Paper D1: Aegean Prehistory

Course Director: Dr Y Galanakis

Aims and objectives

To introduce students to Aegean archaeology: its theories, methods and practices.
To explore the societies preceding the Bronze Age.
To explore the emergence of complex societies, and the formation and transformations of the palatial systems in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece.
To familiarise students in a range of different datasets: from material culture and Linear B to theory- and lab-based work and critical historiography.
To explore current debates on Homeric scholarship and its relationship with the Bronze Age past of Greece.

Scope and structure of the examination paper 2026–27

Candidates are required to answer three of a choice normally of twelve or thirteen questions. The answers required are all of essay type, except for one optional question set in most years which invites ‘short notes’ on two or three from a list of six or eight options, the options varying from sites, artefacts or chronological periods to issues covered in this course. The range of questions should broadly reflect the balance of teaching offered in the course, in lectures, classes and supervisions; candidates may select any three to answer, without restriction.

(Supervisions for this course will be centrally organised.)

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

Course description

AEGEAN PREHISTORY

DR Y GALANAKIS ET AL
(16 L: Michaelmas; 8 L: Lent)

The broad aim of this course is to introduce you to the fascinating world of Aegean Archaeology. We will journey through time, focusing specifically on the Neolithic, Bronze and Early Iron Age cultures of Greece.

Some of the course’s key questions include: how can we reconstruct and 'read' the past without the aid of textual records? What can the study of art and archaeology of Greece's rich and varied pre-classical past tell us about the societies of the Bronze Age Aegean? How did these societies manage to transform from village-based communities to ‘palaces’? What is the connection between the myths of later Greeks and the archaeology of Bronze Age Greece?

This course offers an in-depth survey of the archaeology and art of the Aegean world within the framework of the wider Mediterranean. Particular emphasis is placed on the societies of the Bronze Age (ca. 3200-1100 BCE): the worlds of the Early Cyclades, Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. We will examine critically the emergence of complex societies and their social, political and economic organisation, the trade and exchange networks, attitudes to death and burial practices, the archaeologies of ideology and cult, and the integration of textual evidence with the material record.

Rich in data, theoretical approaches and problems of interpretation, Aegean Prehistory offers an excellent training ground for explaining the formation, transformation and demise of early bureaucratic societies. It is a journey into our deep human history. Within this framework of investigation, emphasis is also placed on how shifting attitudes to archaeological practice, collection strategies, and museum displays have all influenced over time what we know - or think we know - about Greece's astonishing pre-classical past.

Despite the focus of the lectures on the Aegean region, the interaction and contacts between this area and the broader Mediterranean world (and their significance) are also explored. As part of the course there is a pottery handling practical in Cambridge (no previous knowledge required!) involving a series of guest lectures and handling sessions, the course also includes a tour of the British Museum & short presentations of particular objects by students.

Introductory reading:

Knappett, C. 2020. Aegean Bronze Age Art, Cambridge.

Lemos, I. and Kotsonas, A. (eds.) 2019. A Companion to the Archaeology of Early Greece and the Mediterranean, Chichester (browse through to get an idea of topics/themes covered) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118769966

Shelmerdine, C. (ed.) 2008. The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age, Cambridge. Cambridge Companion to Aegean Bronze Age (browse through to get an idea of topics/themes covered)

Paper D2: Rome, City of Art

Course Director: Prof. C Vout

Aims and Objectives

To study the city of Rome's impact (its extent and its limits) on the production, dissemination and collecting of art in antiquity and post-antiquity.
To examine Rome's history and topography as works of art and the impact of these works on private architecture and urban planning.
To understand the (f)actors responsible for this impact in Rome and beyond, and the politics of this.
To appreciate the role of curation in creating landscapes and artistic canons.
To learn to work in ways that usefully integrate visual, archaeological, museological and textual material, antiquity and modernity, representation and reality.

Scope and structure of the examination paper in 2026–27

Candidates will be required to answer three out of a choice of about twelve questions, some of which will be picture related.

(Supervisions for this course will be centrally organised.)

