Undergraduate

The Classic Myths

Telling stories is one of the most common ways that humans make sense of the world and their lives in it. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, these stories were very often in the form of tales of the adventures, triumphs and sufferings of gods and heroes – what we call classical myths. This class examines many of these myths, what they meant to Greeks and Romans, and what they still mean for us. We will cover major myths (including myths of creation, myths of nature and the stars, the Trojan war myths, the story of the house of Oedipus, the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, the career of Aeneas, and the myths of the early Roman kings) and the various media that record them (including ancient literature in translation and visual representations). This serves as an excellent introduction to ancient Mediterranean culture and society: through the myths we can learn more about ancient religion, politics and art. We will also discuss post-ancient responses to the classical myths, from medieval revulsion to modern poetry to spectacular Hollywood renditions. No previous experience of classical studies is necessary.

(Spring 2017, Spring 2019)

Republican Prose

This course introduces students to a pair of the most famous Latin prose authors, Caesar and Cicero, as an entry-point into reading Latin literature. Both authors write in elegant and appealing Latin and are major actors in the dramatic (and sometimes disheartening/horrifying) stories of Roman imperial expansion and the collapse of the Roman Republic. The class is a chance to strengthen skills acquired in introductory language classes and to gain new experiences in reading longer sections from the works of major Latin authors. Through reading of texts and English-to-Latin sentences, we will systematically review Latin forms and sentence structure (morphology and syntax) and work on building vocabulary.

(Spring 2017)

Ancient Religion

The ancient Mediterranean world was a world full of gods: from the poems of Homer to the small towns of the Roman empire, we can find people constantly interacting with and thinking about the gods. Myth, ritual, oracles, mystery cults, magic, philosophy: these were all ways that Greeks and Romans engaged with the divine. War, peace, health, sickness, hope, fear: these were some of the reasons for these engagements. This course explores the polytheism of ancient Greece and Rome (c.800 BCE to c.200 CE), with close attention to both the ancient literary evidence and the archaeological material from the period. We will seek to understand both the long-term continuities and the important changes in religious life during Mediterranean antiquity.

The emphasis of the course is on the social life of ancient religion: we will examine how the structures of private life (including gender and freedom/slavery), of the ancient city-state (politics, law), and of empires (violence, political power) impacted how ancient people interacted with the gods (and even which gods).

(Fall 2019)

Ancient Times: Myth, History, Measurement

What time is it? How old is the earth? Where are we located in history? For us these questions may have simple answers: we can look at a watch or a calendar or a timeline. But ancient people thought very differently about these questions. The aim of this class is to see how. We will look at a variety of ancient evidence, including literature (in translation) and archaeology, to discover how Greeks and Romans thought about the deep past (mythic time), how they understood the direction and order of history, and how they organized and calculated time in their communities. We will also consider how ancient Jews and Christians came to reject classical conceptions of time and how this rejection still informs modern ideas about time and history.

(Spring 2020)

In the past I have also taught Greek History, Roman History and Livy.

Graduate Seminars

Voting the Divine: Religious Disputes and Communal Decision-making in the Roman Empire (co-taught with Prof. Susanna Elm)

Focusing on a selection of texts and events from the early to the later Roman empire this course will investigate forms of communal decisions on matters “religious.” Taking our cue from contemporary theoretical scholarship on democratic practices, voting, arbitration and so on, we want to investigate the extent to which decisions regarding the divine were in fact communal, how such communal decisions functioned, and what that may tell us about deliberation, competitive argumentation, and modes of acceptance with regard to the divine. It is our aim to see whether communal deliberations, debates and decisions might be a fruitful analytic framework (1.) to think about religion in the Roman empire in ways other than the standard narratives, and (2.) to explore venues for “democratic” behavior in a premodern empire other than the more obvious “political” communities and regimes.

Roman Republican Pasts: An Anthropology of Roman Republican Historical Culture

How did Romans of the Republican period understand “history”? What did they know of the past of their own city and how did they relate that history? Did the Romans have historical consciousness and, if so, what was it like? In this seminar we will focus on these questions through both now-traditional disciplinary lenses (the study of historiography, the study of memory, the exemplary habit) and in light of recent developments in the anthropologies of time and of history. Our main ancient materials will be the fragmentary historians of the Roman Republic, select readings from extant late Republican literature that address the question of the past (Varro, Sallust), and the material evidence (epigraphy, architectural monuments and numismatic evidence). Our approach to this evidence will be anthropological and comparative: through the semester, we will put Roman materials into dialogue with recent anthropological and postcolonial studies of diverse historicities; the goal is to decolonize Roman Republican pasts.

