David Castriota

This course will examine the use of mythic imagery in the visual arts of the Greeks and peoples of ancient Italy from the eighth century BCE to the beginning of the Roman Empire. We will consider all visual artistic media—both public and private. We will focus largely on problems of content or interpretation, with special attention to the role of patronage in the choice and mode of presentation of the mythic themes. In order to appreciate the underlying cultural or religious significance of the myths and their visual expression, we will also examine the relation of the artworks to contemporary literature, especially poetry, and the impact of significant historical events or trends.

Fall: Homeric and Archaic Greece
In the fall semester, we will examine the earlier Greek development from the Geometric to the Archaic periods, focusing on the paradigmatic function of mythic narratives—especially the central conception of the hero and the role of women in Greek religion and society. Group discussion will concentrate on the social function of myth and myth in early Greek poetry, as well as key historical or political developments such as the emergence of tyranny and democracy.

Spring: From Classical Greece to Augustan Rome
The spring semester will begin with examining the use of myth during the Classical period, focusing on the impact of the prolonged conflict with the Persian Empire and the great monuments of Periklean Athens. We will then consider Greek myth in the later Classical and Hellenistic periods and the absorption of Greek myth by the Etruscans and early Romans. The course will conclude with the adaptation of Greek myth within the emerging Roman Empire. Group discussion will focus on the relation between myth and an emerging Greek conception of history and ethnography and, finally, on the interrelation of poetry and art in Augustan Rome.

Fall: Early Christian Art and Architecture
In the fall, this course will examine the emergence and development of Christian art in the Mediterranean and Europe during the later ancient and early medieval periods. Here, this development will be considered directly in connection with the emergence and eventual dominance of Christianity itself within the Roman Empire, with appropriate attention to Christian religious belief and theology as a significant factor in the artistic development. The course will consider all artistic media but primarily painting, sculpture, and architecture. We will begin by assessing how art and architecture were used to project the power and ideology of the Roman Empire, both in the public and in the private sphere. We will then examine how existing traditions of Roman art were gradually adapted to create a specifically Christian artistic production, first in the private sphere and then in a public, more monumental setting as the Roman state began officially to embrace and promulgate Christianity. In the fall, the course will focus largely on the western regions of the Roman Empire up to and just beyond its collapse in the course of the fifth century.

Spring: Byzantine Art and Architecture From Theodosius to the Fall of Constantinople
In spring, we will focus on the further development of Christian art and architecture in the surviving East Roman or “Byzantine” Empire, beginning at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries and focusing extensively on the apogee of Byzantine art in the so-called “Age of Justinian.” Here, we will consider not only the art of the imperial center of Constantinople but also the regional variations in the early Byzantine development across the Balkans, Anatolia or Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, North Africa, and Egypt. As the semester progresses, we will then consider the impact of an emerging and expanding Islamic Empire on a gradually shrinking Byzantine world. We will study the effect of these changes on the nature and output of artistic production in the regions that Byzantium struggled to retain while also considering the repeated impact of Byzantine art on the medieval art of western Europe. The course will culminate with the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

Given their geographical setting at the northwestern extreme of Europe, the arts and cultures of “Albion,” or Britain and Ireland, have often been described by the term “insular” in the sense of isolated, discrete, or peripheral—yet nothing could be further from the truth. No less than six Roman emperors spent time in Britain, and four came to power there. To a great extent, Irish clerics were responsible for the survival of classical learning during the Dark Ages. Indeed, throughout history, cultural developments in the British Isles were intimately related to ideas and events on the European Continent and the Mediterranean. Following this basic premise, in the fall semester the course will examine civilization in Britain and Ireland from the late Stone Age or Megalithic period, through the Bronze and Early Iron Ages, to the coming of the Celts and the Roman conquest. In the spring, we will focus on later Roman Britain, Irish monasticism, and the emergence of Anglo-Saxon culture down to the arrival of the Vikings. At every turn, we will consider interactions with the urban civilizations to the south and west—the early Aegean, Greece, Rome, and the early medieval Continent—to discover that Albion was an integral part of the political, religious, and economic forces that shaped the art and history of Europe up to the present time.

With the advent of early archaeological excavation in the Near East, biblical studies entered upon a new modern phase in which the criticism of scriptural revelation was no longer simply a matter of faith or theology. With the new discoveries at Nimrud just before the middle of the 19th century, the Assyrians and the other great powers of ancient Mesopotamia mentioned in Old Testament narratives suddenly became a visible reality, demonstrating that biblical narratives could now be evaluated or corroborated empirically against hard, material evidence. In due course, pioneering archaeologists also turned their attention to the Holy Land to pursue this new agenda. Since then, the convergence of archaeology and modern professional criticism of the Old Testament has increasingly enabled us to reconstruct the reality behind the biblical narratives. The course will explore this process, focusing primarily on the material culture of the ancient Levant—beginning in the Bronze Age with the Canaanites, the emergence and subsequent development of the Iron Age Israelite kingdom, its destruction, the Babylonian Captivity, the eventual return of the Jews under Persian rule, and the re-emergence from Hellenistic Greek domination of a Judaean kingdom under the Hasmoneans. Although focused largely on archaeological or material remains, the course will also make ample use of biblical and historical texts or sources to investigate the intersection of archaeology, culture, and religion.

