A survey of the development of archaeology. The methods and techniques of archaeology are presented through an analysis of excavations, non-invasive surveys, and recovered artifacts. Case studies span the globe with special emphasis give to projects based in the Mediterranean and New England. Students are introduced to techniques for reconstructing the past from material remains. The course includes a field trip to a neighboring archaeological site.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: CLCV 10 3

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes: Wendy Judge Paulson '69 Ecology of Place Living Laboratory course. This course does not satisfy the Natural and Physical Sciences Laboratory requirement. 

Achilles' heel, the Trojan Horse, Pandora's Box, an Oedipal complex, a Herculean task-themes and figures from classical mythology continue to play an important role in our everyday life. We will read the original tales of classical heroes and heroines as depicted by Homer, the Greek tragedians, Vergil, Ovid, and others. Why do these stories continue to engage, entertain, and even shock us? What is the nature and power of myth? Readings from ancient sources in English translation.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; REP - Religion, Ethics, and Moral Philosophy

Typical Periods Offered: Summer; Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring

Notes:

Ancient Athens is celebrated as the birthplace of democracy, but participation was limited to a small selection of the city's population: property-holding males. How did the city engage female members of the citizen class, foreign residents, and enslaved people? And how do the political dynamics of this single city compare to those of neighbors such as Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes? This course examines status and identity within and among city-states, including the ancient definitions of ethnicity that informed alliances and rivalries across the Greek world. Our study of material culture and images, alongside written sources, will enable us to understand a broader spectrum of difference and diversity within ancient Greek societies.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken CLCV 300.

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This course is also offered at the 300-level as CLCV 300.

In the fifth century B.C.E., Athens was home to great intellectual ferment as well as political growth and crisis. This cultural revolution resulted in significant artistic and intellectual accomplishments: Pericles oversaw the building of the Acropolis; citizens saw productions of Oedipus Tyrannos, Medea, and Lysistrata; and Herodotus and Thucydides invented the genre of history as we know it. On the political front, Athens defended itself against the Persian empire, developed into the most powerful city-state in the Mediterranean, and then dramatically fell as the result of failed imperial policy. In the early fourth century, Plato engaged with the political and intellectual conflicts of this period in The Apology and The Symposium. In this course, students will consider works of philosophy, history, tragedy, comedy, rhetoric, and political theory in their cultural and political context. We will examine and interrogate Athenian democracy, its conflicts, and its stunning and influential cultural achievements.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 40

Prerequisites:

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies; LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Roman chariot races and gladiatorial combat were not just entertainment for the masses, just as the ancient Olympic games were much more than sporting events. Athletic competitions, theatrical performances, and militaristic parades were all public enactments of political and religious ideology. This course examines the spectacle of competitive performances and rituals of power that helped shape ancient Greek and Roman society. Students will investigate ancient writings alongside art-historical and archaeological evidence to consider how social values and identities were constructed through these shared experiences. We will also consider how the modern performances of ancient texts, the Olympic Games, and cinematic representations have emphasized the splendor, drama, and gore of antiquity.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 16

Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken CLCV 305.

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

The mythic tales of gods and heroes featured in the epic poems, sacred hymns, and tragic theatre of Greece and Rome were also present in material form as votive statues, on painted vessels, and in architectural decoration. This course will focus on the interplay between textual and visual representations of Olympian deities like Zeus, Hera, and Poseidon; legendary figures such as Heracles, Theseus, and the heroes of the Trojan War; and the infamous women of myth: Helen, Clytemnestra, and Medea. We will analyze how visions of the heroic age-replete with legendary battles, divine seductions, and exotic monsters-provided ancient societies with new opportunities to create a shared history, foster ethnic and civic identity, and transmit ideological values about age and gender.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken CLCV 306.

Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video; HS - Historical Studies

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes: This course is also offered at the 300 level as CLCV 306.

Antigone in Ferguson, Medea from Mexico, Trojan Women in Syria – why do contemporary playwrights and filmmakers keep returning to ancient Greek tragedy?  This class will combine discussion of plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in their original fifth-century BCE context with analysis of their afterlife on the contemporary stage and screen. How do contemporary, cross-cultural re-imaginings of ancient Greek plays like Antigone, Medea and the Trojan Women, unsettle our familiar readings of Athenian drama?  How do these age-old plays create a productive space for questions about politics, community and power that continue to preoccupy us today?  

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 211

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Every story is a travel story, and this class introduces students to the theme of travel as it appears in a range of literary texts from Homer's Odyssey to Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Toni Morrison's novel Home. We will focus on the ways that mobility, transience, and unsettledness function in these works both to confirm and challenge our ideas of home, identity (both personal and cultural), and the possibilities of return.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 212

Prerequisites:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

Do notions of gender change over time? In this course, we will explore how gender was constructed in antiquity and how it functioned as an organizational principle. Through close readings of selections from Greek and Roman epics, lyric poetry and drama, as well as philosophical and historical texts, we will analyze representations of sex and gender exploring how power was shaped through these depictions.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken CLCV 313.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This course is also offered at the 300-level as CLCV 313.

