Global Arc

This course considers the problem of slavery in the Roman world, from the early Republic to the end of the Empire. There will be some coverage of the background developments in the slave system under the earlier age of the Greek city-states. A wide range of subjects concerning slavery in Roman society will be considered including the causes of the creation of the Roman slave system, the ways in which it was maintained, its main social and economic functions, and the problem of resistance to servitude.

From epic bards, drinking songs, and classical tragedies to judicial speeches, funeral comedies and gladiators - ancient Greece and Rome knew how to put on a show! We will cover the most important performative genres of antiquity. We will read texts from the archaic to the Roman Imperial period in English translation, paying special attention to the reconstruction of their performance and cultural contexts. We will also listen to modern reconstructions of ancient music and look at ancient art representing various types of spectacles. The course also introduces occasional comparative material from other cultures, ancient and modern.

The historians of Greece and Rome produced some of the most exciting and influential writings to survive from antiquity. This course investigates how and why ancient Greeks and Roman authors represent the past. Substantial selections from the major classical historians, as well as from the epic poets who influenced and challenged them in preserving the memory of great deeds. Emphasis will be less on the value of these ancient texts as sources of information than on how historical writing develops in response to different social and political circumstances. No prior knowledge of Greek or Roman history or literature is required.

Ranging from the Neolithic to the 21st century, this course will survey the history of human bondage. Topics to be explored include the role of slavery in the rise of the first Neolithic states; the institutionalization of slavery in ancient Mesopotamia, the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, and ancient China; the proliferation of slave systems elsewhere in Eurasia and on the African continent; the economic and political transformation of the Old and New Worlds through the commodification of African and Native American bodies; and the feedback loops linking ancient slave systems to modern ones.

Nature shapes how many of us think about the world. It's a balanced ecological system; the opposite of culture; a way of explaining how living things work; and a way of regulating how living things, especially people, should live. We will look at how ideas about natures, Nature, and "living naturally" take shape in texts from ancient Greece and Rome. We'll consider the Greek and Roman texts in relationship to other ways of imagining human and non-human life and the world in the Mediterranean and other cultures. We'll think, too, about how these ancient ideas bear on how we think about nature today-and how we might think differently.

In this course students will engage with modern social science research on cultural globalization as well as with the texts and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, broadly construed (Greece, Rome, Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, etc.). Students will explore how intercultural contact in the ancient Mediterranean set the stage for local globalization processes and served as the origin for modern globalization. Moreover, students will gain the tools to compare and contrast how people in the ancient and modern worlds reacted to intensive globalization and define their identities against it.

Our focus is the city of Constantinople. Designated 'New Rome' to rule the Christian East at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, the capital of the Byzantine empire was considered the greatest metropolis of the middle ages. We will study the city through primary texts in translation and examine its surviving monuments and urban landscape. To encourage individual engagement with the city, each student will assume a typical persona drawn from the readings, from whose perspective she or he will observe the city as part of a broader assignment.

Where does medicine begin in the West? In this course, we will go back to the earliest medical texts written in ancient Greece that try to give an account of disease as a natural phenomenon that happens inside the biological body. Our aim is not simply to reconstruct the theories of health and disease that these authors put forth. It is also to see the kinds of questions and problems that arise when healers take responsibility for the care and treatment of bodies.

What are the features of persuasive political speech? The reliance of democratic politics on memorable oratory stems from traditions dating back to ancient Greece and Rome which were revived in the modern era of parliamentary debates and stump speeches. This course will analyze the rhetorical structure of famous political speeches over time in a bid to better understand the potent mixture of aesthetics and ideology that characterizes political rhetoric, as well as the equally long tradition of regarding political rhetoric as insincere and unscrupulous. Students will try their hand at political speech-writing and oratory in class.

An introduction to the basic principles of a major system of civil law. The course will trace the beginnings of these legal principles in the society that produced them in the first half of the course, and will examine the afterlife of the Roman legal system - with an emphasis on colonial contexts - in the second half.