Group C: Ancient History

Paper C1: Order and Disorder: Law and Society in the Greek world

Course Director: Dr H. Willey

Aims and objectives

1. To explore the religious, legal and paralegal mechanisms through which the Greeks sought to order their world and the range of ways in which they represented and reflected on disorder and what it meant to control it.
2. To place Greek law into its broader social context and so to better appreciate both the role of law in society and the limits of that role.
3. To explore the ways in which different sorts of evidence, particularly literary and epigraphic, can be used in conjunction with one another, to understand how a society worked.
4. To encourage students to reflect on the ways that approaches to law and society in the ancient world have developed over time.
5. To engage with problems of historical generalisation across time and space.

(Supervisions for this course will be centrally organised.)

Scope and structure of the examination paper 2026–27

The three-hour paper will contain twelve or thirteen essay questions concerning various topics covered in lectures, classes and supervisions. Some of the questions may offer passages for comment. Candidates are required to answer three questions, with no restrictions on which three they answer.

In 2027-28 the scope and structure of the paper will remain unchanged.

Course description

What manifestations of disorder and injustice (social, sexual, religious, political) were the Greeks especially worried about? What kinds of disorder did they think it was for the city to address? What kinds the gods or private citizens? What were Greek laws for, whom did they try to regulate, and in what ways did they reflect or contest social stratifications (between men and women, slave and free, citizens and foreigner)? In the absence of a developed state apparatus, how did the Greeks attempt to exert control through such varied means as, not only laws and judicial action, but also such paralegal measures as curses and other appeals to divine agency, gossip, and mob action? In this course, we will explore these and such questions through a wealth of both epigraphic and literary texts from across the Greek world.

We will begin by examining Greek discourses of cosmic and social order and disorder and the ways in which they formed the backdrop for civic mechanisms designed to govern and control the population, exploring evidence ranging from archaic poetry to the lawgiver traditions that proliferated in classical and later sources. We will then turn to two major case studies chosen for the richness of the available material: Gortyn with its wealth of inscribed law, and Athens where a unique additional perspective is provided by judicial speeches. Supplementary material will be drawn from the many surviving laws from across Greece to highlight points of contact and difference and enrich our appreciation of the diversity of law throughout the Greek world. One major point of discussion will be the validity of comparative and panhellenic approaches to answering the questions set out above. Another will be whether Greek legal systems deserve their old reputation as a poor relation to the grand systems of Roman law and whether, conversely, a more upbeat appraisal of Greek legal and paralegal approaches to law and order might be warranted and illuminating.

Preliminary reading:

M. Gagarin & D. Cohen (edd) Cambridge Companion to Greek Law (CUP, 2005).
M. Gagarin & P. Perlman The Laws of Ancient Crete c. 650-400 BCE (OUP, 2016).
E. Harris & L. Rubinstein The Law and the Courts in Ancient Greece (London: Duckworth, 2004).
S. Todd The Shape of Athenian Law (OUP, 1993).
E. Harris & D. Lewis 'What Are Early Greek Laws About? Substance and Procedure in Archaic Statutes, c. 650-450 BC' in J. Bernhardt and M. Canevaro (eds) From Homer to Solon: Continuity and Change in Archaic Greece (Edinburgh, 2022), 227-262.
A. Lanni Law and Order in Ancient Athens (CUP, 2016).

Paper C2: Instruments of Empire: Roman Ways with Power

Course Director: Prof. Serafina Cuomo

Aims and objectives

1. To introduce students to the narrative of a key period in Roman History, in which Republican government gave way, via triumviral rule, to autocracy.
2. To explore the politics of a period in which an exceptional level of detail is provided by the ancient sources, notably the writings of Cicero.
3. To investigate the implications for the broader social, economic, religious and cultural history of Rome of a period of military and political upheaval.
4. To relate to these developments changes in the physical space of the City of Rome itself.
5. To examine the increasing involvement of the provinces in the political struggles at Rome.
6. To reconsider the analytical framework of these events offered by modern scholarship.

 (Supervisions for this course will be centrally organised.)

Scope and structure of the examination paper 2026–27

The three-hour paper will contain about fourteen essay questions concerning various topics covered in lectures, classes, and supervisions. Candidates are required to answer three questions, with no restrictions on which three they answer.

In 2027-28 the scope and structure of the paper will remain unchanged.

Course description

With the victory of Octavian at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Rome changed from being a Republic to an autocracy. The thirty years leading up to what constituted a fundamental transformation of the Roman political system are the focus of this course.  The period is also exceptional in providing a body of contemporary texts - most obviously the speeches and letters of Cicero - which, together with later narratives, allow for a high-resolution analysis, sometimes on an almost day-by-day basis, which is possible for few if any other periods in antiquity.

