Teaching Tuesday: Teaching Greek History

I’ve just started working on my spring 2025 classes including Greek History. As readers of this blog know, I’ve decided to use Roderick Beaton’s big new-ish bookThe Greeks: A Global History (2021) as a kind of “textbook” (or perhaps better, a survey). It will offer an overview that both complements my lectures and primary source readings. In particular Beaton’s effort to understand “The Greeks” in a way that goes well beyond the limits of the modern nation will complement my tendency to focus on Greek History as the history of folks who lived within the borders of the modern nation state. Because I carry my Greek History course through to the modern period, I use the ancient history of the Greek peninsula as a way to problematize the use of the past in the 19th and 20th century in the nation building enterprise as well as to introduce students to the history of Greek cities and the peninsula as a Roman and Ottoman province.

That said, I’m doing what I can to bring this course into line with my Roman History and Medieval (Byzantine) History class. These courses featured five 3-week modules which involve four lectures and two classes dedicated to “lab work” focusing on primary sources and writing assignments in the class.

Module 1: Archaic and Classical

After a brief introduction focusing on Bronze Age (and drawing heavily on the first few chapters from Beaton), I’ll introduce the Archaic and Classical period and prepare the students to read Thucydides (or more likely excerpts from Thucydides). 

Module 2: Hellenistic and Roman

I’m going to keep my reading of Pausanias, Book 1 and 2 for this section where we can discuss the tension between the Pausanian landscape and its Roman context.

Module 3: Byzantine

This is my favorite module and I’ll likely indulge my (rather uncritical) love of Byzantine architecture, but for the primary sources, I’ll take advantage of Anthony Kaldellis’s and Ioannis Polemis’s translation in Saints of Ninth- and Tenth-Century Greece (2019).

Module 4: Ottoman

Ottoman Greece pushes me the furthest from my comfort zone, but in the long shadow of the Bicentennial celebrations in Greece, it remains an important period to understand and foundational — in some ways — for the formation of the Greek nation. The sources that we’ll use for this section are a scan of a Pierre MacKay’s translation of 17th century Ottoman traveler Evliya Celebi and J. Stephanini’s short book on his life in Greece and time as an Ottoman slave, The Personal Narrative of the Sufferings of J. Stephanini (1829). 

Module 5: Modern

The final module of the semester will focus on the modern period in Greece with particular attention on Johanna Hanink’s 2017 book The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity. Ideally this book will give students a sense for the significance of Greek antiquity in the formation of the modern Greek state both in the present and the past.

As for assignments, this class will follow the model that I used in my Roman and Medieval (Byzantine) class. There will be an outline, a primary source paper, and a review paper based on Hanink’s book and one based on part of Beaton’s book. I think Hanink review will be the final exam. I’m tempted to create relatively traditional (take home) midterm.