HIST 205 - Ancient Greece

Credits: (3)
Imagine yourself spending a day in the Athens of the fifth century B.C.: debating legislation in the Assembly with Pericles, discussing philosophy in the agora with Socrates and Alcibiades, admiring the sculpture and architecture of the Parthenon, perhaps attending a performance of a tragedy or a comedy. Ah, the glory that was Greece. But wait a minute. Weren’t those Greeks a bunch of hypocrites? What kind of democracy excludes women and allows slaveholding? And wasn’t all that culture stolen from Egypt, anyway? Did you know that the ancient opinion of Athenian democracy was not that it wasn’t democratic enough, but that it was too democratic? Far from worrying that women and slaves had no power, the ancients grumbled that democracy gave power to the poor. This course explores these apparent contradictions. We encounter the Greeks on their own terms through the study of primary sources, and are introduced to modern interpretations of ancient history through our reading of secondary sources.