Civil war and politics - the rivalries of Cicero and Clodius and of Caesar and Pompey, Caesar’s dictatorship and assassination, the regime of the triumvirs - are central to the course, but it is not just about elections, battles and great men. Alongside the political narrative we will be investigating the broader social, economic, religious and cultural changes which characterised Rome in this period, as well as the increasing centrality of the provinces, which in the Civil War years became a literal as well as figurative battleground. Using the evidence of coins, inscriptions and material culture alongside ancient literature, we will explore issues including the impact of these upheavals on religion, the role of women in public life, social mobility in Roman society, the role of the Roman army, and changes in the built environment of Rome itself. How far can these processes appropriately be summed up in Syme’s phrase ‘the Roman Revolution’?

Content notice: Political and military violence will be a recurrent theme throughout the course. In particular, please note that explicit accounts of murder will be a central focus of the texts discussed in lecture 20, the suicide of Cato will be mentioned in lectures 9-10, and hostile attitudes to women in lectures 12 and 23.

Preliminary reading:

R. Syme, The Roman Revolution (1939).

J. Osgood, Caesar’s legacy: civil war and the emergence of the Roman Empire (2006).

C. Steel, The end of the Roman Republic 146 to 44 BC: conquest and crisis (2013) esp. ch 6-8.

Paper C3: Popular Culture in the Greco-Roman World

Course Directors: Dr J. Toner and Dr J. Hua

Aims and objectives

1. To introduce students to the cultural world of the non-elites of classical Greece and the early Roman empire, CE1-2.
2. To explore a wide range of literary, documentary and visual sources relevant to the cultural world of the non-elite in the Greco-Roman world.
3. To encourage students to reflect on the particular methodological problems in accessing the culture or experience of those outside the ancient elite.
4. To reflect more widely on the idea of "popular culture", and its applicability to antiquity.

(Supervisions for this course will be centrally organised.)

Scope and structure of the examination paper 2026–27

The three-hour paper will contain twelve essay questions but will include at least one (non-compulsory) question based on passages of texts (with translation given where possible) and/or images. Some of these will have been featured in the course, but not all (part of the point of the course will be to enable students to deal at sight with material (such as epitaphs) which may throw light on popular culture). Candidates are required to answer three questions.

In 2027-28 the scope and structure of the paper will remain unchanged.

Course description

The aim of this course is to see how far we can approach ancient history “from below”. Can we begin to describe the cultural world of the “ordinary” people?  What stories did they tell? What made them laugh? What did they fear? How different were their tastes, cultural preferences even language from those of the elite? Most of the surviving texts in the canon of classical literature pay little more than passing attention to the non-elite, and hardly any were written by those who were not part of a relatively narrow group of the elite or the well-connected. But there is nevertheless a significant body of material that offers us a glimpse of the world and world-view of the ordinary men and women in the street. This includes plays, fables, joke books, oracles, graffiti and visual representations of many kinds. All these will take centre stage in this course.

The course will start by considering what we mean by “ordinary” people. What levels of wealth or poverty do we mean? What living conditions do we imagine? How “multi-cultural” a group were they? And it will go on to explore the character of their culture, from their entertainments to their religious practices. Throughout we shall keep in mind the methodological issues at stake. These popular texts are no more transparent than any others; and some of them may not be as popular as they seem – and, in fact, the very category of “popular literature” or “popular culture” may itself be problematic. Were the cultures of the elite and the non-elite very clearly divided? How much culture was shared?

The course will focus on evidence for popular culture from the Classical Greek world (with Athens as a key case study) and in the first two centuries of the Roman empire. For the Roman period, in addition to Roman popular texts, it will make use of many Greek sources to examine the evidence for a distinct popular culture in the wider Mediterranean world. Some supplementary Greek material will also be drawn from Roman Egypt. The distinction, if any, between the Greek and Roman popular cultures will be one major theme of discussion.

Preliminary reading:

Grig, L. (ed.) Popular Culture in the Ancient World, CUP, 2016.

Sources for Popular Culture

Hansen, W. (ed.), Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature, Indiana UP, 1998.

Baldwin, B., The Philogelos or Laughter-lover, J.C. Gieben, 1983.

Roman Popular Culture

Beard, M., Pompeii: the life of a Roman town, Profile, 2008.

Horsfall, N., The Culture of the Roman Plebs, Duckworth, 2003.

