Fall 2023
CLASS-GA 1011 Greek Rhetoric and Stylistics
THIS CLASS HAS BEEN CANCELLED AND WILL BE OFFERED IN SPRING 2024
This course offers a survey of the ancient Greek language through prose composition and the study of the style of selected ancient Greek prose writers.
CLASS-GA 1013 Greek Literature Survey
David Konstan - Monday/Wednesday 2:00-3:15pm
A survey of Greek poetry from early epic to Hellenistic times, with attention paid to translation, meaning, social context, textual transmission, meter, genre, performance, and the relevant scholarship on all these matters.
CLASS-GA 3000 Seminar in Classical Studies
The World of the Mediterranean Port: Religion, Economics, Society
Barbara Kowalzig - Tuesday 4:55-7:25pm
Port-cities all over the world are gateways to the understanding of global historical change. Central to the movement of goods and people, to the flow of capital and beliefs, they are spaces of social interaction uniquely receptive to transformation. Characterized by religious diversity and an open-textured, sea-borne cosmopolitanism, port-cities typically operate within an interdependent network of competitive economies, attracting merchants and other mobile groups through constant adaptation of their institutions. At the same time, harbours constitute tightly regimented, concentrated domains of civic powers, aiming to control an ever-transient organism always at the risk of upsetting the existing order.
This seminar will study the dynamics of ancient Mediterranean port societies in a long-term and cross-cultural perspective. In particular, it will investigate ports as laboratories of social and cultural innovation, with a special focus on the intersection of religious plurality, institutional flexibility and economic growth. Students will first be introduced to milestones of long-term Mediterranean history, recent approaches to the ancient economy, the lively contemporary field of port studies in global history, including the Indian Ocean and East Asia, and to the notion of port religions. We will then look at the geology and geography of ancient port networks, at the factors driving the development of ever-more sophisticated port facilities and an architecture of interactive façades maritimes, at social and economic institutions set between legal and illegal trade, and at the literary perception of ports.
This will form the basis for engaging with the life of trade diasporas and religious minorities, and a variety of immigrant groups across the Mediterranean. We will delve into the port societies of e.g. Classical and Hellenistic Athens, Rhodes, Kos and Delos, including their Phoenician, Syrian and Egyptian enclaves, the mercantile communities at the ports of Rome, Byzantion, early modern Livorno and Marseille, Ottoman Izmir, as well as Odessa and Alexandria with their Greek, Jewish and Armenian populations. We will examine the role of trade associations (‘guilds’) in the geography of connectivity, often bound up with the emergence of new religious phenomena such as the cults of Isis and Sarapis, spreading through harbours. We will also target the inequalities enhanced by thriving port cultures, to include sailortowns, migrant labour, drinking culture and the commodification of the human body in prostitution. Materials from Greco-Roman antiquity (text, epigraphy, art and archaeology) form the core of this course, but the nature and degree of comparison is flexible and will depend on participants’ interests. Graduates from all periods and fields are invited to attend. All ancient sources will be available in translation; classicists will be expected to work with the original languages for their research papers.
CLASS-GA 3002 Special Topics: Ancient Drama in Context
Peter Meineck - Thursday 4:55-7:25pm
This course will examine the performance conditions, production elements, political and social background, and reception of ancient Greek drama (tragedy and comedy). Several plays and fragments will be studied including works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Epimarchus, Cratinus, Eupolis, and Aristophanes. The seminar will also look at the reception of these plays both in and since antiquity. Performance elements will include chorality, music, dance, movement, speech, environment, cultic connections, space, masks, costumes, stage properties, blocking, and casting. Students will learn to analyze dramatic texts, material culture, and secondary evidence to gain a better understanding of how these plays functioned and were received by the ancient audiences they were intended for. Participants will also be introduced to several methodological techniques for approaching ancient drama derived from Philology, Performance Studies, Cognitive Theory, and Anthropology. Assessment will be participation, a final presentation, and a research paper. The class may also attend the theatre on one external trip.
CUNY CLAS 71100 Greek Historians
Jennifer Roberts - Tuesday 6:30-8:30pm
(Course meets at CUNY Graduate Center)
This course will study historians who wrote in Greek about Greece (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, a little Diodorus, maybe Plutarch). What sources were available to them? What were their purposes in writing history? Of what did they think history consisted ? What did they say when they asked themselves the question, why does history turn out the way it does? Students interested in taking the course are welcome to let the instructor know in advance what particular portions or aspects of these historians’ work interest them. We will read extensively in Greek but will supplement with readings in English.
CUNY CLAS 74100 Art and Power in the Age of Alexander
Rachel Kousser Monday 4:15-6:15pm
(Course meets at CUNY Graduate Center)
This course examines Hellenistic material culture within a global perspective, focusing on issues of art and power. Alexander the Great and his successors brought under Macedonian rule an area stretching from Sicily in the west to Egypt, Persia, and Afghanistan. In doing so, they created immense, wealthy, and diverse empires radically different from what had come before. Yet scholars of the Hellenistic era have often limited their purview primarily to developments in Greece and Turkey. This course will consider both familiar monuments such as the Great Altar of Pergamon and more recently excavated works from Central Asia, Egypt, the Middle East and Macedonia that have revolutionized our ideas of Hellenistic art. In addition, we will make extensive use of the Metropolitan Museum’s holdings, integrating those of the Greco-Roman galleries with the Near Eastern, Egyptian, and South Asian collections. Topics to be addressed include Alexander the Great and his reception in later eras; cultural heritage in wartime during the Hellenistic era; royal sponsorship of ephemeral artworks (e.g., processions, banquets, weddings, and funerals); Hellenistic queens and their representation; and the prehistory of the Silk Road.
CUNY CLAS 72100 Survey of Early Christian History/Literature
Brian Sowers - Monday 6:30-8:30pm
(Course meets at CUNY Graduate Center)