This is a course about ancient Greek and Roman myth.
Myths are stories with religious content, about gods, goddesses, and heroes.
We will try to discover what the myths meant to their original audiences, but we'll also reflect on what they can mean to us now. We'll also consider how these stories are represented in ancient art, so that next time you're in a museum you'll be able to identify who's who in European art. But we also talk about myths of earlier civilizations that influenced the Greeks, such Babylonian creation myths, the Gilgamesh epic, and the story of the Egyptian goddess Isis and her husband Osiris. All reading is in primary source materials, works by Greek and Roman authors themselves, in English translation. Reading what the ancients themselves wrote is both more interesting and challenging than using a text book.