Rome’s great historians and storytellers rooted their narratives of the making of Rome in the deeds of a series of heroes and antiheroes. A mixture of myth and history reflected Romans’ desire to understand their place in a bigger story. This course looks at the different ways Vergil, Livy, Tacitus, and Plutarch examined the contributions of individual excellence and failings to Rome’s development. These analyses provide lasting insights into the nature of politics that will continue to shape the discipline over the ensuing centuries.
Angie Hobbs - Sheffield University, UK
Barry Strauss - Cornell University
Clifford Ando - University of Chicago
David Levene - New York University
Edith Hall - Durham University, UK
Gregg Woolf - University of California, Los Angeles
Kathryn Tempest - Roehampton University, UK
Maria Wyke - University College London, UK
Michael Scott - University of Warwick, UK
Shushma Malik - Cambridge University, UK
Virgil: Aeneid
Plutarch: Lives: Caesar, Cato the Younger, Antony, Brutus
Livy: Early History of Rome
Tacitus: Annals
Kathryn Tempest, University of Leicester
James Romm, Bard College
