Courses listed as Classics (CLAS) are entirely in English and require no knowledge of an ancient language. Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit all involve the study of the language itself.

An introductory survey of the history, literature and material culture of the ancient Greeks, beginning with their arrival in the Agean around 2000 BC and ending with their defeat by Alexander the Great in 338; we will take excursions also into the Near Eastern lands with which the Greeks had important contacts, including Egypt, Babylon and Persia. Focus will be on the development of the polis or city-state with its distinctive political organization, which, in the case of Athens, made possible the first working democracy in the western world; the flowering of the polis-based culture in the so-called Golden Age; and the decline of Athens and of the Greek polis generally, leading to the collapse of democracy and submission to foreign rule. Readings will be taken mostly from primary sources: the writings of Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle and Demosthenes. We will make extensive use of slides and of web-based materials to examine the surviving monuments of this era.