NYU > Classics > Undergraduate Courses Spring 2010

Undergraduate Courses Spring 2010

V27.0004 (001) Elementary Latin M-Th 9:30-10:45 La Londe

This course is an introduction to classical Latin. This is the second semester of a two-semester course designed to prepare students to read the major classical prose writers (Caesar, Cicero, Livy) and poets (Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Ovid). This semester, we shall cover Chapters 10-15 of Learn to Read Latin. We shall finish the semester by reading selections from Latin authors with a specific focus on Catullus.

V27.0004 (002) Elementary Latin M-Th 3:30-4:45 Wisniewski

V27.0006 (001) Intermediate Latin M, T, Th 9:30-10:45 Johnson

In this course we will read one of the greatest works of Western literature, Vergil's Aeneid. Students will learn to read Latin metrically to fully appreciate the work in its original form. A large component of the course will involve in-class translation of selected books of the Aeneid, and we will read the epic in full in translation and place it in its historical and literary context through class discussions and other exercises.

V27.0006 (002) Intermediate Latin M, T, Th 3:30-4:45 Lockey

V27.0008 Elementary Greek M-Th 11:00-12:15 Lockey

In the second semester of this course, we will continue working with Mastronade's Introduction to Attic Greek, reviewing grammar and improving knowledge of the Greek language. We will finish the textbook before the end of the spring semester and move on to reading a speech of the Greek writer Lysias, in order to prepare students for Intermediate Greek or give those who are not continuing the opportunity to read an ancient text in its original language.

V27.0010 Intermediate Greek M, T, Th 9:30-10:45 Becker

V27.0144 Comedies of Greece & Rome Th. 3:30-6:10 Meineck

V27.0150 Ancient Art at Risk: Conservation, Ethics, and Cultural Property Mon. 4:55-7:25 Connelly

This course examines the environmental, material, social, and political forces that put ancient art at risk, including exposure to natural elements, acid rain, pollution, dam-building, tourism, urban development, armed conflict, looting, theft, and the illicit trade in antiquities. Issues of conservation, preservation, and ethics will be considered through case studies that focus on sites, monuments, and materials. Team-taught with physical chemist Prof. Norbert S. Baer of the Institute of Fine Arts Conservation Center, this course reviews a range of applied technologies used in the analysis of ancient objects: radiocarbon dating, thermoluminesence, dendrochronology, stable isotope analysis, dedolomotization, and elemental analysis. Authenticity and forgery, dating and provenience, and the sourcing of ancient materials are among issues examined. The use of coins, inscriptions, stamped amphora handles, and ceramics, will be evaluated as criteria for establishing absolute and relative chronologies. Consideration will be given to the role that stylistic analysis and connoisseurship have played in our understanding of ancient art. This interdisciplinary course is ideal for students who interested in the intersection of archaeology with law, science, ethics, public policy, cultural resource management, and the environment. We will track developments in global cultural property laws, international conventions, and the repatriation of cultural materials.

V27.0243 The Greek World: Alexander-Augustus M & W 3:30-4:45 Monson

Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire brought Greeks to the edges of their known world and brought great prosperity back to Greece. The centuries of cultural efflorescence that began after Alexander’s death were mixed with intense warfare, as his generals seized territory, established dynasties, and battled for dominance. While Greeks colonized the east, their interaction with non-Greeks stimulated new religious, intellectual, and social movements. Meanwhile, emerging empires on the periphery of the Greek world posed new challenges: Romans and Carthaginians in the west, Indians and Parthians in the east. The course examines these times down to the Roman unification of the Mediterranean under Augustus.

V27.0291 Ancient Empires M & W 11:00-12:15 Monson

What are empires? How were they first created? Why did they rise and fall? By 500 BCE the Achaemenid Persian empire extended from India to Egypt. By 120 CE Imperial Rome stretched from Britain to Mesopotamia while simultaneously the Han Chinese empire covered the area from Mongolia to Vietnam. Their size and complexity made these empires spectacularly diverse but also gave them certain common features: monarchical government, cultural and economic integration, ideological and religious change, and tensions on the frontiers. Reading works by modern scholars and by authors who lived at the time, we will discuss what each case tells us about the others and about our perceptions of empire today.

