Lecture in Ancient History I

obligatory courses

State-of-the-art lecture on research on the most important issues and processes in the field of history, culture and

religion from the Late Bronze Age to Late Antiquity in the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin; facts,

methodological concepts of research, specialist terminology and the most important contentious issues of historiography

for particular periods of antiquity and their impact on modern societies.

Topics (part by dr hab. prof. ucz. Marek Węcowski):

1. Introductory Lecture:

(a) Methods and organising ideas; the chronological scope: Early Iron Age through Alexander the Great; competing or complementary approaches: uniformity vs. particularisms;

(b) Time and space in a human experience; The geographical setting and the geographical mobility of the Greeks;

2. Greece coming of age: Mycenaean collapse, Early Iron Age till the Geometric times – the origins of the Polis and the foundations of the social mobility of the Greeks;

3. The Euboeans: trade and prospection of the East and West; the Phoenician connection; the alphabet, the aristocratic banquet in a comparative perspective;

4. The Great Colonization and the New World(s) – towards a “small Greek World”: A Greece of networks, local histories and a global approach;

5. The cultural breakthrough: Homer, the Pan-Hellenic Olympus; the polis religion, the Pan-Hellenic sanctuaries; Greek athletics, the aristocratic culture and its implications; The Orientalising Period;

6. The archaic Greek city or archaic Greek cities: citizenship, aristocracy, social order and the tyranny – general trends, regional patterns, local variations;

7. The Spartan Revolution and the Uniqueness of Sparta;

8. Eunomia, isonomia, democracy, and democracies – Before the Persian Wars;

9. Athens: Democracy, Empire, and the Arts – the Fifth Century;

10. Athens: Democracy, Empire, and the Arts – the Fourth Century;

11. The Greeks under Arms: Greeks vs. Greeks and Greeks vs. Persians; The period of innovations; Heritage of the Persian Wars;

12. The New Art of War, Diplomacy, and the Pan-Hellenism;

13. Macedon, Philip II, and the Greeks;

14. Towards a new world: the new political order in the Aegean; the New Cultural Paradigm.

Topics (part by prof. dr hab. Adam Ziółkowski)

1. Introduction: geographical setting and chronology, sources and methods.

2. Italy and the Western Mediterranean in the Early Iron Age (10th–8th c. B.C.). Latium and the Latins, the rise of urban communities in Latium.

3. Rome of the kings (8th–6th c. B.C.): an ideal school of historical method or an ideological battlefield? The myth of the origins, the seven kings, the great Rome of the Tarquins, between geomorphology/archaeology and written sources.

4. Early Republic (509–396/390 B.C.): becoming historical. Roman society in the 5th c.; political institutions and the public religion; patricians, plebeians and the conflict of the orders; Rome and its neighbours: the Roman–Latin–Hernician alliance till the conquest of Veii and the Gallic catastrophe.

5. Middle Republic I (390–287 B.C.): the making of the machine of imperial expansion and the conquest of Italy. The socio-economic revolution; the political revolution; the Republican social contract and the birth of imperial mentality.

6. Middle Republic II (287–133 B.C.): Rome the super-power. The conquest of hegemony in the Mediterranean: prelude – the war with Pyrrhos; the Punic Wars and their consequences; the easiest of conquests – Rome and the Hellenistic world; forms of control and exploitation of the Republican empire.

7. Middle Republic: society and state. (a) The profits of the empire and their distribution; new economic opportunities; the symptoms of the incoming crisis – abandonment of land and draft-dodging. (b) The Middle Republic – monarchy, aristocracy or democracy?

8. The Roman revolution and the fall of the Republic (133–42/30 B.C.). (a) The Gracchi brothers and the break of the Republican social contract; the spiral of violence from mass lynching to the first civil war. (b) The Sullan régime: a decaying oligarchy vs. warlords, street-fighters and agrarian unrest; Pompeius vs. Caesar and the second civil war; Caesar the dictator and his murder; the third civil war: Caesarians vs. Caesaricides and the end of the Republic; from triumvirate to monarchy.

