Continuing Education Course Finder: CLACS02-1a

The Secret Lives of the Caesars: Roman Imperial History and the Private Lives of Rome’s First Family (CLACS02-1a)

Status: Closed

Fee: $150.00

Timing: 4 sessions from October 6, 2009 - October 27, 2009 on Tuesdays, 10:15am-12:15pm

Course Description: Power struggles, family strife, the difference between a public and a private image, and the encroaching role of family dynamics on state policy.

Sound familiar?

In this course we will explore the ways in which the one of the greatest nation-states of the Western world was shaped by its rulers’ private lives. We will follow the Caesars from Augustus, famous for his Golden Age of peace and prosperity (and the trail of blood he left on the way to his throne) to his great-grandson Nero, who notoriously murdered his own mother and fiddled while Rome burned.

While our modern era is different, a politician’s family remains at the center of media attention now—much as it was in ancient Rome. Regardless of the era, a politician’s public persona continues to be viewed through the lens of his or her private familial roles, spouse, and children. Upon completion of this course, participants will come away not only with knowledge of Roman history but also a sense of its legacy in our own political arena filled with biased news sources and ruthless power games.

Our materials will be both ancient and modern, drawing on ancient historical accounts such as Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars and Tacitus’ Annales, and will supplement our primary sources with modern scholarly articles, film adaptations, and other modern interpretations of Rome’s first emperors including excerpts from the BBC’s I, Claudius and HBO’s Rome.

This course assumes no prior knowledge of ancient Roman history and has no prerequisites. All ancient documents will be used in English translation.

Instructor(s): Lauren Donovan

Instructor(s) Bio: Lauren Donovan is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin and Greek literature at Brown University with a focus on the literature, history, and visual culture of the early Roman Empire, especially concerning representation of power, family, and women. She graduated from Cornell University in 2003 summa cum laude with a B.A. in Classics. Before coming to Brown in 2005, she taught Latin at the high-school level. Her current primary research interests include the poetry of the Julio-Claudian age (44 BC-AD68), historiography, and the representations of and allusions to the historical tradition in Roman poetry. She also has related interests in Art History and the interaction between art and text. Lauren has also conducted research abroad in Rome and Greece, and presented her work at several national and international conferences. She expects to graduate in 2011.