Reinventing the Other: Greeks, Romans, Barbarians

Ancient ethnography was a highly conventionalized tradition stretching from "the father of History," Herodotus, to the last historian of the ancient world, Procopius. We will read selections of these two authors' works as well as of Sallust, Tacitus, and lesser known ones. Within various theoretical frameworks'rhetorical, anthropological, structuralist we will reconstruct the shifting images of The Other, explore what they tell us about their producers, and reflect on what ancient ethnography contributed to its modern descendant.