Course topic: Law & order and social control in ancient societies from classical Athens to the early Roman Empire

Many briefer readings will be posted here: https://sites.google.com/site/ancientpolicing/ ; this includes two readings for you to do over break so we have something to talk about on our first class. I don’t think I will be using Blackboard for this class. Please make sure I have your email address, and check it often.

Assignments, grade, and student duties:

You are expected to read closely and be well prepared for discussing the readings each day. You can have one unexcused absence, no damage, no questions asked, and it’s OK to have one day in which you are not well prepared (as long as you’re not an expert, i.e. paper writer, for that day), with no damage to your grade. Beyond that, absences and under-preparation will hurt your grade. Your goal is to develop the habits of perceptive reading and insightful, balanced contributions to class discussion. There is a certain “golden mean” at work here: I know some of you are quiet, but never stepping up in class discussion is bad (consider Kant’s categorical imperative on this); how good this class is depends largely on how well prepared you are and how well we do in sharing insights and points in an orderly fashion. Checking out of group discussion = dead weight on what we should be doing as a group. At the other extreme is “mic hogging,” i.e. attempting to monopolize time in discussion. This is even worse than staying silent. Don’t derail course discussion with tangents or side-conversations. Think in terms of building an effective community where students are participating equally. Expect to be called on occasionally as part of my efforts to bring this about. By the way, punctuality is important but I would much rather have you come in late than not at all. Participation accounts for 25% of your final grade. I will assign occasional short position papers (as on the last week), and quizzes are by no means beneath us should they be needed as instruments of discipline; these will count as part of your participation grade.

Papers. You will all do at least three (3) papers for this class: one book review, one analysis paper, and a mini-research project due at the end of the semester. None of these need to be much longer than 10 pages. If you choose to do the first two early and don’t like your grade(s), you can do one additional book review and/or analysis paper later in the semester in an attempt to earn a higher grade. Each of these three papers is worth 25% of your grade.

Your book review and your analysis papers are due before the class on which the topic is to be discussed. I like receiving papers more than 24 hours before the due date, so I can try to grade them before class, and so I can come into class aware of how students have perceived the readings. If you can finish your paper a day or two before class, email it to me and don’t bring a hard copy to class. If doing it early doesn’t work out for you, email me the paper and bring a hardcopy to class. I will be a little generous when grading early-submitted papers.

Certain weeks will be book review weeks, others will be analysis paper weeks. To get a sense of which is which, let’s look at . . .

The weeks above that are italicized are ones in which the main reading assignment is one whole book; these weeks are thus book review opportunity weeks. I need to spread out the book reviews fairly evenly, so near the beginning of the semester I need you to rank which books you want to review vs. which you don’t.

The non-italicized weeks above are ones for which there are a handful of articles and chapters from different sources rather than a single modern monograph to read; these weeks (i.e. January 30, February 6 & 27, March 20 [nota bene], April 3 & 10, and May 1) are thus analysis paper weeks. I need to spread these out evenly, too, so I need your personal rankings soon.

I will distribute more detailed guidelines soon; basically, I expect simple, clean, and clear formatting (12 pt. Times New Roman font, 1” margins all around, double-spaced with no extra spaces between paragraphs, no running headers other than a top-right page number beginning with page 2 [as on this syllabus]. Failure to adhere to these format guidelines will perplex and annoy.)

Finally, you will all turn in at the end of the semester a paper which sets up a rudimentary, individualized research project, i.e. a relevant research project you and I discuss over the course of the semester. Ideally this will give students taking the HIST 5020 follow-up seminar something to start on.

A note on grading: I would love for you all to earn A’s in the class, but that’s up to you, not me. I do not inflate the top end of the grading scale in grad classes. B is a good grade in my book. “B” means, “good job, there’s some problems here and there but overall you did what you needed to do here.” A full “A” is a much higher standard of excellence: it means you didn’t just meet the main requirements competently, rather, it means you far exceeded basic expectations. I won’t pretend that a C is anything other than a bad grade.

Detailed schedule of readings:

1. Jan. 23: Introduction; Homer, and Michael Gagarin on ancient Greek law – read the assignment at https://sites.google.com/site/ancientpolicing/home BEFORE our first class meeting.

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2. Jan. 30: Athens 1: David Cohen, “Theories of Punishment” and “Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law in Classical Athens” in M. Gagarin and D. Cohen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law. 43pp PDF.

