CLAS 201 at the University of Waterloo is officially titled Ancient Greek Society and is taught by Dr. Lisa Trentin, a specialist in the visual culture and social history of ancient Rome whose research has focused on marginalized bodies and the representation of identity, and who has excavated at Pompeii.

The organizing question of the course is deceptively simple: who were the Greeks? Answering it requires grappling with problems of identity, evidence, and legacy that are far from resolved. Greek civilization produced democracy, tragedy, systematic philosophy, and the Olympic Games. It also produced institutionalized slavery, the legal exclusion of women from political life, and the massacres of entire populations for strategic advantage. The course does not paper over this complexity. Instead, it uses the lens of Self vs. Other — the way the Greeks defined themselves against various categories of excluded or opposed groups — as its central analytical framework throughout all twelve weeks.

What Is Classical Studies?

Classical Studies is not simply history: it is a convergence of disciplines. A classicist may spend one afternoon analyzing the meter of a Homeric hexameter and the next assessing the stratigraphy of a trench in Pompeii. The field encompasses philology (the study of ancient languages — primarily Greek and Latin — and their literary traditions), archaeology (the excavation and interpretation of physical remains), ancient history (the reconstruction of political, social, and economic events from textual and material evidence), ancient art history (the analysis of sculpture, vase painting, architecture, and coinage), and ancient philosophy (the systematic study of Greek and Roman philosophical thought). All of these sub-disciplines are represented in this course, which draws on drama, epic poetry, history, philosophy, oratory, architecture, and vase painting to explore Greek society.

The primary source anthology for this course is Paul MacKendrick and Herbert Howe, Classics in Translation, Volume I: Greek Literature (University of Wisconsin Press; freely available through the UW Library). This anthology collects translated selections from key Greek literary texts — Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Demosthenes, and others — giving students direct access to the ancient voices that form the basis of the course’s arguments.

The Self vs. Other Framework

The Self vs. Other framework is the course’s spine. It shapes not only the selection of topics but the way each topic is approached. Week by week, the course examines a different axis of Greek identity construction: man against the gods (Week 2), Greeks against Trojans (Week 3), Greeks against foreign peoples encountered in colonization (Week 4), Athenians against Spartans (Weeks 5 and 6), Greeks against Persians (Weeks 7 and 8), Athenians against each other during civil war (Week 9), Greeks as spectacle and competitive community at the Olympics (Week 10), Greeks against Macedonians (Week 11), and finally Greeks against Romans — and the question of who absorbs whom (Week 12).

The framework draws on a strand of modern scholarship influenced by anthropology and postcolonial theory, which emphasizes that identity is never self-evident or given but is always performed, contested, and constructed in relation to what it excludes. Applying this lens to ancient Greece is productive precisely because the Greeks were so explicit about the boundaries they drew: their language encoded the distinction between Hellenes and barbaroi (non-Greek-speakers), between polites (citizen) and xenos (foreigner/stranger), between eleutherios (free) and doulos (slave).

Welcome and Introduction

Week 1i — Welcome

The first lecture is largely administrative, introducing students to the instructor and the structure of the course. Dr. Trentin’s own scholarly background is relevant context: her research specializes in the visual culture and social history of ancient Rome, with a particular focus on the representation of the body and the construction of identity through bodily imagery. Her monograph The Hunchback in Hellenistic and Roman Art (2015) examines how deformed and disabled bodies were represented in antiquity and what those representations reveal about ancient attitudes toward physical difference and social marginality. She has also published an adult coloring book on Classical Sculpture (2017) and is a trained field archaeologist who has excavated at Pompeii.

This background shapes the course’s methodological sensibility. A scholar who has spent years thinking about how marginalized bodies are depicted in ancient art brings particular acuity to the question of how the Greeks represented the Other — the foreign, the female, the enslaved, the disabled. The Self vs. Other framework is not merely a pedagogical convenience but reflects genuine concerns in current classical scholarship.

The syllabus is described in the lecture as a “contract” for the course. Students are reminded of three practical requirements. First, the required textbook (Classics in Translation) must be obtained, and readings should be completed before reviewing lecture slides. Second, all assessments — assignments, tests, and the final exam — are due on Thursdays. Third, additional information sheets for each assessment component are posted on LEARN and should be consulted carefully. The course runs entirely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with all content asynchronous and office hours held via Zoom.

Week 1ii — Introduction: Who Were the Greeks?

The second lecture of the course is organized around three questions that, as Dr. Trentin frames them, the course will “come back to time and time again”: Who are the Greeks? How do we know? And why do we care? These are not merely rhetorical warm-ups but the genuine epistemological pillars of classical study — questions about identity, evidence, and relevance that resist easy answers and grow more complex as the term proceeds. The sections below address each in turn.

