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

CRN	94107	Distribution	C / * (History)
Course No.	HIST / CLAS 100
Title	Ancient History
Professor	Carolyn Dewald
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 202

Cross-listed: History

The course has two main purposes: first, to see how much is implied by the notion of historical causation and what it means to 'think historically'; second, to gain a sense of the way the foundations of western culture were first shaped in the Near East and then developed quite distinctively in the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome. We will begin with the beginnings of recorded civilization in the Near East about 7000 BCE and will move fairly quickly through the Neolithic period, to the urban revolution of the third millennium (early Bronze Age). The focus then will sharpen to the Mediterranean basin: Greece (c.1600-320 BCE) and Rome (c. 600 BCE-430 CE). The main emphasis of the course will be on these latter two cultures and understanding how they came to be shaped in quite different and distinctive ways. We will also, however, focus on the chronological and causal sweep of ancient Mediterranean culture as a whole, from its first beginnings to the death of St. Augustine, with the Vandals storming the gates of Carthage. We will look at underlying features of geography and demography, archaeology (and how to read archaeological remains historically), developments in technology and trade, religion, politics, family organization, communities and governments, art and literacy -- and we will try to consider how all these different kinds of causally-linked factors come together in different ways, at different points in the chronological and geographical continuum of the ancient Mediterranean world.

CRN	94179	Distribution	B/D / * (Humanities)
Course No.	CLAS / LIT 221
Title	From Babel to Brain – The Origin of Language in Western Thought
Professor	Benjamin Stevens
Schedule	Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 201

Where does language come from, and why do languages differ? This course explores the history of Western answers to these questions and their implications for human nature and identity. Topics considered include the role of the divine; whether language is “natural” or “conventional”; linguistic diversity, evolution, and ecology; language acquisition and whether or not “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”; sound, gesture, and symbol; biology, evolutionary theory, and neuropsychology; ethology and zoosemiotics; and language as blessing and curse. Readings include the Biblical account of Babel and related stories; Greek and Roman philosophical speculation; Medieval and Renaissance searches for Adamitic, “perfect”, and “universal” languages; tales of “feral children” and other foundlings; and more recent perspectives on language origins: philological, scientific, critical, and fictional. No prerequisites, but knowledge of languages other than English potentially useful.

CRN	94141	Distribution	B/D / * (FLLC)
Course No.	CLAS / REL 272
Title	India and Greece
Professor	William Mullen / Kristin Scheible
Schedule	Tu Th 11:30 am - 12:50 am OLIN 201

In this course, team-taught by specialists in ancient Greek and in ancient Indic culture respectively, we will explore the present state of the comparative method as applied to the histories and mythologies of two complex civilizations.  We will begin with the perennial question of  shared Indo-European origins and what, if anything, we might posit as “history.”  Turning to rich and foundational cosmogonic and catastrophic myths operative in texts such as Hesiod's Theogony and Ovid’s Metamorphoses and in the Indic Vedas and Puranas, we will consider cosmological structures of time and space, and also varying possible relations between males and females both mortal and immortal.  We will continue to pursue these themes in the enduring epics, the Odyssey and the Ramayana. In a more intensive mode, reflecting the special scholarship of each professor, we will study the interaction of ritual and sacred places in selected texts, principally the Odes of Pindar and the Edicts of Asoka.  We will end the course revisiting historical questions, examining evidence of direct contact between the two civilizations, and how they represented each other as the other, the “barbarian.”