Instructor: Mr. Slowey Meeting: Mon, Wed, Fri – 9:50-11:10 (9A)

Email: Tues & Thurs – 8:25-10:15 (9B)

Tutoring: Tues, Thurs at lunch

Humane Letters I: The Classical World

Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. -Henry David Thoreau

Every one soon or late comes round by Rome. -Robert Browning

It is the historian’s function, not to make us clever for the next time, but to make us wise forever. -Jacob Burckhardt

Welcome, scholars! I hope that all of you have had a summer marked by leisure and contemplation. This year we will be embarking together on Aristoi’s Human Letters sequence, an undertaking that over the next four years will serve as both a summation and capstone of your experience at this school. I am thrilled to have the privilege of taking the first leg of this journey with you.

It has been said that the European philosophical tradition is a series of footnotes to Plato. It would be only a small exaggeration to say that the history of the Western world is a series of footnotes to classical Greece and Rome. In this course we will explore the history and thought of these civilizations in conversation with the great minds that still speak to us through texts like Homer’s Odyssey and Augustine’s Confessions. We will grow to know—in some cases, perhaps to love—people vastly different from us and yet responsible for much of what makes us who we are.

The scope of our studies will encompass the Dark Ages of Homeric Greece through to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century after Christ. For all of us, myself included, intellectual humility is a prerequisite if we are to receive what the past has to offer: the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the first incarnations of democracy and republic, Sophocles’ profound commentary on mortality. We will also investigate how the ideas and even the cadences of Greek and Roman classics have shaped English classics a thousand years after the fall of Rome. Our historical narrative will culminate with the advent of Christianity, and in your Freshman Thesis you will publically defend your position on how Christianity transformed the classical world.

It is my hope that at the end of our journey you will have gained something more than knowledge and the tools it provides; you will have grown in wisdom, which makes us new.

Sincerely,

Shane Slowey

Course Readings

In addition to the following core texts, a variety of excerpts, selections, and supplemental aids will be handed out in class. Parents are encouraged to purchase private copies of the books listed below so that students will have the opportunity to annotate their texts directly.

Herodotus, Robert B. Strassler, and Andrea L. Purvis. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. Anchor, 2009. Print.

Hesiod, Stanley Lombardo, Robert Lamberton, and Hesiod. Works and Days and Theogony. Hackett Pub., 1993. Print.

Livy, Aubrey De Sélincourt, R. M. Ogilvie, and S. P. Oakley. The Early History of Rome: Books I-V. Penguin, 2002. Print.

Homer, Robert Fagles, Bernard Knox, and Homer. The Odyssey. Penguin, 2006. Print.

Plutarch, Robin Waterfield, and Philip A. Stadter. Greek Lives: A Selection of Nine Greek Lives. Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Sophocles, David Grene, and Sophocles. Oedipus the King. U of Chicago, 2010. Print.

Virgil, and Allen Mandelbaum. The Aeneid of Virgil. Bantam, 1981. Print.

Objectives

·  Students will become familiar with both the broad scope and the major episodes and personalities of classical history.

·  Students will analyze and evaluate the distinctive genres and philosophical presuppositions of classical literature.

·  Through collaborative discussion and close engagement with individual great texts, students will cultivate their ability to read, write, and think as aspiring philosophers.

·  Ultimately, students will come to better understand how the classical world informs their own world and themselves, and they will illustrate what they have achieved in a Freshman Thesis.

Grading Policy: Assessments for each quarter will be weighted as follows:

Tests 40%

Daily Seminars 40%

Classwork, Homework, Quizzes 20%
Course Outline

Semester I: How did the institution of the polis provide the conditions for the Golden Age of classical Greece and also for its downfall?

Quarter I: From Mycenaean Greece to the rise of the polis

Cosmology, myth, and the roots of Greek civilization

Arete and the Greek heroic ideal

The epic as literary form and historical artifact

Athens and Sparta: competing visions

Readings: Hesiod, Works and Days and Theogony; Homer, Odyssesy, Plutarch, Lives

Quarter II: From the Persian wars to the Hellenistic world

The Persian Wars and the beginning of historical imagination

Choice and destiny in Greek tragedy

The suicide of Greece: the Peloponnesian War

Plato and Aristotle on the good life

Readings: Herodotus, Histories; Sophocles, Oedipus Rex; Plato, Meno and Euthyphro; Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; Plutarch, Lives

Semester II: Does the advent of Christianity represent a repudiation, development, or fulfillment of Greco-Roman civilization?

Quarter III: From Romulus to Augustus

The structure of the Roman republic

The Punic Wars and the machine of empire

Oratory, statesmanship, and murder in the late republic

Antony and Cleopatra: Shakespeare reads Plutarch

Readings: Livy, History of Rome; Cicero, selected writings; Sallust, The Catiline War; Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

Quarter IV: From the Julio-Claudians to the fall of Rome

Roman poetry and the English tradition

Universal civitas: the Pax Romana

Christianity, the state, and the soul

The barbarians and the inheritance of Rome

Readings: Martial, Juvenal, and Horace, selected poems; selected English Cavalier and Augustan poetry; Vergil, Aeneid; Augustine, Confessions