 4:15-6:15, David Konstan
Ancient Rome bequeathed to literature three novels of very different character: Petronius’ Satyrica, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (also known as The Golden Ass, thanks to a citation by Augustine), and the anonymous History of Apollonius King of Tyre. We shall read most (if not all) of these texts in Latin, and discuss various points of Latin style, narrative technique, and social context. A final paper is required, due at the end of the semester.
Pre-Socratic Philosophy, CLASS-GA 3004, M, 6:30-8:30, David Sider
In this course we shall survey the path of Greek philosophy from its beginnings until just short of Plato. Most of this will be on natural science (such as evolution, the big bang theory, and subatomic particles, to be anachronistic) and the attempts to grapple with the concept of existence, but what little remains of early philosophical ethics will also be examined. Since all of early Greek thought is known primarily from later sources who quote (not always consistently), paraphrase (often tendentiously), and interpret (often erroneously), it must be approached in the first instance philologically fragment by fragment before being put into historical and then philosophical contexts.