Roma Aeterna: The Romans and the Cross

Christianity was born into a world suffused with the cultural achievements of the Romans, who at the time of Christ’s birth held the Jews in subservience, making them long for their Messiah. Although it may seem that Christ and the Romans were simply at loggerheads, and, as the saying goes, “never the twain shall meet, it is important to consider that the Christian worldview was for 1500 years shaped by Latin-speakers reading a Latin Bible. And although it is popular to say that Rome “fell,” and that after that point there was “the Dark Ages,” in reality the Romans remained a living and vibrant cultural force for a millennium through Christians creatively adapting many of the assumptions of what they thought of as “Roman-ness.” For a thousand years, Christians tried to restore the Roman Empire in one form or another, so a major aim of this course is to help us better understand our own heritage as Christians.

This 32-week course consists of four eight-week quarters. Each quarter students will be assigned a weekly pre-recorded lecture, reading appropriate for the week, relevant reading questions, a weekly 1.5 hour live recitation, one 1200-1500 word essay, and a quarterly exam. In the course of the year, the students will read all the texts listed below, listened to 32 lectures, write four essays and attended a minimum of 30 (ideally 32) live recitations to discuss the texts in Socratic fashion.

Course Objectives:

1. To develop the skill of closely reading a variety of texts, seeking to allow them to suggest and refine the interpretive questions we bring to them.
2. To synthesize themes and messages drawn from several types of writing about the same topic, so as to arrive at a more robust and considered view of the whole.
3. To engage with great characters and events of the past with a developing sense of their fundamental connectedness to and relevance for our own present and future.
4. To clarify and sharpen a distinctively Christian understanding of Ancient Greek culture, and refine awareness of the redemptive hope our Faith imparts to us as we strive to “think God’s thoughts after Him.”

Texts:

• Robert Fagles, Vergil, The Aeneid - ISBN 978-0-14-310513-8
• Plutarch, The Makers of Rome: Nine Lives - ISBN-10: 0140441581
• Plutarch, The Fall of the Roman Republic - ISBN-10: 0140449345
• Cassius Dio, The Roman History: The Reign of Augustus - ISBN-10: 0140444483
• Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome - ISBN-10: 9780140455649
• Ammianus Marcellinus, The Later Roman Empire - ISBN-10 : 9780140444063
• Selected works by Christian authors of the 1st - 5th centuries AD