Classics 2200 Week 1 Lecture: Introduction PDF

**Classics 2200 Week 1 Lecture: Introduction** Hello, and welcome to Classical Studies 2200: Classical Mythology. My name is Randall Pogorzelski and I'll be your instructor for the course. Please call me Randy. If you're more comfortable with formality, Dr. Pogorzelski or Professor Pogorzelski are both fine, but I really do prefer Randy. I've been working in Western's Department of Classical Studies since 2011. Before I came to Western, I was a Lecturer at Scripps College in Claremont, California, at the University of California, Irvine, and at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales. I teach mostly classical Latin language and literature courses, but I also have some experience with Greek language and literature courses as well as ancient history courses. My research focus is on the poetry of the early Roman Empire, most especially Virgil and Lucan. I also have an interest in the use of classical literature and myth in modern literature and culture. I wrote my Ph.D. thesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara on Virgil and James Joyce, and I've taught courses including texts like *Watchmen* and *Frankenstein*. There are few things I enjoy more than talking about classical literature and history, so please feel free to contact me any time with questions about the course or about Ancient Greece and Rome in general. Before I get into the substance of this lecture, I want to say a few words about the format of the lectures for this course. I think most of my colleagues, when they teach online courses or record materials for in-person courses, like to use some sort of video recording. Some record the audio in a PowerPoint file, so each slide has an audio component to go with it. Others use VoiceThread or Zoom to record a video that combines the slides and the audio. I prefer to keep the audio separate. This means a smaller file size, but more importantly it means that you can listen to my lectures as you would listen to a podcast or an audiobook. I try to make sure my lectures make as much sense as possible on their own without the slides or any visual component being necessary, so that you can listen while you're walking or driving or on the bus or at the gym or washing dishes or whatever. I do also provide, however, a set of PowerPoint slides to accompany each lecture, and I will refer to the slide numbers throughout the lecture, so you know which slide to be looking at. That allows you to sit at a computer and take notes while you listen to the lecture and follow along with the slides. I just don't want you to feel like sitting in front of a computer is the only way to consume my lectures. I often get emails from students asking me to provide the lecture materials in a different format that works better for their individual study habits. I'm sorry, but I won't do that. I try to make what I provide be as flexible as possible. So, for example, if you want a file in which the audio is recorded directly in PowerPoint, I understand how that could work better for you. It would mean that you could study by looking at the slides, and if there's one where you don't remember exactly what the point was, you can just play the audio for that slide. And if that works best for you, you can make that file yourself just by playing the audio from this file and using PowerPoint to record it. I'm not going to do that for you, and the reason I won't is just because recording lectures in multiple formats takes a lot of time. If I were to accommodate every student's preferred format, then every time I updated a lecture, I would have to rerecord it several times. That would give me a disincentive to change my lectures and I'd end up using the same ones year after year, just because I'd find it hard to find the time to rerecord in all the different formats. That wouldn't be ideal. I don't think it's necessary or practical to rewrite all the course materials every year, and I do mostly use the same lectures for a few years at least, but if I stop thinking hard about mythology and how I want to teach it and just decide that what I've got now is good enough forever, the course will lose the life that animates it. So instead, I'll stick to one style of recording. I'll give you the audio, the PowerPoint slides, and a transcript that incorporates both, and if you would prefer that the course materials be in different format, I'll just ask you to create that format for yourself with the materials I've already provided. **The Story of Ajax** If I keep talking about the format of the course right now, I think I'll be getting off on the wrong foot. I'll get back to the structure and requirements of the course in a little bit, but I want now to talk for a little while about the actual subject of the course: Classical Mythology. On **Slide 1**, you can see an image that is a detail of an Ancient Greek vase painting: A picture containing text, indoor Description automatically generated ca. 540-530 B.C.E.. Achilles and Ajax playing draughts, detail from an Attic black-figure amphora. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AIC\_970010 The same image, by the way, is on the first page of the course syllabus. On **Slide 2**, you can find a little bit of information about that image. It's from an amphora (which is just the name of a particular shape of Greek vase---it has an oval body and narrow neck) painted by Exekias between 540 and 530 BCE. There are many vases painted with a version of this scene, in which a figure labelled as Achilles rolls a four and a figure labelled as Ajax rolls a two or a three. If you'd like, you can read a little more about this type scene and see a couple of different examples of it by following the link on the slide (). Moving on to **Slide 3**, I chose this scene as a thematic one first of all because I think it's fun. It shows two mythological heroes not engaging in warfare as we might expect, but in a peaceful, everyday activity. I really like board games and tabletop roleplaying games, and so I find the idea of Ancient Greek warriors playing games at a table really cool. You can tell these are warriors because they've got their spears and helmets there, and because they're labelled as heroes of the Trojan War. Now they're probably not playing any complicated kind of board game. Probably they're just rolling some dice and comparing the numbers, even though there is some evidence that Ancient Greek people did play board games.[^1^](#fn1){#fnref1.footnote-ref} But still, it seems awesome to me to imagine Achilles and Ajax taking some time away from their day jobs in the army to relax and play a game. It gives me a fuller sense of the characters. I didn't just choose the image because games are cool, though. The picture also has some interesting things to tell us about mythology. One thing is how much mythology was integral to everyday life in Ancient Greece. This vase was a useful object that people saw all the time, and like most painted vases, it depicts a mythological story. Myth was everywhere in Ancient Greece. Not only were people telling each other stories of myth all the time, but on the everyday decorated objects you'd see around the house or around town, you'd see scenes from myth all the time. The expectation must have been that Ancient Greek people seeing these depictions would know the stories they refer to, and if they didn't, they would share stories with each other explaining the context of the pictures. You'd know who Ajax and Achilles were and what their stories were. The constant reminders tell me that in Ancient Greece, myth and life were woven together inseparably. It's like if there was one fictional universe, like for example the Harry Potter universe, and it was big enough and full enough that absolutely everybody knew the stories, and most art and decoration was all characters and themes from that one universe. On **Slide 4**, the story the scene tells is about who is "the best of the Achaeans." Achaea was and is a region in Greece, and the word "Achaeans" gets used in Ancient Greek literature by synecdoche (the part for the whole) as a word for all Greeks. Much of Homer's *Iliad* (and we'll read some of the *Iliad* later on in this course) is about who is the best of them---about which of the warriors in the Greek army at Troy is the best. Achilles is the clear answer in the *Iliad*, and Ajax is explicitly the second best. In the *Iliad*, Homer often describes Ajax as the best warrior after Achilles. In these scenes on vases the numbers rolled are written on the vase, and Ajax always rolls a lower number than Achilles. Sometimes it's a whole phrase like a speech bubble that says something like, "I have rolled a four," or, "I got three." On this vase, if you look very closely, you can see the remains of the words where Achilles is saying, "Four," and Ajax's number is harder to read, but it looks like it says, "Three." Achilles is the best. Not only is he the best at fighting, but, apparently, he is also the best at rolling dice, and he wins because he's just the best of the Achaeans at everything. Moving on to **Slide 5**, many of you probably already know a lot about Achilles. If you don't, don't worry. I will talk about him a lot later on in the course. He's a major figure. But I want to focus for the moment on Ajax. He's also a major character in Greek mythology, but I think these days fewer people know his story. I want to warn you before I get into Ajax's story that it involves suicide. I wrote on the syllabus that I'm going to talk about a number of difficult topics in this course, including suicide, gender-based and sexual violence, colonialism, racism, and many types of violence and injustice. Not every week will involve such a topic, but it's going to be frequent enough that I don't think it's going to be productive for me to give you an explicit warning in the future every time I'm going to talk about a potentially difficult topic. That means that if there's any topic you think will be especially problematic for you to hear about without a warning, feel free to come talk to me about it so we can come up with an accommodation plan. It's just part of the stories of Classical Mythology that they deal with this kind of stuff, and I'll talk more about why that is and why I think it's important over the course of this year. **Slide 6** is a quick summary of the story of Ajax. When Achilles was killed near the end of the Trojan War, Ajax and Odysseus defended his body from the Trojans. They both