Life, Love, and Loss in Ancient Greece and Rome

All of us mortal humans, unfortunately, are subject to the universal challenges of life: pain, distress, sickness, heartache, break-ups, natural disasters, financial loss, and our ageing bodies. Improvements in ‘quality of life’ over the centuries have eliminated some of these problems, and reduced others, but in the process perhaps left us less equipped to cope with the difficulties we still must face. Luckily, wisdom can be found in the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, who had a particularly rich repertoire for expressing some of these universal human problems through the arts and literature. But they also had singular ways of processing them through philosophical reframing. This course will study a suite of these universal human ‘problems’ such as death, illness, anguish and love, and will engage students in the material and literary evidence that demonstrates how the peoples of ancient Greece and Rome confronted problems with the help of various artistic and aesthetic processing modes: from the consolations of literature and inscriptions, to the mythic therapies of funerary art, to the cathartic qualities of music and drama. Through learning how ancient societies practiced communal self-care, students will be encouraged to connect old wisdom to their own lives – but also to use the strangeness of antiquity to defamiliarize themselves.