Frontiers of the Greek World (ANCW40019)

The people we commonly call the Ancient Greeks were, in fact, not very Greek at all. Early modern romantic ideals and European imperialism and colonialism have heavily influenced popular and even many scholarly ideas about the Ancient Greek World. In reality, the boundaries of the Ancient Greek world stretched far beyond contemporary Greece and reached the Etruscans, Scythians and other native populations in the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Moreover, rather than being a fixed physical boundary, “Greekness” in Antiquity was a changing and malleable concept. The Ancient Greek World was diverse and distinctly multi-cultural.

This course introduces students to the geographical and conceptual “Frontiers of the Greek World” by looking at figurative art, architecture, archaeological evidence of daily life and texts that shed light on human mobility, cultural interaction and identity formation.