Greek (GRK)

GRK101 Introduction to Ancient Greek: Semester I

This course is an introduction to the rich and beautiful language of ancient Greek, the language of Homer, Plato, and Euripides. In the first semester students will begin to learn the grammar and syntax of the language and start developing the vocabulary necessary to appreciate and understand Greek with the goal of reading as soon as possible. Throughout the semester we will also explore some inscriptions and dip our toes into both Herodotus and biblical Greek.

This course is a prerequisite for GRK102.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Prereq: None

GRK102 Introduction to Ancient Greek: Semester II

This course is a continuation of GRK101. We will complete the study of Greek grammar and continue to develop vocabulary and reading skills. We will read selections from Sophocles, Euripides, Lysias, Apollodorus, Demosthenes, Aristotle, and Plato, among others.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Prereq: GRK101

GRK205 Reading Greek Prose: Court Room Dramas, Selections from Athenian Oratory

In classical Athens there were no public prosecutors and no lawyers. Citizens took it on themselves to prosecute their political enemies, their wives' lovers, and violent offenders against family, friends, and state. Court cases are fascinating for the laws, political dynamics, social beliefs, animosities and gossip they bring to light. In this course, we will focus on selections from two cases in Greek and will also read additional cases in translation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Prereq: None

GRK250 Body, Soul, and Afterlife Journeys in Ancient Greece (CLAC.50)

The connection between body and soul and their journey in the afterlife were at the center of how the ancient Greeks thought not only of mortality but also of the good life itself. This CLAC course is connected to the Classical Civilization course titled "Death and Afterlife in Egypt and Greece" that will be taught in the fall by Kate Birney. The parent course explores the archaeology of death and burial in Egypt and Greece. It examines how the funerary practices and the very notions of death, the soul, the body, and the afterlife operated in these societies by drawing upon diverse evidence--archaeological, art historical, and mythological.

In this CLAC course students with some background in ancient Greek will read selections of the surviving evidence on death and the afterlife. Sources will be drawn from diverse genres and periods: historiography, Homeric poetry, Platonic philosophy, and religious tablets. This diversity will offer a unique opportunity to identify different registers and to explore how language itself reflects and in turn shapes the ideas and practices for which it is used. We will thus be looking at: how different media and performances are used to express loss, hope, and heroism in the face of death; how social class, gender, and political ideology are reflected in these media and how they influence ideas about death and the afterlife; and, last, how we are to create adequate methodologies as "readers" of such diverse evidence.

The selections of readings will be drawn primarily from what the students read in translation in the parent course. The final selection will be based on the level of the students. This CLAC is conceived as appropriate for students on the intermediate and advanced level of ancient Greek.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Identical With: CGST250
Prereq: GRK102

GRK252 Dionysiac Transformations: Gender, Violence, and Justice in Euripides' Hecuba

Euripides' "Hecuba" dramatizes the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War, as the victorious Greeks are waiting for favorable winds in Thrace--a no-man's-land. At this liminal time and space, we witness the "civilized" victors' abuse of power and the law against their female captives and the brutal revenge of the oppressed, culminating in literal transformation and loss of human form. Working with the Greek and secondary readings, we will explore the rhetoric and morality of power, justice, and empathy, how these shift within the plot, and how the dramatic medium itself may affect the audience's sympathies.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Prereq: None

GRK290 Truths and Other Fictions

What makes for a good story? What makes for a good argument? Is deception ever beneficial?

In this course we will read selections from ancient Greek works in the original, ranging from Homer, tragedy, love-poetry, law-court speeches, sophistic treatises, and Platonic philosophy to explore whose truth prevails, whose story moves, and who is better for it. The precise selection of sources will depend on the composition of the student-group and previous familiarity with Greek texts.

For CLST Major requirements, this course can be used for the Literature and Performance track and the History, Politics, and Social Justice track.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Prereq: None

GRK291 "Sexuality" in the Making: Gender, Law, and the Use of Pleasure in Ancient Greek Culture (CLAC.50)

The parent course (CCIV 281/FGSS 281) examines the construction of gender roles in ancient Greece and approaches gender as an organizing principle of private and public life in ancient Greek society by using literary, scientific, historical, and philosophical sources as well as material evidence. Issues addressed include: the creation of woman, conceptions of the male and female body, the legal status of men and women; what constitutes acceptable sexual practices and for whom (e.g., heterosexual relationships, homoeroticism, prostitution etc.); ideas regarding desire, masculinity and femininity, and their cultivation in social, political, and ritual contexts such as rituals of initiation, marriage, drinking parties (symposia), the law court, and the theater.