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

Course description

ROME, CITY OF ART

PROF. C VOUT
(16 L, 3 C (2 hr): Lent;
1 (2 hr) C: Easter)

In a period of urgent decolonisation, decanonisation and globalisation, it is crucial that we understand the 'centre'. No city has been as central to our inherited understanding of Greco-Roman antiquity, and its legacy, no city more important in making antiquity's material remains 'classical' and 'art' than Rome, which has itself been reproduced in maps, models, paintings and architecture, and turned from reality to representation. From anicent authors' understanding of Rome's first encounters with art and its inhabitants' enduring engagement with that ongoing discovery through to the dissemination of this art and of the image of Rome itself across continents ancient and modern, east and west, this course critically examines the aesthetics and politics of the city as cradle and catalyst. It winds up now, in the twenty-first century, when the Fascist building which housed the Ara Pacis has been replaced, and Italy's first national gallery of contemporary art (Zaha Hadid's MAXXI) opened in Rome (both controversially) to ask what the future is for a city still shaped by ancient and Renaissance heritage.

Introductory reading:

Arthurs, J. (2012) Excavating Modernity: the Roman Past in Fascist Italy. Ithaca;
F. Haskell, N. Penny et al. (2024 ed.) Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900. Turnout;
Christian, K. W. (2010) Empire Without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350-1527. New Haven & London;
Edwards, C. & M. Liversedge (eds.) (1996) Imagining Rome: British Artists and Rome in the Nineteenth Century. London;
Elsner, J. Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: the Art of the Roman Empire, AD 100-45. Oxford;
Gilroy-Ware, C. (2020) The Classical Body in Romantic Britain. New Haven;
Hart, V. & P. Hicks (eds.) (2009) Palladio’s Rome. New Haven;
Marlowe, E. (2013) Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art. Debates in Archaeology.London;
Marvin, M. (2008) The Language of the Muses – The Dialogue Between Roman and Greek Sculpture. Los Angeles;
Mayer, R. (2025) The Ruins of Rome: a Cultural History. Cambridge;
Ridley,R. T. (1992) The Eagle and the Spade: Archaeology in Rome during the Napoleonic Era, 1809–1814. Cambridge;
Rutledge, S. (2012) Ancient Rome as a Museum: Power, Identity, and the Culture of Collecting. Oxford;
Salmon, F. (2000) Building on Ruins: The Rediscovery of Rome and English Architecture. Aldershot;
Vout, C. (2012) The Hills of Rome: Signature of an Eternal City. Cambridge;
Vout, C. (2018) Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present. Princeton;
Wilton, A. & I. Bignamini (1996) Grand Tour: the Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century. London.

Paper D3: The Living Image? Art and its Critical Discourse in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

Course Director: Prof. M Squire

Aims and objectives

To explore a range of ancient Greek and Roman cultural discourses about images and material objects, with particular emphasis on the contested parameters of their 'objecthood'.
To investigate the many ways in which the production of Greco-Roman artefacts (across diverse materials and media) at once drove and responded to such discourses, within a long chronology that stretches from the early Archaic Greek world to late antiquity, and across the Mediterranean world.
To analyse the sorts of 'epistemic work' that material objects embody, perform and make known.
To appreciate the cultural contingency of Greco-Roman ideas and practices of image-making, especially with a view to a range of comparative cultural perspectives (not least those from elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world).
To gain an introductory understanding of the rich and manifold ways in which ancient rhetorics of the image - alongside the material forms of Greco-Roman visual culture - have directed trajectories of thinking about art both within and beyond western cultural traditions.
To engender reflective ways of studying classical art and archaeology that integrate formal anaysis of the extant material record with critical perspectives drawn from (inter alia) the study of ancient literature and philosophy, the visual and material culture of other times/places, anthropology, ecocriticism, cognitive humanities, psychology, histories of religion and the study of virtual reality/AI.
To cultivate historically framed, self-reflexive and sophisticated critical frameworks for analysing Greco-Roman material culture, by extension, to reflect upon the place of such analysis within the broader study of classical archaeology, as well as the disciplines of classics, archaeology and art history more generally.