Ancient Greek historians associated the ruins of Bronze Age cities with the legends of the Trojan War, the lost city of Atlantis, and the labyrinth of the Minotaur. This course takes a more archaeological approach, combing the ruins for evidence that allow us to reconstruct complex societies that integrated contributions from diverse participants, including enslaved people and foreigners, as well as heroic adventurers. We will investigate the role of African and Asian cultures in early Greek state formation and collapse, technologies of art and writing, and religious traditions featuring a mother goddess. The course requires no background and offers an introduction to archaeological analysis as well as the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: ANTH 215

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies; SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

We tend to place epic and lyric poetry at opposite ends of the spectrum: epic poetry is musty, monumental, and masculine while lyric poems are fresh, exquisite, and feminine. This class will read and discuss the works of those contemporary lyric poets who reach across this divide to embrace Homeric epic -- revising these ancient poems for modern times, for different audiences, in new forms. The class will read the Iliad and Odyssey together with the works of contemporary poets (e.g., Anne Carson, Louise Gluck, Alice Oswald, Adrienne Rich, Derek Walcott) to explore the nature of this contrapuntal conversation about poetic form across time and genre. All readings will be in English.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 221

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Through daily visits to archaeological sites and museums, this intensive travel course will explore the complexities of cultural exchange in the ancient Mediterranean world. We will assess first-hand the different forms of evidence for history and ask how ancient literary works, inscriptions, artifacts, and buildings can work together to help us understand ancient places and how they were perceived in the past. We will also consider how the challenging topics of ancient empires, colonization, and long-distance
trade are currently being presented to the public, and how heritage programs sponsored by local governments, UNESCO, and private enterprises are changing how residents and visitors access sites and museums.

Topic for 2026: Wintersession in Naples, Italy

We will survey the mix of cultural groups–including Oscans, Etruscans, and Greeks–that were flourishing here before Rome's political influence spread across the region. We then aim to put the stunning remains of Pompeii and other sites preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE into a broader cultural and historical context, and help students understand how cities such as Naples and Pozzuoli continued to thrive after the Vesuvian eruption.

Units: 0.5

Max Enrollment: 12

Prerequisites: 200-level course in Greek, Latin, Classical Civilization, or related field. Permission of the
instructor required.

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies

Typical Periods Offered: Every three years

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Winter

Notes:

War is undoubtedly bad. But human beings have always practiced war. Indeed, war preceded history itself by tens of thousands of years-if by history we mean the written inquiry into the past. But what causes wars? How have wars been justified historically? How are wars won and lost? What are their effects? In this class, we examine a series of case studies in warfare, including the Trojan War, the Peloponnesian War, and the Roman Punic Wars. We will read classic accounts of warfare and theoretical literature about tactics, strategy, and logistics, and also will analyze how war is represented in other media, such as art and film.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None. Not open to student who have taken CLCV 330.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This course is also offered at the 300-level as CLCV 330.

The founders of Western civilization were not monotheists. Rather, from 1750 B.C.E. until 500 C.E., the ancient Greeks and Romans sacrificed daily to a pantheon of immortal gods and goddesses who were expected to help mortals achieve their earthly goals. How did this system of belief develop? Why did it capture the imaginations of so many millions for more than 2,000 years? What impact did the religion of the Greeks and Romans have upon the other religions of the Mediterranean, including Judaism and Christianity? Why did the religion of the Greeks and Romans ultimately disappear?

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken CLCV 336.

Distribution Requirements: HS or REP - Historical Studies or Religion, Ethics, and Moral Philosophy

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes: This course is also offered at the 300-level as CLCV 336.

Ancient Rome’s economy was pre-industrial but highly developed and sophisticated. We will study fundamental large-scale questions such as the labor force with both free and slave labor, raw materials acquisition, start-up capital, transportation by land and sea, state involvement in the economy, banking, production methods, marketing, and retail trade. We will also study how individual businesses and trades operated, such as restaurants, furniture making, agriculture, pottery production, construction, stonework, lodging, sex work, handcrafts, textile and clothing production, dry-cleaning, and professional services (e.g., education). What modern models and approaches, including behavioral economics, help us understand ancient Roman businesses? Possible projects include case studies, consultations with modern craftspeople, and development of business plans.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies; SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Ancient Roman civil law; its early development, codification, and continuing alteration; its historical and social context (property, family, enslavement); its influence on other legal systems. Extensive use of actual cases from antiquity.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: None.

