Undergraduate Seminar in History: Discovering and Recording the World from Archaic Greece to the Late Roman Empire (c. 1000 B.C. to A.D. 640)
Course number: HIST 99
Instructor: Richard Talbert
Last taught: Fall 2002
Next scheduled: TBD
This limited registration undergraduate research seminar, first taught by AWMC Advisory Board member Richard Talbert in Fall 2002, had the following focus:
In terms of territory, ancient Greece and Rome were both civilizations that started small and later – in response to a variety of circumstances – experienced an immense expansion. The horizons of their ‘world’ (Greek oikoumene, Latin orbis terrarum) first expanded through the Mediterranean and Black Sea, and eventually stretched in a great arc from the British Isles across to the Indian subcontinent as well as deep into North Africa. Here they fought, settled and traded, and in consequence developed a rich spread of means to record and evaluate the lands and peoples they encountered, using not only writings, but also maps and various art forms. Moreover some of their scientific thinkers developed a literally global vision, with the spherical Earth divided into climatic zones and the Northern oikoumene matched by a habitable, but unreachable, antichthon. A few intrepid individuals did contemplate the journey to Ultima Thule in the frozen North (Pytheas), or the circumnavigation of Africa (Hanno). For the vast majority such exotic ventures could be only be a dream, however, and it gave them a keen appetite for a literature which (in modern terms) blends anthropology, geography, history and novelistic fiction. In the Late Roman Empire, Christianity radically altered its adherents’ perspective on the world (both cultural and geographical), and in particular required a rethinking of the traditional ethnographic opposition of ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’.
The response of Greeks and Romans to their expanding and changing world is a wide-open field for research, not least because of new approaches and the exciting emergence of fresh material. In this course, our aim as a group is to establish a common foundation; then to exchange the discoveries (and difficulties) of our individual projects as these develop; and finally to pool our shared findings about the outlook of classical antiquity.
Knowledge of Greek or Latin is not required. Most ancient source material is available in English translation, and for most topics there is now sufficient up-to-date scholarship in English.1
