Teaching Thursday: Greek History

I’m putting together my Greek History class for the spring semester today. I’m redoing the class to bring it more in line with what I’ve done in my Roman and Medieval (Byzantine) History classes. Instead of a traditional lecture+discussion style, I’ve turned the class into a series of projects focuses on primary source readings. Each of these modules involve in class exercises — brainstorming, outlining, sometimes group work — as well as some scaffolding provided by both of survey type book and a series of lectures.

My Greek History class is divided into five of these projects.

Module One: The Archaic and Classical World.

This project will focus on Thucydides and usually I have students read books 1 and 2 and 5, 6, and 7 (with Mytilenean situation [3-3.50] being optional). I feel like this gives students the broadest perspective both on the Peloponnesian Wars and Thucydides in general without the (frankly unrealistic) expectation that student read all of Thucydides in the first 4 weeks of classes.

The goal of this project is a brainstorm where we both concoct questions and assemble references to the text that offer answers.

Module Two: Hellenistic and Roman Greece

In this section, we explore the first two books of Pausanias and consider how the Romans looked back on the Hellenistic and Classical periods in Greece. In this project, we’ll not only frame some possible research questions and brain storm, but also begin to put evidence together to produce an argument. We’ll return to these readings (and this project) later in the semester when we discuss how we construct the Greek past.

Module Three: The Byzantine and Medieval Period

This was the hardest module to develop. On the one hand, I really wanted to read Marinos’s Life of Proclus. Not only is it a fantastic source, but it also ties in very nicely to Thucydides (on account of its connection to Athens) and Pausanias (in its Proclus’s commitments to Classical antiquity). That said, there’s a risk of my class becoming too Athenocentric and indulging my own interest in the Late Roman period. Instead of reading the Life of Proclus, I’m going to ask the students to read the Life of Peter of Argos, the Life and Miracles of Theokletos, Bishop of Lacedaimon, and the Life of Theodore of Kythera. As part of the fun, I’m going to do something that I almost never do and assign a little essay that I wrote on Theodore of Kythera. This is indulgent, I admit, but it makes me feel better about passing on Late Antiquity. To keep me humble, I ask my students to critique my paper and make suggestions as to how I could tighten my argument or even interpret the text in different ways.

Module Four: Ottoman and Early Modern Greece

I’ll admit that I start to get pretty far out of my depth here, but fortunately, “out of my depth” is kind of my comfort zone when it comes to teaching. After all, who really likes to teach what they know? What makes this more challenging is that our students have almost no familiarity with the Ottoman world (other than parroting back to me like some kind of quasi-sentient AIs, that the Ottoman Empire was the “sick man of Europe”). To counter balance that some, we’ll read Evliya Çelebi’s description of parts of Greece and compare it to Pausanias’s description (and the landscapes introduced in the Saints’ Lives). 

This summer, I read The Personal Narrative of the Sufferings of J. Stephanini (1829) which combines the experiences of Joseph Staphanini’s experiences as the son of a prosperous merchant in Ottoman Ioannina and Arta at the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence and his fall into slavery when he was captured after the Ottoman sack of Patras. American abolitionists apparently supported the publication of this narrative and used it as a way to demonstrate to an American audience the horrors of slavery by introduce them to a white, Christian who had been enslaved. Aside from that, it provides a solidly polemic position toward the Ottomans as well as a window into life in Arta and Ioannina that students should be able to critique.

Module Five: Modern Greece

For the final module of the class we’re going to read Johanna Hanink, The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in the Era of Austerity (Harvard 2017) and talk about how images of the Classical Greek past have formed the foundation for global attitudes toward Greece (and Greece’s idea of itself as a modern nation state). The key project here will be a providing the students with not only a culminating perspective on a history of Greece and also provide students with a final opportunity to prepare a book review for the class (which is one of the key assignments for the semester). 

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The syllabus for this class is largely complete. The students will have to write five assignments: a source paper, a source paper outline, a review of four chapters of Roderick Beaton’s survey, and midterm exam (after Module Two). They’ll have an option to write any number of “fifth assignments” which range from another book review, a final exam, or a second source paper (perhaps on a source that we didn’t read in the class).