Teaching Thursday: Reimagining my Roman History Class

Next semester, I am going to teach Roman History for the first time since 2005 (I think). My Roman historian friends have assured me repeatedly that not much has changed. (I’m probably kidding here.) 

That said, I still need to teach the class and it is clear that the traditional lecture+discussion format of my original, early-21st century class, is no longer an acceptable (or even familiar) approach to teaching for most of our students. In other words, not only is my content woefully out of date, but so is my pedagogy when it comes to this class.

I told myself this fall that I need to have the basic organization of this class together by November 15th. It’s an artificial deadline, to be sure, but I needed something to motivate me to figure out whether I need to order some books and, as likely, read some things.

Here are my tentative learning goals for the class:

1. Become familiar broadly with Roman history and culture. 

2. Improve our capacity to read and analyze a range of unfamiliar primary and secondary sources. 

3. Continue to develop the ability to write about the past effectively.

These are sufficiently broad to allow me to approach Roman history is a wide range of ways. I have two other things on my agenda.

First, I want to be more deliberate about “workload management” in this class. As I’ve said any number of times on this blog, a 16-week semester is too damn long.

Secondly, I want the class to offer a wider range of assessments than my standard: midterm + book review + primary source paper. I’m considering, for example, a paper written collectively by the class (but perhaps turned in individually?), oral presentations on a particular source, and perhaps more creative assignments that involve engagement with news media, fiction, films, or video games. My goal is to have 5 assessments in the class, each worth 20% of the final grade. 

Finally, I want to build the class on five, five-week modules, each with a primary source, but I want the first module to introduce students to the “grand narrative” of Roman history which we will proceed to question, ignore, and subvert over the course of the rest of the class.

So here goes:

Module One

Class 1: The Roman Republic

Class 2: The Republic to Empire

Class 3: The Principate

Class 4: Late Roman World

Class 5-6: Livy, Book 1

Assessment: Rome, America, and Popular Culture: In a 1000 word essay discuss three examples of how Rome appears in popular culture and the media. Each example must be from a different medium (e.g. news, video game, feature film, television, fiction, music, and so on).

Module Two: The Fall of the Roman Republic

Class 7: The Gracchi

Class 8: Pompeii and Cicero

Class 9: Caesar and Civil War

Class 10: Octavian to Augustus

Class 11-12: Sallust, The Conspiracy of Catiline.

Optional Book: Ed Watts, The Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny. 2020.

Assessment: Write a critical book review of one of the four optional books.

Module Three: The Empire and its Discontents

Class 13: The High Empire

Class 14: The Provinces during the High Empire

Class 15: Roman Religion and the Second Sophistic

Class 16-17: Apuleius, Metamorphosis.

Class 18: Writing a Primary Source Paper 

Optional Book: Sarah Bond, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean. 2016.

Assessment: Work together to produce a primary source paper. 

Module Four: The Fall of Rome?

Class 19: The Crisis of the Third Century

Class 20: The Rise of Christianity 

Class 21: The Age of Constantine

Class 22-23: Augustine, Confessions.

Class 24: Writing Day

Optional Book: Giusto Traina, 428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire. 2009.

Module Five: Rome after Rome

Class 25: The World of Late Antiquity 

Class 26: The Age of Justinian

Class 27: Christology and Controversy

Class 28: The Seventh Century

Class 29-30: Corippus, In laudem lustini Augusti minoris.

Optional Book: John Haldon, The Empire that Would not Die: the Paradox of Eastern Roman Survival, 640-740. 2016.

As always, I’m open to suggestions, observations, or outright attacks on my character (hacks, somebody’s gotta put me in my place).