OCW: You’ve been teaching this course for roughly twenty years—longer than Caligula, Claudius, or Nero was emperor of Rome! How has your approach to the material evolved in that time?
William Broadhead: The central aim of the class has remained the same in all the time I’ve been teaching it: to push students to develop and refine their own judgment through a close critical examination of the many ways in which Roman emperors have been judged, from different chronological and ideological perspectives.
In terms of the educational experience in the classroom, on the other hand, the class has evolved quite significantly over the years. In its current form, it’s a highly participatory seminar with an enrollment capped at 15. Every class meeting is a close analysis and discussion of the day’s material; and that material is now more tightly focused on the two case studies of Augustus and Nero, with the emphasis firmly on depth of analysis over breadth of coverage; we work with a spotlight rather than a floodlight. In my experience, structuring the class so that students have the time and space to “linger longer” on specific ancient sources—literary, archaeological, and epigraphic—has resulted in much more satisfying in-class discussions.
