Classics 320: The Greeks

Using Homer’s Odyssey as a foundational text, this course introduces students to the Ancient Greeks through artifacts, literature, and their cultural legacy, focusing on their own assumptions about themselves, their relationships, and the transhistorical and universal dilemmas of human identity in its social context. “Odyssean” ideas – the search for identity, belonging, recognition, the call to adventure, the costs of war, the concept of the ‘hero’, the paradox of fate and responsibility, the unanswerable question of what happens when we die (and many more) – will be considered alongside complementary primary source materials, contemporary scholarship on Greek cultural history, and the reception and legacy of Greek ideas and structures in our modern world.