Scope and structure of the examination paper 2026–27

Candidates are required to answer three of a choice of about twelve questions, one or more of which may be related to an illustration and/or extract of translated text.

(Supervisions for this course will be centrally organised.)

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

Course description

The Living Image?

PROF. M SQUIRE
(9 L, 7 C (2 hr): Lent:
1C (2hr): Easter)

This course explores not only histories of Greco-Roman image-making, but also frameworks for approaching the critical matter of ‘art’. What sorts of cultural roles did objects play in the ancient cultural imaginary? How did material forms themselves give rise to, mediate and challenge such thinking? And to what extent are contemporary ideas about images still married (for richer, for poorer…) to classical legacies? On the one hand, the course seeks to emphasise the weirdness of ancient practices, critical languages and modes of engaging with objects. On the other hand, our aim is to interrogate the abiding influence of classical materials in shaping whole western trajectories of art, intellectual history and aesthetics.

The scope of this course is purposefully expansive. In chronological terms, materials will range from the Archaic Greek world to the late-antique Roman empire (including the rise of the Christian ‘icon’ and other sacred objects); while the structure of the course is thematic, the aim over the term is to embed themes in developments over time. A particular focus will be on the forms and styles associated with what is today called ‘naturalism’, including: the stories told about ancient art since the late eighteenth century (its supposed development along ‘Archaic’, ‘Classical’, ‘Hellenistic’ lines – no less than assumptions about ‘late antiquity’ and abstraction); visual engagements with ancient ideas of mimēsis (‘imitation’) as indeed of mental ‘impression’ (phantasia); the challenge of figuring subjects that resist figurative and bodily frames (like the immortal gods, or indeed the dead); the contested comparative resources of visual and verbal media; the ‘iconoclastic’ destruction of objects; and stories of falling in love with images (so-called agalmatophilia). While rooted in classical art and archaeology, the course has a strong interdisciplinary component, with recourse to e.g. ancient literature, philosophy and history of science. All ancient texts will be studied and assessed in translation (albeit with the Greek and Latin usually provided).

Issues of historiography and critical will loom large, too. As we shall see, ancient discourses of the ‘living image’ can help us to understand our own cultural moment in the late 2020s, as indeed vice versa: in an age of digital avatars, automata and generative multimodal artificial intelligence, the boundaries between the artificial and the real matter as they have never mattered before – in defining the nature of objects, certainly, but above all in understanding the limits of human subjectivity.

Teaching for this course integrates weekly lectures with 2-hour classes (designed to be interactive and discussion-focused, with pre-assigned readings). Student numbers allowing, parts of the course may be taught in the Museum of Classical Archaeology and the Fitzwilliam Museum/British Museum.

We will be reading a variety of ancient texts in classes – all in translation.

Content note: This course will involve discussion of some difficult and sensitive topics. These include, but are not limited to: themes of mutilation and violence; death and dying; issues of theology and divine representation; slavery; the transhuman; pornography, the objectification of the human body and sex with objects; histories of racism; and the limits of human subjectivity.

Introductory reading:

