Course Meeting Times
Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session
Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites for this course.
Course Description
Through close examination of the emperor Augustus and his Julio-Claudian successors, this subject investigates how Roman emperors used art, architecture, coinage, and other media to create and project an image of themselves, how the surviving literary sources from the Roman period reinforced or subverted that image, and how both phenomena have contributed to post-classical perceptions of Roman emperors. It also considers works of Suetonius and Tacitus, as well as modern representations of the emperors such as those found in the films I, Claudius, Quo Vadis, and HBO’s Rome series.
Required Readings
Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, transl. C. Edwards (Oxford World’s Classics 2000). ISBN: 9780199537563. [Preview with Google Books]
Tacitus, The Annals, transl. J.C. Yardley (Oxford World’s Classics 2008). ISBN: 9780192824219. [Preview with Google Books]
Virgil, The Aeneid, transl. R. Fagles (Penguin Classics 2010). ISBN: 9780143106296. [Preview with Google Books]
E. Buckley and M.T. Dinter (eds.), A Companion to the Neronian Age (Wiley-Blackwell 2013). ISBN: 9781118316535. [Preview with Google Books]
For additional readings, see the Readings section.
Recommended Online Resources
The Oxford Classical Dictionary, a scholarly and authoritative encyclopedia of all things ancient Greek and Roman.
The Loeb Classical Library Online. The LCL has long been the go-to collection for reading English translations of ancient texts alongside the original Greek or Latin. Some LCL translations are now quite old and correspondingly stilted; but the collection is comprehensive and reliable.
LacusCurtius. Many of the same texts appear on the LCL site, but here in a format that some will find more user-friendly.
JSTOR. The Scholarly Journal Archive, including relevant classical studies and archaeology journals.
Assessment
| ACTIVITIES | PERCENTAGES |
|---|---|
| Reading Quizzes | 20% |
| Class Participation | 20% |
| Short Analytical Response Papers (SHARPs) x 2 at 10% each | 20% |
| Museum Artifact Video Project | 20% |
| Final Paper | 20% |
For further detail on the activities listed above, see the Assignments section.
