# Teaching ## **Language Courses** ### Advanced Latin Courses LATN 117: Livy and the Gauls: As Rome expanded beyond the Italian peninsula, the new empire came into contact with their earliest and longest enduring enemy: the Gauls. In this course, we will read how the Latin historian Livy narrates a series of Rome’s interactions with several Gallic tribes across a vast swath of modern-day Europe and Asia (e.g. northern Italy, France, Germany, and Turkey). Throughout our reading, we will pay special attention to Livy’s use of the ancient ethnographic tradition and support our Latin readings with modern scholarship on historiography and racecraft. LATN 112b: Latin Literature:Texts and Context (Imperial): This course is designed to help students develop a map of Latin literary culture. Students are allowed to take either or both halves of the course. The class prepares students to discuss Latin literature in its historical and cultural context with chronology, genre, theme, performance, and reception context as organizational frameworks. This is a reading-intensive course: we will cover a vast amount of original material in Latin with the aid of assigned commentaries and other appropriate resources. Through prepared translation of assigned text, reading practice sessions, and interpretative exercises, students will improve their reading fluency and enhance their ability to read and interpret a range of Latin texts. LATN 108: Cicero and Sallust on Catiline: This class will take us into the seedy underbelly of Roman politics, where we will witness the ancient reality of political revolution, conspiracy theories, and the creation and mythologization of some of history’s greatest heroes and villains. Our Latin readings will present us with everything from heated debates over the power of the state over the life and death of its citizens to scandalous accusations of murder, adultery, and worse…. But can we trust our ancient sources—in this case, Sallust and Cicero—to tell us the *real* story of 63 BCE? And was Catiline really the bad guy of the story? This class will present us with ample opportunity to practice not only our Latin reading ability, but to interact and engage with primary sources and ancient historical evidence. LATN 145: Writing for an Emperor: What does it take to survive as a writer in Imperial Rome? The courage to stand up and claim that the best ruler of all time is….whoever happens to be on the throne now! In this advanced Latin class, we will work our way through excerpts from Seneca, Pliny, and Tacitus that paint a picture of life under a Roman autocrat. Along the way, we will supplement our Latin texts with secondary readings that focus on imperial literature in context, the mechanics of autocracy, and the poetics of tyranny. ### Graduate Seminars CLASPHIL 203: Roman Historiography: This seminar goes beyond the canonical triad of Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus to read across the surprisingly broad number of expressions historical discourse could take in Ancient Rome. We will begin with Ennius and the fragmentary Republican historians, examine the formal and theoretical adaptations historical writing undergoes in the Late Republic and early Principate, and finish the term with an investigation into the legacy of Roman historiography in Late Antiquity and beyond. Latin proficiency is expected; supplementary Greek readings will be done in translation. ANCSTD 201: Oracle and Divination in the Ancient Mediterranean (co-taught with Giovanni Bazzana, HDS): This graduate seminar will focus on oracles and divination in the ancient world in their capacity as a widespread phenomenon. The course will deal with texts and material artifacts pulled from a broad range of epochs and regions across the ancient Mediterranean. We will explore the historical, literary, and artistic significance of this evidence in order to understand more adequately, for example, ancient concepts of divine-human communication, integration of divinatory practices into literatures, and authorization in religious and political discourses. This is an interdisciplinary course that focuses on developing research and communication skills across classics, religious studies, and ancient history. ## Courses in Translation CLS-STDY 181: “Do as the Romans Do”: Roman Exemplarity in Antiquity and Beyond: Romans prided themselves on following the example of their illustrious and noble ancestors. The only problem? Some of those ancestors weren’t exactly illustrious or noble—or even good guys! This Classical Studies course aims to answer question about the hows, whats, and whys of Roman Exemplarity, the long-term discourse by which subsequent generations of Romans selected, interpreted, and enacted the lessons provided by their ancestors. We will read from primary documents, look at inscriptions and monuments, and conduct ethical experiments of our own in order to find out what it means to “do as the Romans do”. ### General Education Proram GenEd1110: Classical Mythology: Myth in Antiquity and Today: The myths of ancient Greece and Rome embody both our worst nightmares and our most fabulous fantasies. Heroism, happy endings, and everlasting love blend with disturbing themes of parricide, cannibalism, incest, misogyny, and unthinkable violence. The resulting stories have fascinated generations of artists, writers, and thinkers, and this course will serve as an introduction to this distant but strangely familiar world. We will move from the very first works of Greek literature through the classic Greek tragedies and the Roman reinventions. Along the way, we will ask these fundamental questions: What is “mythology”? What can these ancient stories tell us about ourselves as human-beings, and why are they still so resonant thousands of years later? And how does mythology both ancient and modern continue to reflect and shape our world view today? ### First-Year Seminar Program FYSEMR "What is a Classic?": Classical literature, classical art, classical music all suggest art forms that are fundamental, elevated, perhaps even elite… but why? And who gets to decide what qualifies as ‘classical’, especially when those who constitute today’s intellectual communities are increasingly heterogenous and have greater access to an impossibly vast, impossibly diverse trove of global artistic production?In this class, we are going to read ‘The Classics’—defined within universities as the study of literature from ancient Greece and Rome—in order to open up larger questions about the nature, purpose, and consequence of labelling certain works, aesthetics, and ideas ‘classical’. We will read selections from a broad sampling of written works that survive from antiquity, learning firsthand what it means “to have read” a classic. At the same time, we will be reading, watching, and listening to a diverse array of media that explain, criticize, and reimagine the role of classical literature and ideas in today’s world.