Field of Ancient World Studies

Law and society in the ancient world (15 ECTS)

[Instructor: Delfim Leão]

This seminar seeks to identify the unique features of ancient Greek law and the primary sources for its knowledge. It covers the figures of great legislators and the movements that stimulated the codification and revision of laws. The course also aims to understand the historical and procedural stages that shaped the themes under analysis, without neglecting their mythical precedents, social and religious implications of justice, and their literary treatment, particularly within Greek tragedy.

Ethos, Praxis and Poiesis in Greek culture (15 ECTS)

[Instructor: Delfim Leão & Martinho Soares]

With the formation of the polis, the whole literary “production” (poiesis) became intertwined with “politics”, reflecting the citizen’s voice (polites) and conveying perspectives (individual or collective, proper or extraneous) of a worldview (local or global) which is a product and produces of a set of values (an ethos). Values which, in turn, shape and/or are questioned by “ways of acting” (praxeis). In the context of this seminar, we approach constructions, values, and practices that Greek texts, structural of the Greek culture, portray as the human pillars of the polis: the man – ruler, soldier, husband, father, son; and the woman – governess, governed, wife, mother, daughter. Because a multifaceted approach to the theme is intended, several authors, genres, and eras will be studied: Homer, Herodotus, Euripides, Plato, Aristoteles, and Plutarch.

Themes of Ancient Greek literature (15 ECTS)

[Instructors: Susana Marques & Cláudia Cravo]

This seminar examines different genres of Greek literature – tragedy, historiography, comedy, and Hellenistic poetry – to highlight the intersection of their shared themes and how the proper expression of each literary genre enhances different approaches to similar problems. The following topics will be addressed: a) the (de)construction of the hero’s figure (as seen in Aeschylus’s The Persians, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, and Herodotus); b) poetry as an explicit and implicit vehicle of poetic theorization (Aristophanes’s Thesmophoriazusae and The Frogs, and Callimachus’s works).

Themes of Latin and Neo-Latin literature (15 ECTS)

[Instructors: Frederico Lourenço & Margarida Miranda]

This seminar explores the power of the verb in the continuity of literary culture from the ancient world to post-Roman times (from late antiquity to Renaissance humanism). There is a focus on the rhetorical power of the word, in a semantic-pragmatic context, analysing simultaneously the word’s diachronic evolution and its synchronous diversity. As a privileged medium that reflects society, politics, culture, and the dominant powers, the literary text is the object of extraordinary transformations. These are enhanced by the classical legacy that drives the renewal, update, and permanent adaptation of Latin letters to the thought of each era, thanks to the efforts of new agents versed in classical languages and culture. The strength (uis) of the verb and its power of persuasion will be analysed, preferably in the context of new literary genres and subgenres. There will be an important but not exclusive emphasis on apologetics and homiletics as rhetorical resources of persuasion, and on biography and hagiography as instruments of legitimation of and from power.

Orientation Seminar (130 ECTS)

PhD thesis (50 ECTS)