then claimed the right to inherit his armor, and Agamemnon and Menelaus awarded the armor to Odysseus. Ajax felt deeply disrespected and subsequently suffered an episode of madness, killing a flock of sheep because he thought they were enemies. He was so ashamed that, despite the pleas of his girlfriend and son, he died by suicide. This is not exactly the story that is on the vase. That story is really about Achilles being the best, and about him being specifically better than Ajax. But that's got to suck for Ajax---always being the second best. I think that the combination of these two characters means that an Ancient Greek person---remember that everyone was familiar with the whole story already---would find it hard not to remember that Achilles is going to die in battle and Ajax is going to be standing over the corpse of his friend, trying to hold the line. And in that context, this vase is a reminder that it's not just about honor and glory on the battlefield. These guys are friends. In the war, Ajax is going to be successful in holding off the Trojans, and he and Odysseus are going to carry Achilles' body back to the Greek camp, making sure not to leave him behind. There's an emotional power to this scene of two friends playing a game, and that emotional power is not immediately apparent unless you know the whole story, but when you do know the story, the image is really beautiful in a bittersweet way. It gets even more powerful when the story continues. After the death of Achilles, Ajax feels betrayed by the leadership of the army when Agamemnon and Menelaus award the inheritance of Achilles' armor to Odysseus instead of Ajax, and eventually he has trouble reintegrating with everyday life and maintaining his personal relationships with his girlfriend and son. Ultimately, he's not able to cope with his feelings and he dies by suicide. In case it's not obvious, I'm making the point here that feeling betrayed by military leadership, facing difficulty with relationships at home, and dying by suicide is a really common story for combat veterans. In Ancient Greece, warfare was common and there were a lot of combat veterans. For them, seeing this image of two friends in war, one of whom would die in combat and the other by suicide, must have made a very powerful and visceral connection with the story. On **Slide 7**, the story of Ajax's suicide is most famously told in Sophocles' tragedy, *Ajax*. That play has connected powerfully with veterans of modern wars, depicting Ajax's struggle with grief over his friend's death, disconnection with the values of the leaders of his army, episodes of insanity, and an inability to reconnect with his loved ones after the war, resulting ultimately in suicide. Projects like Peter Meineck's "Warrior Chorus" (part of the Aquila Theatre, which you can learn about by following the link on the slide: ) use myth to help combat veterans talk about and cope with the experience of war. I can totally see why a story like this would connect with modern war veterans. I'm not a veteran myself, and I haven't suffered the kind of trauma people suffer in war. Some classicists say that the trauma that modern war veterans suffer is radically different from the kinds of things that Ancient Greeks experienced in ancient wars. They argue that life expectancy in Ancient Greece was very low, and death was much more ubiquitous than it is now. Instead of dying in hospitals, more people died at home with family, and even children saw death much more in their everyday lives than we do, including both animal sacrifice rituals and human death. There's an argument to be made that the violence and death that Ancient Greek people saw in war was not so far out of the realm of their everyday experience. But I think that idea is at least partly contradicted by the power of Sophocles' tragedy. *Ajax* is a story that seems to parallel the stories of modern war veterans very closely. They struggle with grief over friends' and comrades' deaths, as Ajax struggles with the loss of Achilles. They feel disconnected from the values of the leaders of the army. Ajax feels like Agamemnon and Menelaus are rewarding Odysseus, who is weaker but cleverer and good with words and rhetoric and giving speeches. Ajax feels like his commanders are just taken in by bullshit instead of the strength and honor and straightforward action he thinks is important. As many modern veterans report, Ajax feels like he\'s the one who did the fighting, and the leaders of the army have lost touch with what it takes to actually fight in a war. And then there are these episodes of insanity that Ajax experiences coming back from the war. The trauma that he has suffered keep coming back and they keep preventing him from reconnecting with his loved ones after the fighting. This is a story that gets told over and over. I think one of the ways that the story of Ajax helps modern veterans in trying to process the trauma of war is that it's an ancient story. Sometimes it's easier, I think, to deal with difficult topics and to talk about difficult issues when you can work through a familiar kind of story that's set in a radically different time and place. That space helps to create enough critical distance---enough space between you and the story---that you can think about it and work with it without getting overwhelmed by it. And this isn't just about modern people working through trauma by using Ancient Greek myth. The mythological stories in Greek tragedy were also ancient for their original audiences. The space of the theatre provided a kind of frame that helped to contain potentially explosive topics and issues, and by setting the plays in an ancient, legendary, or mythological time, tragedians like Sophocles were able to confront urgent social problems with just enough safety. Mythological stories were never about the present time. In our first evidence for the stories, and from the first time the stories were being told, they were already about ancient times. Sophocles was writing in the fifth century BCE, but the Trojan War was already a legendary past of centuries before then. As much as myths were a part of everyday life in Ancient Greece, and so the stories felt very close to people's lives, there was also this enormous gap that helped them to feel a great distance between what they saw on the stage and in temples and on vases and their own lives. For the story of Ajax, that's important because it means that Sophocles can confront issues like combat trauma, suicide, and the difficulty combat veterans have reacclimating to civilian life without the violence they experienced turning on their families and themselves. In other words, myth is absolutely about fun stories, but it's also a way in which Ancient Greek people confronted the most explosive social issues of their time, and it's a way that we can confront our own explosive social issues with some measure of distance and safety. On **Slide 8**, the scene on the vase connects myth to everyday life in a few ways. It shows us a scene of everyday life, it's on an object that demonstrates the ubiquity of myth in Greek life, and it shows us a part of a story that describes a profoundly human experience that is similar in ancient and modern life. Greek myth tells sometimes fun and absurd stories, but it also tackles some of the most difficult topics for people to talk about, and it does so in a way that gives us enough distance to make them a little easier. This year I'm going to talk about some fun and wild stories, and I really hope you are going to enjoy those stories. I'm certainly going to have fun talking about mythology, but I'm also going to spend a lot of time talking about the difficult topics and social issues that myth brings up. The Athenian theatre was a civic institution in which the government saw a lot of value. It wasn't just entertainment---it was somehow good for people and for the community. It helped to build the community by working through the issues that community was facing, and I hope this course does that too, at least some of the time. Theatre, art, literature, and myth are not just useless entertainment, and they're worth devoting time and resources to, both individually and collectively. That was true in Ancient Greece, and it's true today in Canada too. On **Slide 9**, if there's one, big thing I want you to take away from this course, it's that fictional stories matter. You will make your life better if you develop a habit of reading fiction. That can be myth-related stuff, or it can be anything else, but people who have a habit of reading fiction have better social skills and live longer than people who don't. There are some links on the slide that have more information about those points. (, ). I'll talk more in future weeks about the benefits of stories and how I think they work. For now, I just want to make the point that stories are genuinely important. I sometimes get the impression that people think that fiction is frivolous. It's just entertainment or escapism and it's not really necessary. And myth is fictional stories. It's made-up stuff and it's a lot of fun. That doesn't mean it doesn't occupy a serious place in our lives. Narrative and stories are fundamental to human cognition. Later on in this course I'm going to make the argument that we don't just think in language---we think in stories. Stories are also fundamental in education. They're how we learn how to form social relationships and what to value in life. From the earliest uses of writing, humans used writing to tell stories. All of this means that studying stories, and not just what they say but how they work, is a very deep way of studying humanity. Mythology is a subject that tackles some of the most effective and influential stories the world has seen. I'll talk in the future about how I think that importance works and about what exactly myth is in the realm of stories, but for now I want to ask you to think even beyond mythology. Make space in your life for fiction and don't feel like that's wasting your time. Reading novels or stories or comics, listening to fiction audiobooks and narrative podcasts, playing narrative and role-playing games, watching TV and movies, and, in this course especially, learning about mythology all reward the time you put into them. These are not side projects that distract you from what's really important. My biggest goal in this course is to convince you by the end of it that these things are themselves really important to you. **Course Policies and Practicalities** I would love to keep talking about myth, but this is the first lecture for the course, and I feel like I have to talk a little about the mechanics of how the course is going to work. I'll come back to myth before this lecture is over, but the policy part of the lecture starts on **Slide 10**. I can't spend this whole first lecture on the good stuff. I feel like I really have to spend some time talking about how the class is going to be organized and what the requirements are. All of this information is also in the syllabus for the course, which you can find on the OWL site. It's the required reading for this week. The most important thing to take away from this part of the lecture is that there are a lot of students and just one of me. That means there's no flexibility in the policies, and it's important for you to know those policies so that everything will go as smoothly as possible. The syllabus is pretty long and there are a lot of policies on it. In a large course like this one, that's important because it's important that everything run smoothly for the course to be successful. A lot of things have to happen automatically because there's not enough time in the day for me to take care of every individual issue. That means that I need a lot of policies to make it very clear what will happen in different circumstances, and I need you to know those policies and that there's not going to be any flexibility. Sometimes I teach small courses, and in those courses, I'm happy to make exceptions and take into account individual circumstances and what's best for each of my students. I love that kind of teaching, and when I was a student, I loved those kinds of courses. If you feel like you would benefit from some flexibility, there are courses like that at Western, and a lot of them never fill up. So, for example, some of my favorite courses to teach are Ancient Greek and Latin language courses, where students learn how to read Homer and Plato and Cicero and Virgil in the original languages. They're really great courses, they're almost never full, and they're small enough that they can be shaped to fit what the students need. In large courses like this one, on the other hand, I just can't make any exceptions to the policies. Instead, I try to make the policies and materials as clear as possible. One of the things that's great about being a student at a big university like Western is that you have a lot of choice, not just about the subject matter you study, but also about the type of classes you attend. I think smart and engaged people like Western students are interested in all kinds of things, and it's a mistake for you to feel like you're only interested in one thing. That means that at least some of the time, you should choose courses not based on what they teach, but on how they teach it. I think that many of you are taking this course because you're interested in Classical Mythology, but a lot of you are taking this course because it's an online course that allows flexibility in your schedule and fulfills the Category B requirement with multiple-choice tests. And that's great, but it also comes with some costs, and there are benefits to other types of course formats. Don't get me wrong---I'm happy that so many students are interested in this course, and it's great for me to feel like a subject I really love is appealing to you too. So don't let me chase you away. I just want you to think about the benefits of small classes too. On **Slide 11**, you can find some contact information for me. You're welcome to contact me any time. The best way to contact me is by my UWO email address:. You're also welcome to stop by my office, Lawson Hall 3205, any time. I work there a lot. I'm generally around between 8:30am and 5pm on weekdays, but I do have other courses to teach and meetings to go to, so I'm not always in my office. You can just come by to see if I'm there, or if you want to guarantee that I'll be there, you can email me to make an appointment. There are hundreds of students in this course, so I may not be able to respond to emails right away. I will do my best to respond within one business day, but I don't generally check my email before 8am, after 5pm, or on weekends or holidays. On **Slide 12**, this course will have a regular, weekly structure. Each week there will be a reading assignment, an audio recording of a lecture, and a set of PowerPoint slides designed to accompany the lecture. You will find links to the assigned reading, the slides, the lectures, and transcripts of the lectures on the OWL site. Once you have read the assignment and listened to the lecture, you will need to take an online quiz by 4pm on Thursday. Let me just pause to emphasize that. The quizzes are due at 4pm on Thursday. I want to make sure that if there are any problems with a quiz, I don't have to try to resolve the issue over the weekend, so quizzes are due on Thursday and not on Friday. Also, I want to make sure that there's a little time in the afternoon after the quiz closes so I can try to resolve any minor issues without going into the evening. That means quizzes must be completed by 4pm. In addition to the online quizzes, there will be an online test in October, an in-person exam during the December examination period, and an in-person exam during the April examination period. I think I should explain why I'm requiring in-person exams for this course. I know it's inconvenient for you to have to come to exams in person, and for some of you it's more than inconvenient---it's really difficult. Some of you may not be able to take the course at all because it requires in-person exams. I'm sorry about that. I think it's reasonable that you should expect an online course to be completely online, including exams, and I haven't made the decision to use in-person exams lightly. The short version of the reason is simply this: academic integrity. It would be great if I could give you all some rules to follow for the exams and trust that all, or at least most of you would follow those rules. Experience has shown me that that's just not the case. I would love to have exams online, and if I could trust you to follow the rules, there could be all kinds of flexibility involved in those exams. That would be way better for you, and it would be way better for me too. But we can't have nice things. Experience has shown me beyond a doubt that if I trust you to follow the rules, many of you will cheat. It breaks my heart that many students have as a first response to a lack of enforcement that the rules don't matter and they'll just break them, but it's the reality of the situation. And it's not like I just tried it once and gave up. I tried very hard for years to find a way to make tests online that provide responsible measures of student learning, and I failed despite my best efforts and the support of some people a lot smarter than I am. Here's a short story about those efforts. In the spring of 2020, the covid pandemic forced us to move our final exams online with very little notice, and most of us at Western couldn't worry too much about academic integrity, and we didn't have time to completely redesign our exams. In the Department of Classical Studies, in our small courses, the grades declined a little, and in our large courses, the grades were about ten points higher than normal. That suggested that very few students in the small courses were cheating, but a lot of students in the large courses were cheating. Then, the following year, we had a chance to plan for online assessment in courses ahead of time, and that gave us an opportunity to try out a few different strategies. In the large courses, we had the constraint that the grading had to be automatic, since there are many students and not enough instructors and TAs to grade assignments. In some courses, instructors asked the students not to use any books, notes, or other materials when writing the tests. In those courses, many students didn't realize that instructors can track when a student accesses materials in OWL, and about 40% of students accessed files like PowerPoint slides and recorded lectures in OWL during the tests. And that's just the students who didn't download those materials ahead of time or use other, less easily detectable resources. Other instructors (and I was one of these) allowed students to use any books, notes, or websites they wanted to use, but asked them not to collaborate with other people. We focused on writing multiple-choice questions that didn't just ask students to recall information, but also asked them to use logical reasoning. Those questions can be effective measures of learning even when students have access to books, notes, and websites. In those courses, many students collaborated in group chats during the exams with the explicit purpose of cheating. It became clear to us that we simply could not make rules that we weren't able to enforce. But we weren't ready to give up yet. In addition to writing questions that were suitable for open-book testing, we were able to design the tests with constraints that made collaboration both more difficult and less effective. Tools like using questions randomly selected from large question banks, requiring students to write tests synchronously, restricting time limits, and showing students one question at a time without the ability to go back to previous questions were all effective in minimizing collaboration between students. Using those tools, I was able to make multiple-choice exams that were reasonably effective online. It worked---but it only worked briefly. The next problem was generative AI. When AI chatbots first became widespread in late 2022, they were very bad at logical reasoning. They could answer multiple-choice questions that simply required recalling information, but they were no better than random guessing at more complicated questions. By early 2024, chatbots were able to get about 75% on even my best efforts at questions that would challenge their reasoning skills. I can no longer write multiple-choice questions that are reasonable for undergraduate students and still challenging for chatbots. That means that even minimizing collaboration and writing questions that test reasoning and analysis rather than information recall is no longer an effective strategy. Students can simply copy and paste questions into a chatbot and get a good grade without any knowledge of the course material. And I don't know how to stop that from happening. Some of you may be thinking that it would be better to use an online proctoring tool like Proctortrack or Proctorio rather than have in-person exams. I did seriously consider that. I know those tools are invasive, but I was willing to live with that, even though I think that's a serious concern. I also know they're not 100% effective, and I was willing to live with that too, and that's also a serious concern. The real problem is that online proctoring tools encourage students to try cheating. Good proctoring encourages students to follow the rules. Online proctoring does just the opposite. Western's experience of a few years of using Proctortrack in many courses has resulted in a significant increase in academic integrity cases reaching the deans' offices. You might think that's a good thing because it means we're catching more cheaters. That's not what the deans are reporting. They're saying that the increase is because students find it hard to resist trying to get around the online proctoring systems. Some students are succeeding, and there are cheaters we're not catching. The ones we catch are often students who would not even attempt to cheat on an in-person exam, but somehow think that it's okay to try to cheat on an online exam. The dean's office in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities has very strongly recommended not using an online proctoring tool, and I think they're right about that. They're invasive and ineffective, and the biggest problem is that they turn otherwise honest students into cheaters. It's a tough call, but I think it's better to have in-person exams than it is to accept the problems of online proctoring. Finally, I just want to say that there's also some advice out there that professors should discourage cheating not by proctoring and enforcement, but by getting students excited about learning and making the course material stuff that students actually want to learn. Additionally, if we use so-called "authentic assessment," which is to say assessment that mirrors what students will do with their knowledge after the course is over, students should want to do the work instead of cheating. I really do my best to do that, and I also really believe that the material in this course is important and worth learning. I try to make my questions not only reasonable, but the kind of questions that use authentic and transferable skills. The problem is grades. As long as grades get used for things like who gets into graduate school or law school or medical school or Ivey or whatever, no amount of emphasizing enthusiasm for learning or authentic assessment is going to prevent students from violating rules to maximize their grades. I hate that, but it's how it is. I simply have to use some kind of enforcement, and I can't make rules in this course that I don't plan to enforce. I tried my best for years to make that possible while keeping the exams online, and I just couldn't do it. So, now we have in-person exams. There's only the two of them, though, so you only have to be able to show up in person for two things for this entire, two-semester course. I'm sorry. I wish I could have figured it out. Sometimes students ask me for advice on how to study and how to prepare for the exams in this course. On **Slide 13**, you can see a short answer to that question. Each student will find reading and study techniques that work for them, and what works well for one student may or may not work well for others. The quizzes and the October test should help you to check how well you're learning the material. They'll give you a sense of what the exam questions will be like. You have some time before the December exam to try out a few things and see what works best for you. Continuing on **Slide 14**, one study technique I might suggest is talking with another person about the course. Learning works best when it's a social process, and one of the disadvantages of an asynchronous course is that you don't have to spend any time with your classmates. If you know someone else in the course, it would be a good idea to spend some time talking with them about the course, and whether you know any of your classmates or not, you might try explaining some of the course material to a friend who is not in the course. For more techniques for reading and studying, you might look into Western's "Learning Development and Success" (https://learning.uwo.ca). On **Slide 15**, you'll see that there are no books you are required to buy for this course. All of the assigned readings are from the Loeb Classical Library, to which Western has an institutional subscription. If you'd like, you can buy the physical books, but the complete Loeb Classical Library is online and accessible through Western Libraries. You may read a different translation of the Greek and Latin works instead, but I will put passages from the assigned reading on the test and exams, and I'll take those passages from the Loeb translations. If you read a different translation, you may find those questions more difficult. I'll provide more detailed instructions about how to access the Loeb Classical Library online in next week's lecture, but in general it's pretty straightforward. There are links on the syllabus and on the OWL site to the assigned reading. If you click the link, Western has a subscription, so you should be able to enter your Western credentials and it should take you right to the first page of the reading assignment. It's a nice resource, and it's not cheap for Western to subscribe, and I really appreciate that Western Libraries has found room in the budget for it so you don't have to worry about buying a bunch of books. **Slide 16** is about the components of your grade in this course. Those will be weekly quizzes, a test in October, an exam in December, and an exam in April. The quizzes will be collectively worth 10% of your grade, the October test another 10%, the December exam will count for 40%, and the April exam will count for 40% of your course grade. I also want to take a moment to note that I understand that having your performance in a course assessed and graded can be stressful, but please try to keep in mind that grades are an important part of your university experience. You're here not only to learn, but also to have your level of success in learning assessed. Think of having your work graded as an opportunity to show what you've learned. Also, remember that your grades are a measure of your academic performance and not a judgment of you as a person. I have taught many students whose grades were not great, but who were wonderful people and a great pleasure to teach. Sometimes the students who are the most enthusiastic and dedicated and friendly have something that isn't clicking or have something go wrong and their grade isn't great. And sometimes there are students whose grades are nearly perfect, and they're just jerks. I'm not saying you have to be a jerk to get good grades. What I'm saying is that I care a lot more about what kind of person you are than what your grade is, and I want you to feel that way too. I know that a bad grade can make you feel unworthy as a person, but it really shouldn't. I'm going to tell you a story about a good friend of mine in university. She was really, really smart, but something just wasn't right about her and university. She wasn't in the right place in her life for it to go well. She got really bad grades, and in her second year, she got kicked out. So, she got a job working as a file clerk in an office and started working her way up the ladder for a while. And seven years later, she got kind of frustrated with her career path and interested in university, so she enrolled at the local college part time. And she got great grades then, and she got admitted to a great university and went all the way to do a Ph.D. She'd always been capable of it, but she had to be in the right frame of mind and the right place in her life for university to work out for her. Sometimes I feel like my students think it's now or never, and that if Western isn't going how they hoped or expected, it's the end of the world. There's a lot of pressure that makes it feel that way. I know a little of that myself. I got straight As in high school, but I didn't always get the best grades in university. I was often disappointed at the time, but I remember when one of my professors who gave me a terrible grade in the first course I took with her later asked if she could write a letter of recommendation for grad school for me. It was shocking to me that I felt like I had let her down, but she didn't care about that grade. She saw something in me worth supporting anyway. So, if you struggle at Western and if your grades aren't the best, I would first say that grades are not the only measure of your worth, and they aren't even a very good measure of it. Second, I think that it's possible to struggle in university and still end up on a great path. Third, I want to assure you that every single student at Western is capable of succeeding here, but sometimes through no fault of their own, circumstances mean that good and capable students struggle. And finally, even if the worst is happening and you're failing so many courses that you're in danger of being required to withdraw, that's not the end of the world. It may be a harder path in life to take some time away and figure out if university is right for you and how it can be, but in more cases than you think, that's the right thing to do and will be the better path in the long run. There's no need to be impatient and feel like you have to have it all figured out right now. With all that said, I know that for many of you, your grade is the most important part of this course. For me, that's not the case. I love classical mythology and I genuinely think it's important. That means that the most important part of this course for me is the material rather than the grades, but I do understand that even though some of you are with me on that, even then grades are important for students. It's easy for me, in the position I'm in as a professor working in my dream job, to say what I'm saying about grades. But I do care about them. If I didn't, I'd just give everyone in this course the grade they want. I would love to just do away with grades altogether, but I can't do that, and as long as we're going to have grades, I think it's important that they communicate the messages they're supposed to communicate, and I think it's important that they be as fair as I can make them. I promise I will respect the importance of grades. And I respect that many of you have specific goals, like admission to the Ivey Business School or to medical school or law school, that require certain grade averages. I know those goals are really important to you. I can't take your individual goals into account when assigning grades and I won't add some points to your grade just because you need them to accomplish a goal, but I will abide by grading policies that are as fair as I can make them for all students. I just want to emphasize in the context of that promise that I really don't think you should let grades cause you as much stress as students often do. So let me talk a little more about the quizzes, test, and exams. **Slide 17** is about the quizzes. In most weeks of this course, you will have a quiz **due by 4pm on Thursday**. The quizzes will be available in OWL beginning at 9am on the Friday of the week before they are due. They will be untimed, and they will be graded automatically by OWL. You will be allowed to use any materials you'd like for the quizzes, including books, notes, AI tools, the internet, and collaboration with other people. I would only ask that you honestly try to engage with the material yourself, and when you're helping a classmate, please help them to find the right answer rather than just telling them what it is. The reason I make the quizzes is so that you'll have a regular schedule of engaging with the course material. Especially in an online course without regular class meetings, it's tempting to just binge everything right before the test. The quizzes are there to make things more gradual than that. They're also supposed to help you get ready for the exams. The quizzes will have the same kind of questions as the exams, but they won't have any of the stress. They're untimed, and there's no possible way to cheat on them because anything and everything is allowed. You can redo each quiz as many times as you like, and only your highest score will count. And you can ask anybody you want for help. Everybody should be able to get 100% on every quiz. The point is that I want you to work on a gradual, weekly schedule, and I want you to be prepared for the exams. If you ask me what kinds of questions will be on the exams, I'll just tell you that the questions will be like the quiz questions. So, if you spend some time with the quiz questions and try to understand why the right answers are right and the wrong answers are wrong, you'll be better prepared for the exams. **Slide 18** explains that you will receive your score immediately and you will be able to redo each quiz as many times as you'd like, but your final attempt will have to be submitted before the quiz closes. Only your fifteen best quiz scores will count, and your lowest five scores will be dropped. Because the quizzes are designed so everyone can get 100%, you should be able to skip five quizzes without suffering any penalty. The quizzes are super flexible, but the one firm rule is that I will not accept any late quizzes for any reason. It doesn't matter how sick you are or what terrible thing has happened, if you can't complete a quiz on time, I won't extend the deadline or accommodate you in any way. If you go to see an academic counsellor or advisor and they recommend academic consideration, I still won't extend a quiz deadline, reweight your quiz grades, or allow you to make up a quiz. The missed quiz will just be one of the quiz scores you drop. The next thing I want to talk about, and this is on **Slide 19**, is the October test. In October, as detailed on the syllabus, a test will be available to you in OWL. The test will be due, like the quizzes, by 4pm on Thursday. There will, however, be no penalty for submitting the test up to four weeks late, by 4pm on the Thursday four weeks after the official deadline. There is no need to contact me or request academic consideration for the test if you miss the initial deadline. Any student may submit the test up to four weeks late for any reason and without the need to contact anyone. Because of this flexibility in the submission deadline, no academic consideration will be granted for this test for any reason. The only flexibility in the deadline will be that you may submit the test up to four weeks late without any penalty. If you do not submit the October test by then, your grade for the test will be 0%. Of course there's a need to be reasonable about this, and I recognize that there's a possibility someone could be sick or have some other circumstance that makes them unavailable for all four weeks of the grace period. If that happens to you, I can work with you and your academic counsellor or academic advisor on a plan, but in virtually all cases, if you miss a month of the course, it's better for you to withdraw from the course than it is for you to try to catch up. What I won't do is grant any academic consideration if you're sick for the last few days of the grace period. The test is due on the initial date, and if you plan to ignore the initial deadline and submit it instead at the end of the grace period, and then something goes wrong for you at that time, you're out of luck. Instead, you should plan to submit the test by the initial deadline, and only use the grace period if something goes wrong. Continuing on **Slide 20**, the test will cover all course material from the beginning of the semester. It will be made up of twenty multiple-choice questions. The test will be untimed, and it will be graded automatically by OWL. You will be allowed to use any materials you'd like for the test, including books, notes, AI tools, the internet, and collaboration with other people. You will be allowed to attempt and submit the test as many times as you'd like, and only your highest score will count toward your course grade. I expect that almost all students will achieve a grade of 100% for the test. In other words, the test will be like the quizzes, except that it will have more questions, cover more material, and be worth a larger portion of your course grade. On **Slide 21**, the purpose of the test is to give you a sense of how you are doing before the deadline to drop the course without academic penalty. The 10% for this test plus the quizzes in the weeks before the drop deadline add up to 16% of your grade for the course. There's a requirement at Western that in 1000-level and 2000-level courses, at least 15% of the course grade must be available to students before the deadline to drop the course without academic penalty. That way, you have some information to go on. The October test is designed to fulfill that requirement for this course. Now, I don't think it does that very well, but it's a kind of compromise. The best way to comply with the spirit of the requirement would be to make the test an in-person test. That way you'd have a real sense of how you're doing and a reasonable way to predict how the December and April exams will go. But, organizing an in-person test for hundreds of students in an asynchronous course during the term when students have other courses is a logistical nightmare. The schedule conflicts are very hard to manage. So, I keep this test online. If you want to use the test as a genuine measure of how the December and April exams are likely to go for you, then try doing a first attempt at the test without using any books, notes, websites, or collaboration. That will give you a good sense of how you're doing, and it won't have a negative effect on your course grade because you can just redo the test using whatever you want to use after that first attempt. Even for those of you who don't do that, the test will still be of some help because the test questions will be like the questions on the December and April exams so that you have in October a low-stakes and low-stress introduction to the kinds of questions I will ask on the exams. Be aware, however, that the December and April exams will be more difficult than the October test because the test will allow you to use books, notes, AI tools, websites, and collaboration with other people, but none of those aids will be available to you for the exams in December and April. Even though the October test can't be really good preparation for the exams without being in-person, I still think it serves a purpose. That's related to exam stress. The more low-stakes experience you have with the kinds of questions you'll see on the exam, the less exam stress you'll feel. Exam stress is a big problem in education. It's hard to learn things if you're full of negative emotions like fear and anger and if you're feeling stress and anxiety. Learning happens best when you're relaxed and happy, but exams are not the best things for helping students feel relaxed and happy. My strategy for minimizing the stress of exams as much as possible is to ease you into the exams for this course. The quizzes and test will ask you questions just like the exams, but those questions will be pretty stress free. There's no time limit, no rules, and being able to repeat the quizzes and test means you can get 100% and you don't have to worry about any consequences for getting a question wrong. You can just take the quiz or test again until you get it right. You get a sense of the questions without the anxiety. Then, by the time you get to the exams, you should at least know what you're getting into. And speaking of the exams, there's some information about them starting on **Slide 22**. The Office of the Registrar will schedule an in-person exam for our course in the December Examination Period and another in-person exam in the April Examination Period. The December exam will cover all course material from the fall semester. The April exam will cover all course material from the winter semester, but not material from the fall semester. I won't repeat here my whole thing about why I think in-person exams are necessary. The most important information on this slide is that the December exam will cover everything in the course from the fall semester, and that the April exam will cover the winter semester material, but not the fall semester material. This is a really common question, so I want to make sure you get the answer now at the beginning of the course. On **Slide 23**, you'll see some information about how the exams will work. You must bring your Western ID card to the exams. The reason it's important to bring your Western ID rather than a driver's license or something else like that is that your Western ID has your student ID number on it, which will allow the proctors to compare that ID number with the ID number you write on the nominal roll sheet. You also need to bring a pencil or a pen to the exams. A pen is fine, but I recommend a pencil in case you make a mistake or want to change an answer. That's easy with a pencil because you can erase your answer. It's harder with a pen, so it's better to use a pencil if you can. You will be required to sign a nominal roll sheet during the exam. Those used to be required for all exams at Western, but they're optional for instructors now. I use them in large exams because I want to have a record of who is there. That goes some way to making it harder for a student to claim dishonestly that they wrote the exam and the proctor lost the exam paper. If a proctor loses an exam paper, which is very rare but possible, I want to be as certain as I can be that that's what actually happened. You will also be required to mark your answers both on the test paper and on a bubble sheet that will be used for grading using Gradescope. If there are any problems with the bubble sheet, like stray marks that make your answer potentially ambiguous, the software will flag the issue and I will review the sheet to make sure your answers are recorded correctly. The machine does most of the work, but there is human labor involved in the processing of the grades to make sure everything is all correct. That means that it will take a little while to make the results available to you. Please be patient. Continuing on **Slide 24**, the December exam will be made up of 45 multiple-choice questions and the April exam will be made up of 50 multiple-choice questions. You will be allowed 120 minutes to complete each exam. You will not be allowed to use any books, notes, or electronic devices during the exams, and you will not be allowed to collaborate with any of your classmates or with anyone else during the exams. Neither I nor any of the proctors will answer any questions during the exams. Let me repeat that for emphasis. Neither I nor any of the proctors will answer any questions during the exams. I know that that makes some students uncomfortable, but I can't keep things fair for students in different rooms if some answers are more helpful than others, and it's always a judgment call for proctors about which questions are answerable and which ones are not. So, I just keep things fair by having all proctors refuse to answer any questions. You can feel free to ask your questions after the exam is over and you have your results. The questions on the exams will be similar to the questions on the quizzes and the October test, so the quizzes and test will give you a good idea of what kinds of questions to expect on the exams. I've found that just saying that the exam questions will be like the quiz and test questions doesn't always explain everything that students want to know about the exam questions. One of the most common questions I get is how many of the questions will test your knowledge of the reading assignments and how many will test your knowledge of the lectures. On **Slide 25**, on both exams, there will be questions that rely on both the lectures and the assigned readings. I will not provide proportions of questions that test your knowledge of the lecture material and questions that test your knowledge of the assigned readings. In general, it will be necessary to know both the lecture material and the assigned readings to get a very high score on an exam, but you will get better value for the time spent reviewing the lectures than for the time spent reviewing the readings. If you were to study only the lectures but not do any of the assigned reading, you might not get an extremely high score, but you should be able to do reasonably well. If you were to study only the readings and not listen to any of the lectures, you would be unlikely to pass. With that said, I don't want to give you the impression that the reading is not important. If anything, the reading is more important than the lectures. The lectures are there to support the reading and help it make sense to you. If you want to get the most out of this course for the long term, you'll want to be responsible about doing the assigned reading. I'm just saying that if you've got a few hours to study for an exam and you want to know how to get the most improvement in your grade for the time you have to spend, you'll do better to review the lectures or your own notes than you will to review the assigned reading. Another point I want to make about the exam questions is on **Slide 26**. There will be questions on the exams that ask you about images or about passages from ancient texts. These questions may use images or passages from the lecture slides or passages from the assigned readings. In addition, there may be questions that ask you to apply the knowledge you have gained from the lectures and readings to images or passages you have not seen before. This is one I sometimes get complaints about after an exam. Some students tell me that it's not fair to ask questions about material that wasn't explicitly taught in the course, but that's not exactly what I'm doing with those questions. It's a perfectly legitimate pedagogical strategy to teach you in the course how to interpret ancient texts and images, and then ask you to apply those interpretive strategies to related material you haven't seen. It's like teaching you how to do a kind of math problem and then giving you a test question that is that kind of math problem, but a particular one you haven't seen. You wouldn't expect that a math exam would include only problems you have seen before. You also shouldn't expect that a mythology exam will contain only passages and images that you have seen before. The point of the exams is not just to get you to repeat exactly what I've taught you, but to use the strategies I've taught you to think about new problems. I want to know not only what information you've learned, but also how well you think. **Slide 27** is about accommodations for students with disabilities. It's totally possible to have accommodations for the exams. You just need to use the official procedures to arrange those accommodations through Accessible Education (there's a link on the slide: http://academicsupport.uwo.ca/accessible\_education/index.html) and Accommodated Exams (there's another link on the slide: https://registrar.uwo.ca/academics/examinations/accommodated\_exams.html). **Slide 28** is about the Special Examinations to make up for the December and April exams. If you miss the December exam or the April exam, you must contact the Academic Counselling or Academic Advising office of your Faculty of Registration as soon as you are able to do so. They will assess your eligibility to write the Special Examination. You may also be eligible to write the Special Examination if you have an exam conflict or if you are in a "Multiple Exam Situation" (for example, 3 or more exams in a 23-hour period or 4 or more exams in a 47-hour period). **Slide 29** continues, the Special Examinations for this course will have the same format as the regular examinations. The dates of the Special Examinations will follow the guidelines in the Academic Calendar, so the Special Examination to make up for the December exam will be on the first Thursday in January following the start of winter semester classes, and the Special examination to make up for the April exam will be on fifth business day in May following the end of the April Examination Period. There's a lot more about Special Examinations on the syllabus, but most of you won't need that information, and those of you who do need it are likely to forget about it between now and December, so I'll just leave it at that for now. If you need to write a Special Examination because you are sick or something for the regular exam, the syllabus will give you a lot of information about how that will work. The next few slides highlight some course policies that are especially important. Experience tells me I'll get a lot of email questions about these, and I'll reply just by quoting the policies. **Slide 30** is about the unavailability of extra credit opportunities. In a course with hundreds of students, it is important to adhere strictly to policies that keep the course fair for all students and manageable for the instructor. For these reasons, I will not grant any extra credit, offer any additional assignments, or reweight your course grade. Even if you have an academic counsellor or advisor recommend that I reweight your course grade, I will not do so. The only academic consideration I will grant in this course is the opportunity to make up a test or exam that you missed, and I will grant that opportunity only if an academic counsellor or advisor recommends it. **Slide 31** continues that theme and reiterates that there are more opportunities for flexibility in smaller courses. If you think you would benefit from that kind of flexibility, it's a good idea to seek out smaller courses. There are advantages for students taking large courses like this one, but those advantages come at the cost of some necessary inflexibility. For students who are interested in Classical Studies but prefer courses with a little more flexibility, I recommend any Classical Studies course with a number in the 3000s. These courses are open to students in years 2, 3, and 4, they do not require students to be enrolled in Classical Studies programs, and most do not have any prerequisites. I know it's weird that in Classical Studies, 3000-level doesn't mean third year. We classify our courses by type rather than by year. So, a 2000-level course in Classical Studies is like this one: large, mostly online, and assessed by multiple choice tests. A 3000-level course is smaller and in person. If you're interested in Classical Studies and you want a more personal learning experience, don't be afraid to try a 3000-level course. **Slide 32** is about the rounding of grades. Course grades in this course will be rounded to the nearest percent. Students occasionally cite the university policy linked on the slide (). That university-level policy includes at the bottom of page 4 this sentence: "Averages will be calculated to two decimal places and rounded to the nearest whole number with.45 rounded up." That policy applies to the calculation of averages in your academic record, for purposes like determining eligibility for progression in modules or for awards. The policy does not apply to the calculation of course grades, and the standard practice at Western is to calculate grades to two decimal places and round grades to the nearest percent. That means that in this course, any grade with a.49 or below will be rounded down, and any grade with a.50 or above will be rounded up. For example, an 89.49% will be submitted to the registrar as an 89%, and an 89.50% will be submitted to the registrar as a 90%. There's one last policy that I want to talk about before I move on to the final part of this lecture, and that's about using artificial intelligence. All syllabuses at Western are now supposed to include a statement on whether using AI tools is allowed in the course, and **Slide 33** has that policy from the syllabus for this course. During the December exam and the April exam, students may not use any digital tools, including any artificial intelligence tools. Those will be in-person exams, and no books, notes, or digital devices will be allowed. Apart from that, students may use any tools they like, including any artificial intelligence tools. Students may use these tools at any time, including using them for help while writing quizzes and the October test. It is encouraged that students discuss the course material with other people, and when that is not possible, a chatbot is a good substitute. Learning is more effective when students are able to discuss course material in the physical presence of the people they're talking to, and it's also more effective when a conversation partner can remember previous conversations, but talking with a chatbot is better than not talking with anyone. As the technology improves, it may happen that in some cases talking with a chatbot is even more effective than talking with another person. I think that AI tools have great potential to make positive change in education. Even now, though, there's also the potential for great harm in education. If you use AI tools responsibly, you can learn better and faster than you could learn without them. AI can be your personal mythology tutor. But you can also use AI tools to do the work for you in a way that means you don't learn much. It's up to you. I want you to use AI tools, and I want you to use them in a way that helps you learn. So, for this course, the only thing you're not allowed to do with AI is to use it during the December and April exams. Everything else is great. Experiment with it and see what works well for you. And let me know what works, too. I'm really curious to hear the ways you're finding to get new tools to help you learn. Okay---that's what I have to say about course policies. **The Meaning of "Classical" in "Classical Mythology"** Now that I've covered a lot of information about the structure and format of the course, I'll just direct you to the syllabus for more information about that kind of thing. I want to get back to talking more about the actual substance of the course, and in the last part of this lecture I'm going to talk about what "Classical Mythology" means. This starts on **Slide 34**. For the most part, I'll leave the definition of "myth" and "mythology" for later. It will become clear over the course of the year. What I actually want to talk about now is the "classical" part. The Department of Classical Studies is dedicated to studying everything about Ancient Greece and Rome. What "classical" means in this context is "Ancient Greek and Roman." That may seem strange and confusing, so I'm going to try to explain how "classical" came to mean "Ancient Greek and Roman." Sometimes people think that the etymology of words, that is the origin of words and the history of how they came to mean what they mean, tells us the true or hidden meaning of words. That's not really true. Words mean what they mean because that's how people use them, not because of their origin. As **Slide 35** says, etymology is not destiny. Words change their meaning over time, and we shouldn't always feel like the residue of older meanings remains in newer ones. Nevertheless, I think it is interesting to talk about how words came to mean what they mean, especially in cases like "classical," where it's not obvious why it means "Ancient Greek and Roman." **Slide 36** explains that "classical" comes from the Latin word "classis," which means, according to the *Oxford Latin Dictionary*, "1. One or the other of the five classes into which Servius Tullius is said to have divided the Romans on the basis of property...2. A body of citizens summoned for military service, a levy...3. A naval force, fleet...4. A class or grade." There are two kinds of definitions here. One is a class like a socioeconomic class or a grade, and the other is a military definition. The two are closely related because of the way armies were recruited in ancient Mediterranean cultures and especially in Ancient Rome. In the early days of Rome, the army was entirely a volunteer army, and nobody got paid. It was expected that everyone eligible for military service sign up, but everyone had to supply their own equipment. Now, this wasn't true forever, and by the time of say Julius Caesar, the Roman army was a professional one in which soldiers were recruited, got paid, and got equipment supplied to them, but in the early days of Rome, it was like a lot of ancient cultures in that there wasn't a governmental budget for the military. And since the soldiers had to supply their own equipment, when Rome needed an army, the officers would organize everyone by how wealthy they were. The richest men could afford to buy and take care of horses, so they were the cavalry, called the *equites* or knights. Slightly less rich people could afford heavy armor and became the heavy infantry. Less rich people were lighter armored, and poor people who couldn't afford any armor or weapons were not eligible to serve in the army. So, the early Roman king Servius Tullius divided the Romans into property classes as a way of organizing army recruitment, and that's how the Latin word *classis* came to mean both economic class and a military assembly or naval fleet. **Slide 37** explains how that turned into "classical" like "Ancient Greek and Roman" or even like "classical music." The first recorded use of the adjective "classicus" to mean something like our "classical" was in the second century CE in Aulus Gellius' *Attic Nights* 19.8.15. Here is J. C. Rolfe's 1927 Loeb text and translation: I've quoted on this slide not just the English translation, but also the original Latin. As is often the case, the translation doesn't quite give us the information we're looking for, and to get what we need we really have to look at the untranslated text. Gellius is being a grammar nerd here. The word *harena* in Latin means "sand." Interestingly, this is where we get the word "arena" from, because in arenas like the Coliseum in Ancient Rome, the floor was sand to soak up the blood. But anyway, in Latin "sand" is a collective noun and is only supposed to be singular. Romans said "sand" but not "sands." Except that's only sort of true. Like all languages, Latin was spoken by a lot of different people, and it evolved over time. By Gellius' time, people had started saying "sands" in the plural, and this drove Gellius crazy. For him, that was a grammar mistake. And the same thing happened in the opposite direction with *quadrigae*, which means "four-horse chariot." Gellius the grammar nerd said you can only ever say that word in the plural. There are four horses, so a four-horse chariot is plural. But people kept making the mistake of using it in the singular. And Gellius says effectively that if you want to know what a classical author is, it's someone who only uses the "correct" grammar. We can go further than this in using the Latin to try to get at what Gellius is doing here too. Our translation says that the kind of author who uses correct grammar is "classical or authoritative." That's a fine translation, but the Latin word that means "authoritative" is *adsiduus*, and this doesn't just mean "authoritative." This word comes originally from the word that means "to sit on," and it comes to mean someone who owns property. Etymologically it's someone who sits on the land, but it means a landowner. And Gellius says this is the opposite of what our translator calls "the common herd," but the Latin calls a *proletarius*. We get the English word "proletariat" from the Latin *proletarius*, and it means someone who doesn't own property. So, what Gellius is really saying in the Latin here is that you can expect rich people who own land, that is members of the upper class, to use correct grammar, and this makes them "classical" authors. He associates them with *antiquior* or older times. He's being conservative here, associating older times with people being wealthier and using better grammar. For him, the word "classical" brings those associations together. **Slide 38** gets us closer to the modern usage. It says that in the 16^th^ century, humanist scholars were very excited about Ancient Greek and Roman texts, and they read Gellius and started using his term to refer to the ancient texts they valued. This was the age when scholars were traveling around Europe and going to libraries and digging up obscure manuscripts of ancient texts that nobody had heard of in a long time. They were super excited about Ancient Greek and Roman texts, and they thought it was great that Gellius was already in the second century valuing the old-timey stuff. And so, they associated his "classical" with the kinds of Greek and Latin manuscripts that were written by rich people, by aristocrats, in ancient times and in proper Greek and Latin. Modern universities like Western have since then used the term in that sense. Ancient Greek and Roman texts were called "classics," and when universities started organizing themselves by department, they created Departments of Classics. **Slide 39** has some history of what this means at Western in particular. The 1922-23 Academic Calendar is the first available in Western's archives to include separate sections for departments (https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/uwo-calendars/2/). The section for the Department of Classics begins with the following: In some ways this is a great mission statement. It explains that the point of learning about Ancient Greece and Rome is to understand their relevance to the modern world. And it also depends on the principle that the best way to learn about Ancient Greece and Rome is to read the literature that the Greeks and Romans wrote. Both of those are key principles in my own teaching. There