Spring 2025

CLST 07   First-Year Seminar in Classics Topic to be determined

CLST 10.03 Mind, Heart, Brain. Considers some of the earlest recorded theories of human and animal psychology worked out in Greco-Roman antiquity. What physical substances and/or bodily organs give rise to the characteristic functions of living things, such as sense-perception, self-movement, and self-awareness? How it is that human beings are capable of concept-formation, reasoning, memory, and emotion, and to what extent are these capacities also present in non-human aniimals? Is the mind-stuff radically distinct from the body and its afflictions, or initmately bound to it? Students work collaboratively to develop their own analyses of these and related issues in a range of philosophical, scientific, and medical texts from both Greece and Rome.  TMV, W. Graver

CLST 10.13 New Testament. Studies the collection of Christian texts now called the "New Testament" for the insights they provide into the complex cultural interactions in the first-century Mediterranean world. Three primary texts, the Gospel of Mark, Paul's letter to the Colossians, and Paul's letter to James, will be examined in light of their original Jewish context and their embeddedness in Greek thought and Roman socio-political structures. This small-enrollment class is taught conjointly with GRK 29, but with assignments and assessment appropriate for students reading entirely in English. TMV, W. Whaley

CLST 19 Roman Britain (Methods and Theory in Ancient History) This seminar explores the history of Roman Britain, from the pre-Roman Iron Age cultures through the first Roman contact (55-54 BCE), the development of a Roman presence, up to the official Roman withdrawal by imperial decision in 410 CE. We survey the kinds of evidence to write the history: Greek and Roman literary records; British and Roman coinage; inscriptions on stone and wood; archaeological material, including cult installations, military camps, houses, walls. Roman Britain was both an administrative region of the Roman Empire and a frontier, a place where different peoples/cultures interacted and where cultural as well as physical boundaries were crossed. Whereas the province of Britain illustrates the typical structures of Roman society and culture, its frontier society problematizes questions of lived experience and cultural hybridity, how we study the heterogeneous experience of status, gender, ethnicity of various peoples in antiquity.  SOC, W. Stewart

CLST 20 Greek Archaeology: First Hominins to Mycenean Palaces. This course traces the cultural evolution of humanity in the Aegean basin from the era of hunting and gathering (Palaeolithic-Mesolithic) through the early village farming stage (Neolithic) and the formative period of Aegean civilization (Early Bronze Age) into the age of the great palatial cultures of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. The emphasis in the early part of the course will be on the different economic bases of early life in the Aegean and on regional variation within it. In the latter half of the course, study of the palaces, fortified citadels, and royal tombs at such sites as Knossos, Mycenae, Tiryns, and Troy will lead to discussions of the Greek myths about Atlantis, King Minos' sea empire, and the Trojan War, and their basis in historical fact. May be taken in partial fulfillment of the major in Art History.  SOC, W. Hruby

CLST 30/31               Off-Campus Study Program in Greece. Christesen

GRK 1.02/3.02  Intensive Greek    A double course (two time slots) covering both GRK 1 and GRK 3 in a single term. Introduces all the basics of grammar and syntax and provides a gradual introduction to the reading of continuous texts. Tell

GRK 3   Intermediate Greek  Continued study of Greek grammar and syntax and an introduction to reading in prose authors. Satisfies the College language requirement. Schultz

GRK 29 New Testament. A brief introduction to the language, vocabulary, and idiom of New Testament Greek, followed by readings in the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul.  TMV, W. Whaley

LAT 2   Latin 2  Continues the study of the Latin language, with a look at the history and culture of Roman Britain and the city of Rome in the first century AD. Includes an introduction to Roman funerary inscriptions, curse tablets, and coins.

LAT 3   Latin 3  Completes the introduction to Latin grammar and syntax, then moves into unadapted selections from Pliny, Catullus, Ovid, and other Roman authors.

LAT 10.04 Latin Manuscripts and Paleography An introduction to paleography, from the scripts of Late Antiquity to the Humanist scripts of the Renaissance. Students learn to transcribe and translate Latin manuscripts and to understand them both as transmitters of texts and as material objects that tell their own stories. Lynn

LAT 35 Satire and Humor. Basically a humorous monologue on contemporary topics, verse satire is the one kind of writing the Romans claimed as entirely their own. The class will read some of the best-known examples by Horace and Juvenal and may also explore other examples of Roman humor: epigrams by Catullus or Martial, Seneca's Pumpkinification, Petronius's Satyricon.  LIT, W. Graver