Suffering, Grief, and Consolation

Undergraduate / Graduate

Why do people suffer and die? How can we find comfort? Should we hope for a better future, focus our energies on making peace with the present, or attempt to do both? How do we cultivate joy in the midst of adversity? Can pain be productive? The literature of ancient consolation engages these questions as it bears witness to the myriad ways in which ancient Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians attempted to comfort suffering people. The goal was not simply to defeat grief, but to replace grief with its opposite, joy. This course introduces students to ancient consolation literature, a genre composed of various literary forms (e.g., funeral orations, consolatory letters, apocalypses, prophecies) but united by a common store of vocabulary, expressions of sympathy, arguments against grief, and exhortations to admirable behavior amid hardship. We will read selections from Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, the Bible, and various texts of early Judaism and Christianity. At the end of the course, we will bridge the horizons between ancient approaches to consolation and current debates about how to treat grief and facilitate human flourishing during hardship. While there are no prerequisites for the course, if there is sufficient student interest, the course may feature Languages Across the Curriculum (LxC) sessions in which students who have knowledge of Latin will be able to read select course texts (e.g., from Cicero and Seneca) in Latin. Participation in the LxC sessions is elective and s