This summer I had the opportunity to teach “Ancient Greece,” the introductory Greek history survey offered here at Penn for undergraduates. One of the more exciting things about teaching an introductory course of your own is having the opportunity to present to students the methodological and theoretical frameworks that define your own approach to making history. I wanted to model explicitly the critical self-reflection of a historian—the constant assessment of methodology, the willingness to acknowledge failures of interpretation or analysis, the reevaluation of tools for different contexts. Part of this was to make it clear to my students that history is a process rather than a product.
Perhaps my favorite part of the class was my discussion of Aesop’s fables as representative of practices of popular storytelling and folklore. I presented to my students some tools (James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak and Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World) and set off reading fables that, on their surface, appear to bear little evidentiary value. With these tools, though, my students were able to reconstruct the mental worlds of regular Greeks through their stories. Class, gender, ethnicity, power—all of these manifested in remarkably different ways through ancient fables in comparison to our reading, for example, of Thucydides. Also, we simply had a blast reading some great stories together!