Mondays & Wednesdays
4 sessions, 11:30 AM – 1:30 PM
Session 1: September 25
Session 2: September 27
Session 3: October 2
Session 4: October 4
All sessions at DOC House - Hanover, NH
Course Fee: $40

When and why did Roman civilization slowly perish? Historians have come up with many colorful and conflicting answers. Some offer a precise date and time. Others claim Rome never fell but persisted into the Middle Ages. This four-meeting course will consider Rome’s imperial decline from four perspectives: (1) Juvenal’s Satires, a first-hand report of Roman luxury and licentiousness; (2) Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; (3) American painter Thomas Cole’s nationalistic moral narrative, Course of Empire; and (4) Federico Fellini’s bacchanalian film, Satyricon. Although the topic is large, outside preparation will be relatively brief: reading short extracts from Juvenal and Gibbon, a web-based pictorial analysis of Cole’s series, and viewing short film clips from Fellini. These four acclaimed masterworks, dated from the 2nd to the 20th Century, touch on literature, history, painting, and cinema, and a background in classical history is not a prerequisite. In class we will mix short lectures, analysis of the works themselves, and open discussion. Although we’ll be doing ancient history, not current events, class discussion will include comparisons of Rome and the contemporary US.