Ancient History

CLST 11.02   Ancient Sparta.  The city-state of Sparta, which played a leading role in the Greek world for centuries, attracted a great deal of attention in ancient times and continues to exercise a hold on the imagination of scholars and non-scholars alike.  This course explores the birth, rise, and fall of the Spartan state, from its foundation c. 1000 BCE to 371 BCE and the disastrous defeat at Leuctra, which effectively ended Spartan hegemony.  We will pay careful attention to both the relevant literary sources and to the extant remains of Spartan material culture, such as pottery and figurines; hence this course draws on the subject matter and methodologies typically associated with both history and archaeology. SOC, W. 

CLST 11.06  Sex, Celibacy, and the Problem of Purity: Asceticism and the Human Body in Late Antiquity   Examines the changing understanding of the body, marriage, sexuality, and gender within Christianity through reading saints' lives, letters, polemical essays, and legal texts. TMV, W.

CLST 11.11  War Stories     Surveys stories of deployment and return from antiquity to the present and especially the self-fashioning narratives of individuals who have witnessed the realities of war and return home. Texts include Homer, Odyssey; Remarque, The Road Back; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds; Phil Klay, Redeployment. SOC, W

CLST 11.17 Greek Athletics   Athletics played a pivotal role in the ancient Greek world, and the history of athletics offers insight some of the basic forces shaping ancient Greek society. The topics we will cover include the origins of Greek athletics; the ancient Olympics; the reasons why the Greeks chose to compete in the nude; the connections between athletics and war, athletics and sex, and athletics and art; and the participation of women in athletics. SOC, W

CLST 11.19 Before Billboards and Twitter: Roman Coins Text. This hands-on course focuses on the ancient Roman production, the development and use of money at Rome, and the logistics of coin production, and the methods for studying coinage to write ancient history. Students learn basic numismatic methodology by handling and studing coins from the collection in Dartmouth's Hood Museum of Art and prepare material for a coin installation focusing on the Roman war against Cleopatra and Mark Antony. A final unit treats the ethics of coin collection and the role of the modern museum. Soc, W. Stewart. 

CLST 11.20 The Slaves' History of Rome This course examines the slave system of ancient Rome from the slaves' perspective. Topics include the historiography of slavery; the economic roles of slaves and their structural relation to other classess of free and unfree labor; the historical context and political motives for the development of slave societies; slaves' evolvoing political, social, and legal roles; the cultural processes that made and un-made the legal definition of the slave as a thing without status or identity. SOC, CI Stewart, 11

CLST 14  Greek History: Archaic and Classical Greece  Surveys the major events in the history of ancient Greece from the emergence of Mycenaean palace culture to the end of the Peloponnesian War. During this period, the Greeks spread their culture, language, and religion throughout the Mediterranean, invented democracy, and enshrined their values in art and literature. Includes the origins, economy, institutions, and warfare of the classical city-state, the public and private lives of citizens, women, children, and slaves. SOC, W

CLST 15  Alexander the Great and the Macedonian Kings     Examines the history of Alexander the Great and of Greek-speaking peoples in the eastern Mediterranean during the 4th-1st centuries BCE, together with the remarkable cultural, military, political, and economic innovations of this period of history. SOC, W

CLST 17  Roman History: The Republic  Surveys the history of the Roman people from 753 (traditional date of the founding of Rome) to 44 B.C. (the assassination of Julius Caesar). Topics include the development of Roman law, the conquest of all lands bordering on the Mediterranean, and the civil wars that destroyed Republican government. Particular emphasis is placed on the Roman political community: the political, religious and social factors that influenced the definition of the Roman aristocracy in the fourth century, the institutions that maintained the ascendancy of the elite, the military and political values inherent in the citizenship, the social and political mechanisms that militated against civil dissent, and the role of political values in the eventual destruction of Republican government from within. SOC, W

CLST 18  History of the Roman Empire: Roman Principate to Christian Empire  Surveys the major events from Octavian's victory at Actium in 31 B.C. through the rule of Septimius Severus. This course considers the logic of the Roman system, including such topics as the reasoning that favored the leadership of a single individual, the evolving relationship between the princeps and the senatorial aristocracy, and the role of the army in the assimilation of non-Roman peoples. SOC, W

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 hte histor: Greek and Roman liberary records; British and Roman coinage; inscription 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 diffuerent peoples/cultures interacted and where cultural as well as physical boundararies were crossed. Whereas the proncince of Britain illustrates the typical structures of Roman society and culture, its frontier soceity problematizes questions of lived experiences and cultural hybridity, how we study the heterogeneuous experience of status, gender, ethnicity of various peoples in antiquity. SOC, W. Stewart.