Human Aspirations Among the Greeks and Romans

Catalog description

Is it enough to merely live? This course introduces students to how ancient authors and thinkers explored deep questions about life and the human condition, exploring their views of what it means not only to live, but to live well. Studying famous classical works of drama, literature, history, philosophy, and religion, the course explores what it means to be human, and how great thinkers have described the human experience and the goals to which humans aspire. These writers believed that the world does not get better through random chance, but by deliberate action that grows out of carefully reasoned beliefs about how life should be. This course explores how these aspirations arose in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, how they developed over time, and how they still shape much of modern thought about humanity and the human condition. The course has no prerequisites.