This course is an advanced-level reading course, encompassing the entirety of Plato’s enchanting (and rather amusing) dialogue about rhetoric, the Gorgias. I have apportioned the readings so that we should be able to complete the whole by the end of the year. When I first taught this in the past, in fact the student who took it was sufficiently engaged with the material that she covered almost twice as much material as is outlined here, and we were finished with the whole of the dialogue by late January or early February; we continued from there with some of Aristotle’s writings. The main goal here is to push for enhanced fluency and ease with the idiomatic and conversational kind of Attic Greek Plato was writing, on the assumption that this fluency will positively affect almost everything else you set out to read. Admission to the course requires instructor approval, and presupposes a hefty background in serious reading.
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