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What is Classics?

Classics has traditionally focused on the literature and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Students are trained in the classical languages (Greek and Latin) and study ancient art, archaeology, literature, and history. But here at Stanford, our engagement with Classics has always been much broader in scope. The classical Mediterranean world was part of a larger ancient world and is best examined in this global context. The study of Classics also encompasses our own relationship with the ancient past, the ways in which the legacy of Greece and Rome has been imagined and appropriated by modern observers. These perspectives open up exciting new ways of understanding the relevance of Classics for the world today, in arts and letters, science and medicine, law, entertainment, religion, or geopolitics. Classics is an intellectually ambitious and genuinely interdisciplinary field. Covering thousands of years of the human experience, Classics provides a background for many of the subjects offered at Stanford, from Law and Medicine to Philosophy and Comparative Literature, from the History of Science to Linguistics. It is also, in itself, a source of intellectual challenge and joy. If you want to understand fundamental traditions, begin by exploring Classics.

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.

Classical Archaeology

 The later twentieth century saw a fundamental move away from Classical Archaeology's traditional focus on the excavation of city centers, the architectural analysis of major monuments, the typological classification of artifacts, and the aesthetic or purely descriptive analysis of visual imagery.  The material record of the past can no longer be subsumed to evolutionary historical narratives or an essentialist view of cultures.  Several archaeologists who played a leading role in this paradigm shift joined Stanford's faculty in the 1990's (including Michael Shanks and Ian Morris in Classics, and Ian Hodder in Anthropology) and became founding members of a new Archaeology program at Stanford.  Classical Archaeology at Stanford grew from there; we are committed to developing and exploring cutting-edge theoretical and methodological approaches to the material culture of the ancient Mediterranean. 

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.