First-Year Seminar: Spectacle! Popular Entertainment in Ancient Greece and Rome

3 units

The grand spectacles of the Greco-Roman world still resonate today as some of the most familiar and celebrated images of antiquity, including Athenian tragedy, the Olympic Games, chariot-racing, and gladiatorial combat, among many other forms of visually arresting rituals staged before public audiences. In this seminar students will analyze a range of paintings, mosaics, sculpture, coins, graffiti and other media depicting these spectacular performances, as well as their specific archaeological and cultural contexts, in order to reach a better understanding of how each society defined themselves through such complex and ephemeral phenomena. Drawing on recent work in history, media studies, and political theory, we will also explore together scholarly debates about the function of spectacles in each society, from moral instruction or expressions of communal identity to social control or negotiations for power. By the end of the semester students will be equipped to compare the highly artificial and theatrical aesthetics characteristic of Julio-Claudian Rome with spectacular modes of expression in our own age of mass production and global telecommunications, including modern protest movements and blockbuster films such as Ben-Hur and Gladiator.