Branch of Ancient World

Law and society in the ancient world (15 ECTS)

[Instructor: Delfim Leão]

This seminar seeks to identify the specificity of ancient Greek law and the main sources for its knowledge, as well as the figures of the great legislators and the movements that stimulated the activity of coding and revision of laws. It also aims to understand the historical and procedural stages that accompanied the way of approaching the themes chosen for analysis, without neglecting their mythical antecedents, the social and religious implications of this area of enforcement of justice, as well as their literary treatment, addressing in particular the legal horizon of the Greek tragedy.

Ethos, praxis and poiesis in Greek culture (15 ECTS)

[Instructors: Carmen Soares and Alexandre Sá]

With the formation of the polis, the whole literary “construction” (poiesis) became “politics”, to the extent that it is an expression of the citizen’s word (polites) and conveys visions (individual or collective, proper or extraneous) of a world view (local or global) which is a product and producer of a set of values (an ethos) that shape and/or are questioned in “ways of acting” (praxeis). In the context of this seminar, we approach constructions, values and practices that Greek texts, structural of the Greek culture, portray as the pólis’ human pillars: the man-ruler-soldier-husband-father-son; the woman-governess/governed-wife-mother-daughter. Because a various approach to the theme is intended, several authors, genres and eras will be considered: Homer, Herodotus, Euripides, Plato, Aristoteles and Plutarch.

Themes of Ancient Greek literature (15 ECTS)

[Carmen Soares and Frederico Lourenço]

This seminar focuses on different genres of Greek literature – tragedy and historiography, on one hand, comedy and Hellenistic poetry, on the other – with the aim of highlighting the intersection of common themes and how the proper expression of each literary genre enhances different approaches and similar problems. The following topics will be addressed: a) (de)construction of the hero’s figure (Aeschylus, The Persians; Sophocles, Oedipus the king; Herodotus); b) poetry as an explicit and implicit vehicle of poetic theorization (Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae and The Frogs; Callimachus).

Themes of Latin and neo-Latin literature (15 ECTS)

[António Rebelo and Paula Barata Dias]

This seminar aims to explore the power of the verb in the continuity of literary culture conceived and modelled in the ancient world and designed for the post-roman world (from late antiquity to Renaissance humanism). In this seminar, the focus of the study of literary discourse is the rhetorical power of the word, in a semantic-pragmatic context, simultaneously of diachronic evolution and synchronous diversity. As a privileged medium, which reflects society, politics and culture, and the dominant powers, the literary text is the object of extraordinary transformations enhanced by the classical legacy that drives the renewal, update and permanent adaptation of Latin letters to the thought of each era, by the hand of new agents versed in classical language and culture. The strength (uis) of the verb and its power of persuasion will be analysed, preferably in the new literary genres and subgenres, with an important, but not exclusive, emphasis on apologetics and homiletics as rhetorical resources of persuasion, and on biography and hagiography, as instruments of legitimation of and from power.

Orientation seminar (130 ECTS)

PhD thesis (50ECTS)