Josephus: Writing a Self in the Roman Mediterranean (co-taught with Prof. Daniel Boyarin)

The historian Josephus tells us many things about himself: he was a Judean priest and committed to God and his law; a general in the Great Revolt against Rome; a prophet of Vespasian’s rise to the emperorship; an author of Greek historiography; a Roman citizen named Titus Flavius Josephus. But how and why does he tell us all this? Through readings of his Vita and Bellum Judaicum, we will seek in this seminar to understand Josephus’ written self in the context of Greek historiography, Roman imperial history
and the history of the Judaean people during the Second Temple Period (and after). As a figure at the intersection of the Greco-Roman world and the cultures of the Near East in the first century CE, Josephus’ complex subjectivity will lead us towards questions of identity (“Hellenization”; “Romanization”) and resistance/accommodation to empire.

(Taught Fall 2018)

Polytheism in Rome

As scholars have become increasingly conscious of the polemical overtones of paganism as a label for ancient religious cultures, its most popular substitute, polytheism, has received much less scrutiny. But what do students of Roman culture gain by focusing on the multiplicity of the Roman gods? Our investigation will have two strands: we will take a critical look at the literature on “polytheism” as a concept in the study of religion and we will look at (some of the) literary and material evidence for Roman engagement with multiple deities. For the latter strand, we will spend several meetings reading significant selections from Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, a particularly valuable witness to the Roman (and Greek) intellectual reckoning with divine plurality, and the fragments of the later books of Varro’s Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum.

(Taught Fall 2016)

Augustine’s Rome

This seminar will center on a detailed reading of the first five books of Augustine’s De Civitate Dei in its historical context. Written in reaction to the traumatic Fall of Rome in 410, Augustine’s big book has long been considered a (timeless?) classic of political philosophy and Christian theology. We will take a different approach, reading Augustine as a ‘Roman thinker’, a thinker of ‘Rome’ and as a subject of the late Roman Empire.

To put Augustine’s treatise in context, we will approach several different historical topics. One will be an investigation of the form and strength of the late antique Roman State in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. So often, this state has been caricatured as either weak or overbearing. Augustine gives a valuable perspective from the periphery and from the Church on the working of this Theodosian state. We will also address the question of violence­–state violence, ‘barbarian’ violence, private violence–and its effects. Another important question will be the social role of historical memory in late antiquity and the question of how that memory was mediated by ‘classic’ texts for figures like Augustine. In addition to the De Civitate Dei, we will read sermons and letters by Augustine that address these topics.

(Taught Spring 2016)

Religion in the Roman Republic

“It is not in numbers that we are superior to the Spaniards, nor in personal strength to the Gauls, nor in cunning to the Carthaginians, nor in arts to the Greeks, nor in the natural acuteness which seems to be implanted in the people of this land and country, to the Italian and Latin tribes; but it is in and by means of piety and ritual precision, and the special wisdom of perceiving that all things are governed and managed by the divine power of the immortal gods, that we have been and are superior to all other countries and nations.” (Cic. Har. 19). Cicero’s claim that the piety of the Romans was their unique quality has not always found the agreement of modern students of Roman history. Indeed, the religious life of Republican Rome has frequently been described as “cold” and “formal” and the idea that religion was entirely embedded in Republican politics has been remarkably persistent. In line with recent scholarly trends, this seminar will reconsider the place of religion in Roman Republican society, seeking to move past modern stereotypes and to identify the complexity and diversity of interaction with the gods in Roman social life.

 The seminar will be project based. Each student will be responsible for a set of primary sources related to key historical problems, including religion of the Big Man (Africanus, Sulla and Pompey); the religion of votive offerings; divine signs and their interpretation; Republican colonial religion; Roman imperialists in the Hellenistic Greek religious landscape; philosophy as a religious option etc. The problems all require study of combinations of literary, documentary and archaeological sources. Seminar papers will be developed over three in-class presentations on the primary materials, on the relevant secondary literature and on the project as a whole.

(Taught Fall 2014)

I also teach or have taught graduate surveys in Latin literature, Roman History, and Roman Documents; I have also taught Teaching Classics (a Pedagogy class for graduate students).