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Greek Social History
Individual, Family, and Civic Life in Ancient Greece
HSTR (History) 303
Class meetings: Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:10-12:30 PM, Liberal Arts Bldg. 244
Instructor: Hayden W. Ausland (Classics/FLL; office: LA 425 Phone: 243-2125)
Primary Office Hours: to be announced
This course examines several aspects of personal, social, and political life of classical
times in Greece, with a particular focus on ancient Athens and the Athenians in relation to
posterity. Readings are primarily in various ancient authors, with some additional modern
material to be considered in the light of these. Through lecture and some discussion we will try
to get to know the ancient Greeks, comparing their history, lives, and social thought with our own
in a number of respects. The coursework will call upon students' powers not only of careful and
critical listening and reading, but also of written and oral discourse. A preliminary draft
preparatory to a more ambitious final paper, a midterm and a final exam, and various other
indications of genuine engagement in the course (e.g. attendance, participation) will constitute the
bases for evaluation. Students should acquaint themselves with the conditions governing
enrollment, performance, and evaluation in university course work set out in the University of
Montana Catalogue, Schedule of Classes, and Student Conduct Code.
General Education credit: [see addendum]
Projected Schedule of Topics and Readings
Weekly topic(s):
Reading(s):
Week 1:
Introduction; who were the Greeks?
Hesiod, Theogony
Week 2:
Dorians and Ionians; early conditions Hesiod, Works and Days
Week 3:
War and personal themes in poetry
Greek Lyrics (tr. Lattimore)
Week 4:
Life & politics during a war
Aristophanes, Acharnians & Lysistrata
Week 5:
Athenian Democracy
[Xenophon], Athenian Constitution*
Isocrates, Panegyricus
Week 6:
Philosophy and politics at Athens
Aristophanes, Clouds
Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates (I)
Week 7:
Family and friends
Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates (II)
Week 8:
Public Life
Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates (III-IV)
Week 9:
Home and leisure
Xenophon, Estate Manager & Dinner Party
Week 10:
Problems of social status (i)
Lysias, On behalf of the Cripple*
Week 11:
Problems of social status (ii)
[Demosthenes], Against Neaera*
[Demosthenes], The Erotic Oration
Week 12:
Questions after a funeral
Isaeus, On Philoctemon's Estate*
Week 13:
Charicles' story (I)
Bekker (Scenes 1,2, & 5)
Week 14:
Charicles' story (II)
Bekker (Scenes 6, 9, & 10)
[Exam week: the final exam will be administered according to the announced University schedule]
The UC Bookstore has been asked to order: Hesiod, tr. M. West; Greek Lyrics (tr. R. Lattimore); Aristophanes,
Lysistrata, Acharnians, & Clouds (tr. Sommerstein); Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates, etc. (tr. TredennickWaterfield); Pseudo- Xenophon, The Old Oligarch; and also (as an 'optional' text) M. I. Finley, The Ancient
Greeks. Other items are available in photocopy from Denny's.
Addendum on General Education Credit and Student Learning Goals
It is useful to mention the terms under which this course qualifies for General Education Credit:
(Indigenous and Global Perspectives) This course instills knowledge of diverse cultures in a
comparative and thematic framework. Students will be encouraged to cultivate ways of thinking
that foster an understanding of the complexities of indigenous cultures and global issues, past and
present. They will in consequence also learn how geographically and culturally separate parts of
the world are linked by various, multiple interactions. More particularly, the course focuses upon
one ancient "first people" and its descendants, who derived their cultural communal identities
from a long-standing and historical habitation of a particular region. It will thus foster an
appreciation more generally for indigenous peoples, their histories and cultures, and their efforts
both to maintain their ways of life and to gain viable positions in the broader pragmatic ecumene.
Criteria: (1) Indigenous ... courses will familiarize students with the values, histories, and
institutions of two or more societies through the uses of comparative approaches. (2) Indigenous
perspective courses address the longstanding tenure of a particular people in a particular
geographical region, (3) their histories, cultures, and ways of living, as well as their interaction
with other groups, indigenous and non-indigenous.
