Classical Mythology

This course explores the mythology of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Near East within its cultural, political, historical, and religious contexts. You will meet (or renew your acquaintance with) mythical figures like Zeus, Gilgamesh, Medusa, and Helen as they appear in multiple literary genres and other artistic media. In order to analyze and interrogate these myths we will use ancient and modern frameworks for thinking about what mythology is and what it does. What can a myth tell us about the civilization that created, adopted, or adapted it? What do our uses of Classical mythology--and our creations of our own myths--tell us about ourselves?