Historically, competition or conflict between the European or Mediterranean West and the regions of the Middle East has been seen as a struggle between Christian and Muslim worlds with roots in the era of the Crusades, whose precedent and implications reach into the present time. While this course will focus extensively on the medieval period, it seeks to do so by situating the relations between Christian Europe and the Muslim world within a larger context as the result of geopolitical patterns that long antedated the emergence of Christianity or Islam. In the fall, the course will begin with the Greek invasion of the Near East under Alexander as a war of retribution for the Persian invasion of Greece more than a century earlier. We will consider how the political structure and culture of the multiethnic Hellenistic Greek kingdoms emerged from the wreckage of the Persian Empire and how Rome subsequently built on Hellenistic Greek experience and conflict with the Near East in establishing its empire. We will examine the emergence of Christianity as an example of a Roman or Western response to an originally Eastern religion and, conversely, the emergence of the Islamic faith and its new empire as an Eastern challenge to the Christianized Roman Empire of Late Antiquity. In the spring, we will see how this approach affords a very different view of the Crusades and the battle for the Holy Land as the outgrowth of longstanding cultural and political interactions or competitions that transcend religious faith and doctrine. The course will look at Christian and Muslim cultural relations in Spain and then close by examining the rise of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which originated as a Muslim regime in Eastern Europe and became a major power in Asia only after it had conquered the remaining symbol of the old Christian Roman Empire, Constantinople, in 1453. We will consider primary historical and literary sources, as well as major artistic monuments.

In modern terms, myth has come to be commonly understood as the antithesis of history. Whereas history is taken as a reasoned, factual account of the past and how things came to be, myth appears to operate in the realm of fiction or fantasy. Myths may have the claim of venerable tradition, but they are no longer accepted as an accurate record of events. The ancient world, however, made no such black-and-white distinctions. In antiquity, myth was accepted as early history. Its heroes were real, and their actions were thought to exemplify essential paradigms of political order and morality. Consequently, this course will apply a different approach in which myth is distinguished from history not by a truth test but, rather, by virtue of its function as a means of cultural self-representation. We shall examine the myths of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome—both in their literary form and in various media of visual art. Throughout, our goal will be to understand the potency of these narratives as vehicles of social or cultural values and as tools of power legitimizing and justifying closely entwined notions of religious and political authority. The course will close by considering how, in Late Antiquity, Christian narratives and ideologies in the literary and visual arts developed from the mythic traditions that preceded them.

The study of the Greco-Roman world and its contribution to the evolution of ancient Mediterranean culture remains a primary object for classical studies. But what of the complex connections or interactions that existed between the urban cultures of the Greek and Roman world and the so-called “barbarian” peoples? What does the term “barbarian” imply as used by the Greeks and their Roman successors? Was it simply meant to denote “otherness,” or did it signify notions of social and material cultural or technological inferiority, as well? What did Greek culture in its formative stages borrow from its non-Greek neighbors? In the course of time, what technologies and modes of artistic expression did “barbarian” peoples of Asia and Europe absorb from the classical world? How does consideration of such issues help us to gain a clearer understanding of the whole substance and rhetoric of Western cultural identity? The answers to these questions are neither simple nor easy. They require a careful look at the cultural dynamic between the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans and an array of non-classical peoples—Egyptians, Phoenicians, Persians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Celts, and various Germanic tribes—through a vast panorama of space and time. We will approach the problem from the perspective of history, especially through such primary sources as the histories of Herodotus, Polybios, and Tacitus. But we will also consider the problem from the perspective of art history or archaeology, since it was in the domain of material culture—the art of ornament and display—that tribal peoples of Europe and Asia found their most important modes of expression and most tangible form of interaction with classical peoples to the west and south.

The fate of the western Roman provinces during and after the collapse of the imperial center in the fifth century remains a major concern for historians of Late Antiquity, yet no single former Roman province has proven to be as obscure and resistant to serious historical study as Britain. Through much of the 20th century, a substantial body of historical research was devoted toward developing the figure of Arthur, a post-Roman ruler or warlord who strove to preserve something of Roman imperial order and culture while stemming Germanic or Anglo-Saxon settlement. More recently, however, the tide of scholarship has turned against a historical Arthur. The fact remains that Arthur is unattested in any historical sources of the late antiquity or early medieval periods. Nor is there much evidence that Anglo-Saxon settlement was effectively shaped or contained by native Romano-British resistance. Consequently, the course will examine the origins of Arthur as a figure of legend rather than of history, and we will examine the factors that led to Arthur being accorded historical status—first in the early medieval period and then in modern scholarship. At the same time, we will attempt to establish the basis for a genuine dynastic and political history of Britain from the fifth to the seventh centuries.

