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You’ve probably heard the axiom “Never meet your heroes.” In Ancient Greece, the phrase was closer to “Never meet your heroes, because they will straight up get you killed, if they don’t casually kill you themselves.” Although Ancient Greek gave the world the word “hero,” their definition of the word was pretty far from our …

Have you ever wondered if mystical forces control your life in ways you can barely conceive? Have you ever wondered if those forces might be petty, violent, and prone to irrational fits of jealousy? Have you ever wondered if those forces occasionally get bored, decide to prank some humans by wandering around on earth disguised …

Benjamin Franklin once said “[I]n this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Since our program already had a course on ancient death, we were inspired to add a course about ancient taxes…and all other things money related in Ancient Greece and Rome. And there’s a lot of things money …

Have you ever wondered how ancient societies understood the natural world around them? The people of Ancient Greece and Rome conceptualized nature as a mixture of gods and science, peace and terror, prosperity and challenge. Rural farmers, sailing merchants, conquering armies, and urban dwellers all saw nature differently. They expressed their relationship to nature through …

Have you ever wondered what the lives of women were like in the ancient world? Mythology is full of extraordinary women, and, statistically, 50% of every human who lived in ancient times was a woman. Yet finding ancient women can be difficult, given that they were excluded from many of the activities, big and small, …

Have you ever wondered how ancient societies understood the world around them, especially the worst parts? Today we can predict, prevent, and process disasters through scientific technology. Past peoples did not have such luxury, but they still had to make sense of disasters, natural and manmade. CLAS-B 312 serves as an introduction to disasters in …

Have you ever wondered if concepts like “female” or “male,” “woman” or “man” have been consistent across cultures? Or whether past peoples thought about sexual identity, morality, and orientation in the same way that you do? Maybe you’ve heard rumors that Ancient Greece and Rome were basically wild orgies, societies that contributed to their own …

In 79 CE, Mt. Vesuvius erupted on a massive scale, burying a large swath of the prosperous Bay of Naples area under meters of rock, ash, and mud. Cities such as Pompeii and Herculaneum were snuffed out, preserved for millennia until they were rediscovered in the modern era. Almost overnight, Pompeii became one of the …

Why and how did ancient societies represent stories in art? What can pottery and sculpture tell us about the role of story-telling in ancient life? How did visual art serve as a means of powerful communication across cultures and centuries? Explore these questions and more in Myth and Reality in Classical Art. This course is an introduction …

Come explore the material culture of Ancient Rome, a world of gladiators, gods, and generals, emperors, priests, and enslaved. Learn how the Roman army conquered an empire that stretched from Scotland to Syria, Romania to Morocco. Delve into architectural and artistic achievements that would not be matched for millennia. Evaluate how archaeologists draw their conclusions …