Humanities 110
About Hum 110
Fall semester: Greece
The fall semester focuses on the development of culture in ancient Greece, beginning with Homer’s Iliad. It progresses through the rise and evolution of the polis as reflected in the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides as well as in Aeschylus’s Oresteia and selected plays of Sophocles and other dramatists. The semester ends with the critiques made by Plato and Aristotle in the Republic and the Nicomachean Ethics of individual and polis virtues. Parallel developments in the heroic ideal and civic art are followed through a study of archaic and classical sculpture, vase painting, and architecture. The course concentrates on the Greeks’ relation to the gods, to the state, to their fellows, and to their developing self-consciousness. The subject areas of art history, philosophy, political institutions, and myth are studied to understand how they and their interrelationships reveal distinctive features of Greek civilization.
Spring semester: Rome
The second term is devoted to a consideration of imperial Rome and to the encounter between classical culture and the Judeo-Christian tradition. The course examines the background and ideology of the early Principate as developed and described by the major authors of the Augustan Age, including Livy, Virgil, and Ovid. The political, philosophical, and historical implications of this development are traced in the works of Seneca and Tacitus. The second half of the spring semester begins with a reading of Hebrew biblical materials and then examines both noncanonical texts of the Jewish and Christian traditions as well as New Testament materials. After a detailed investigation of the confrontation between Christianity and the Roman world, the course concludes with St. Augustine’s Confessions, in which the values and ambitions of classical antiquity are developed in the light of an emergent Christian orthodoxy.