Mapping the Ancient Novel: Affordances,

This seminar explores the affordances and precarities of a variety of ancient landscapes and urban centers. So too it delves into the predilections of their inhabitants. At some point in the late first or second centuries CE, when the Eastern Mediterranean was under the authority of the Roman Empire, Greek writers and readers turned to escapist literature in which incredibly beautiful couples (predominantly heterosexual but also homosexual) met, fell and love, suffered setbacks, and ultimately… no spoilers here. While suffering the travails that separated them, they were often transported (by bandits, pirates, slave traders, armies, etc.) all across the Eastern Mediterranean. Over the semester, we will map these movements using the open-source geographical information system QGIS and discuss the choices that authors (and their characters) made, the cultural perceptions of settlements and their inhabitants, and the various affordances of different geographic regions (where bandits lurk, for example). We will also read and discuss material that will help us ascertain the degrees of fantasy vs. plausibility, not only in the mechanics of movement but in the religious and social practice of the protagonists.