Antioch was unique among the great cities of the classical world for its position at the crossroads between the Mediterranean and Asia. Students in this course will get exclusive access to the archives and artifacts from Princeton's mostly unpublished Antioch excavations of the 1930s. The focus of the 2024 course will be death and its aftermath in the Greek, Roman, and Islamic worlds, based on excavations in an area just outside the ancient walls of Antioch, which revealed burial remains and the famous and unparalleled Mnemoysne mosaic, which depicts a symposium of women participants.

The origins and nature of English vocabulary, from Proto-Indo-European prehistory to current slang via Beowulf. Emphasis on linguistic tools and methodology. Topics include the Greek and Latin elements of English, the wonders and complexities of reading and translating ancient texts, the study of language families.

The social, political, and cultural history of ancient Greece from ca.750 B.C. through the time of the Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.). Special attention is paid to the emergence of the distinctively Greek form of political organization, the city state, and to democracy, imperialism, social practices, and cultural developments. Emphasis is placed on study of the ancient sources, methods of source analysis, and historical reasoning.

Nature shapes how many of us think about the world. It's a balanced ecological system; the opposite of culture; a way of explaining how living things work; and a way of regulating how living things, especially people, should live. We will look at how ideas about natures, Nature, and "living naturally" take shape in texts from ancient Greece and Rome. We'll consider the Greek and Roman texts in relationship to other ways of imagining human and non-human life and the world in the Mediterranean and other cultures. We'll think, too, about how these ancient ideas bear on how we think about nature today-and how we might think differently.

This course explores the history of engagement by women writers and artists with the place, idea, and myths of Greece. We first read ancient female writers, preeminently Sappho, and examine the representation of women in ancient texts; we then trace the strategies through which "Greece" allows later women writers to assert their authority and authorship, question gender hierarchies and political/sociocultural paradigms, and lay a claim to the classical tradition. We consider how ancient writing affects contemporary understandings of identity and gender, and how modern works, from novels to plays to films, shape our view of the ancient world.

In this course students will engage with modern social science research on cultural globalization as well as with the texts and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, broadly construed (Greece, Rome, Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, etc.). Students will explore how intercultural contact in the ancient Mediterranean set the stage for local globalization processes and served as the origin for modern globalization. Moreover, students will gain the tools to compare and contrast how people in the ancient and modern worlds reacted to intensive globalization and define their identities against it.

Roman history courses usually cover grand narratives based on literary evidence and usually no room for discussing how knowledge is created and the different methods for studying ancient history. This course instead looks at different questions to shed light in fruitful collaborations between scholars from different fields. Students will engage with STEM and digital humanities methods as they consider historical questions. Through different case studies and hands-on activities, students will learn how different scientific, technological, and computational methods help us employ a multi-disciplinary approach to learning about the ancient past.

Recent developments in the United States and throughout the world have exposed fault lines in how communities design and regulate forms of citizenship. But current debates over the assignment, withholding, or deprivation of citizen status have a long and violent history. In this course we will attempt to map a history of citizenship from the ancient Mediterranean world to the 21st century. Questions to be tackled include: who/what is a citizen? (How) are exclusion and marginalization wired into the historical legacies and present-day practices of citizenship?

What philosophy of history belongs to Greek and Roman historians? How did the ancient historians themselves ask this question? Was their theory and practice as marked with change as has been European and American historiography since the 18th century? Finally, why did some contemporary practice turn back to classical narrative historiography? This course will cover major Greek and Roman historians, ancillary classical theory, and some pertinent contemporary philosophers of history.

This discussion-based seminar will examine the social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of food and dining in the ancient Roman world. This course will approach food in the Roman world through a variety of sources, literary and archaeological, and will push students to consider what we can learn about Roman society and culture through the lens of food.

The Augustan age is generally considered to be a golden age of Roman art, literature, and culture. This course will examine the time-period between the assassination of Julius Caesar (44 BC) and the death of his heir Augustus (AD 14) from a variety of perspectives, with special focus on politics, religion, and culture. The political and religious climate of this age will serve as background both to the transition to a system of one-man rule and to the many cultural developments in literature and the arts, especially in the city of Rome itself.

This course explores the ideas of sex, sexuality and gender in ancient Greek and Roman literature to better understand how these worked in the social, cultural and political spheres of antiquity. We will analyze the primary literary and material evidence we have for sexuality and gender in Greece and Rome, and survey the modern scholarly approaches to those same texts. Topics will include: interactions between the sexes (courtship, extramarital desire, sex and marriage); same-sex desire and homosociality; the status of women and men in terms of social function, age and religious activity; and transgressions.

The course discusses classical Greek perspectives on the gods and theology, drawing from both "philosophy" and "literature" and exploring their intersections and divergences. Topics include myth and myth-criticism, cosmology and cosmogony, allegoresis and hermeneutics, ritual and divination, and agnosticism and atheism. Major authors include Heraclitus, Aeschylus, Empedocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, the sophists, the Hippocratic authors, Xenophon, and Plato. The course works closely with texts in the original, but is open to students who wish to engage intensively through translation.

