Macquarie University Department of Ancient History 2nd Semester, 2011. AHIS 241 / 341 AlexanderAlexander thethe GreatGreat andand thethe HellenisticHellenistic AgeAge Unit Outline, Schedule, Tutorial Materials and Bibliography 1 Contents: Unit Introduction and Requirements p. 3 Unit Schedule: Lecture and Tutorial topics p. 9 Map 1: Alexander's March of Conquest. p. 11 Weekly Tutorial Materials p. 12 Map 2: Alexander's Successors, 303 B.C. p. 17 Map 3: The 3rd Century World of Alexander’s Successors p. 18 Map 4: The Background to the Maccabean Revolt p. 27 Unit Main Bibliography p. 32 2 Macquarie University Department of Ancient History 2011 AHIS 241 / 341: Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age. UNIT INTRODUCTION This Unit on Alexander the Great and the ‘Hellenistic Age’ will begin with the political situation in Fourth Century Greece and the rise of Macedon. It will focus first on the career of Alexander the Great, and the interpretation of a number of key episodes in his life. The aim will be to build up an overall picture of his motives and achievements, and the consequences of his extraordinary conquests for later history. The focus will then turn to the break up of his ‘Empire’ at his death, and the warfare among his successors which led to the creation of the great rival kingdoms of the Hellenistic period. The Unit will be primarily a study in cultural history, set against the background of the political history of the Mediterranean world. It will not be tied to an event-by-event account of the post- Classical Greek world, but will focus also on the history of ideas and institutions. Wider cultural questions will be discussed in relation to institutions, manners and thought (including religion, philosophy and art) of the period. General issues to be treated will include kingship, political ideology, inter-city relationships and leagues, ideas of unity and cosmo-politanism, resistance to Greek political hegemony by the conquered peoples, and syncretism and monism in religion. These and other topics will be studied in relation to Greece itself and in relation to the ‘hellenised’ cities of the Near East. An attempt will be made to define the relationships between Greek culture and those of ‘the East’. For example: can we speak of the ‘cultural hegemony’ of the Greeks, or was the process in fact the reverse? Was Hellenism swallowed up in the ‘morass’ of Near Eastern cultural diversity? Is the process simply one of accommodation, or is a more whole-hearted syncretism involved? The last time the Unit was run, in 2009, it was worth 4 credit points. For 2011 the workload has been scaled back to match the Unit’s current 3 credit point value. Teaching Staff: Unit Convenor Dr. Chris Forbes Phone: (02) 9850 8821 Email: [email protected] Office: W6A 536 Consultation Hours: Wednesday and Thursday, 3-4 pm. General Enquiries: Ms. Raina Kim, Ms. Angela Abberton Phone: (02) 9850 8833 Email: [email protected] Office: W6A 540 Lectures, Tutorials and Class Work. For lecture times and classrooms please consult the MQ Timetable website: http://www.timetables.mq.edu.au. This website will display up-to-date information on your classes and classroom locations. At the time of printing the details were as follows: The Lectures take place (1) on Wednesday at 4 p.m. in W5C 320 and (2) on Friday at 11 a.m., in W5C 220. Both Lectures are recorded, and may be downloaded from the iLecture system. External students also receive the lectures on CD by mail. 3 For Internal students, Tutorial times are Wednesday 5-6 p.m. (Y3A 212), Thursday 10-11 a.m. (W5A 203), Friday Midday (W5A 201), Friday 2-3 p.m. (W5C 209) and Friday 3-4 p.m. (W5C 334). Other tutorials may be organised, depending on class sizes. Attendance at Tutorials is compulsory: if you miss more than two you will need to explain your absence to your tutor in writing. Medical certificates or photocopies of them should be attached where appropriate. For External students, there are, naturally, no weekly Tutorials (though if you are close to the University you are very welcome to turn up anyway!). There is, however, exactly the same Tutorial work, on the same timetable, except that you must send in your written Short Papers (see below) within 7 days of receiving the Lectures for the relevant week. The weekly schedule of lectures and tutorial topics can be found later in this Unit Introduction. Detailed questions are also to be found below, in the Tutorial Materials section. You should bring your notes for Tutorial questions with you to the compulsory On Campus Session, on Saturday September 17th. Special Library services for Distance students are detailed on the Library's Distance Education Page, http://www.lib.mq.edu.au/borrowing/distance-ed-students.html. The address is: Library Distance Education Service, Macquarie