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.

Course	CLAS / HIST 201 Alexander the Great: Monster or Philosopher-King?
Professor	James Romm
CRN	18214
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 – 11:50 am Olin 204
Distribution	History

Alexander the Great changed the world more completely than any other human being, but did he change it for the better? How should Alexander be understood -- as a tyrant of Hitlerian proportions, or as a philosopher-king seeking to save the Greek world from self-destruction, or as an utterly deluded madman?  Such questions remain very much unresolved among modern historians.  In this course we will attempt to find our own answers (or lack of them) after reading the ancient sources concerning Alexander and examining as much primary evidence as can be gathered.  Students will attain insight not only into a cataclysmic period of history but into the moral and ideological complexities that surround the assessment of historical personality, whether in antiquity or in the modern world.  No Prerequisite, but students will be greatly helped by some familiarity with Greek history or civilization. On-line registration

Course	CLAS / LIT 204 Comparative Literature:The Ancient Mediterranean World: Birth of Text, Birth of Reader
Professor	Benjamin Stevens
CRN	18015
Schedule	Tu Th 9:00 - 10:20 am Olin 203
Distribution	Literature in English

See Literature section for description. On-line registration

Course	CLAS 276 Indo-European Epic
Professor	William Mullen
CRN	18046
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 -2:50 pm Olin 204
Distribution	Foreign Language, Literature, and Culture

Linguists and archaeologists have a rough agreement that there existed a people speaking a language called Proto-Indo-European (PIE), unattested itself but linguistically reconstructable from cognate features in a number of languages covering a geographical spread from Sanskrit to Old Irish. There is little consensus about that people’s original homeland, or  the timing or causes for its migrations as far as the Indus Valley at  one extreme and Ireland at the other. What can be agreed upon most readily from the linguistic evidence of this band of Indo-European cultures is that they shared not merely a common language and social structures but also common literary genres, principally epic and lyric, in which there are signs of common metaphors and even meters. Hence it is possible (without adopting any one theory about PIE history) to compare passages from epics originating in oral traditions and later crystallized into such texts as the Mahabharata and Ramayana in India, the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greece, the Norse Elder Edda, and the Irish Táin Bó Cuailnge. We will read selections from these areas and try to isolate cognate features, on the level of rhythm, diction, tropes, religious and military practices, and narrative structures, and read some of the principal secondary literature of Indo-European comparatists. We will then further try to formulate what may have been distinctive about each epic tradition’s evolution. All texts will be read in English, with occasional glances at metrical and linguistic features of the originals. On-line registration

Course	CLAS / HIST / REL 277 EMPIRES, Ancient and Modern
Professor	Carolyn Dewald / Richard Davis
CRN	18011
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 – 4:20 pm OLINLC 115
Distribution	History

Cross-listed: History, Religion

“The United States today is an empire—but a peculiar kind of empire,” says the conservative British historian Niall Ferguson, and he urges American leaders to learn from British imperialists. The British empire-builders, in their time, garbed themselves in the classical robes of Roman emperors. The Romans set out to complete the conquest of the world that the Macedonian Alexander had tried unsuccessfully to accomplish. And when Alexander conquered the Achaemenids under Darius III, he adopted the imperial customs of the defeated Persian Empire. Where does the idea of world-conquest arise? What is its legacy for American proponents and opponents of our imperial enterprise? This course will explore several of the great world empires of the past: the Achaemenid Empire under Darius I, the Greek world-conquest of Alexander, the Mauryan Empire of Candragupta and Asoka, the Roman Empire, and the modern sea-based British Empire. Along with the individual histories of these imperial formations, the course will attend to the poetics of empire. We will read visions of world-conquest and celebrations of the victors, and explore universalist ideologies as well as the military and administrative practices that enable empires to function and persist. We will look also at some of the struggles for liberation of imperial subjects. On-line registration

Course	CLAS / LIT 314 Ovid
Professor	Benjamin Stevens
CRN	18016
Schedule	Mon Wed 9:00 - 10:20 am RKC 200
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: Literature

“I tried time and again to write prose, / but each time a poem appeared on its own, and / whatever I tried to say was poetry.” So Ovid describes himself as a natural poet, and his enormous output agrees: love poems; poetry about how best to seduce (and where, and whom); fictional letters to faithless lovers from the famous abandoned women of myth; a long poem in which the calendar is made to explain its festival days and rituals; an epic in which one thing is transformed into another, one story somehow ties in to the next, until the very origin of the world is connected, dizzyingly, to Ovid’s own time; and more ... but the rest only after Rome’s greatest living poet had been exiled from the city to the coast of the frigid Black Sea because, to hear him tell it, of “a song and a mistake.” In this course we read all of Ovid, and thus read, along with him and transmuted by him, the full inheritance of Greek and Latin literature: for Ovid the writer is above all a reader, and by reading him we stand to learn how to read well, widely and deeply. Topics include poetic genres; Greco-Roman mythology; the characteristic Roman practice of ‘competitive imitation’ as it appears in translation, allusion, and other kinds of intertextuality; the equally Roman and surprisingly modern ideal of witty or figured speech, in writing as in one’s public persona; and the very human experience, captured especially by Ovid’s last works, of loneliness, alienation, and the fear of being forgotten in death. We also consider a range of approaches to the study of literature. All readings in English; optional concurrent tutorial on select passages in the original Latin. Prerequisites: moderated junior or senior standing and consultation with instructor. On-line registration