Persians, Others, in Greek Literature

This Advanced-level Greek course explores the depiction of the ‘other’ in the long-5th century BCE. The course engages the construction of identity, and issues of race and ethnicity, in relation to the Greek presentation of the Persians in the century after the Second Persian invasion (478 BCE onwards). We will read, in ancient Greek, selections from Aeschylus’ Persians, Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Ctesias’ Persica, Herodotus’ Histories, and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. Equipped with the more recent approaches to identity and critical race theory, students will explore the production of categories of ethnicity in ancient Greece and the world beyond the confines of the Mediterranean.