Parsons, P., City of the Sharp-nosed Fish, Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2007.

Toner, J., Popular Culture in Ancient Rome, Polity, 2009.

Ancient Greek Popular Culture

Forsdyke, S., Slaves Tell Tales: And other episodes in the politics of popular culture in ancient Greece, Princeton UP, 2012.

Kurke, L., Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose, Princeton UP, 2010.

Taylor, C. Poverty, Wealth, and Well-Being: Experiencing 'Penia' in Democratic Athens, OUP, 2017.

Paper C4: The Transformation of the Roman World, AD 284–476

Course Director: Mr Harvey Phythian

Aims and objectives

1. To introduce students to the social, economic and cultural history of the Roman Empire and surrounding regions from the late third to the late fifth century AD and to the literature and art produced in this period.
2. To explore in depth the nature of government in the Late Roman state, the cultural self-understandings of its ruling élites and the structure of the Late Roman economy.
3. To trace the ways in which Christianity reshaped conceptions of the body and permissible sexual conduct in the late-antique Mediterranean and Near East. To analyse the relationship between state power and religious forms of authority in the Roman Empire, and to trace the radically different ways in which religious difference was managed in Sasanian Iran.
4. To consider the impact of the dissolution of the Roman Empire on the distribution of power between élites and peasantries in different regions of the Mediterranean World and western Europe. To think about the development of new forms of ethnic self-understanding in post-Roman states.
5. To explore the utility for the study of ancient history of modern theoretical strategies from other disciplines. To introduce undergraduates to a wide range of (ancient and modern) historical approaches and literary traditions.
6. To encourage a wide variety of critical responses to the sources; to seek to integrate a wide range of different source material, in particular, studies of specific authors and their surviving works with art historical and archaeological material.

(Supervisions for this course will be centrally organised.)

Scope and structure of the examination paper 2026–27

The three-hour paper will contain around fifteen essay questions concerning various of the topics covered in lectures, classes and supervisions. Candidates are required to answer three questions.

In 2027-28 the scope and structure of the paper will remain unchanged.

Course description

This paper traces the history of the Mediterranean and Near East from the accession of Diocletian in 284 to the dissolution of the Roman Empire as a unified political structure in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. Three themes will stand in the centre of our attention.

First, we will explore the structure of the Roman state at the height of its power. In the period from the late third century onwards, the imperial administration became more present in the lives of its subjects than ever before. We will look at the shape of the ideologies on which emperors drew to justify the formation of a more energetic state apparatus. We will trace the relationship between this new state and local landowning élites and the effect this had on cities.

Secondly, we will explore the relationship between state power and the Christian church. After the conversion of the emperor Constantine, Christianity gradually became the dominant religion in the Mediterranean and Near East. How did this development change Roman conceptions of the body and permissible sexual behaviour? What role did religious institutions and charismatic leaders play? How did Roman policies towards minority groups change?

Thirdly, we will analyse the factors that led to breakup the Roman Empire. The fifth century saw the western half of the empire fragment into a group of successor states. But the eastern Mediterranean and Near East entered a prolonged period of stability and economic growth. We will trace the reasons for the weakening of imperial authority, examine the impact of ‘barbarians’, and explore the effects of the end of the empire.

In addition to the lectures, there will also be four (2 hr) classes. Supervisions will be centrally organised. 

This paper will discuss themes of religion and ethnicity and may touch on issues of religious intolerance and conflict, imperialism and state repression, homophobia, gender oppression, ethnic discrimination, and enslavement. Engagement with any of these topics will be flagged before the lecture or class.

Suggested preliminary reading:

C. Ando, Imperial Rome AD 193 to 284: the Critical Century (2012)

P. Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (1978)

P. Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (1992)

A. Cameron, The Later Roman Empire: AD 284–430 (1993)

K. Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: idealized womanhood in late antiquity (1996)

J. Elsner, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: the art of the Roman empire AD 100-450 (1998)

P. Garnsey and C. Humfress, The Evolution of the Late Antique World (2001)

K. Harper, Slavery in the late Roman world, AD 275-425 (2011)

K. Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

J. Harries, Imperial Rome AD 284 to 363: The New Empire (2012)

P. J. Heather, Goths and Romans 332-489 (1991)

M. Kahlos, Religious Dissent in Late Antiquity, 350-450 (2019)

C.M. Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire (2004)

S. Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman Empire AD 284-641: The Transformation of the Ancient World (2007)

I. Sandwell, Religious Identity in late antiquity: Greeks, Jews, and Christians in Antioch (2007)

C. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (2009)