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GRK 2003 Ancient Greek Level III GRK 2003 Ancient Greek Level III Fall 2020 TTh 11-1:15 Block 2 by WebEx http://myweb.ecu.edu/stevensj/ Prof. John Stevens Ragsdale 133 Classical Studies, Dept. Foreign Languages & Literatures [email protected] Fall 2020 Contact: after class by WebEx, or by appt. and email (252) 328-6056 Because of the pandemic, we are meeting on a block schedule 10/1-11/16 (finals 11/17-25) with double length classes. We will meet by videoconference via WebEx on Tuesday and Thursday, from 11-1:15. The remaining 16% of required contact hours will be allocated for homework for these extra long classes. I will be available to answer questions and help by email outside of class if you have questions. To be successful in this course, students will need access to a computer with reliable internet access sufficient for videoconferencing. My office hours will be after class (it may be easiest just to continue the WebEx session after the others have left) or by appointment via phone or WebEx. I check email every couple hours and will usually get back to you quickly. Objectives. Upon completion of this course, you will be able to: • read and understand Classical Greek high prose • identify and explain all the elements of the complex sentence in Classical Greek. • situate Socrates and Xenophon in the Greek enlightenment of the 5th-4th century BC. • discuss the argument and literary-philosophical implications of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. Textbooks: • Cynthia W. Shelmerdine, Introduction to Greek (2nd ed. Hackett: 2008) 9781585101849 • Xenophon. Oeconomicus VII-XIII. Ed. Ralph Doty (Bristol Classical Pr: 1994). 9781853993947 • Liddell and Scott's Greek English Lexicon, abridged (Oxford Little Liddell with enlarged type for easier reading: Martino Fine Books 2015) 9781614277705 Online texts and tools: • Text of Xenophon’s Memorabilia https://bit.ly/2ERwdbv • Josiah Renick Smith Commentary on Memorabilia (Boston 1903) https://bit.ly/3h1J9rY • Text of Xenophon's Oeconomicus https://bit.ly/3bxdz4j • A.H.N. Sewell Commentary on Oeconomicus (Cambridge 1925) https://bit.ly/2EZqoIT • Alpheios Reader plugin. https://alpheios.net/ Grading: Homework and Class Translation 40% A 93-100, A- 90-92 Take-home Midterm 30% B+ 87-89, B 83-86, B- 80-82 Take-home Final 30% C+ 77-79, C 73-76, C- 70-72 D+ 67-69, D 63-66, D- 60-62, F 0-59 We will review some of the complexities of grammar and quickly finish Shelmerdine, then move on to reading Xenophon’s short dialogue, Oeconomicus. Xenophon the Athenian (ca. 444-354 BC) is known as a general for his campaign with Greek mercenaries on behalf of Cyrus the Younger, Satrap of Lydia, to overthrow the satrap’s brother Artaxerxes II, King of Persia in 401 BC, recorded in his Anabasis. Xenophon says that Socrates warned him against it. Cyrus dies half way to Babylon but the expedition decides to continue, and is successful until very near Babylon when they are trapped, with only one avenue of retreat, north to the black sea through the mountains of E. Turkey. When the other leaders are tricked and beheaded by the Persian Satrap Tissaphernes, Xenophon emerges as something of a hero for leading them all safely through Armenia to the Black Sea. On his return, he helped establish Seuthes II as King of Thrace, and then joined a Spartan campaign against Tissaphernes. He returned to Sparta with King Agesilaus II and fought with the Spartans against Athens at the Battle of Coroneia in 394 BC. For this he was exiled from Athens, and spent over 20 years in Scillus in Elis writing, until war forced him to move. Though he sent two sons to fight at the battle of Mantineia in 362 BC with Athens and Sparta against Thebes, and one died, his exile was not rescinded by Athens, and he is thought to have died in Corinth. Among his works are Hellenica, a continuation of Thucydides, and Cyropaedia, the 2nd most famous book in antiquity and perhaps the first novel, on how the earlier Cyrus (the Great) conquered the Persian empire. He also wrote Socratic dialogues, and ancient sources imagine a hostile rivalry between him and Plato, because neither mentions the other, though I see more admiration and competition than animosity. Xenophon wrote his own Apology and Symposium, and Cyropaedia is his version of Republic. He also wrote Recollections of Socrates (Memorabilia / Ἀπομνημονεύματα), in which he gives his own account of how Socrates taught, and denounces the infamous problem students Alcibiades and Critias, whose betrayals of Athens led to the death sentence upon Socrates in 399 BC. While there is not an exact equivalent of Oeconomicus in the works of Plato, its concluding dialogue is responding to two of Plato’s famous scenes. The title refers to the art of household management, which Xenophon connects with the art