A. Anguissola and A. Grüner (eds.), The Nature of Art: Pliny the Elder on Materials (2021, Turnhout)
M. Barasch, Theories of Art (three volumes: New York, 2000)
L. Barkan, Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures (Princeton, 2013)
*A. Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (trans. J. M. Todd: Chicago, 2009)
*H. Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (trans. T.R. Dunlap: Princeton, 2011)
S. Bussels, The Animated Image: Roman Theory on Naturalism, Vividness and Divine Power (Amsterdam, 2012)
*P. Destrée and P. Murray (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Ancient Aesthetics (Malden MA, 2015)
J. Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton, 2007)
J. Elsner and M.J. Squire, How to Describe a Painting: Philostratus and Art Criticism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Cambridge, fthc. 2026)
D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1991)
M. Gaifman, Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (Oxford, 2012)
S. Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, 2011)
I. Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden MA, 2012)
*T. Hölscher, Visual Power in Ancient Greece and Rome: Between Art and Social Reality (Berkeley, 2018)
J. Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Cambridge MA, 2004)
I. Männlein-Robert, ‘Epigrams on art: Voice and voicelessness in Hellenistic Epigram’, in P. Bing and J. S. Bruss (eds.), Brill's Companion to Hellenistic Epigram down to Philip (Leiden, 2007), pp. 251–71.
C. Marconi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Art and Architecture (2014, New York)
W.J.T. Mitchell (1994) What do Pictures Want? (Chicago, 2004)
R. Neer, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (Chicago, 2011)
V.J. Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (Cambridge, 2011)
V.J. Platt, Epistemic Impressions: Making and Meaning in Classical Art and Text (Oxford, 2025)
V.J. Platt and M.J. Squire (eds.), The Frame in Classical Art: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 2017)
N.J. Spivey, Greek Sculpture (Cambridge, 2013)
M.J. Squire, The Art of the Body: Antiquity and its Legacy (London, 2011)
D. T. Steiner, Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought (Princeton, 2001)
P. Stewart, Statues in Roman Society: Representation and Response (Oxford, 2003)
C. van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Leiden, 2015)

Paper D4: Beyond Athens and Rome: people, places, things

Course Director: Dr J Rempel

Aims and objectives

To explore the archaeology and history of regions beyond Aegean Greece and/or Rome.
To understand the broad and varied impact of Athens and/or Rome on the political, social, economic and cultural development of other regions.
To investigate aspects of colonisation, empire, identity and economy as they relate to, from the perspective of people and regions that interacted with Aegean Greece and/or Rome.
To consider ways in which a rich and varied array of material, literary and epigraphic evidence may be effectively integrated.

Please note that this paper features two courses: The Greeks and the Black Sea and Italy in the Roman World. Candidates may choose to study EITHER one OR both.

Scope and structure of the examination paper 2026–27

The paper will be divided into three sections (A, B and C). Section A will contain seven questions requiring engagement with the content of The Greeks and the Black Sea. Section B will contain seven questions requiring engagement with the content of Italy in the Roman World. Section C will contain four questions requiring engagement with the content of both courses. Candidates must answer three questions in total, chosen from one or more sections.

(Supervisions for this course will be centrally organised)

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

Course description

The Greeks and the Black Sea

DR J REMPEL
(14 L: Michaelmas; 4 C: Easter)

In the ancient imagination the Black Sea was a place of dangerous knowledge (e.g. Medea), home to an ur-barbarian (the Scythians) and a locus of cruel exile (Ovid). Its shores were lined with ancient Greek settlements but in both ancient texts and modern scholarship there has been a tendency to view their Greekness with suspicion, home to “an original and distinctive form of Hellenism” (Burstein 2006: 150). These views have been exacerbated by the etic nature of most of the textual record, including a dominance of Athenian sources, and the inaccessibility of parts of the Black Sea region to western scholars in the twentieth century, but the rich archaeological evidence from the region tells its own story.

This course aims to investigate the ways in which Greek communities in the Black Sea developed and interacted with each other, as well as with the non-Greek populations in the region, from the Archaic through Hellenistic periods. At the same time, it will consider the ways in which the Black Sea region was variously impacted by external powers, especially Athens in the Classical period, which was a time of particular prosperity in the region. The course’s approach will combine both a chronological and thematic element, exploring specific themes (colonisation, empire, identity, economy) as the defining features of specific historical phases. Through a consideration of archaeological, textual and epigraphic evidence for settlement, trade and ritual of the living and the dead, the goals are two-fold: First, to examine the specific nature of Black Sea networks of exchange, diplomacy and cultural interaction in order to interrogate ancient – and modern – ideas of what it meant to be Greek in the Black Sea. Second, to consider how and why Black Sea poleis engaged with Athens during the height of Athenian empire in the fifth century and as important diplomatic and trade partners in the fourth century. The examination of Athenian people and things in their Black Sea contexts will contribute to understanding the dynamics of Greek life in the Black Sea and positioning the Black Sea region in relation to the Aegean ‘core’ of the Greek world.

