HIST 222
Greek History Fall 2023
Division II
Cross-listed CLAS 222
This is not the current course catalog

This course covers the history of ancient Greece from the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean palace civilizations to the Roman conquest of the East Mediterranean (c. 1500-1 BC). We will study the development, expansion, and interactions of Greek society and its cultural expressions through a wide variety of textual sources and archaeological evidence across the Mediterranean basin and West Asia. How did the Greek world conceptualize and enact various modes of individual and collective status, construct political systems from one-man rule to popular democracy, and grapple with issues of memory and identity? How did the Greek world deal with victory and defeat, imperialism and subjugation, freedom and slavery, upheaval and decline? How should we approach the mythology about the origins of humanity, or the subsequent development of natural science and philosophy from Ionia to Athens and beyond? Why has this past continued to work as a mirror in subsequent periods, even up to our modern day? From the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces to the building of the Athenian acropolis, from autocratic warlords to the birth of democracy, from wandering merchants to Hellenistic kings, from Hesiod to Herodotus, Socrates, and Thucydides, this course will seek to reconstruct and understand the trajectory of ancient Greek society and culture from its early inception to its subjugation under Roman rule. All readings will be in translation.