Classical Texts and Traditions I: "It's All Greek to Me": Ancient Greek Classics

History, philosophy, tragedy, ethics, politics, epic and lyric poetry - not only do these words all come to us from Ancient Greece, but the genres to which they refer were invented there as well. This course introduces students to some of the texts that served as the cultural matrix for Western culture. These texts are foundational in themselves, in the sense that they have been read by generations of students, over millennia. But they also defined the genres that shaped texts by later Roman, European, and now global authors. This course is designed as a reading-intensive, discussion seminar.