Graduate

Restricted to graduate students. We focus on the question of how to study the Roman monarchy today: as Roman history or as part of the global history of monarchy? Focus is on methodology, emphasizing comparative and transdisciplinary approaches.

A direct and detailed exploration of the uses of classical learning during the first decades after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, showing how Renaissance knowledge of Latin and Greek and of classical antiquity was rapidly transformed or customized for a non-European environment. The focus will  be on scholarly categories of the period (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, epistolography, historiography, poetry)  approached primarily through analysis of Latin texts authored by missionary friars and by scholars from the indigenous Nahua elites of central Mexico.

What makes a narrative persuasive? How did Athenian authors use language to make narrated events vivid and plausible to an audience who had not seen them? What emotions did they try to excite?

Continuation of Imperial Greek Prose A through regular colloquium meetings.

First course in a required two-year sequence. Focus is on the origins, development, and interaction of Greek and Latin literature, history, and philosophy. Greek and Latin material taught in alternate years. Focus is on translation, textual criticism, genre, the role of Greece in shaping Roman literature, and oral versus written discourse.

Since Herodotus in the 5th century BCE, the Persian Empire has been represented as the exemplar of oriental despotism and imperial arrogance, a looming presence and worthy foil for the West and Greek democracy. History of the Achaemenid Empire, beginning with the rise of the Medes in the 7th century BCE to the fall of the Achaemenids to Alexander the Great's armies in 331 BCE. Focus on the intimate relationship between religion and empire and will also survey the diverse cultural institutions and religious practices found within the Empire.

Comparative and archaeological view of urban design and sustainability. How fast changing cities challenge human relationships with nature. Innovation and change, growth, industrial development, the consumption of goods and materials. Five millennia of city life including Near Eastern city states, Graeco-Roman antiquity, the Indus Valley, and the Americas.

Overview of the archaeology of early Roman Spain (3rd c. BCE-1st c. CE) and the processes involved in the creation of the Roman provinces. What is a province? Critical (postcolonial) analysis of the "Romanization" paradigm. Study of the role of the army, early Roman settlements and Roman provincial capitals in tying province and metropolis together. Change and the persistence of local heritage (temples, houses, tombs, coins). Hispania in Rome and Rome in Hispania.