Topics Overview


(Subject to change as timing and class preference dictate. We may not be able to engage with all these topics and/or some may need to be curtailed.)
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1. The Invention of the Alphabet - a study of writing systems

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  • Typology of writing systems
  • Writing systems and cognition
  • In what sense was the alphabet “invented”?
  • Why the focus on the *Greek* writing system?


​2. The Creation of Literary Culture: What is Literature?

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  • Homer and predecessors: the Near East
  • Early Greece: poetry and society
  • The Iliad as a poetic text
  • Personal Identity, Greek Identity: how poetry constructs culture
  • Homer’s Iliad and the Meaning of Life?


3. The Making of History: What is History?

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  • From mythos to logos: what can it mean to invent “History”?
  • Herodotus, the “Father of History”
  • Herodotus and Thucydides


​4. Pericles, Athens, and Empire: What is Democracy? 

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  • Democracy, Empire, and War
  • The “Classical Moment”: Art, Intellectualism, and Empire
  • Athenian Exceptionalism


​5. The Birth of Drama: What is Theater?

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  • Tragedy and the Polis
  • Limits of Empire; Victims of War
  • Laws and Rights
  • Elites and intellectualism and hoi polloi


​6. Socrates & the Origins of Western Philosophy: What is Philosophy?

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  • The Idea of Philosophy
  • Intellectualism and Philosophy
  • Philosophy, Eros, sexuality
The archaic funerary statue pictured above is the Phrasikleia Kore, marble with traces of color, created by the artist Aristion of Paros. At left the statue is pictured as found; on right, with the original colors restored. Attic, 550-530 BCE. National Archaeological Museum of Athens, cat. nr. 4889.