GREEK 112B: History of Greek Literature II

This course offers a survey of Greek literature from around 400 BC to 400 AD through the lens of rhetorical discourse. We will read extracts from a broad range of texts from the Classical, Hellenistic, Roman and Late Antique periods. The selection will include exemplary orations (e.g., Demosthenes’ First Philippic), inserted speeches in narrative texts (e.g., Pericles’ famous funeral oration as rendered by Thucydides, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount according to the Gospel of Matthew), a panegyrical poem (Theocritus' Idyll 17), texts about rhetoric and rhetoricians (Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, Lucian’s satire Teacher of Rhetoric), and rhetorical exercises (Synesius’ Encomium of Baldness which he wrote in response to Dio’s Encomium of Hair). The close reading and translation of the excerpts will be accompanied by discussions of genre in relation to historical contexts, performance, and discursive and linguistic (dis)continuities.