Classics

Classics is the study of the languages and cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. The field includes great writers such as Homer, Sappho, Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Caesar, Cicero, Vergil, Horace, and Tacitus; and great monuments such as the Parthenon and the Colosseum.

To study Classics is to enter into a world that stretches from Europe to Western Asia and North Africa, and in time from the Stone Age to the fall of Constantinople and beyond. Classicists study great civilizations such as those of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Crete, Etruria, Hellenic Greece, Persia, Rome, Israel, and Byzantium. Christianity, Islam, the Renaissance, and modern science were inspired by admiration of and rivalry with ancient humanism. The modern world is unthinkable without the legacy of classical antiquity.

Liberal arts education was born in the seven great subjects of the ancient curriculum, the Trivium or "three roads" of Grammar, Rhetoric (including literature), and Logic, and the Quadrivium or "four roads" of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. As such, classics lies at the root and core of modern liberal arts studies. Classics involves archaeology, art, architecture, history, literature, economics, gender studies, philosophy, theater studies, and other disciplines. No field gives its students a wider experience of the liberal arts than classics.

It is not surprising that a field as rich and influential as classics should be rewarding to the practical life of those who study it. Training in classics is training for life. Students of the classics can and do go on to careers in law, medicine, government, business, religion, journalism, advertising, acting, as well as pursue advanced academic work in classics, literature, women's studies, education, religious studies and more. No degree is more versatile. For more career opportunities. . .

Students may major or minor in classical languages or classical studies. The classics department at Connecticut College offers courses in Greek and Latin language and literature including Plato, Homer, and Vergil. Students may choose to read a wide variety of authors in the original languages in individual studies with the classics faculty. We also teach a very wide range of classical antiquity in translation, including Greek and Roman civilization and history, mythology, philosophy, epic, tragedy, comedy, and the classical tradition.  Students are also encouraged to take related courses in art and art history, history, philosophy, religious studies, and theater.