Although the Romans come to mind most immediately as the people who absorbed and passed on the achievements of Greek civilization to the Western world, the transmission of Greek culture to Western posterity was a far more complex process involving various other peoples. Already during the late second millennium BC, Greek culture began to interact with that of its neighbors in the Near East and Egypt to produce a common, “international,” Eastern Mediterranean cultural zone. Later, after a period of collapse and regression in the early first millennium BC, renewed contact with the East would revitalize and revolutionize Greek culture which, in due course, came to dominate the entire Mediterranean region—even among Near Eastern peoples like the Phoenicians, who had formerly been the teachers of the Greeks. But it was especially among the peoples of Italy—above all, the Etruscans and early Romans—that Greek artistic and literary culture took root. No other region was ever able to absorb Greek ideas so thoroughly and consistently while also managing to preserve a unique cultural identity. In the end, it would be the Romans rather than the Greeks themselves who would spread and administer an advanced stage of Hellenism from western Asia to Britain. The course will explore these issues for the entire year. The fall portion, The Early Greeks and Their Neighbors, will first examine the beginnings of Greek civilization in the Late Bronze Age—its relation to Minoan Crete and Egypt, as well as connections with the Hittites, Phoenicians, and Assyrians to the east. Then, we will consider the so-called “Orientalizing” process in which the Greeks adapted Phoenician and Egyptian culture to produce a distinctive new civilization in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. The spring half of the course, Ancient Italy and the Hellenization of the West, will focus on how the Greeks affected Italic peoples like the Etruscans and, above all, the Romans—who emerged as the dominant political force in Italy and then across the Mediterranean and southern Europe. The course will apply a varied approach, concentrating largely on material culture, art, and architecture but also on literary and historical data in order to achieve a larger cultural perspective.

This course will examine one of the most challenging problems of Western and European history—the transformation of the Roman Empire and the ancient world into the world of medieval Christian Europe. Toward this end, we will examine major artistic monuments against the background of a broad range of evidence, including literature and religion as well as military and political history. Within this perspective, the fall of the Roman Empire will emerge not as an event but as a process, one that unfolded slowly over several centuries to evolve continuously into the complex mosaic of early medieval Europe. Fall: The Fall of the Roman Empire. During the fall semester, we will examine how Rome went from a period of unquestioned power and prosperity in the late second century AD into an era of economic, political, and military instability that resulted in a steady decline, punctuated by periodic revivals that ultimately failed. The course will focus on the root causes of this decline in Roman military and economic policy under relentless pressure from barbarian Europe and the neighboring Persian Empire. We will also consider the emergence of Christianity, not so much as a cause or symptom of decline but as the cultural process through which the Romans reinvented themselves one last time. Spring: From Barbarian Kingdoms to the Holy Roman Empire. The spring semester will begin with the various Germanic “successor states” that filled the vacuum left by Rome’s collapse. We will examine the various Germanic-speaking peoples who settled within the former Roman territories and how they accommodated themselves to surviving Roman institutions. A key factor here will be the early medieval Church hierarchy that rapidly came to assume the organizing cultural and administrative role formerly maintained by the Roman Empire in Western Europe. We will then consider how the Merovingian Frankish successor state eventually merged with the papacy to revive the old Christian imperial ideal as a new “Holy Roman Empire” under the Carolingian and Ottonian dynasties. Here, we will examine the theme of revival not only as a political and economic phenomenon but also in terms of the great rebirth of architecture and the arts under Charlemagne and his political heirs.

The course will examine the origins and development of urban architecture and city planning in the ancient Near East, Egypt, and the Greek and Roman world. We will consider the built environment as a practical response to the requirements of social, economic, and political organization, as well as to religious belief. We will begin by examining the factors behind the earliest urban developments among the settled communities of the Near East and Egypt, culminating in the great cities of Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley. We will then shift to urban development in the Greek world, starting with the Bronze Age Aegean and then the subsequent emergence of the polis in response to the urban cultures of Egypt and the Near East. We will conclude by examining the urban elaborations of Classical and Hellenistic Greece and the Greek impact on the cultures of ancient Italy.

Given their geographical setting at the northwestern extreme of Europe, the arts and cultures of “Albion,” or Britain and Ireland, have often been described by the term “insular” in the sense of isolated, discrete, or peripheral, yet nothing could be further from the truth. No less than six Roman emperors spent time in Britain, and four came to power there. To a great extent, Irish clerics were responsible for the survival of classical learning during the Dark Ages. Indeed, throughout history, cultural developments in the British Isles were intimately related to ideas and events on the European Continent and the Mediterranean. Following this basic premise, in the fall semester the course will examine civilization in Britain and Ireland from the late Stone Age or Megalithic period, through the Bronze and Early Iron Ages, to the coming of the Celts and the Roman conquest. In the spring, we will focus on later Roman Britain, Irish monasticism, and the emergence of Anglo-Saxon culture down to the arrival of the Vikings. At every turn, we will consider interactions with the urban civilizations to the south and west—the early Aegean, Greece, Rome, and the early medieval Continent—to discover that Albion was an integral part of the political, religious, and economic forces that have shaped the art and history of Europe up to the present time.