A. Tuesdays 10.30am – 12.30pm
Spring term 2024: Victoria Hall
9 January – 26 March (11 weeks)
Half term: Tuesday 13 February 2024
Summer Term 2024:
16 April – 25 June (10 weeks)
Half Term: Tuesday 28 May 2024
B: Fridays 2.30pm – 4.30pm
Spring term 2024: Online
12 January – 29 March 2024 (11 weeks)
Half term: Friday 16 February 2024
Summer Term 2024:
19 April – 28 June (10 weeks)
Half Term: Friday 31 May 2024
Members: £140 Non-members: £179
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.
Spring Term
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.