[Instructor's explanation:
(1) By a society's "values" is here understood the various levels of worth characteristically
assigned various things or ideas by members of a given society. Ancient Greek society employed
distinctive values, which have survived in a classical (i.e. paradigmatic) form. HSTR 302
exhibits these values through numerous readings illustrative of such values on the level of
ordinary life, and as such familiarizes students with ancient Greek social values. HSTR 302 is a
history course, and as such fosters an appreciation for history properly understood. In the plural,
the same term can also refer to stories (cf. "narratives"). HSTR 302 examines many such stories,
for instance those integral to several forensic speeches among the required readings. By requiring
students to read many such stories, the course also familiarizes then with such histories.
Institutions presumed or mentioned in the ancient literary sources for the course include
citizenship, marriage, inheritance, slavery, public religion, courts of justice, public poetic forms,
and the public management of orphans, invalids, and prostitutes, among numerous other such
things. HSTR 302 in this way familiarizes students with institutions. The values, histories and
institutions so confronted can in most cases be brought into comparison with rival values,
histories, and institutions of other ancient peoples. But they are always brought into comparison
with our own -- whether these be modified derivatives from them, or novel rivals to them. To
offer examples taken from but a single source used in the course: Against Neaera is a speech
accusing a man's wife of being a foreign ex-prostitute rather than the Athenian citizen woman she
seems to be. In reading this speech, students learn the Athenian social value attached to citizen
birth for women (only their offspring can inherit), a foreign prostitute's history likely invented in
many respects, but also designed (by the prosecutor) to be plausible to an Athenian jury, and the
Athenian legal institutions governing the disposition of such a case: conviction would carry a stiff
penalty for Neaera and her man alike, but acquittal by a large percentage of the jury a fine for the
prosecutor. The values, typical stories, and legal institutions of Athens here revealed admit of
comparison with those of other contemporaneous societies (e.g., Egyptian), as well as with our
own. HSTR 302 proceeds so as to bring out these and many other such comparisons.
(2) The Greeks of antiquity have demonstrably inhabited Greece since about 2000 BC, and in fact
may have arrived rather earlier. They eventually spread into many other areas around the
Mediterranean and Black Seas. As a whole, the ancient Greek people inhabited its home until it
was absorbed under Ottoman rule. Within the ancient Greek people, there were two main groups:
"Achaeans", who came into Greece by 2000 BC at the latest, and Dorians, who arrived around
1000 BC. Among the former, a dialectal sub-group called Ionians occupied Athens and its
territory Attica, among other areas of ancient Greece, from about 2000 BC onward through
archaic, classical, and Hellenistic eras and into Christian times. When Dorian Greeks came in,
they pushed some of the Ionian and other earlier populations aside in the process. Among the
institutions the Ionians in Attica developed and sought to export something they at length termed
"democracy", but first called "equality under the law". Integral to this effort, they claimed to be
the sole people of Greece that was truly indigenous (Greek autochthones; Latin indigenae). The
classic statement comes from the orator Isocrates:
". . . for we did not became dwellers in this land by driving others out of it, nor by finding it
uninhabited, nor by coming together here a motley horde composed of many races; but we are of
a lineage so noble and so pure that throughout our history we have continued in possession of the
very land which gave us birth, since we are sprung from its very soil and are able to address our
city by the very names which we apply to our nearest kin; for we alone of all the Hellenes have
the right to call our city at once nurse and fatherland and mother." (Isocrates Panegyricus 4.21)
Archaological evidence supports the claim, which is better attested historically than like claims
on the part of a number of present-day groups recognized as indigenous (e.g., the Sámi, whose
precedence in Northern Scandinavia remains conjectural, scientifically speaking). The ancient
Athenians are in any case the first people on record to claimed an "indigenous" status in a way
integral to their assertion of an interpretation of human culture. While some modern scholars
have raised doubts, assimilating the phenomenon to modern "indigenismo", the best ancient
testimony goes to the contrary (see Herodotus 8.44.1). The ancient Athenians were a longstanding indigenous cultural group, and also remain the classic instance of a self-consciously
indigenous "culture".
