The skills and knowledge acquired through the classics are easily transferable to other areas. You'll also develop a unique sense of perspective that comes from the study of a cultural history that is so broad and pervasive.
You will find an academic and social home in the Department of Classics. Our program is rigorous, but as a small department, we provide extraordinary individual attention to students. Many students find they are able to double-major in Classical Civilization and another field of interest.
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Modern Warrior Encounters Ancient Insights
"I joined the United States Marine Corps immediately after high school and served there for six years. Towards the end of my tour, during a particularly trying time in my life, I came across an English translation of Vergil’s Aeneid. In the beginning, the hero Aeneas, exhausted and shipwrecked, addresses his comrades with the following words: 'Perhaps one day it will help you, to remember even these things.' In class a few years later, I had the opportunity to read this great epic, and that same line, in the original Latin: Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. This line has become one of my favorites, and it’s one that has helped me often since my initial reading. I think that at some point, we have all found ourselves at a loss when trying to express something personal, a powerful feeling or experience that seems to be beyond words. The classics, whether it is the epics of Homer and Vergil, the tragedies of Sophocles, the letters of Pliny, or the history of Thucydides, have always been there to express that which appears incomprehensible. This is one reason why I study classics, and it’s why the Ancient Greeks and Romans will always be pertinent to our daily lives." - Ryan Dupuis '19
Meet your Classics Colleagues
Study the classics and you will join the ranks of some of the most influential men and women of all time--in all fields of endeavor. A few examples: Toni Morrison, William Shakespeare, Joe Paterno, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Jefferson, T. S. Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Sir Isaac Newton, e. e. cummings, Immanuel Kant, Salvador Dalí, Johann Sebastian Bach, Gertrude Stein, Indiana Jones, Karl Marx, Robert Graves, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Cleopatra, Ezra Pound, Bertrand Russell, Jules Verne, Sigmund Freud, Blaise Pascal, Desmond Tutu, J. R. R. Tolkien, Moses Maimonides, Desiderius Erasmus, W. H. Auden, René Descartes, Camille Paglia, Albert Einstein, John Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Benjamin Franklin, Winston Churchill, Umberto Eco, W. E. B. DuBois, Jean Racine, Jorge Luis Borges, St. Augustine, Wole Soyinka, Queen Elizabeth I, Ted Hughes, John Milton, J. K. Rowling, Galileo Galilei, Vince Lombardi, Mary Shelley, James Joyce, Sting, Max Weber, David Packard, James George Frazer, Willa Cather, Thomas Hobbes, James Baker, Martin Luther, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Friedrich Nietzsche, H. D., William Gladstone, Mahatma Gandhi, Oscar Wilde, Michel Foucault, Alexander the Great, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ted Turner, Lord Byron, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Derek Walcott, Richard Wagner, Sören Kierkegaard, Sylvia Plath, Carl Jung, Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, William Wordsworth, Iggy Pop.