General works by dr hab. prof. ucz. Marek Węcowski:

BARRINGER, J.M., The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Greece (Cambridge 2014).

CARTLEDGE, P., The Greeks. A Portrait of Self and Others (Oxford–New York 1993).

DOVER, K. J., Greek Popular Morality in the time of Plato and Aristotle (Indianapolis–Cambridge 1994 [1974]).

DOVER, K. J., Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA 1989 [1978]).

EHRENBERG, V., From Solon to Socrates. Greek History and Civilization during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. (London 1968).

GARLAND, R., The Greek Way of Death (Ithaca, NY 2001 [1985]).

HALL, J. M., Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge 1997).

HANSEN, M. H. & NIELSEN, T. H., (eds) An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (Oxford 2004).

HANSEN, M. H., Polis. An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State (Oxford 2006).

HURWIT, J. M., The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100–480 B.C. (Ithaca–London 1985).

MORRIS, I. & POWELL, B.B., The Greeks. History, Culture, and Society (Upper Saddle River, NY 2010).

MURRAY, O. & PRICE, S. (eds), The Greek City. From Homer to Alexander (Oxford 1990).

PARKER, R., Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford 2005).

POLLITT, J. J., Art and Experience in Classical Greece (Cambridge 1999 [1974]).

WHITLEY, J., The Archaeology of Ancient Greece (Cambridge 2001).

General works by prof. dr hab. Adam Ziółkowski:

Compiling a student-oriented English modern bibliography on Roman history is not easy. Anglo-Saxon historiography – in spite of a number of first-rate monographies – long dragged behind (some would say: still drags behind) its Continental counterparts, and there are no good English textbooks. The present list is a very personal choice of works of different categories broadly covering Rome’s political, social and economic history from the Early Iron Age beginnings (10th century B.C.) to the sudden near collapse of the greatest empire the Western oikumene has ever seen in the 3rd century A.C.

Cambridge Ancient History2, Cambridge. 7.2: The Rise of Rome to 220 B.C. (1990), 8: Rome and the Mediterranean to 133 B.C. (1989), 9: The Last Age of the Roman Republic, 146 – 43 B.C. (1994), 10: The Augustan Empire, 43 B.C. – A.D. 69 (1996), 11: The High Empire, A.D. 70 – 192 (2000); 12: The Crisis of Empire, A.D. 193 – 337 (2005). (classic, all-embracing, very uneven)

M. Beard, J. North, S. Price, Religions of Rome, Cambridge 1998. (indispensable for English-speakers though overpraised: too little substance, too much modern talk)

P. A. Brunt, The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays, Oxford 1988. (epoch-making)

T. J. Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome. Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 BC), London–New York 1995. (the best you can find in English)

M. Crawford, The Roman Republic, Glasgow 1978. (very good, a bit too concise)

P. Garnsey, R. Saller, The Roman Empire. Economy, Society and Culture, Berkeley–Los Angeles 1987. (very good but slightly dated)

M. Gelzer, Caesar, Politician and Statesman, Oxford 1968. (originally published in 1921 but still the best)

W. V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome: 327 – 70 B.C., Oxford 1985. (revolutionary, at least in the so-called Western historiography)

J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change in Roman Religion, Oxford 1979. (a bird’s eye view of problem signalled in the title)

J. Linderski, The Roman Questions. Selected Papers, Stuttgart 1995. (includes some of the most important texts ever written on Republican Rome)

A. K. Michels, The Calendar of the Roman Republic, Princeton 1967. (the best introduction to the vilest calendar humanity ever devised)

F. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World, Ithaca NY 1977. (grand and irreplaceable)

K_W02; K_W04;

K_W05; K_W06;

K_U09; K_K02

Written test.