Week 1 — Lycurgus: How to Build a Utopia
Lycurgus was not loved but feared, not dazzling but inexorable. Where others promised freedom, he demanded sacrifice; where others sought prosperity, he imposed restraint. He forged Sparta’s strength by stripping away its comforts, binding its citizens through discipline into an order at once severe and enduring. Lycurgus embodies the symbolism of political identity as sacrifice: "a people" assumes an identity not by what it wants to gain, but by what it has to refuse.

Week 2 — Alcibiades: Narcissism as political technology
Alcibiades was dazzling, gifted, and fatal: Athens both adored and condemned him, turning against the very man who might have secured its survival. His career shows not just democracy’s structural tendency to devour its best but also the shallowness of what "best" democracy can originate. He embodies narcissism weaponized: charisma that becomes an idol of self. 

Week 3 — Lysander: Discipline, intrigue, and the price of victory
Lysander was shaped by Spartan order but learned to wield discipline as an instrument of manipulation. His victories over Athens were not only military but political, revealing the power of intrigue and the temptation of empire. Yet his reliance on force and stratagem shows the soldier’s perennial temptation: to “solve” civic disorder through martial means. In Lysander, we see how victory can destroy the very order it claims to defend, and how instrumental power without higher service leads to corruption.

Week 4 — Essay Colloquium I
This first colloquium gathers the most compelling essays from Weeks 1–3 into a live roundtable. Students will articulate their answers to the guiding triad—what drives this man, what is most important to him, whom does he serve? Pavel will synthesize these readings to highlight the symbolic contrasts: sacrifice vs. narcissism, service vs. manipulation, discipline vs. corruption. Together, we will distill the lessons of the Greek crucible and measure them against the Roman horizon.

Week 5 — Pompey: Limits of a Deep State
Pompey rose within the structures of the Roman Republic, mastering its laws, rituals, and codes of honor. His glory was spectacular yet bounded, always expressed through the recognized channels of triumph and reputation. But in pushing these forms to their limit, Pompey exposed the weakness of a system that could not contain ambition indefinitely. His life shows both the grandeur and the fragility of lawful glory, and why even the “best” republican generals could not resist the coming storm.

Week 6 — Julius Caesar: Glory as sovereignty
Caesar did not desire power for its own sake; what he sought was glory. Not the fleeting honor of office or triumph, but the immortal glory that only divinity bestows. To approach this god, he bent republican structures into his orbit, mastering time with unmatched speed and mercy, and buying the people’s devotion with a genius for spectacle. Caesar symbolizes glory transfigured into sovereignty—a drive so absolute that it demanded to stand above law itself, as though eternity could be seized within history.  

Week 7 — Octavian/Augustus: The craftsman of order
Octavian, later Augustus, reveals patience as the supreme political virtue. Unlike Caesar’s explosive speed, he built authority slowly, letting time itself become his ally. More than any rival, he understood that power must be clothed in symbols: triumphs, temples, sacrifices, and ancestral cults woven into a fabric that made his rule appear as Rome’s natural order. Through calculated restraint and symbolic mastery, he built a strict hierarchy that seemed natural and organic.  

Week 8 — Essay Colloquium II
The second colloquium draws together essays from Weeks 4–7, focusing on Rome’s crisis and settlement. Students will test their symbolic readings of Pompey, Caesar, and Augustus in dialogue. Pavel will guide synthesis, showing how ambition, sovereignty, eros, and patience reveal the symbolic modalities of power. This capstone session aims to articulate a grammar of political theology applicable not only to antiquity but to the crises of our own time.