Columbia University in the City of New York · Courses
GREK UN
10 courses with the subject GREK UN, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
GREK UN1101ELEMENTARY GREEK I4.00
For students who have never studied Greek. An intensive study of grammar with reading and writing of simple Attic prose
Prerequisites: GREK V1101 or the equivalent, or the instructor or the director of undergraduate studies' permission. Prerequisites: GREK UN1101 or the equivalent, or the instructor or the director of undergraduate studies permission. Continuation of grammar study begun in GREK UN1101; selections from Attic prose
GREK UN3016Readings from the Greek New Testament3.00
The New Testament introduces us to a register, or rather registers, of Greek radically unlike those of the high canon of classical texts. In broad terms, all the texts in the collection possess features that link them to the documentary Greek used in early imperial papyri and inscriptions, for example, the obsolescence of the optative, the infrequency of certain particles, and the relative simplicity of the syntax. But there is remarkable variety within these broad constraints: Matthew straightforwardly imitates the language of the Greek Old Testament, Markan prose is pared down to the point of being gnomic, Luke/Acts has some generic markers of historiography without any meaningful indication that the classical historians served the author as a model, and the lively paraenetic/argumentative/hysterical style of the authentic Pauline Epistles resists facile classification. The existence of such texts reminds us of the need to break out of the Atticistic canon if we want to get a full picture of Imperial Greek. We need to determine who in socio-economic terms the writers and readers of such texts may have been and whether there may not have been many more like them. In this way we can complicate the facile view that draws an excessively close connection between the eastern Empire, Greekness and the Greek city, and the Second Sophistic. Not all Greek writing was a vehicle for the dissemination of an exclusivistic Greekness. It will also not be ignored that these texts are important not only for literary scholars and Roman social historians, but also for historians of Christianity and Judaism, for reasons too obvious to require explication. But no texts analyze themselves: students will be introduced to the central problems raised by the texts and the main methodological and theoretical approaches used to solve them
Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit
Subject
GREK UN
Credits (min)
3
Credits (max)
3
Credit unit
points
Type
course
Repeatable
may be repeated for credit Fall 2026: GREK UN3309 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment GREK 3309 001/10326 T Th 1:10pm - 2:25pm 316 Ha
Prerequisites: GREK V1201-V1202 or the equivalent. Prerequisites: GREK UN2101 - GREK UN2102 or the equivalent. Since the content of this course changes from year to year, it may be repeated for credit
Subject
GREK UN
Credits (min)
3
Credits (max)
3
Credit unit
points
Type
course
Repeatable
may be repeated for credit Spring 2026: GREK UN3310 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment GREK 3310 001/11009 T Th 1:10pm - 2:25pm 609
This seminar aims to provide students in the post-baccalaureate certificate program with opportunities 1) to (re-)familiarize themselves with a selection of major texts from classical antiquity, which will be read in English, 2) to become acquainted with scholarship on these texts and with scholarly writing in general, 3) to write analytically about these texts and the interpretations posed about them in contemporary scholarship, and 4) to read in the original language selected passages of one of the texts in small tutorial groups, which will meet every week for an additional hour with members of the faculty
Prerequisites: junior standing. Required for all majors in classics and classical studies. The topic changes from year to year, but is always broad enough to accommodate students in the languages as well as those in the interdisciplinary major. Past topics include: love, dining, slavery, space, power
