Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

This overview of Near Eastern and Mediterranean history, from Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire to the rise of Christianity and the emergence of Islam, covers the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Byzantine Worlds and gives emphasis on the place of Hellenism in social, political, religious, and cultural life. Students with credit for HIST 275 or HS 275 may not take this course for further credit. Students who have taken HIST 308 or HS 308 first may not then take this course for further credit. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

The Victory of Alexander over King Porus, Charles-André Vanloo, France, circa 1738

The history of ancient Greece is marked by the emergence of the polis, the city-state, a fertile ground for ideas, art, and politics. While the artistic and cultural legacy of the city-state has been enduring, Athens, Sparta, and the other Greek poleis had otherwise a more limited impact on the Mediterranean world. It was rather the dynamic Macedonian monarchy under Philip II and Alexander the Great as well as the Italian city-state of Rome that were to leave their mark on the Near East and the Mediterranean by bringing disparate territories and diverse peoples and cultures under the hegemony of a Hellenistic and, later, a Greco-Roman culture.

This course studies the Hellenistic and Roman worlds and examines their eventual melding, following their history all the way to the rise of Islam in the Seventh century. By tracing the footsteps of Alexander all the way to modern day Afghanistan and outlining the history of the Hellenistic kingdoms that emerge after his death, it examines the spread of Greek ideas about politics, religion, ethics, art, and social formation in the rich world of the Near East. At this very moment, in the western part of the Mediterranean, Rome set itself on the path of imperial expansion. The course outlines early Roman history and internal political evolution and then follows the eventual clash between the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, the victory of the latter, the gradual integration of the Hellenized Near East into the Roman Empire and the Romanization of those previously under Greek cultural hegemony.

The addition of Christianity into the Greco-Roman cultural blend that marks the Mediterranean of the early centuries CE will bring us by the 4th century to Constantine the Great and the gradually Christianizing Roman Empire that we have come to call Byzantium. In this course we follow the history of the Later Roman Empire (or alternatively Byzantium) all the way to the reign of its greatest, if not uncontroversial emperor, Justinian, and the rise of Islam, some 50 years after his death in the early 7th century. At the time, the Caesars of the Romans almost lose their crown to the nomadic warriors of Arabia, even as in the west, in the original homeland of the Caesars, new peoples adopt Roman culture as a means for cultural and political self-definition.

Grading

Materials

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