ollege students in this Spring Quarter program enjoy a wonderful opportunity to study the history and culture of Greece in Athens, once the celebrated center of the ancient Greek culture and now the lively and cosmopolitan capital of contemporary Greece. The three-course sequence "Greek Antiquity and Its Legacy," which treats ancient Greece in its first two courses and Byzantine and modern Greece in its third, is the core of the program. Program participants also take a fourth course in the Greek language, either modern or ancient. As an essential supplement to this course work, the program features a series of excursions both outside Athens (to Korinth, Delphi, and Thessaloniki) and within (to the Akropolis, the Greek and Roman Agoras, and the National Museum).

Foundations amid the Ruins

ince the founding of the University of Chicago more than one hundred years ago, Western civilization has been at the core of the undergraduate curriculum. Central to that study has been ancient Greek civilization, with its focal point in Athens, the symbolic heard of Western civilizations. Today, all Chicago students continue in the Socratic tradition of studying—and questioning—the great authors of the West. But the Civilization Abroad program gives some of them the extraordinary opportunity to take their usual classroom studies to the very places where Western civilization was born. Studies come alive in Greece as students read texts and then explore the context of their work right outside the front door. Study in Greece also gives students the opportunity to explore and absorb the full range of Greek history, ancient to present.

"Greek Antiquity and Its Legacy" introduces students to such ancient texts as the Homeric epics and Homeric Hymns, the Oresteia of Aeschylus, the comedies of Aristophanes, the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, and the dialogues of Plato. While in Athens, course readings may include such primary sources as Plutarch's The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives or Pausanias' Guide to Greece, in addition to secondary works that explore the political, social and cultural history of Greece, including its art, religion and archeology.