BA Ancient History / Course details

Three crucial episodes in the history of European imaginative responses to the natural world are examined in this course. The first is the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil (3^rd and 1^st centuries BC), which documents a fictional world inhabited by shepherds and herdsmen who often manifest a heightened attunement to animal and vegetal life. The second is the landscape painting of the seventeenth century, in particular that of Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, in which landscape becomes a fully fledged agent in pictorial dramas. The third is the conceptualization of nature by early modern poets and thinkers such as Milton, Rousseau, and Schiller, culminating in Wordsworth’s philosophical epic, The Prelude. In studying these episodes, we shall trace continuities and explore differences between ancient and modern thinking, and consider how the pastoral tradition might help us imagine responses to the environmental crisis that faces humanity today.

  The material studied complements courses such as the Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, as well as courses studied on the English Literature and Art History programmes.

To help students trace changes and continuities in the European environmental imagination.

To pursue comparative study of ancient and early modern conceptualizations of the non-human environment.

To enable students to understand the ideas and techniques employed by the poets, philosophers, and artists under discussion.

To enable students to engage with the most important critical debates pertaining to the primary material.

By the end of the course all students should be able to

 • show a knowledge and sophisticated understanding of the content, form, conventions, and aims of bucolic literature and early modern landscape painting 

• demonstrate a detailed understanding of the influence of cultural contexts on how the poems and paintings were created 

• demonstrate understanding of the influence of Theocritus on Virgil, and of ancient bucolic literature on Milton and Wordsworth, and to understand the differences between these authors’ poetic achievements

• demonstrate understanding of how the natural world is constructed in selected philosophical arguments and situate those constructions in relevant intellectual genealogies

• discuss the influence of eighteenth century thought on Wordsworth’s poetry

 • to assess criticially the differences between ancient and early modern representations of landscape and rural life

By the end of this course students should be able to:

demonstrate subject-specific skills, including the ability to respond thoughtfully to difficult and complex texts and paintings, and demonstrate the ability to comment critically upon that material.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

Manage time and resources

Discuss complex texts clearly in writing and conversation

By the end of this course students will be able to:

·       construct an argument in written and oral form;

·       pose questions about complex issues;

·       assimilate and summarise large quantities of evidence;

·       locate and retrieve relevant information from primary sources;

·       conduct bibliographic searches;

·       present the results in a professional manner with appropriate reference to sources and modern published scholarship;

·       use e-resources and gain knowledge of research methods and resources;

engage in critical discussion.

R. Hunter, Theocritus: A Selection (Cambridge, 1999): Introduction.

K. Volk (ed.) Oxford Readings: Virgil’s Eclogues (Oxford, 2008).

P. Rosenberg and K. Christiansen, Poussin and Nature (New York, 2008).