Creating the Other in Ancient Greece and Rome

3 units

This course will investigate the ways that ancient Greeks and Romans portrayed people who they thought were different from them. We will use literary and archaeological evidence from the ancient world to look at how people living in the ancient Mediterranean understood difference between themselves and people of other cultures, whom they encountered through trade, imperialism, and war, and also how they understood difference within their own society. What naturalized theories did they use to explain difference? What moral qualities did they attribute to different groups? Did they have a concept of race? And most of all, how can the way they depicted people who were 'other' inform our understanding of Greek and Roman self-identification? We will focus on classical Athens, Hellenistic Egypt, and imperial Rome, considering how earlier ideas influence later cultures and how changing political and social dynamics change the way difference is understood.