The Geography of Ancient Greece

Any serious engagement with Greek civilization must begin with the land, because the physical environment of Greece decisively shaped its political and cultural development. The Greek peninsula extends into the eastern Mediterranean, bounded by the Ionian Sea to the west, the broader Mediterranean to the south, and the Aegean Sea to the east. The single most important physical feature of the mainland is its extreme ruggedness: the Pindus Mountains run like a spine down the length of the peninsula, and Mt. Olympus — at roughly 10,000 feet the highest peak in Greece — rises in the north. The ancient Greeks believed Olympus to be the dwelling-place of the gods, a belief that was not purely metaphorical: the mountain’s cloud-wreathed summit seemed genuinely to touch another realm.

The rugged topography had two decisive consequences. First, it fragmented the population into hundreds of isolated valleys and coastal plains, making unified political organization across the whole of Greece nearly impossible and encouraging instead the development of hundreds of independent poleis. Second, poor agricultural land forced the Greeks toward the sea: maritime trade, fishing, and eventually colonial expansion were economic necessities. The sea was not just a route; it was an identity. Athens in particular, situated in the plain of Attica with its port at Piraeus, became a naval empire precisely because the Attic land could not feed its population in periods of growth.

The major seas are the Ionian to the west, the Mediterranean to the south, and the Aegean to the east. The major island groups include the Argo-Saronic islands close to Athens, the Cyclades (the ring of islands in the central Aegean), the North Aegean islands, the Dodecanese (the islands along the southwestern coast of modern Turkey), the Sporades (scattered islands in the northern Aegean), and the Ionian islands off the western coast of the mainland. Crete, the largest Greek island, was home in the Bronze Age to the Minoan civilization, a sophisticated palace culture that preceded Greek civilization proper.

The city of Athens is built around and beneath the Acropolis — literally the “high city,” a rocky plateau rising sharply above the surrounding plain. The Acropolis served both as a defensible citadel in times of war and as the sacred heart of Athenian religious life in times of peace, crowned from the fifth century BCE onward by the Parthenon and the other monuments of the Periclean building program.

A Timeline of Greek History

The lecture presents a chronological framework that students are expected to know in broad terms. Greek history is conventionally divided into four major periods.

The Bronze Age ended in a widespread catastrophe around 1200–1100 BCE that destroyed the Mycenaean palace centers across the Greek mainland and disrupted civilizations throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The cause — whether invasion by the mysterious Sea Peoples, internal revolt, climate-driven agricultural failure, or some combination — remains actively debated. What followed was the Dark Age (c.1100–800 BCE), a period characterized by the loss of writing, the disappearance of monumental architecture and figurative art, sharp population decline, and the interruption of long-distance trade networks. It is called “dark” partly because we know relatively little about it, and partly because it represents a genuine diminishment of material complexity relative to what had preceded it.

The Archaic Period saw the re-emergence of complex civilization. Around 800 BCE the polis appeared as the characteristic unit of Greek political organization. Around 750 BCE the Greeks borrowed and adapted the Phoenician alphabet, creating the Greek writing system and enabling the first inscriptions and the recording of epic poetry. Between 750 and 550 BCE Greek colonization spread settlements to southern Italy (Magna Graecia), Sicily, the Black Sea coasts, and as far west as modern France and Spain. Athens’s turbulent political development — from aristocratic governance through the lawgiving of Draco and Solon, the tyranny of the Peisistratids, and finally the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes in 508/7 BCE — unfolded across this period. The Archaic Period closed with the Persian Wars (499–449 BCE), in which the Greek poleis confronted the vast Achaemenid Persian Empire.

The Classical Period opened with decisive Greek victories over Persia at Salamis (480 BCE) and Plataea (479 BCE). Athens, enriched by silver mines at Laurion and the tribute of its Delian League allies, funded the construction of the Acropolis monuments and supported an extraordinary cultural flowering. The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) pitted Athens against Sparta and ended Athenian imperial supremacy. The period closed with the conquests of Alexander the Great (338–323 BCE), who spread Greek language and culture from Egypt to the borders of India.

The Hellenistic Period began with Alexander’s death and the wars of his successors and ended with the Battle of Actium (31 BCE), after which Greece was fully incorporated into the Roman Empire.