Andrew Lintott, chapter 1 (“Violence in Archaic Society and Its Legacy”) of Violence, Civil Strife, and Revolution in the Classical City, plus pp. 173-176. (34pp PDF)

Edward Harris, “Introduction” and “Is Oedipus Guilty? Sophocles and Athenian Homicide Law” in E. M Harris, D. F. Leão, and P. J. Rhodes, eds., Law and Drama in Ancient Greece

(37pp PDF)

Werner Riess on curse tablets, pp. 164-234 in Performing Interpersonal Violence: Court, Curse, and Comedy in Fourth-Century BCE Athens. (~80pp, PDFs)

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3. Feb. 6: Athens 2: Virginia Hunter, Policing Athens, and Edward Harris, The Rule of Law in Action in Democratic Athens (excerpts from both books will be posted in PDFs)

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4. Feb. 13: Adriaan Lanni, Law & Order in Ancient Athens (CUP 2016) (UNT Library site)

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5. Feb. 20: John Bauschatz, Law & Enforcement in Ptolemaic Egypt (CUP 2013) (UNT Library site)

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6. Feb. 27: Early Rome and the Republic.

Olivia F. Robinson on the Bacchanalia repression (Ch. 1, Penal Practice and Penal Policy in Ancient Rome, 7-29; Routledge 2007)

Richard A. Bauman, Crime & Punishment in Ancient Rome, ch. 12 “Attitudes to Punishment” (Routledge 1996, 15 pp.)

Excerpts from A. Lintott, Violence in Republican Rome, 2nd edn, OUP 1968/1999.

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7. Mar. 6: Wilfried Nippel, Public Order in Ancient Rome (CUP 1995, in PDF)

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Mar. 13: SPRING BREAK: party so hard you get arrested! Extra credit for jailhouse selfies!

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8. Mar. 20: Apuleius. In addition to the text of the Metamorphoses (Golden Ass), we will consider the short-story version in the corpus of Lucian, Fergus Millar’s classic article “The World of the Golden Ass,” Keith Bradley’s “Animalizing the Slave,” and Keith Hopkins’ “Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery.”

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9. Mar. 27: Robert C. Knapp, Invisible Romans (HUP 2012)—you can skip the gladiator chapter

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10. Apr. 3: Slaves, bandits, the body, and law

Olivia F. Robinson, The Criminal Law of Ancient Rome, chapters 3 & 4 (JHUP 1995)

Brent D. Shaw, “Bandits in the Roman Empire,” (www.jstor.org/stable/650544), “The Bandit” (in A. Giardina, The Romans), and his review of W. Riess, Apuleius und die Räuber (Ancient Narrative)

Peter Hunt, “Violence against Slaves in Classical Greece” and Noel Lenski, “Violence and the Roman Slave,” in Werner Riess and G. Fagan, eds., The Topography of Violence in the Greco-Roman World (Michigan 2016)

C. Fuhrmann, “Arrest me for I have run away.” Ch. 2 in Policing the Roman Empire.

Deborah Kamen, “A Corpus of Inscriptions: Representing Slave Marks in Antiquity,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 55 (2010) 95-110.

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11. Apr. 10: Violence, riots, and petitions (Kelly, Fagan, et alii)

Benjamin Kelly, “Policing and security” and Greg Aldrete, “Riots” in P. Erdkamp, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome.

Benjamin Kelly, “Riot Control and Imperial Ideology in the Roman Empire.” Phoenix 61.1/2 (2007): 150-176, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20304642

Garrett Fagan, “Violence in Roman Social Relations.”

Garrett Fagan, “Urban Violence: Street, Forum, Bath, Circus, and Theater.” Ch. 9 in Werner Riess and G. Fagan, eds., The Topography of Violence in the Greco-Roman World (Michigan 2016)

On petitioning:

Serena Connolly, “Petitioning in the Ancient World." In Medieval Petitions: Grace and Grievance, edited by G. Dodd et al., 47-63. York Medieval Press, 2009.

Also read the Conclusion of Benjamin Kelly’s study Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt (Oxford 2011), 327-33.

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12. Apr. 17: Fuhrmann, Policing the Roman Empire – give ‘im hell!

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13. Apr. 24: Ari Bryen, Violence in Roman Egypt (via UNT Library site)

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14. May 1: Jesus as a public order problem. Bring a good historical study Bible and be familiar with the four gospels (especially Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem). Also read the so-called Gospel of Peter and Josephus Jewish War book 2.1-308.

Much of our discussion will focus on a series of articles in The Journal for the Study of the New Testament, starting with Dale Martin’s provocative article “Jesus in Jerusalem: Armed and Not Dangerous” in JSNT 2014, Vol. 37(1) 3–24, = http://libproxy.library.unt.edu:4137/content/37/1/3.full.pdf+html ; then the replies of Paula Fredriksen (JSNT 2015, Vol. 37(3) 312–325: http://libproxy.library.unt.edu:4137/content/37/3/312.full.pdf+html ) and Gerald Dowling (JSNT 2015, Vol. 37(3) 326ff:

http://libproxy.library.unt.edu:4137/content/37/3/326.full.pdf+html ). Finally, read Martin's response: JSNT 2015, Vol. 37(3) 334–345: http://libproxy.library.unt.edu:4137/content/37/3/334.full.pdf+html

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May 8: We will meet today ONLY if a previous class was canceled due to a UNT closure. In any case, your short research project paper is due today.

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