Love and Loathing: Greek Culture and Roman Literature

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

By the time the Romans came closely into contact with Greek culture, it had been flourishing for half a millennium. Its habits of life and its artistic productions both captivated and repelled the Romans, who saw in Greek culture both habits antithetical to their own ideals and artistic forms that could give expression to those very same ideals. Greek culture, in that way, forced Romans to think about what it meant to be Roman. This course probes the historical shape of that debate and considers texts which reflect both sides of it in all its variations. Primary texts, to be read in Latin, will include selections from archaic inscriptions (which are often “secretly Greek”), writers of early epic (whose output takes implicit positions on Hellenization), Cato (who professed suspicion to all things Greek), Terence’s Adelphi (which contrasts modern and old-fashioned child-rearing), the Rhetorica ad Herennium (which enthusiastically adapts Greek models, rejecting older Italic speech habits), Cicero’s oratory (in which anti- and philHellenic tropes can both be found), Cicero’s de Oratore (which contains both praise and blame of Greek-style rhetorical study), Catullus (whose wide poetic output includes both “Roman” and “Greek” insult poems), and Livy (who describes the moral decline caused by Hellenizing and who provides a vivid account of a Roman attempt to suppress certain Greek religious practices).