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

Course	CLAS / LIT 230 “Like Strangers in Our Own City": Life and Literature in the Late Roman Republic
Professor	Benjamin Stevens
CRN	17044
Schedule	Tu Th 2:30-3:50 pm Olin 202
Distribution	OLD: B/D	NEW: Foreign Language, Literature & Culture

The last generations of the Roman Republic experienced widespread social change resulting from dispossessions and the loss of traditional lifeways in Italy, sanctioned exploitation abroad, and increasingly intense and varied cultural contacts throughout an unceasingly expanding empire. Roman authors of the period responded to these “consequences of conquest” by fashioning Latin literary languages in diverse genres including private letters, public speeches, the military diary, epic and lyric poetry, and philosophical prose. This combination of ongoing change and linguistic experimentation brought problems of its own and, for us, raises a set of enduring questions. In general, what is the relationship between language and lived experience? What uses of language, and who among its users, are able to bring about change in politics, the economy, society, or culture? If linguistic acts are classified as official, informal, inappropriate, threatening, dangerous, or obscene, among others, may speech be free? During a time of difficult and urgent questions, who may speak and who must listen? Topics include Latin literary history; late Roman Republican politics, society, and culture; the so-called ‘poverty of the [Latin] language’; linguistic and cultural pluralism, purity, and policy; the diversity of attested Roman lives; the differences between 'plainspoken' and 'figured speech'; and the promises and problems of the 'literary'. Readings, all in English, from Caesar, Cicero, Catullus, Lucretius, and Sallust; some of their later biographers, admirers, imitators, and detractors; and modern historiography and literary criticism. No prerequisites; possibility of concurrent Latin tutorial on selected passages from the five principal authors. On-line registration

Course	CLAS / LIT 275 Poetry and Athletics
Professor	William Mullen
CRN	17115
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00-2:20 pm Olin 201
Distribution	OLD: B/D	NEW: Foreign Language, Literature & Culture

The meanings to be seen in athletics have stirred the meditations and praises of poets in many different cultures and genres, and sometimes these poems have been wedded to choral dance in contexts in which several choruses are themselves competing “athletically” for a prize. This course will study the strange intersections of the physical, the social and the sacred we still recognize in sports. We will allot equal time to three different sets of readings: 1) Mesoamerican and native American tales of the foundational ball game, with focus on the Mayan Popol Vuh; 2) victory odes for the ancient Greek games, principally those of Pindar, often considered the greatest lyric poet of the West, concerned with boxing, wrestling, running, pentathlon, pancratium, chariot, dithyramb, and paean; 3) two case studies of the wedding of poetry to athletics in Hawaiian culture: a) chants for the royal surfing festivals, and b) traditional hula viewed, like the Greek dithryamb and paean, as a fusion of words, music and dance in a context which under some circumstances can itself be a prize-awarding athletic event for competing choruses. In all three parts we will read not only the poems themselves but also some scholarship by sports and dance historians on the particular forms of movement they reflect. All readings will be in English, and there are no prerequisites. On-line registration

Course	LIT / CLAS 3034 Homer
Professor	William Mullen
CRN	17114
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30-2:50 pm Olin 201
Distribution	OLD: D	NEW: Foreign Language, Literature & Culture

In taking the measure of the greatness of the Iliad and the Odyssey we will use several complementary approaches. First, in scrutinizing short passages we will compare a range of English translations, from Chapman and Pope to Logue and Reck, and students will become acquainted with the metrical and linguistics properties of the original Greek. Second, we will study the evolution of the approach to the Homeric poems as instances of oral formulaic traditions passed on by illiterate bards for many generations before being crystallized into written texts-- the theoretical approach founded by Parry and Lord and further extended by Nagy. Third, we will fit the poems into the larger context of Indo-European epic as disseminated from India to Ireland. Fourth, we will ponder the archetypes of combat trauma traced in the poems by the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. On-line registration