Intellectual Enquiry in Classical Athens

Undergraduate

This course centers on the period of intellectual ferment and enquiry in fifth- and fourth-century Athens, when traditional beliefs came under scrutiny and many different figures laid claim to truth telling, from orators and sophists to poets and the practitioners of philosophy and history. Texts studied will be taken from the following: philosophy (the sophists, the early dialogues of Plato); history (Herodotus and/or Thucydides); the medical writers; dramatists (Euripides, Aristophanes): orators.