Who Were the Greeks? The Problem of Identity

The lecture’s central question — “who were the Greeks?” — is not rhetorical. It points to a genuine historical puzzle. The Greeks called themselves Hellenes and their shared homeland Hellas, but there was no Greek nation-state. The Hellenes were divided among hundreds of independent poleis, often at war with one another, speaking distinct regional dialects, celebrating different local cults, and organized under radically different constitutions. Athens was a democracy; Sparta was a dual monarchy with an oligarchic council; Corinth was governed by oligarchs; some cities had tyrants.

What, then, unified the Hellenes? Three things above all: a shared language (with regional variation), shared religious practices centered on the great Panhellenic sanctuaries at Olympia, Delphi, Corinth, and Nemea, and a shared sense of opposition to barbaroi — those who did not speak Greek.

When the lecture notes that the Greeks defined themselves “against ‘Others’, e.g. the Persians,” it is identifying the mechanism by which Greek identity was constructed. This is not simply a modern interpretive lens imposed on the ancient material; it is visible in the ancient sources themselves. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, has the Greek generals at Plataea invoke shared blood, shared language, shared religion, and shared customs as the basis of Panhellenic solidarity against the Persian invaders — and he is implicitly distinguishing all of these from what the Persians are.

Within the category of “the Greeks,” further distinctions were operative. Hellenes technically meant all freeborn adult males of Greek descent. Citizens (politai) were a more restricted category: in democratic Athens, citizenship was limited to freeborn adult males born of two Athenian parents. This excluded women, slaves (douloi), and metics (metoikoi — resident foreigners). The gods, the lecture notes, were “omnipotent and omnipresent” — a reminder that Greek religion was not a private matter but permeated all aspects of public and domestic life.

How Do We Know? Sources and Methods

The study of ancient Greek society depends on two broad categories of evidence, each with significant limitations.

Literary sources include epic poetry (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey), didactic poetry (Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days), lyric poetry (Sappho, Pindar), drama (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides for tragedy; Aristophanes for comedy), historiography (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon), philosophy (Plato, Aristotle), and oratory (Demosthenes, Isocrates). These texts survive because medieval monks copied and preserved them — but only a fraction of what was originally written has come down to us. The Greek tragic poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are thought to have composed roughly three hundred plays between them; thirty-three survive.

Material and visual evidence includes pottery (especially Attic black-figure and red-figure vase painting), sculpture (kouroi, korai, friezes, free-standing statues), architecture (temples, theatres, stoas, fortifications), coins, and inscriptions. Archaeological excavation provides physical context — the stratigraphic layers that allow objects to be dated and sites to be interpreted.

All of this evidence is partial and problematic. The literary tradition is overwhelmingly male, elite, and Athenian in perspective. It tells us a great deal about how citizen men thought about themselves and their world, and very little about the perspectives of women, enslaved people, or non-Athenian Greeks. Visual sources are more socially broad in some respects (pottery was a mass-produced commodity consumed across society) but carry their own conventions and must not be read as transparent windows onto reality. The archaeological record is fragmentary, dependent on what happened to survive, be excavated, and be properly recorded.

The lecture identifies several endemic problems: evidence is partially reconstructed (many objects survive in fragments), limited in survival (most ancient material is lost), often context-less (found out of archaeological context and therefore harder to interpret), and patriarchal in its production (made by and largely for men).

Why Does This Matter? The Legacy Question

The lecture poses the question “why do we care?” and offers three interlocking answers. First, the practical answer: the roots of Western civilization — democracy, philosophy, mathematics, science, dramatic performance, the Olympic Games — lie in ancient Greece. Second, the humanistic answer: Greek literature and philosophy engage with timeless questions — what is a citizen? what is love? what is justice? what is the relationship between the individual and the community? — that remain genuinely alive. Third, the estranging answer: Greek society was also profoundly unlike modern liberal societies — built on slavery, the systematic exclusion of women, brutal inter-state violence — and studying it requires confronting that difference rather than projecting modern values backward.

The course’s learning objectives make the stakes explicit. By the end of term, students should be able to demonstrate familiarity with the events that shaped Greek society within their cultural and historical contexts; understand the construction of Self vs. Other in ancient Greece; engage critically with primary sources (literary and visual); and evaluate secondary scholarship in the reconstruction and reinterpretation of Greek society. The overarching aim, as the lecture puts it, is to “recognize and appreciate the legacy of ancient Greece and its continued impact on our lives today” — not as an exercise in ancestor-worship, but as a way of understanding both how we got here and what alternatives the past contains.