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies; SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year; Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring

Notes:

Units: 0.5

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring

Notes:

Ancient Athens is celebrated as the birthplace of democracy, but participation was limited to a small selection of the city's population: property-holding males. How did the city engage female members of the citizen class, foreign residents, and enslaved people? And how do the political dynamics of this single city compare to those of neighbors such as Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes? This course examines status and identity within and among city-states, including the ancient definitions of ethnicity that informed alliances and rivalries across the Greek world. Our archaeological approach will enable us to position written sources alongside material evidence to understand a broader spectrum of difference and diversity within ancient Greek societies.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: Not open to students who have taken CLCV 200.

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This course is also offered at the 200-level as CLCV 200.

Roman chariot races and gladiatorial combat were not just entertainment for the masses, just as the ancient Olympic games were much more than sporting events. Athletic competitions, theatrical performances, and militaristic parades were all public enactments of political and religious ideology. This course examines the spectacle of competitive performances and rituals of power that helped shape ancient Greek and Roman society. Students will investigate ancient writings alongside art-historical and archaeological evidence to consider how social values and identities were constructed through these shared experiences. We will also consider how the modern performances of ancient texts, the Olympic Games, and cinematic representations have emphasized the splendor, drama, and gore of antiquity.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 16

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor required. Not open to students who have taken CLCV 205.

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: Ann E. Maurer '51 Speaking Intensive Course. This course is also offered at the 200-level as CLCV 205.

The mythic tales of gods and heroes featured in the epic poems, sacred hymns, and tragic theatre of Greece and Rome were also present in material form as votive statues, on painted vessels, and in architectural decoration. This course will focus on the interplay between textual and visual representations of Olympian deities like Zeus, Hera, and Poseidon; legendary figures such as Heracles, Theseus, and the heroes of the Trojan War; and the infamous women of myth: Helen, Clytemnestra, and Medea. We will analyze how visions of the heroic age-replete with legendary battles, divine seductions, and exotic monsters-provided ancient societies with new opportunities to create a shared history, foster ethnic and civic identity, and transmit ideological values about age and gender.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 10

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor required. Not open to students who have taken CLCV 206

Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video; HS - Historical Studies

Typical Periods Offered: Every three years

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes: This course is also offered at the 200 level as CLCV 206.

Do notions of gender change over time? In this course, we will explore how gender was constructed in antiquity and how it functioned as an organizational principle. Through close readings of selections from Greek and Roman epics, lyric poetry and drama, as well as philosophical and historical texts, we will analyze representations of sex and gender exploring how power was shaped through these depictions.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: 200 level course in CLCV, GRK, or LAT; or permission of the instructor. Not open to students who have taken CLCV 313.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This course is also offered at the 200-level as CLCV 213.

War is undoubtedly bad. But human beings have always practiced war. Indeed, war preceded history itself by tens of thousands of years-if by history we mean the written inquiry into the past. But what causes wars? How have wars been justified historically? How are wars won and lost? What are their effects? In this class, we examine a series of case studies in warfare, including the Trojan War, the Peloponnesian War, and the Roman Punic Wars. We will read classic accounts of warfare, theoretical literature about tactics, strategy, and logistics, and also will analyze how war is represented in other media, such as art and film.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor required. Not open to students who have taken CLCV 230.

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This course is also offered at the 200-level as CLCV 230.

The seminar examines the “big dig” excavations of the 19th and 20th centuries, through which American and European archaeologists established classical archaeology as an academic discipline. Many of these projects were designed not only to reveal ancient ruins but also to recover art and artifacts that could be legally exported through an authorized division of finds. Students will consider factors shaping the creation of archaeological knowledge as we evaluate the challenges, obligations, and opportunities created by historic practices. Research projects on the excavations that brought substantial archaeological material to New England museums will explore how scholars and institutions can productively engage with these disciplinary legacies and develop ethical practices for future archaeological work.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Previous courses in Classical Studies or related fields.

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies

Typical Periods Offered: Every three years

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

The founders of Western civilization were not monotheists. Rather, from 1750 B.C.E. until 500 C.E., the ancient Greeks and Romans sacrificed daily to a pantheon of immortal gods and goddesses who were expected to help mortals to achieve their earthly goals. How did this system of belief develop? Why did it capture the imaginations of so many millions for over 2,000 years? What impact did the religion of the Greeks and Romans have upon the other religions of the Mediterranean, including Judaism and Christianity? Why did the religion of the Greeks and Romans ultimately disappear?

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor required. Not open to students who have taken CLCV 236.

Distribution Requirements: HS or REP - Historical Studies or Religion, Ethics, and Moral Philosophy

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes: This course is also offered at the 200-level as CLCV 236.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Open to juniors and seniors.

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring; Fall

Notes:

Units: 0.5

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring

Notes:

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Permission of the department. Does not count toward the minimum major in Classics or Classical Civilization.

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring

Notes: Students enroll in Senior Thesis Research (360) in the first semester and carry out independent work under the supervision of a faculty member. If sufficient progress is made, students may continue with Senior Thesis (370) in the second semester.