Living and Dying in Ancient Athens

Catalog description

This class is designed to explore the experience of daily life in ancient Athens, with special attention to the values and practices that constitute the habits of life in the classical period. Methodologically the class will attempt a bottom-up reconstruction of lived experience by focusing on those features of ordinary life that were taken for granted by the Greeks but which strike us as either alien, odd or hard to understand.Topics covered include: settlement and resource extraction; crops and risk mitigation; trade and manufacturing; slavery; sex work; the symposium; military service; and burial.