Cathy Keane

The myths of ancient Greece are not only inherently interesting, but they are an incomparable starting point for the study of the ancient world, and they have offered numerous images and paradigms to poets, artists, and theorists. This course provides an introduction to the major Greek myths, their role in literature and art, their historical and social background, and ancient and modern approaches to their interpretation. Student work will include discussing course material in sections and online, taking two exams covering both the myths themselves and the ancient authors who represent our richest sources, and writing several essays interpreting or comparing ancient literary treatments. Open to first-year students.

This Writing Intensive seminar provides a thorough introduction to the works of prose fiction written in Ancient Greek and Latin, most dating from the 1st through 3rd centuries CE. These novels are concerned with romance, human psychology and sexuality, exotic travel and adventure, magical phenomena, and religious experience. Once excluded from the classical literary canon, in the last half-century these works came to occupy an important place in the study of the ancient Mediterranean world. We will consider them both as literary texts that yield many interesting ideas through close reading, and as vehicles for Greek and Roman constructions of cultural, social, and gender categories. Selections from modern scholarship on the novels will assist us in both these projects. So will the Writing Intensive structure of the course: all students will write, receive feedback on, and revise three analytical papers and perform regular shorter exercises designed to develop relevant skills. We will spend some class time talking about writing, taking inspiration both from the ancient texts (themselves great rhetorical tours de force and examinations of rhetoric’s uses) and from modern scholarship.

This course focuses on the genre of hexameter satire represented by the Roman poets Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal (2nd century BCE - 2nd century CE). The Roman professor Quintilian called satire "entirely Roman" (tota nostra), and our readings will allow us to explore the meaning of this claim for satire's authors and readers. We will read a large sampling of satiric verse in the original Latin, practice reading the dactylic hexameter, and observe and discuss differences between the poets' styles and themes. We'll also read and discuss scholarship on the genre's formal characteristics and influences, its origins in Republican literary culture, and its development in the Imperial period.

The unlikely emperor Claudius, who ruled from 41-54 CE, is famous for his physical disabilities, his scholarly pursuits, his surprising elevation to power in middle age upon the murder of Caligula, his tragic promotion of his successor the teenaged Nero, his postmortem deification by the senate, and his modern reception in fiction and television. In this course we read two Latin texts that sum up Claudius’ life, character, and reign: the Life of Claudius from Suetonius’ 2nd-century CE collection of imperial biographies, and the vicious satire written just after Claudius’ death, attributed to Seneca and called Apocolocyntosis (“Ascent of the Pumpkinhead into Heaven”). We also sample the historical writing of Tacitus and the satire of Juvenal. For all their distortions, all these texts are invaluable accounts of the Julio-Claudian era and the evolution of the institution of the principate. While we sharpen our translation skills, we also seek to understand the sources in context by discussing additional ancient accounts and studies by modern scholars and engaging in analyses of our own.