V27.0293 Socrates & His Critics T & Th 9:30-10:45 Renzi

Despite having written nothing himself, Socrates is among the most influential—if not the most influential—philosopher in the Western tradition, for it is with Socrates that philosophy seems first to move from natural history to an explicit concern for human affairs. Indeed, so great is the magnitude of this change that we continue to term those earlier thinkers “pre-Socratic philosophers.” His stature is marked again in the name given to a distinctive form of philosophical literature, the Socratic dialogue, and an approach to philosophical inquiry and instruction, the Socratic method. In antiquity, his thought, importantly, inspired Plato, Xenophon, the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Cynics, beyond those thinkers stretching to influence in Rome and Judea...and four centuries before the presumed time of Jesus, Socrates had already suffered martyrdom for his idiosyncratic political, philosophical, and religious views. In modernity, his exemplary life alternately fascinates and repels the attention of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; though criticisms of his mode of existence he had already endured in his own time at the hands of the comedian Aristophanes, among others. Given the state of the evidence, one can look only to the history of the reception of his thought to try to recover any sense of the “historical Socrates”; but we must likewise ask whether he does not perhaps exert a greater influence as a result of the reception of the doxography itself than for his actual intellectual contributions. In short, had Socrates never existed, would not the tradition essentially have had to create him, in its move from its origins to ethics and political philosophy? Even given that he did actually live, is what we have of him really just such a necessary fiction?

V27.0297 Honors Seminar arranged

V27.0404 Classical Mythology T & Th 11:00-12:15 Meineck

Discusses the myths and legends of Greek and Roman mythology and the gods, demigods, heroes, nymphs, monsters, and everyday mortals who played out their parts in this mythology. Begins with creation, as vividly described by Hesiod in the Theogony, and ends with the great Trojan War and the return of the Greek heroes, especially Odysseus. Roman myth is also treated, with emphasis on Aeneas and the foundation legends of Rome.

V27.0873 Advanced Latin: Roman Love Elegy T & Th 11:00-12:15 von Glinski

Roman love elegy presents a genre that enjoyed an extraordinary but short-lived flowering in the Augustan period, with the relationship of the poet/lover and his beloved/muse at its center. We shall read selections from Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid, discussing how the authors establish and push the boundaries of this genre. While novel perceptions of love, gender and sex are going to be central concerns, we shall see how the radical re-evaluation of traditional terms reflects more broadly on this time of great social and political upheaval.

V27.0975 Advanced Greek: Plato's Symposium T & Th 3:30-4:45 von Glinski

We shall read Plato’s Symposium in which the theme of love is discussed in a series of speeches made at a dinner party hosted by the tragedian Agathon in 416 BC. The social and literary institution of the symposium provides the dramatic setting and a cast of characters from Socrates and the comedian Aristophanes to the surprise appearance of the notorious Alcibiades. Special attention will be paid to the interaction of the philosophical argument and its literary presentation such as multiple narrative layers, blending of genres and the artistic and erotic rivalry of the participants.

V55.0403 Antiquity & the Enlightenment M & W 11:00-12:15 Connolly

“Know yourself” was the phrase inscribed over the entrance to the great temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece. Roman thinkers called the search for the good life cura sui, the “cultivation of the self.” Our concerns in this course are how Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, and the Enlightenment thinkers inspired by antiquity contemplate the well-lived life in the context of the political community (polis, res publica, empire, civitas Dei, cosmopolis). Who belongs to the community, who does not, and why? Is it best organized on the basis of reason, common tradition, language, or faith? Is the community perfectible? Our texts explore the challenge of living well in various civic contexts (and in retreat from them); the extent of citizens’ duties and responsibilities to one another; and the role of education in shaping community. However, this isn’t a course in political theory. We will concentrate on the ways these texts work as literary texts. We will ask how different genres—drama, historical prose, philosophical dialogue, epic poetry, treatise, opera, and memoir — present ideas; and we will examine the role of literature and art in society and politics.