of ruling (the βασιλική τέχνη) because, he says, a ruler has charge of thousands of homes, so the starting point is learning to manage one. In this dialogue, Socrates is talking with Critobulus, the son of Crito, a young man who wants to be important in the city and thinks that the best thing in civic life is to be known as a ‘gentleman’ (καλός κ’ ἀγαθός, kaloskagathos). So Socrates tells him of his encounter with a famous gentleman, Ischomachus, who talks about how to manage a large farm profitably. This is the opposite of what Critobulus wants – he likes the city life and big drinking parties with important people. Ischomachus also talks about how he trained his wife. This is relevant for Critobulus, who is what one would call a lover, not a fighter, though this is also an ‘opposite’ lesson in that Critobulus is in love with one of the great beauties of his age who is male. The dialogue is famous as a supposed illustration of Greek misogyny, because we have such a revulsion to the Victorian idea of a husband training a woman to be the good little wife. But feminist interpreters are perhaps a bit hasty, because there is a famous Ischomachus in Athenian prosopography (family histories), which may suggest Xenophon was being ironic. In Apology, Socrates calls the wealthiest man in Athens as a witness of how the sophists educate, and he asks him who tutored his 2nd son. His 2nd son Hipponicus was the product of the greatest personal scandal in Athenian history, when Callias, as heredetary chief priest of Eleusis and its temple of Demeter and Persephone (Eumolpidae, priests of the cult of the mother and daughter) married the widow of a rich landowner named Ischomachus who had an even more beautiful daughter. In time he threw the mother over to marry the daughter, but then the mother turned up pregnant, and Callias found himself in an Oedipal position of fathering a half-brother for his young bride and of being married to the half-sister of his own child. It made him, the richest gentleman in Athens, a laughing stock, all of which calls into question the success of Ischomachus' training of his wife. Callias’ wealth came from mining silver at Laurium with large numbers of slaves. After the Spartan occupation of Deceleia in 413 BC, he was likely broke. His large farm holdings from the wife of Ischomachus would have become worthless at the same time, which may suggest that he overthrew the mother because she had no more financial worth to him. The flaw in Ischomachus’ method of education (if we set aside for a moment the paternalistic sexism of it all) is that it never discusses right and wrong except to say that Ischomachus treats his slaves with the laws of Draco (basically an eye for an eye). There is also practically no mention of love in this famous ‘education of a wife’, despite the fact that Critobulus is more concerned about love than even being a gentleman. Socrates jokes that if Critobulus wants to know about the art of love, the ἐρωτική τέχνη, he will send him to Aspasia (the courtesan who married Pericles, famed for training her girls to talk to men about matters of the city, envisioned in the right hand image above, but depicted by Aeschines as counseling couples to think of the good of the other). If we are right to suppose that the education of the wife of Ischomachus is a negative object lesson on the art of love, it raises the question of whether Socrates is actually teaching the art in his usual way, by tearing down conventional views of a subject. We are prompted to ask whether Socrates is preparing Critobulus for love or philosophy (i.e., to be in love with his world, rather than that of the gentleman). If one of the Platonic models is the encounter of Socrates and Callias in Apology, the other (aside from Platonic works on love in Symposium, and on Aspasia in Menexenus) is probably Socrates’ ironic treatment (and implied refutation) of another fabulously rich gentleman – Cephalus at the start of Republic. The work raises interesting questions about the role of friendship in philosophy, about education and irony, and about the curious relationship between love and the art of ruling. For information about severe weather and university closings, see http://www.ecu.edu/alert/. East Carolina University seeks to comply fully with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Students requesting accommodations based on a disability must be registered with the Department for Disability Support Services located in Slay 138 ((252) 737-1016 (Voice/TTY). Academic integrity is expected of every East Carolina student. Cheating, plagiarism (claiming the work or ideas of another as your own), and falsification, will be considered a violation of Academic Integrity (http://www.ecu.edu/cs- studentaffairs/dos/upload/academic-integrity-manual.pdf).
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