Hope College | Department of Modern and Classical Languages

The requirements for majors and minors in the Classics Section are flexible enough to allow students the opportunity to study in any overseas program. But here are ones of special interest to classicists:

The Classics Section and/or the Department of Art often sponsor May or June Terms in Greece or Italy.

Students may spend one or two semesters at College Year in Athens. Located at the foot of a mountain-park in the heart of Athens, CYA offers English-language courses in the archaeology, art, and history of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean generally. Students live in apartments, scattered throughout the area so that they will interact as neighbors with ordinary Athenians. All students at CYA learn some modern Greek; Classics students may also study ancient Greek and Latin.

Hope College is one of the schools that sponsor this program every fall semester. Students take some courses of their own choosing at universities in the nation's capital (where all courses are conducted in English), and some courses taught by the American faculty who have come to Turkey with them as Global Partners. Courses in archeology and ancient art history are always available at the Turkish universities, and sometimes (depending on their specialties) from the American faculty.

Hope College's deadline for preliminary application for study abroad is April 15 for Fall and Spring semesters.

For further information contact the Office of International Education at http://www.hope.edu/admin/international/ or ext. 7605

Course Description
Rome is one of the most fascinating archaeological sites in the world. Beginning as a city founded by pig-farmers, Rome became the capital of the Roman Empire and the center of Christian Europe. The remnants of its rich history exist simultaneously. The Vatican, for example, was built on the site of the Circus of Nero, where, reportedly, Saint Peter was crucified upside down. Thus ancient and modern, Italian and Roman, and Christian and pagan make up the rich tapestry of this most fascinating of cities.

This course opens a dialogue between the various ways to approach and experience the city, both ancient and modern. We will explore the topography of the city of Rome through the interaction between archeological, material evidence and ancient written, literary accounts (especially of the Augustan authors Propertius, Livy, Virgil and Ovid) and how their experiences compare and contrast with, and potentially even influence, later approaches to the city (especially in the Christian period). Students will be invited to compare their experience of the city with those described in the ancient world. That is, we will examine how the ancients laid out their city, how the ancients wrote about their city, and how, as Rome became Christian, religious and intellectual changes transformed the face of the city.

Within this methodology we will examine the typologies and topographical relationships of structures and spaces in ancient Rome, from early Republic to the Christian period. We will examine the distribution patterns of public monuments and urban topographical narratives via the interrelation of literary and archaeological evidence. We will combine a historical survey of the development of various functions of urban spaces, such as the Roman Forum, with a literary survey of the texts that describe them.

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