Town and Country in Ancient Greece

Catalog description

The ancient city of Athens, Greece, is renowned as the birthplace of democracy; Sparta is famous for its warlike society; Olympia for the Olympic Games; and Delphi for its famed oracle. But the Greek landscape was dotted with hundreds of other cities, towns, villages, sanctuaries, and hamlets. This seminar is a journey through town and country in ancient Greece, from dense urban spaces to vast forests and agro-pastoral countrysides. We will examine many lines of evidence: (1) ancient texts (e.g., Homeric epics, Hesiod's depiction of rural life, the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, the tragedies and comedies of the great playwrights, the geography of Strabo, the travel writing of Pausanias); (2) inscriptions that record details of life and death ; and (3) archaeology (site discovery and excavation, recovery of the material remains of everyday life). These sources will reveal much information about how urban and rural life were organized. A central aim of this seminar is to address this question: is the past a foreign country, or is there nothing new under the sun?