The textual sources used in the course cover a spectrum of genres: medical texts, Homer, lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, law-court speeches, and philosophy among others. In the CLAC connected to this course students with some background in ancient Greek will read selections from these genres and will be able to compare different discourses and registers in the original. In the past, even through brief lexical examples--e.g., pointing at the use of ta Aphrodisia (the things/matters related to Aphrodite) in a culture that has no one term/concept for our notion of "sexuality"--students were intrigued by how different terms and discursive media in the original may offer access to perspectives, visions, and values that differ from and can, in turn, inform our own. The CLAC will create an opportunity precisely for this kind of access and a better informed and nuanced conversation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Identical With: CGST291
Prereq: GRK102

GRK315 Homeric Epic

This course involves a close reading of selections in Greek from the ODYSSEY on the wanderings of Odysseus, his encounters with Polyphemus, Circe, and Kalypso, and his return to Ithaca. In addition, we will discuss major scholarly approaches to the Odyssey and Homeric epic more broadly.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Prereq: None

GRK350 Body, Soul, and Afterlife Journeys in Ancient Greece

The connection between body and soul and their journey in the afterlife were at the center of how the ancient Greeks thought not only of mortality but also of the good life itself. This course is connected to the Classical Studies course titled "Death and Afterlife in Egypt and Greece" that will be taught in the fall by Kate Birney. The parent course explores the archaeology of death and burial in Egypt and Greece. It examines how the funerary practices and the very notions of death, the soul, the body, and the afterlife operated in these societies by drawing upon diverse evidence--archaeological, art historical, and mythological.

In this course students with some background in ancient Greek will read selections of the surviving evidence on death and the afterlife. Sources will be drawn from diverse genres and periods: historiography, Homeric poetry, Platonic philosophy, and religious tablets. This diversity will offer a unique opportunity to identify different registers and to explore how language itself reflects and in turn shapes the ideas and practices for which it is used. We will thus be looking at: how different media and performances are used to express loss, hope, and heroism in the face of death; how social class, gender, and political ideology are reflected in these media and how they influence ideas about death and the afterlife; and, last, how we are to create adequate methodologies as "readers" of such diverse evidence.

The selections will be drawn primarily from what the students read in translation in the parent course. The final selection will be based on the level of the students. This course is conceived as appropriate for students on the advanced level of ancient Greek.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Prereq: GRK102

GRK355 Homer in Bronze Age Context

Although written down in the 6th century B.C., the Homeric epics offer a literary narrative that captures echoes of a Bronze Age world in transition, an era of globalization reshaped by collapse, migration, and war. Empires fell and pirates plundered. This course recontextualizes the original Greek texts of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" in this space.

Reading sections of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" in the original Greek, this course introduces students to the literary and linguistic structures of Homer and contemporary Mediterranean texts. We will examine Homeric language and scholarly approaches to structure, narrative, and cultural concepts (kinship, blood sacrifice, piracy, honor) in the context of Bronze Age Indo-European texts, from Hittite historical annals and poems, to Mycenaean Linear B tablets (the earliest-known form of Greek), as well as inscriptions from Archaic-period Greece.

This course will fall under the Poetry & Performance and History/Social Justice tracks.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Prereq: GRK201

GRK365 Greek Tragedy: Euripides

Euripides is well known for being experimental and controversial, in his own time and beyond. Aristophanes famously accuses him of corrupting his audience by bringing too much of a democratic sentiment to his plays--women and slaves having way too much to say. Nietzsche much later will attribute to him the very death of tragedy. In this course, we will explore this legacy by reading one of his plays in the original along with diverse approaches to his work. The selection of the play will be determined by the composition of the student-group and previous exposure to Greek drama.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Identical With: THEA365
Prereq: None

GRK367 The Great Greek Creation Myth: Hesiod's Theogony

In this seminar, we will read Hesiod's Theogony, the Greek creation myth, in the original ancient Greek and examine this fabulous work in light of other creation stories of the ancient Near East, Egyptian, and Hittite cultures by which it was influenced. Through examination of structural themes and motifs (how the universe was created and ordered, the role of violence, the origins of an application of justice, the creation of mankind, the shaping of women), we will discuss whether and how the Theogony diverges from other creation myths to establish or reflect values that can be said to be uniquely Greek. Discussion will be supplemented by passages from Hesiod's Works and Days, along with other creation myths and secondary scholarship.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Prereq: None

GRK401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate