A. Summer Term 2024:
Tuesdays 10.30am – 12.30pm
16 April – 25 June (10 weeks)
Half Term: Tuesday 28 May 2024
B. Summer Term 2024:
Fridays 2.30pm – 4.30pm
19 April – 28 June (10 weeks)
Half Term: Friday 31 May 2024
Summer fees:
Members: £130 Non-members: £163
Concessions: £10 (call the office 020 8340 3343)
The course will explore the social and cultural basis of Greek civilisation, from the Bronze Age to the Roman conquest of Greece. Drawing on archaeological evidence, literary texts, architecture and the visual arts, it will look at the complex and shifting relationships between the present and the past in the definition and transformation of European cultures and identities.
Summer Term
Week 24
Greeks and Scythians: Civilisation and the World of the Steppe
Week 25
A Clash of Civilisations: The Greco-Persian Wars
Week 26
A World Divided: The Peloponnesian War
Week 27
‘In the Hands of the Many’: the Rise and Fall of Athenian Democracy
Week 28
The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip 11
Week 29
The Age of Alexander
Week 30
Stoics and Epicureans: Philosophy in the Later Greek World
Week 31
Greece Beyond Itself: The Seleucid Empire and its Networks
Week 32
Greece Beyond Itself: Egypt, between the 4th and 1st Centuries BCE
Week 33
The Roman Conquest of the Greek World
Spring Term
A. Tuesdays 10.30am – 12.30pm
Spring term 2024: Victoria Hall
9 January – 26 March (11 weeks)
Half term: Tuesday 13 February 2024
B: Fridays 2.30pm – 4.30pm
Spring term 2024: Online
12 January – 22 March 2024 (11 weeks)
Half term week there will be a class on Friday 16 February 2024 (due to Good Friday on 29 March)
Week 13
From Thales to Aristotle: The Greek Philosophical Tradition.
Week 14
Forms of Government: Reading Plato’s Republic.
Week 15
Forms of Government: Reading Aristotle’s Politics and The Constitution of the Athenians.
Week 16
The Mask of Melpomene: The Tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
Week 17
The Comic Muse: The Plays of Aristophanes and Menander.
Week 18
Ordering the World. Nature, Science, and the Greeks.
Week 19
The Form of the Beautiful. The Body, Sculpture, and Sport.
Week 20
The Birth of Clio: Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Greek Idea of History
Week 21
Rivals at Sea: Egypt, Phoenicia, and the Greeks.
Week 22
Contact and Cultural Change: The Greeks in the Western Mediterranean.
Week 23
Greece and the Orient: Civilisation and “The Other.”
Dr Mark Patton
Mark is a graduate of the universities of Cambridge and London, and the author of several published works of historical fiction and non-fiction. He has taught at the universities of Leiden, Paris, Wales, Greenwich and Westminster, and currently teaches for the Open University.