This course is meant to help you improve the ease and accuracy with which you read ancient Greek and to introduce you to the joy of reading Greek drama in the original.
We shall read Euripides’ famous Medea and alongside it some of the ancient “scholia” (readers’ notes and commentary preserved in the ancient manuscripts!); we shall also try our hands (and eyes and mettle!) at reading a bit of the same from ancient papyri (antiquity’s paper) and manuscripts. And that’s just the mechanics…the play itself is a gut-wrenching exploration of love and revenge, belonging and betrayal, power and intimacy, gender and violence, and on and on.
Our goals will be: (1) To move beyond translating and begin to read with a feel for context, language, and genre, (2) To grow familiar with the conventions of Attic drama, (3) To try to square our own sense of what seems shocking or not with ancient Athenians’ views of the same.