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CUSSO 274 - Passion, Insult, and Virtue: Popular Morality in Ancient Athens
MWF 11:30 - 12:20
Rachel Hall Sternberg
Students explore the social fabric of Athens at its height - the various social and economic institutions that
shaped households and the city-state in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Primary source material will include courtroom speeches, two comedies of Aristophanes, and Aritotle's Ethics. Topics: lust, love, marriage,
prostitution, slavery, elite drinking parties, street life, hubristic violence, competition, feuding murder, the legal system, diverse concepts of virtue, and how ordinary people were expected to treat one another in good times and bad. Prereq: FSCC 100 or equivalent.
USSY 203 - Myth, Ritual & Society in the Ancient World
TR 1:15-2:30 PM
Paul Iversen
This course will introduce students to Greek, Roman and some Ancient Near Eastern myth and ritual along with the various ways of interpreting or explaining them. The focus will be on reading the primary sources (Hesiod, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander) in their entirety and from these gleaning an understanding of what myth and ritual tell us about the societies that generated them: what were their values, collective memories, sense of humor and how are they similar to or different from our own? Part of the class will involve an overnight stay at the Pink Pig (located at CWRU's Squire Valleevue Farm) on Friday, February 16 in order to read significant parts of the Odyssey in translation. Prereq: FSCC 100 or equivalent.
USSO 278 -- Magicians, Helers & Holymen.
TR 2:45-4:00 PM
Gil Renberg
This course will examine magic, divination, and other unconventional religious phenomena in the Greco-Roman world primarily during the Roman period by focusing on several extraordinary practices and practitioners. The focus will be on a number of forms of "unofficial" practices: seeking the healing power of a god by visiting that divinity's temple in the hope that the god would appear in one's dream and lend aid; using forms of beneficial magic to restore or maintain one's health; using more aggressive forms of magic to ensnare the object of one's sexual desires, or to affect the outcome of competitions in such disparate settings as the arena and the courtroom; and, attempting to foresee the future through astrology or various forms of divination. This course, then, is not about traditional civic religion, but rather religious phenomena which were for the most part outside of the mainstream of "official" religion - phenomena which often get less attention in traditional courses about Greek and Roman religion. Prereq: FSCC 100 or equivalent.
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