The Primary Source Tradition

Reading Ancient Texts in Translation

Because the course is taught in English, students engage with ancient texts in translation rather than in the original Greek or Latin. Translation always involves interpretation: a translator must make choices about ambiguous words, idiomatic expressions, and cultural concepts that have no direct English equivalent. The anthology used in the course, Classics in Translation, provides accessible renderings designed for undergraduate use, but students should keep in mind that the “Homer” they are reading is already twice-mediated — first by centuries of manuscript transmission and scholarly editing, and then by a modern translator’s decisions. When possible, consulting multiple translations of the same passage can reveal where the original Greek is genuinely ambiguous or where different translators have made meaningfully different interpretive choices.

The required citation format for all written work in this course is the Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago MoS), which is the standard citation format in the humanities and classical studies in particular. Chicago style offers two systems: the Notes-Bibliography system (footnotes or endnotes paired with a bibliography), which is the format used in most classical scholarship, and the Author-Date system (in-text parenthetical citations with a reference list), more common in the social sciences. Classical studies assignments typically use the Notes-Bibliography system.

Key Ancient Authors Featured in the Course

Several ancient authors recur throughout the course and are worth introducing at the outset. Homer, whose name is attached to the Iliad and the Odyssey, is the foundational figure of Greek literary tradition: his epics were recited at public festivals, memorized by schoolchildren, and quoted by orators and philosophers for a thousand years. Hesiod (c.700 BCE) composed the Theogony and Works and Days — the foundational texts of Greek cosmology and ethics. Herodotus (c.484–c.425 BCE), the “Father of History,” narrated the Persian Wars in nine books of richly digressive prose. Thucydides (c.460–c.400 BCE) wrote a narrowly focused, analytically rigorous account of the Peloponnesian War. Aeschylus (c.525–456 BCE), Sophocles (c.496–406 BCE), and Euripides (c.480–406 BCE) are the three great tragedians whose surviving works define classical Athenian drama. Plato (c.428–348 BCE) preserved the thought of Socrates in a series of philosophical dialogues that remain foundational texts of Western philosophy. Xenophon (c.430–354 BCE) wrote on Spartan society, among many other subjects. Demosthenes (384–322 BCE) is the greatest orator of the Classical period. Plutarch (c.46–119 CE), writing centuries after the Classical period, composed paired biographies (Parallel Lives) of famous Greeks and Romans that remain indispensable sources despite their lateness. Virgil (70–19 BCE) composed the Aeneid — the Roman national epic that puts the final period to the course by showing how Roman literary culture absorbed and transformed its Greek inheritance.

Looking Ahead: Topics to Come

The course proceeds from this foundational orientation into twelve weeks of focused case studies. Week 2 takes up Greek religion and mythology, examining Hesiod’s Theogony, the structure of the Greek cosmos, and the Olympian gods — asking how the Greeks used religious narrative to make sense of the world and their place in it. Weeks 3 and 4 address Homer’s epics: the Iliad as a poem of heroic identity, war, and the tension between individual glory and communal responsibility; the Odyssey as a poem of colonial anxiety, hospitality, and the encounter with the foreign. Weeks 5 and 6 contrast the two most powerful Greek poleis — Sparta and Athens — examining the “Spartan Mirage” and the complex, contested nature of Athenian democracy. Weeks 7 and 8 turn to the great external confrontation of the Classical period: the Persian Wars, as narrated by Herodotus and dramatized by Aeschylus. Weeks 9 through 12 follow the arc of Greek civilization from internal collapse (the Peloponnesian War and the trial of Socrates) through the spectacular expansion of Hellenism under Alexander and finally to the absorption of the Greek world by Rome.

Throughout, the course will draw on a diverse range of primary sources — epic, tragedy, history, philosophy, oratory, and visual art — and will ask students not just to absorb information but to practice the critical skills of analyzing evidence, evaluating competing interpretations, and constructing well-supported arguments in writing.

A useful habit from the first week is to keep a running glossary of key Greek and Latin terms as they appear. Many concepts central to the course — arete, xenia, hubris, nomos, polis, barbaros — have no clean English equivalent, and understanding their nuance is essential to reading the ancient sources on their own terms rather than filtering them through modern assumptions. The definitions boxed throughout these notes are a beginning; the reading responses and discussion forum posts are opportunities to test your understanding against the texts themselves.

Key Concepts and Vocabulary Reference

The following terms appear throughout the course and are introduced here as a reference. Fuller discussion of each occurs in the week where it is most prominent.

These eight terms form the conceptual bedrock of the course. Encountering them in the primary sources and learning to recognize how different authors deploy and inflect them — Homer’s arete is not quite Aristotle’s arete; Thucydides’s logos is not quite Plato’s — is one of the core intellectual skills that classical studies develops.