are also some things that I'm not crazy about in this. One of those is that it assumes a homogenous modern civilization that is "ours" and, whatever "our civilization" means, it's supposed to be entirely a later phase of classical civilization. I think that any and every modern culture in the world has a complicated past that draws on many different influences, and singling out Ancient Greece and Rome as the only or even the main progenitor of modern European cultures or the cultures of former European colonies can't be right. But that doesn't mean that the influence and impact of classical civilization on modern cultures is negligible or meaningless. It just means it's not the only thing. One of the ideas that's problematic about the term "classical" is that it implies that Ancient Greek and Roman culture are the best and that the best people can demonstrate their worth by being familiar with classical civilization in general and with the grammar of Ancient Greek and Latin in particular. And it's true that in the nineteenth century when Western was founded, aristocrats proved their aristocratic credentials by knowing Ancient Greek and Latin. Rich and powerful people went to universities where they studied Greek and Latin, and they could tell if you were in the club by whether you knew those languages. Gellius argued that the best people were upper class, and you could tell that by the fact that they used good Latin grammar. So, the emphasis in this mission statement on the demonstration of a good command of Greek and Latin grammar has problematic roots. At the same time, however, I still find it admirable. When I was talking about that passage from Gellius, I couldn't really understand the nuances of it, and I couldn't read it very closely, using only the English translation. Anyone even a little familiar with more than one language will know that a lot is lost in translation. And so, I think that if you really want to understand Ancient Greece and Rome, learning how to read Greek and Latin is really important. That was for a long time basically all Classics departments did---they taught students to read (and write) classical languages. And we still do that at Western. I encourage you all to sign up for Greek and Latin courses, which will give you an insight into classical mythology much deeper than this course can. But even though we still teach Greek and Latin, we also do much more than that in Classical Studies today. **Slide 40** says that until 1970, Western's Classics Department relied primarily on Latin language courses for enrolment numbers, but when the university dropped its language requirement, enrolment in first year Latin dropped from ten sections to one. The department changed its name to the Department of Classical Studies and started offering courses that didn't require a knowledge of Greek or Latin. In this, Western was at the beginning of a movement that has transformed Departments of Classical Studies across North America and around the world. Instead of focusing on "classics," meaning texts in Greek and Latin, we focus on "classical studies," meaning everything about Ancient Greece and Rome. We professors, who can read Greek and Latin, help to make the stories, art, architecture, philosophy, history, and cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome accessible to everyone. I love that. I love teaching this course because it makes analysis of classical mythology accessible to people who can't read Greek or Latin. In some ways, it does exactly the opposite of what Gellius was doing with the word "classical." Gellius was saying that classical is aristocratic, and I think the transformation of the field of Classical Studies in the last fifty years has instead democratized classics. We can all enjoy and benefit from the amazing stories and literature that the Greeks and Romans left behind, even if our grasp of Latin grammar isn't great. Ultimately, the word "classical" seems to me to have an unsavory origin and history, but as we use it now, it serves a worthwhile purpose. I want to dwell for just a little bit longer on the Department of Classical Studies and what I love about it. Some departments at Western are focused around a particular language and culture. The Department of French Studies, for example, teaches the French language and the cultures of France and the Francophone world. In the Department of English and Writing Studies, you'll find a focus on reading and writing literature in English. Other departments are focused on a particular way of thinking, like the Department of Philosophy, or the Department of Mathematics. Classical Studies is odd. We're focused not only on a place, but on a time, and we incorporate many different ways of thinking. We include philosophy and history and art and architecture and literature and linguistics and archaeology and sociology and economics and political science and criminology and popular culture. We can be that interdisciplinary by focusing on a particular time and place, and that gives us a kind of perspective that's hard to find elsewhere. What I haven't said in this is that Greek and Roman literature and culture is the best or the most influential. I think it's awesome, and it has been very influential, but you can't single out one or two cultures like Ancient Greece and Rome and say they're better than any other. They're what I've chosen to focus on, and I don't regret that decision, but they're certainly not the only thing I'm interested in and I'm not saying they're the thing everybody should focus on. With that said, I think if you are interested in Ancient Greece and Rome, it's really worth learning the languages. If you love Greek mythology, then being able to read the ancient sources in the original is the best way to deepen your relationship with Greek mythology. A language is a way of understanding the world, and learning Greek really helps you to see the world in a different way. Any language is like that. Maybe you think that with translations available and with translation software making it possible to communicate across language barriers, it's not worth putting the time into learning a new language, but there is a huge difference that understanding a language makes. Not only that, but it can be a way of showing respect. Always demanding that other people communicate with you in your language isn't great. It's much better to be able to be the one to take the step and reach out to other people in their language. Of course, nobody can know every language and it's not always possible to be the one to reach out, but when and where you can, it's a nice thing you can do for other people. Incidentally, I appreciate all of you who are not native speakers of English taking this course in English. I wish I could relate to all of you in your first or preferred languages, and I'm sorry I can't. I think the same can be said for ancient texts. I can show respect for Ancient Greece by reading Ancient Greek texts in the original. And, of course, learning languages is great for training the mind and keeping the mind young. Plus, as long as I'm talking about what I love about Classical Studies, the best thing about my department and discipline is the community. Stories and language are all about communication and relating to other people. When I was a student, the people I met in my small classes, including especially my Greek and Latin classes, were some of the best friends I've ever had, and we bonded by learning together. Small classes like our language classes at Western are great for building relationships with your classmates and with your professors. I'll keep talking with you about Greek and Latin later on in the course, but for now I'll move on to **Slide 41** and say that all of that is to say that my own expertise comes from the "Classical" part of "Classical Mythology." What I'm going to talk about this year is the myths of Ancient Greece and Rome. The cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome have been exceptionally influential in Europe and European colonies, and the remains of the texts and material of Ancient Greece and Rome are plentiful in comparison with the remains of many other ancient cultures. Still, they are not in a general sense more important than any other ancient cultures. They're just, for complicated reasons, what I know about and what I can teach. For me, what I think makes Ancient Greece and Rome special is how much writing of those cultures as survived. Of course, it's still small compared to the amount of writing that gets produced now, but in comparison with many other ancient cultures that are more mysterious to us, we have a kind of access to Ancient Greece and Rome that is rare because of how much we can read. And I love that so much of that is imaginative literature. There's great speeches and philosophy and history, but so much of what the Greeks and Romans valued enough the share and pass on and preserve was what I think is best in life: stories. I'll close with **Slide 42**. I love this stuff, and I love talking about it with other people. I know that some of you signed up for this course because the schedule or the assessment structure is convenient, and for many of you the most important thing about this course is your grade. For me, grades are the least important thing about the course. I think Classical Mythology is interesting, fun, and compelling. I think that the stories are amazing, and that amazing stories are genuinely important in life. My goal in this course is first of all to have fun myself, and secondly to convince you that time spent reading Ancient Greek and Roman mythical stories is time well spent. Make room in your life for this stuff, and I think you won't regret it. That's all I have for you for this week. Next time I'll ask you to read Hesiod's *Theogony* and I'll talk about "The Greek Gods and the Creation of the World." I'll talk to you then. ::: {.section.footnotes} ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. ::: {#fn1} If you're interested in Ancient Greek board games, you might start with: Kurke, Leslie. 1999. "Ancient Greek Board Games and How to Play Them." *Classical Philology* 94: 246-67. This article isn't the how-to manual for board games that you might imagine from the title, but instead is about why and in what contexts Ancient Greek people played board games.[↩](#fnref1){.footnote-back} ::: :::

Classics 2200 Week 1 Lecture: Introduction PDF

Document Details

Tags

Related

Summary

Full Transcript

Upgrade to continue