This course focuses on linguistic approaches to Greek literature.

A comprehensive introduction to the central topics and methods of Greek history, offering a chronological overview of periods and significant developments; a survey of the current state of the field and of specialized sub-disciplines (e.g., epigraphy and numismatics); and an exploration of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to the study of the past.

The course aims to balance detailed close reading with an appreciation of the design and architecture of the poem as a whole. It surveys important recent methodologies of interpretation and topics of scholarly interest including intertextuality, cosmology, memory, and modes of political intervention. Seminars focus on books 1, 2, 4, 6-8, and 12, but participants should read the complete work in translation before the first session.

This course, intended partly as a continuation of the Roman History Proseminar, has two aims. The first is to teach active debates in the study of Roman history. To this end, each week, we read a monograph-or, in select cases, programmatic long articles or edited volumes-published in Roman history within the past five years. The second aim is to sharpen collective skill in critically engaging monographs, from evaluation of their role in resolving-or amplifying-live controversies to assessment of their place within infrastructures of knowledge production.

This course aims to demystify the methods, instruments, and skills of palaeography and textual criticism, while furnishing participants with hands-on experience of discovering, researching, and editing a previously unpublished Greek text. Students are introduced to relevant aspects of codicology and manuscript study more broadly, as well as scholarship on the potential and the limits of editorial practice in the humanities. Strong classical Greek (e.g., ability to handle Attic prose) a must.

A collaborative workshop to practice scholarly writing at the dissertation level and beyond, providing guidance on planning and completing the dissertation and on other aspects of becoming a professional scholar and teacher, such as mastering the craft of the journal article (conceiving, writing and submitting), writing effective syllabi for different kinds of courses, and turning the dissertation into a book (with the opportunity to talk to an editor from a university press).

In early modern Europe, mythology provided the stimulus for a host of performances in theaters, palaces, and different media involving song, stone, gardens, and even water. This course will consider the performance of mythology in early modern Europe. What are the gendered implications of the myths in which women turn into plants, trees, flowers, and animals, and how were they presented in media? How is the trope of the abandoned transformed into song and painting? We'll explore the interactions between artists, poets, and musicians and the ways in which opera - a brand new medium in the early 17th century -brought the ancient world to life.

This course will focus on the history of the later Roman Empire, a period which historians often refer to as "Late Antiquity." We will begin our class in pagan Rome at the start of the third century and end it in Baghdad in the ninth century: in between these two points, the Mediterranean world experienced a series of cultural and political revolutions whose reverberations can still be felt today. We will witness civil wars, barbarian invasions, the triumph of Christianity over paganism, the fall of the Western Empire, the rise of Islam, the Greco-Arabic translation movement and much more.

In lectures, to provide my interpretation (and a conspectus of differing interpretations) of the civilization of Western Europe, 11th-14th century; by readings, to introduce students to the variety of surviving sources; through the paper, to give students a taste of doing medieval history.

This course compares the canonical cosmogonies of ancient Mesopotamia, Israel and Greece. We will study in detail the creation epic Enuma eliš and the flood epic Atra-hasis from Babylon, the opening chapters of the Biblical book of Genesis, and Hesiod's Theogony and Catalogue of women; as well as considering related texts from across the ancient Mediterranean. We will ask how the set texts describe the earliest history of the world and what this meant for their ancient audiences, how they relate to each other, and how they inform the long history of human investigation into the origins of the universe.

In this course, we investigate questions of material persistence and plasticity through artifacts, embodied practices, and textually embedded ideas of matter and body that emerged in the ancient Mediterranean and carry on today. Moving along three conceptual axes (body, cosmology, change) and working with three primary materials (plaster, rubber, wax), we experiment with practices of close reading; speculative, material-based art-making; different genres of writing; historical analysis; and other strategies of engaging premodern techniques of making alongside ancient philosophies of matter within contemporary materialist projects.

The world's astonishing linguistic diversity owes to the fact that languages change, and that each language takes a unique and unpredictable trajectory of change. In this course, students explore how and why languages change. Employing core methodologies (the Comparative Method and Method of Internal Reconstruction), students learn to analyze phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic language changes. Topics include the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language and the people who spoke it. Strong focus on applying methods to a variety of data sets. See below for prerequisite information.

We shall study Aristotle's contributions in logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics, with emphasis on the ongoing philosophical interest of some of his central insights.

Ancient Antioch and Dura-Europos (in Syria) were characterized by religious diversity. Stunning mosaics, frescoes, and other archaeological evidence and a rich literary tradition help us to understand life in the cities. In this seminar, we join with students at Yale University to learn about the social and religious history and cultural heritage of these cities. Yale students travel to Princeton, and Princeton students travel to New Haven, to learn about the collections that each of our universities has. We engage in new research into historical reconstructions of Antioch and Dura.