Logo Header

Programs

Undergraduate Program

Traditionally, the study of Classics is centered on the literature and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Training includes the study of the classical languages (Greek, Latin), art, archaeology, literature, and history. But at Stanford, we believe that Classics is more than the study of two great civilizations in the Mediterranean basin.

Graduate Program

Ours is a vibrant intellectual community of classicists with diverse specialties and wide-ranging interests; we are committed to the innovative and theoretically informed exploration of the ancient Mediterranean world. Graduate work here accordingly mixes rigorous training in the materials and skills of specific disciplines with openness to new approaches and dialogue across media, genres, time periods and specialties. We are actively seeking PhD students who will contribute to this distinctive intellectual atmosphere and who will thrive in its particular strengths and opportunities.

Ancient History

The historical study of the ancient world has a disciplinary history that itself merits study. In the eighteenth century, Europe began to dominate the globe. Asking themselves why this was, European intellectuals came up with a radical new theory: European superiority came not from Christianity, but from a cultural tradition that began in ancient Greece. The Greeks invented freedom and rationality; Rome then spread these gifts across Europe. This was why only Europe had a Scientific Revolution and an Enlightenment; and why Europe was now colonizing the other continents.

Literature

Because ancient texts are indivisibly social and aesthetic, because ancient texts are both forms of communication and formal objects, we read them with the help of a number of approaches. At Stanford, these range from traditional philology (including the rigorous analysis of manuscript and papyrus sources, language, meter, rhetoric and style) to performance and reception studies, translation theory and practice, social anthropology and folkloristics, and a wide range of contemporary literary theories.

Ancient Philosophy

At Stanford the departments of Philosophy and Classics cooperate to offer a joint program in Ancient Philosophy at both graduate and undergraduate levels. The graduate program is designed to provide students with the training and specialist skills and knowledge needed for research and teaching in ancient philosophy while producing scholars who are fully trained as either philosophers (with a strong specialization in ancient languages and philology) or classicists (with a concentration philosophy).

Ancient Science

Why is the study of science important to the ancient world? A major part of the corpus of ancient writing is scientific in character—Galen being perhaps the most prolific non-Christian author extant from antiquity, and the writings of the Alexandrian mathematicians offering some of our most substantial evidence for Hellenistic civilization. There are good reasons for that: science was seen by the ancients themselves to be constitutive to Greek civilization, while many later civilizations took Greek science as their model—right down to our own modern science.