University Library, NSW 2109, Australia. The Distance Education Librarian can also be contacted by Email, at [email protected], or by phone on (02) 9850 7558, Freephone (within Australia): 1 800 632 743, Fax: (02) 9850 7590. Prescribed Texts: The three prescribed books for the Unit are (1) Arrian, The Campaigns of Alexander, the Penguin translation of A. de Selincourt; (2) M.M. Austin, The Hellenistic World from Alexander to the Roman Conquest, 2nd edition, 2006, (3) G. Shipley, The Greek World after Alexander. The early tutorials will be based on Arrian, The Campaigns of Alexander, and documents from M.M. Austin, The Hellenistic World. Students will need to begin working through Arrian at once. Later tutorials will be largely based on documents from Austin. This book is essential, and is supplemented by documents provided in the Tutorial Materials section, below. Tutorial discussion will focus around the detailed examination of particular documents. All but three of these come from either Austin or Arrian. The additional material will be provided in the Unit booklet. Students will need to work through the documents in detail before coming to the Tutorial, and in many cases do some wider reading as well. There is little point coming to the Tutorial without doing this reading. Our aim will be to explore issues raised by the documents in as much detail as possible. If you are interested, further ancient sources can easily be purchased in Penguin translations; both Plutarch's Life of Alexander (in The Age of Alexander, trans. I. Scott-Kilvert) and Quintus Curtius Rufus (trans. J. Yardley) are available. The other book recommended (but not required) is A.B. Bosworth's Conquest and Empire, (in my view) the best modern work on Alexander; if you are particularly interested in Alexander, it is the one to buy. All these should be available in the Co-op. Online Forum: Once again this year we will be running a Blackboard CE6 Online Forum, an electronic ‘Bulletin Board’ where issues related to the Unit can be discussed. To gain access to this system you will need a computer capable of running one of the common web-browsers, and you will need to make sure it is correctly configured. For more information, see the Online Browser Tune-up, at https://learn.mq.edu.au/. Note that participation in the Online Forum is worth 15% of your marks: see below. 4 The Forum will provide two basic facilities: the ‘Bulletin Board’, where issues can be publicly discussed and ideas or references can be shared, and internal email, so that you can send one another private notes. I will post extra material on the Forum, and take part in the public discussions. I can also be reached by Email either via this system or the normal University Email. Please note that your contributions to the Forum are part of the assessable work in the Unit. Further details will be announced in the first weeks of term; they will also be available online at the Unit public Web site: http://www.anchist.mq.edu.au/241/241frames.htm. We hope that this Online Forum will be of particular value to external students. Graduate Capabilities and Learning Outcomes: All academic programmes at Macquarie seek to develop Graduate Capabilities. These are: 1. Discipline-specific knowledge and skills; 2. Critical, analytical and integrative thinking; 3. Problem-solving and research capability; 4. Creative and innovative; 5. Effective communication; 6. Engaged and ethical local and global citizens; 7. Socially and environmentally active and responsible; 8. Capable of professional and personal judgement and initiative; 9. Committment to continuous learning. Note: The numbers listed at the end of each Learning Outcome (below) indicate how it is aligned with the Graduate Capabilities. The learning outcomes of this unit are (link to graduate capabilities in brackets): A. learning from a variety of ancient text types and other ancient sources relevant to the career of Alexander the Great, and the political, social and cultural history of the subsequent Hellenistic period (1, 2, 8) B. gaining a comprehension of ancient world-views and cultural concepts (1, 2, 6, 9) C. contextualising particular ancient documents and other sources of information within their wider cultural environment (2, 3, 5) D. gaining an awareness of the complexity of ancient accounts of past events and experiences (1, 2, 3, 8) E. conducting independent research on a chosen topic (2, 3, 4, 5, 8) F. engaging with and responding critically to a variety of scholarly opinions (2, 3, 4, 6, 8) G. formulating an independent view in dialogue with both ancient evidence and modern interpretations (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8). Assessment. Assessment for the Unit is made up of three pieces of written work, Online Forum participation, and an examination.