Current Graduate Courses & Descriptions

2024-2025 Graduate Courses & Descriptions

Prose Composition

Language-Intensive Courses

Research Seminars

Prose Composition Course Descriptions

GRK1000H Advanced Greek Language

A course designed to enhance language skills. Prose composition, sight translation, stylistic analysis of classical Greek prose. 

Students should enhance their skills in reading Greek prose in this course. Specifically, at the end of the course they should: 

• have increased confidence and ability in reading classical Greek prose at sight 
• be able to translate passages of English prose into classical Greek prose 
• have improved their appreciation of classical Greek prose style 

Graduate students entering the program will already have the knowledge they need for accomplishing these objectives; this course will focus on the application of that knowledge and the development of some appropriate skills. 

LAT1000H Advanced Latin Language - C. O'Hogan

Detailed study of classical Latin prose. Students will consolidate their knowledge of advanced Latin grammar and be introduced to a variety of different prose styles. Particular attention will be paid to prose composition and to stylistic analysis of classical Latin prose.

Language Instensive Course Descriptions

GRK1801H Greek Historiography - E. Lytle

This course is intended as a survey of Ancient Greek historical writing – historiography – as viewed through the relatively narrow lens of the department's Greek prose reading list. Given the limitations of the reading list this survey will be decidedly incomplete – notable absences include Xenophon (at least while wearing his historian’s cap), the many important but fragmentary historians of the fourth century BCE through the end of the Hellenistic period (apart from Polybius), as well as the Christian historians of later antiquity. Nevertheless, the reading list includes a number of key programmatic passages as well as a diversity of texts sufficient to allow us to trace the early development of the genre of Greek historiography, to understand Greek historical writing in the larger contexts of Greek literature and thought, and to familiarize ourselves with some of the key themes in modern scholarship on Greek historiography.   

LAT1809H Readings in Roman Republican Literature and Culture - E. Gunderson

TBA

Research Seminars Course Descriptions

CLA5021H Elemental Investigations - V. Wohl

The four elements played a fundamental role in ancient Greek thought across all genres and discourses. Like the air we breathe, the elements are so ubiquitous in ancient texts as to largely escape notice. But precisely this ubiquity makes them productive objects of study in their own right and media through which to access the thought-world of the Greeks. From Homer’s wine-dark sea to Hesiod’s well-worked earth, from the fires of Aetna to the animating breath of air, the elements oscillate between matter and metaphor, organizing ancient ways of thinking and being.

In this seminar will look at the elements both collectively and individually, investigating the unique associations of each. We will consider earth as Gaia, arable land, and political territory, but also as clay, dirt, and stone, and as the mysterious non-space of Plato’s chōra. We will look at water in its manifold states, from liquid to solid, tears to ocean, exploring its paradigmatic fluidity of form and affordance. Air provides atmosphere, both meteorological and aesthetic, and a medium for diverse beings (including clouds, birds, ghosts, images, words, gods, and daimones); its association with the soul also makes it the privileged element of life itself. Finally, our exploration of fire will encompass volcanoes, sacrificial fires, and funeral pyres, as well as the cosmic “fire ever-living” of Heraclitus. Bringing together a diverse set of readings, both ancient and modern, the seminarwill use the elements as a way to explore the complex interrelation between things and words, physics and metaphysics, the natural world and its theorization.

CLA5016H Sailing the Erythraean Sea: Greeks and Romans in the Indian Ocean World - E. Lytle

This course is designed as an interdisciplinary investigation of the social, economic and intellectual histories of Greco-Roman interactions with the Indian Ocean World, the ancient Erythraean Sea. Although the Indian Ocean is increasingly a focus of attention for scholars from a wide range of disciplines and often interested more generally in the history of globalization, the ancient Erythraean Sea remains largely peripheral to the study of classical antiquity. It is invoked most often as a way of illustrating the scale and scope of the Roman economy. In fact, the Greeks and Romans were late arrivals to a region where archaeological and textual evidence attests the existence of long-distance maritime exploration and trade for thousands of years before the Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire. From a point of view decentered from the Mediterranean, the whole history of classical antiquity can be imagined as the brief and otherwise limited appearance of Greco-Roman culture at the far margins of a globalized Indian Ocean World. Nevertheless, thanks to a rich abundance of literary and documentary texts the history of Greco-Roman interaction with the Erythraean Sea remains uniquely important for our understanding not only of the ancient Indian Ocean World itself but also of the Mediterranean contexts that engendered these interactions. 

Some of the topics we will explore include the earliest Greek knowledge of the Erythraean Sea as refracted through the stories recorded by Herodotus; the emergence of more concrete knowledge in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests; Ptolemaic exploration, settlement and trade in the modern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden; the origins and development of the Indian Ocean monsoon trade; the arrival of Rome and the nature and scale of Greco-Roman trade with India, East Africa and SE Asia; and ancient ethnographic, geographic and scientific interest in the Erythraean Sea. In exploring these topics we will interrogate archaeological, art historical, literary and documentary evidence. For students with appropriate language training the course will offer opportunities to engage directly with a rich body of literary and documentary texts, but knowledge of Greek and Latin is not required. 

CLA3020H Ancient History Methods Course - B. Akrigg, C. Atkins

TBA

CLA5010H Virgil - M. Dewar

Virgil himself introduces the second half of his poem as his maius opus (Aeneid 7. 41-45), a tale of grim war and of all Italy mustered for battle. In the last six books of the poem he re-interprets Homer’s Iliad, to sing of another brutal war waged for a woman, but also for national destiny and to satisfy the will of the gods. And yet, Ovid told the Emperor Augustus that no part of the Aeneid was more widely read in their own day than the tale of the love-affair of the hero and Queen Dido recounted in the First and Fourth Books (Tristia 2. 533-536). Similarly, four centuries later Augustine, recalling the studies of his youth, remembered how he had been moved to tears, not by the thought of his sins and his estrangement from God, but by the death of Dido, and by the tale of the Wooden Horse full of armed men, of the burning of Troy, of the ghost of Creusa, and of the wanderings of Aeneas – the subject-matter of Books One to Six (Confessions 1. 13. 21). In this course, we shall examine Virgil’s techniques in adapting Homer to the Roman subject matter and ethics of his Latin Odyssey, while also responding to a wide range of poets, both Greek and Latin, who had repeatedly renewed Homer’s legacy, and yet remaining true to the Callimachean aesthetics of his early poetry.  

CLA5021H The Task of Criticism: Ancient and Modern Explorations - K.Yu

The idea of criticism has deep and conflicted histories reaching back to classical antiquity. The ambit of criticism, the persona of the critic, and the activities, policies, and purposes of criticism continue to evolve, and these changes have informed how classical scholarship is practiced. This course traces conceptions of criticism in ancient texts and in modern scholarship, grounding itself in a suite of central questions: What does it mean to conduct criticism (in its various guises in Classics across philology and history)? What are its functions and how have they changed over time? What competences and expertise does criticism require? What are the scholarly values, knowledge practices, and institutions that mediate the manifold activities of the critic?   

We will examine a range of Greek and Latin texts from presocratic writers to the second sophistic that theorize and debate the notion of criticism; we will also explore the products of “critical” practices in Classics, such as commentaries and critical editions. We will complement our readings of ancient texts with attention to recent reflections in literary scholarship (in and beyond Classics, e.g., Guillory’s recent Professing Criticism) that challenge or renegotiate these foundations (e.g., hermeneutics of suspicion; “postcritique”; reparative reading). We will follow the major debates and their transformations to come to a better understanding of the history and legacy of criticism as a practice and distinct form of judgement in Classics.