Athenian democracy and its crises: Thucydides, Euripides, Aristophanes

Undergraduate / Graduate

As the fifth century BCE came to a close, Athenian democracy faced significant political, ideological, and even constitutional crises. In this course, we will explore how these challenges were described and dramatized in tragedy (Euripides), comedy (Aristophanes), and historiography (Thucydides). We will read these authors in Greek, focusing on the sources these authors ascribed to these democratic crises, as well as the development and evolution of major lines of political thought in this era. In conjunction with this, we will consider how genres, and the traditions that lie behind them, exert an influence on the literary products themselves, and thus on the ideas expressed within.