#  GREEK 112B: History of Greek Literature II 

 





 Semester:   Fall 

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 Year offered:  2018 

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 Link: [Course Website](https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/43304) 

 

 

 

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.