This course begins the year-long introduction to the language of 5th-4th century BC Athens. Successful completion of both CLG 101 and 102 will prepare students to read Homer, philosophers, playwrights, historians, and more, and to enroll in intermediate and advanced courses dedicated to Ancient Greek authors. In CLG 101 we will cover the alphabet (learned in 1-2 days), core vocabulary, and grammar, and begin to focus on Ancient Greek as a literary language and a window onto the dynamic cultural, social, and political world in which our authors lived.

This course aims to improve students' proficiency in classical Greek prose, expanding vocabulary and honing grammar and syntax, while simultaneously becoming acquainted with Plato's unique style of philosophic exposition through dramatic dialogues, such as we find in the Symposium.

This course offers an introduction to the literary and cultural life of the Greek-speaking world under the Roman Empire. Our focus will be the Greek novel of Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, a pastoral romance set on the island of Lesbos with erotic confusion, shepherding life, pirates and 'true' love. The romantic novel emerged as a new genre in the Hellenistic and Roman Greek world, and offers us an opportunity to consider how society is presented, questions of sexuality and gendered relations, and explore the unique features of this genre with its shared plot points, foibles and humor.

This course will introduce students to the virtuoso Greek poetry composed during the period from Alexander to Augustus, often referred to as the "Hellenistic" age. Besides selections from such notable poets as Callimachus, Theocritus, and the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, as well as now lesser-known but once fashionable poets as Moschus and Bion, students will study the enduringly popular form of the Hellenistic epigram. We will examine the conventions and innovations of this poetic tradition which, through its formative influence on Roman poets, left its stamp on European literature in times to come.