(3) Ionians and Dorians preserved distinct societies, and a strong sense of their mutual difference:
Athens was open and democratic, Sparta closed and almost totalitarian. In the early 5th century,
this difference had to be overcome in order to engage in a critical struggle against invading
Persians (the subject of Herodotus' history, half of which he spends examining and comparing
other groups around the Mediterranean: Lydians, Egyptians, Scythians). Its subsequent
resurgence conditioned a war between Dorian and Ionian Greeks groups in the late 5th century
(the subject of Thucydides' history, which dwells on the differences between the Athenian and
Spartan ways of life). During the 4th century, a Macedonian threat materialized, causing some
for a while to contemplate alliance with the Persians. In the event, Athens and Greece succumbed
to the new empire. During the classical period, however, Athenian history, culture, and private
lives are particularly well documented and of special comparative interest due to the lasting
cultural authority Athens gained beginning already in ancient times. Sources for this course
amply describe or illustrate many histories (including, but not limited to, the kind exemplified
above) and numerous features of Athenian culture, while documenting the dynamic struggles
Greeks as a whole and Athenians in particular underwent opposite a geopolitical power like
Persia and a cultural rival like Dorian Sparta, respectively. By presenting these matters to students
from the perspective of primary sources, i.e. from the perspective of the indigenous peoples
themselves, rather than via reductive modern portraits of them, HSTR 302 fosters an appreciation
of the peoples, and for their histories, culture, and struggles to remain the Greeks they were, and
to institute and enjoy freedom and equality.]
-- and the Student Learning Goals:
1. Place human behavior and cultural ideas into a wider (global/indigenous) framework, and
enhance their understanding of the complex interdependence of nations and societies and their
physical environments;
[Instructor's note: By exchanging ignorance or preconceptions -- whether positive or negative -of the ancient Greeks for evidence derived from the testimonies used in a social history of
Greece, and particularly of classical Athens, students will be able to view the Greeks as an
indigenous people among others that has, through its actions (or behavior) within the social
sphere suffered stress though its politically complex relationships with both external imperial
powers and Dorian Greek rivals. They will also come to appreciate how ancient Greece and
Athens have had a peculiar and long-standing cultural significance for a great part of the world,
and potentially all of it. Essay questions on the examinations, marked for historical accuracy and
effective focus on the assigned question (or take-home paper assignments marked also for the
writing) will test this synthetic ability. Example: a take-home paper assignment, asking students
to explain Example: an exam-question challenging students to explain the consequences, as
parodied in Aristophanes' Acharnians, for both Megarian and Athenian farmers early during the
greater Peloponnesian war. The grading measure will be the instructor's considered judgment of
the whole result, based in part on his professional experience.]
2. demonstrate an awareness of the diverse ways humans structure their social, political, and
cultural lives;
[Instructor's note: Comparison of Greek with Persian (or other foreign) ways, Athenian with
Spartan ways, and, finally, Classical Greek with modern European and American ways, will
induce awareness of their diversity in social, political, and cultural respects. Essay questions on
the examinations, marked for historical accuracy and effective focus on the assigned question (or
take-home paper assignments marked also for the writing) will test this awareness. Example: a
take-home paper assignment on Demosthenes' Against Neaera, with a question asking how free,
citizen women's preferences for a life-style in ancient Athens differ from those of today's women
American or European women. The grading measure will be the instructor's considered judgment
of the whole result, based in part on his professional experience.]
3. analyze and compare the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in the 21st century including
those of their own societies and cultures.
[Instructor's note: Students will engage in a comparative analysis of their own institutions
governing what are now called "rights and responsibilities" in many particular ways based on the
readings, as referred to experience or knowledge of the present. Examples: they will compare
and contrast our current European and American cultural, social, and legal norms in regard to the
differing legal statuses of Citizen and non-Citizen women and children as part of their study of
Demosthenes' Against Neaera (see the explanation above); they will compare and contrast our
current European and American cultural, social, and legal norms in regard to the treatment of
handicapped citizens by studying Lysias' On Behalf of the Cripple); and they will compare and
contrast our current European and American cultural, social, and legal norms in regard to the
disposition of family property in the settlement of estates by reading Isaeus' On the Estate of
Philoctemon. These, and many other matters resembling them in the readings for this course,
number among rights and responsibilities apt for comparison. Students will be encouraged to
develop, and expected to show, an analytic command of such questions.
Essay questions on the examinations, marked for accuracy, and analytic acuity on the assigned
question (or take-home paper assignments marked also for the writing) will test this analytic
command. Example: a quoted passage from Isaeus' On the Estate of Philoctemon, with an examquestion challenging students to explain elements in it indicative of the need for analysis of our
own assumptions, practices, and laws in matters of bequest and inheritance. The grading
measure will be the instructor's considered judgment of the whole result, based in part on his
professional experience.