CLASSICS TOPICS: Missing Cosmogonies? Thinking the world / translating the gods in Roman culture
Classics 239 Section 1 (4 units)
BETTINI, M
**Please note this course has a reduced schedule**
These are the meeting dates:
September 11, 18, 25
October 2, 9, 16, 23, 30
Surveying the most ancient Roman sources - or at any rate the texts describing the most ancient period of Rome - scarcely any reference at all can be found to cosmogonies, theogonies, or anthropogonies. The Etruscans, by contrast, have left at least one trace of a cosmogony, not to speak of the well known Mesopotamic and Hebrew narratives, of the Hesiodic Theogony or of the other 'indo-european' cosmological traditions. It does not mean that the Romans, in the course of their history, did not at some time compose works dealing with the origin of the cosmos and of man: they did, of course - but only after their city had already been in existence for centuries and its citizens had acquired a great empire. Only at this point did Lucretius write the fifth book of De rerum natura, Vergil the sixth Eclogue, and Ovid the first book of his Metamorphoses. Why the Romans waited so long to compose works of this kind? Why did they not do so earlier? This is the question we will try to answer - in the conviction that in order to understand a culture, sometimes it is as useful to reflect on what is absent from that culture as to study what is actually present in it.
By exploring the specific cultural frames according to which the Romans thought their relations with the world and the gods, we will have the opportunity of better understanding some very specific features of their religious system: such as the possibility of translating, borrowing and 'creolizing' the gods of other cultures.
Texts
A handout of texts and a bibliography will be distributed in class.
Location: 308C DOE LIBRARY
Times: W 200-500P
