Course info

The first to third centuries CE was one of the most prolific periods of Greek literary production: we have more Greek literature surviving from that period than from all the previous centuries put together. The Roman empire saw the development of a breathtaking range of new genres and literary forms, side by side with new ways of narrating individual experience and cross-cultural interaction. This module samples a range of prose authors, with a particular focus on novelistic, (auto-)biographical and satirical texts and their playful manipulation of the Greek literary tradition. Highlights include the works of the controversial orator/philosopher Dio Chrysostom, especially his novelistic account of being shipwrecked on the island of Euboia in his Euboicus; the writing of Lucian, especially his satires of Roman elite culture and religious fraud in the Nigrinus and the Alexander; the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides, which offers an extraordinary first-person diary account of the experience of illness and religious healing; and the works of Philostratus, especially his Heroicus, with its depiction of encounters with ghosts of the heroes who fought at Troy and their reimagining of Homeric epic.