Introductory reading (those reported in bold are digitally available online):

D. Braund et al. (eds) (2021), Environment and habitation around the ancient Black Sea (Berlin); D. Braund (2018) Greek religion and cults in the Black Sea region (Cambridge); S. Burstein (2006), The Greek cities of the Black Sea. In K.H. Kinzl (ed.) A companion to the classical Greek world, 137-152 (Oxford); B. Cunliffe (2015), By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia (Oxford); V. Gabrielsen & J. Lund (eds) (2007), The Black Sea in Antiquity: Regional and Interregional Economic Exchanges (Aarhus); P. Guldager Bilde & V.F. Stolba (eds) (2006), Surveying the Greek Chora. The Black Sea Region in a Comparative Perspective (Aarhus); C. King (2004), The Black Sea: A History (Oxford); V. Kozlovskaya (ed.) (2017), The Northern Black Sea in antiquity: networks, connectivity, and cultural interactions (Cambridge); C. Meyer (2013), Greco-Scythian Art and the Birth of Eurasia (Oxford); A. Moreno (2007), Feeding the Democracy (Oxford); V.F. Stolba & L. Hannestad (eds) (2005), Chronologies of the Black Sea Area in the Period C. 400-100 BC (Aarhus).

Italy in the Roman World

PROF. A LAUNARO
(14 L: Michaelmas; 4 C: Easter)

It is fairly common to consider Italy as a region intimately tied with Rome, an almost seamless extension of it, as such placed at the very core of the Roman world. Conversely, studies of (Roman) imperialism have tended to concentrate their attention on its impact on newly-acquired provinces or peripheral regions. However, not only such impact may be as great, if not greater on core regions (especially as peripheries develop from a political and military land of conquest into an integrated and ‘global’ empire), but Italy’s geographical proximity to and precocious engagement with Rome can be deviously misleading. Indeed, the five centuries spanning the period 300 BCE to 200 CE saw the Italian people being (reluctantly) brought together under Roman hegemony, supplying Rome’s imperial ambitions with soldiers and resources, eventually achieving a position of unique privilege within the empire, if only to lose it – somewhat ironically – once that same empire had fully matured. As conquerors became emperors, the people of Italy became just a part of a wider empire.

This course aims at disentangling ancient Italy from Rome by exploring the political, social, economic and cultural transformations which took place within it because of its own changing relationship with Rome and her empire. Its approach will combine both a chronological and thematic element, exploring specific themes (colonisation, empire, identity, economy) as the defining features of specific historical phases. To achieve this, it will deploy the full array of available evidence – both archaeological and textual – as part of an integrated analysis. Moving beyond easy narratives of ‘rise and fall’, this analysis will offer a more dynamic view of the transformations of ‘Roman’ Italy, highlighting its unique and distinctive historical trajectory as well as its remarkable degree of flexibility and adaptation to the new conditions – both challenges and opportunities – which Rome and her empire brought about.

Introductory reading (those reported in bold are digitally available online):

G. Bradley, E. Isayev and C. Riva (eds.) (2007), Ancient Italy: Regions without Boundaries (Exeter); G.D. Farney and G. Bradley (eds.) (2017), The Peoples of Ancient Italy (Berlin); M. Maiuro and J. Batsford (ed.) (2024), The Oxford Handbook of Pre-Roman Italy (1000–49 BCE) (Oxford); A. Cooley (ed.) (2016), A Companion to Roman Italy (Chichester); T.C.A. De Haas and G.W. Tol (eds.) (2017), The Economic Integration of Roman Italy (Leiden & Boston); J. De Rose Evans (ed.) (2013), A Companion to the Archaeology of the Roman Republic (Chichester); A. Launaro (2011), Peasants and Slaves (Cambridge); K. Lomas (1996), Roman Italy, 338 BC – AD 200: a Sourcebook (London); J.R. Patterson (2006), Landscape and Cities (Oxford); T.W. Potter (1987), Roman Italy (London); S. Roselaar (2019), Italy’s Economic Revolution (Oxford); N. Terrenato (2019), The early Roman expansion into Italy (Cambridge); A. Wallace-Hadrill (2008), Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge).