r/classics

I got into classics almost a year back and Ive read theogony, works and days and metamorphoses so far, and I’m learning the history of Ancient Greece as well. My next read would be Prometheus bound. I’m still in high school so I’m loaded with other assignments and stuff which causes me to put my reading aside for weeks at a time. And unfortunately I also don’t have Latin or Greek in school, or any other relevant (to classics) subjects like history or philosophy, as I made the mistake of taking other subjects. So I know how dumb this sounds when I say I want to apply to Oxford for classics 😭 however I do have writing experience and have awards/certificates to my name and served as one of the editors of my school magazine. I plan to drop one year after graduation and do some in depth reading before applying the next year. I have been reading about how one has to submit essays and other writings etc and I’m very confused in which direction I should study so that there’s even a chance for me to get there. I’m very sorry if this is a rookie question or not appropriate for this sub but I’m willing to put in all my time and effort to get to a certain standard at least! Please guide me in which direction I should study and what works, and how to tackle the writing part. Also the interview process.
Thanks a lot 🙏
Edit: I’m really sorry I just realised that id typed that I have stem subjects (autocorrect 😭) I meant to say (now corrected) that I had subjects other than philosophy, history English lit etc)

Hi I read 10s of classics each year and wanted a new challenge, so have decided to start literature from the beginning. I accidentally forgot Gilgamesh but will skip back after I have finished Greece. I just wondered if there was any gaping holes in this list.

Homer - Hymns, Odyssy, Iliad
Hesiod - Sheild of Heracles, Works and Days, Theogony
Plato + Theocritus + Sappho + Pindar + Aristoltel - Complete works
Apollonius - Argonautica
Euripes, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Aristophones - Select plays
Herodotus - Histories
Thucydides - History of the peloponnesian war
Xenophon - Anabasis

Also I will be moving on to Rome and that is way more daunting so any advice on building a similar list would be great.

For some context, I’m in my second year of a classics MA at a high ranked university and have a BA in History and Philosophy. I entered an MA to hone my language skills because my undergrad had lackluster classical language pedagogy and I wanted to pursue a PhD in Ancient History.

I wrote my MA thesis in the first year of my MA, and it was very well received by my professors, who said they thought I had a decent shot at getting into a good PhD program if I wanted to pursue academia further. I liked my project, and was really glad to get all that good feedback, and it was certainly fulfilling work. However, the already bad job market seems to have gotten much worse since I entered my MA— worse than can reasonably justify the stress of a PhD and the nomadic lifestyle of an early career academic. As a result, I need to seriously consider making the pivot into public/private sector work, even if I do still plan on applying to PhDs.

By the time I leave my MA, I’ll effectively have done two years of graduate coursework alongside PhDs, written several graduate research projects including my thesis, and have advanced language proficiencies in Latin and Greek, in addition to German reading proficiency. I’ve also got really good experience with oratory.

For people who have made a similar transition out of academia, what did you do, and how did you market your skills? I know an obvious thing is “go to law school,” but I’d like to get at least some entry level workforce experience before I do something like that.

Open to any and all advice or comments, including the thoughts of current PhDs on the state of the job market as programs shut down, pause admissions, and shrink.

I've fallen down a Trojan War rabbit hole recently(Thanks Nolan) and I've realized I don't actually understand what we mean when we talk about the "canon" version of this story. Most people, myself included until recently, have this vague idea that the Trojan War story we all know basically comes from Homer. But the more I read, the more obvious it becomes that it really doesn't.

The Iliad covers a tiny period near the end of the war. It doesn't give us the Judgment of Paris as the complete story we usually know, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Achilles at Skyros, the Trojan Horse, the actual fall of Troy, Achilles' famous invulnerable heel, and plenty of other things that most people would consider basic Trojan War lore. Yet somehow all of these traditions have merged in popular culture into one enormous narrative that we casually associate with Homer.

What confuses me even more is how selective this process seems to have been. Take the Mysian campaign. In the wider Epic Cycle, before the Greeks successfully reach Troy, they launch an earlier expedition and land in Mysia, apparently mistaking it for Trojan territory. They fight Telephus, Achilles wounds him, the Greeks are scattered and eventually return home. According to the later mythographic chronology, eight years then pass before they assemble again. Telephus eventually comes to Greece because his wound cannot heal, Achilles heals him, and Telephus helps the Greeks find their way to Troy.

That's not exactly a minor deleted scene. The Greeks literally invade the wrong country before invading Troy. And yet almost nobody who casually knows the Trojan War seems to know this happened. This creates many plot holes as it makes everyone 8+ years older.

Meanwhile, basically everyone knows that Achilles was invulnerable because Thetis dipped him in the Styx while holding him by the heel. Except that isn't Homer either. As far as I understand it, that specific version of Achilles' invulnerability is extremely late compared with Homer and is associated with sources such as Statius, writing in the 1st century AD! While the Mysian campaign is likely 50-100 years after homer ,part of the Epic cycle.

And that's where I start getting confused about what we actually mean by "canon." How has something written something like seven or eight centuries after the traditional dating of Homer become so culturally dominant that Achilles' heel is probably one of the most famous details in all of Greek mythology, while an entire failed Greek expedition preserved as part of the archaic Trojan tradition has basically disappeared?

Mysia is only one example. The more you reconstruct the Trojan War we think we know, the stranger the source list becomes. You have Homer, then the lost poems of the Epic Cycle such as the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Sack of Ilium, Nostoi and Telegony. Then you have lyric poets and other archaic traditions, followed by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who sometimes preserve older material and sometimes give us radically different versions. Then come mythographers trying to organize all of it, later Greek writers, and Roman authors such as Virgil, Ovid and Statius. Somehow pieces from all of these periods have been thrown together and produced what we now think of as the "standard Trojan War."

This also creates some hilarious problems if you try to treat everything as one internally consistent fictional universe. For example, if you incorporate the Mysian expedition and the eight-year interval into the same chronology as Homer's Odyssey, suddenly the clean 10 years at Troy + 10 years wandering = Odysseus was gone for 20 years becomes much more complicated. You start wondering whether Odysseus was involved in Trojan-related expeditions for something closer to 28 years, what exactly happened during the interval, when Telemachus was conceived, how old everyone should be, and so on.

Which leads to the question I'm actually interested in: did the ancient Greeks themselves have anything resembling a canonical Trojan War timeline? If someone in 5th-century Athens heard "the Trojan War," was there a broadly understood sequence of events that almost everyone accepted, with poets and playwrights merely choosing which parts to dramatize? Or could two Greeks genuinely know substantially different versions of what happened and consider both legitimate?

And then there is the even stranger question of when this process actually stops. Statius is writing about Achilles around the first century AD, many centuries after Homer, and material from that later tradition can apparently become part of what a modern person considers basic Achilles lore. So when does the Trojan mythological universe close? Does it ever?

Could a writer in the 3rd century AD introduce a new episode about Achilles and, if that story became influential enough, would we now call that "Greek mythology"? What about the 5th century AD? The Byzantine period? The Middle Ages? At what point do scholars stop calling something "a variant of the Achilles myth" and start calling it later reception, adaptation or essentially fan fiction using Achilles as a character?

This is especially confusing because our modern pseudo-canon seems incredibly selective. Statius' Achilles heel gets in, Euripides' Helen living in Egypt mostly doesn't, the Mysian campaign mostly doesn't, the sacrifice of Iphigenia absolutely does, the Trojan Horse obviously does, and Homer's name somehow gets retroactively attached to the whole package.

So I'm starting to think there are really three different things that we casually collapse into one. There is the Homeric version, meaning what the Iliad and Odyssey actually say. Then there is the enormous ancient Trojan mythological tradition, including the Epic Cycle, archaic poetry, tragedy, mythographers, local traditions, Hellenistic literature and Roman retellings. And finally there is the modern "Trojan War canon," which seems to be a greatest-hits compilation assembled from whichever versions happened to become culturally dominant.

And that final category is what fascinates me. Where did this pseudo-canon actually come from? Was there a particular ancient synthesis, mythographer or later educational tradition that had an outsized influence on the story we inherited? Or is our "standard Trojan War" genuinely just the result of 2,500+ years of cultural selection, Roman literature, medieval transmission, Renaissance classicism and modern adaptations gradually deciding which pieces were memorable enough to survive?

Thank you all for your time reading this

I've been diving into Ancient Greece and Rome for the first time and wanted to share my reading list in the order that I'm reading it in (with rough date spans for both the author and what the work covers). For those here with a lot more Classics knowledge than me, I'd love feedback on this list - any more sources I should add, any thoughts on changing the order, and any modern sources I should layer in for added context? I've heard good things about Adrian Goldsworthy's books, but open to all recs.

Ancient Greece
Homer (850 - 750 BC) - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Various - Homeric Hymns
Aeschylus (525 - 456 BC) - The Oresteia
Aeschylus - Prometheus Bound and Other Plays
Sophocles (497 - 406 BC) - The Oedipus Plays
Sophocles - Electra and other Plays
Euripides (480 - 406 BC) - Medea and Other Plays
Euripides - The Bacchae and Other Plays
Herodotus (484 - 425 BC) - The Histories (650 - 479 BC)
Thucydides (460 - 400 BC) - History of the Peloponnesian War (431 - 411 BC)
Xenophon (430 - 355 BC) - A History of My Times (Hellenica) (411 - 362 BC)
Xenophon - The Persian Expedition (Anabasis) (401 BC)
Plato (428 - 347 BC) - The Republic (380 BC)
Plutarch (50 - 120 AD) - The Rise and Fall of Athens (508 - 322 BC)
Plutarch - On Sparta (500 - 371 BC)
Curtius Rufus (0 - 100 AD) - The History of Alexander (356 - 323 BC)
Arrian (86 - 160 AD) - The Campaigns of Alexander (356 - 323 BC)
Plutarch - The Age of Alexander (350 - 272 BC)

Ancient Rome
Virgil (70 - 19 BC) - The Aeneid (19 BC)
Livy (59 BC - 17 AD) - The History of Rome, Books 1-5: The Early History of Rome (757 - 386 BC)
Plutarch - The Rise of Rome (700 - 400 BC)
Livy - The History of Rome, Books 6-10: Rome and Italy (386 - 293 BC)
Polybius (200 - 118 BC) - The Rise of the Roman Empire (264 - 146 BC)
Livy - The History of Rome, Books 21-30: The War with Hannibal (218 - 202 BC)
Plutarch - The Fall of the Roman Republic (100 - 50 BC)
Plutarch - Rome in Crisis (134 - 31 BC)
Appian (95 - 165 AD) - The Civil Wars (133 - 44 BC)
Julius Caesar (100 - 44 BC) - The Conquest of Gaul (58 - 50 BC)
Julius Caesar - The Civil Wars (49 - 47 BC)
Cicero (106 - 43 BC) - Selected Works (43 BC)
Cassius Dio (165 - 235 AD) - The Roman History: The Reign of Augustus (27 BC - 14 AD)
Tacitus (55 - 120 AD) - The Annals of Imperial Rome (14 - 68 AD)
Tacitus - The Histories (69 - 70 AD)
Tacitus - The Agricola and The Germania 
Suetonius (69 - 122 AD) - The Twelve Caesars (30 BC - 96 AD)
Seneca (4 BC - 65 AD) - Letters from a Stoic
Seneca - On the Shortness of Life
Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180 AD) - Meditations

The proem that opens the Histories has this clause, towards the end:

>ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα

[Important caveat: I do not speak or write Greek. Getting the correct Greek snippet required a lot of googling and Google Translate.]

Here is the English in the translations I have at hand:

#Holland, 2013

>and all the glory of those exploits which served to display Greeks and barbarians alike to such effect,

#Waterfield 1998, 2008

>and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks;

#Rawlinson, 1858

>and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory

#Purvis/Landmark, 2007, 2009

>May the great and wonderful deeds - some brought forth by the Hellens, others by the barbarians - not go unsung;

My questions:

How important is the word *barbarian* for Herodotus? My understanding is that it's primarily a pejorative -- and please don't over-credit what I mean by "understand"; I only read in English -- and was a onomatopoetic way of mocking what the Greeks believed non-Greeks sounded like.

The Waterfield is the only one to render βαρβάροισι as "non-Greeks." The other three stick with "barbarian."

1. Do you have a sense as to why someone might render βαρβάροισι as "non-Greek"?

2. If you had to guess, does Herodotus use βαρβάροισι as a pejorative? Or, by the time he's using it, has some of the negative connotations worn off?

3. How much time do you think a group of new readers to the Histories should spend thinking about this specific non-Greek v barbarian "issue"?

For context, I graduated in 2025 with a BA in History and Classics, with 7 semesters of Latin and Greek each. I don't have a frame of reference for how "language-heavy" of a degree mine was.

1. What does the "life of the mind" look like outside of grad school? I am interested in how other classics graduates sustained this outside of full-time study.

How do classics graduates sustain it? I understand that grad school is both reading and language heavy, but I would be lying if I said that I didn't envy grad students because they have the opportunity for mastery of classics with their language work and their reading.

I envy grad students for their ability to deepen their Latin and Greek. I think that in my approximately 3.5 years of serious study I got good enough to understand how much more there was to do in the languages.

I am passionate about languages but I am sincerely not sure how many people have continued their serious study alone. I want to be able to fluently read all of Roma Aeterna by Hans Orberg and continue reading Latin from there.

I just think that, passionate as I am about this topic, I won't be able to match someone working full time as a student in the field. Maybe I have to come to grips with that.

2. What are the realistic job outcomes for MAs and PhDs in classics?

The job market in classics is bleak. But I found conflicting data on what percentage of Classics PhDs secure tenure track jobs.

Nowadays, is there any consensus realistic outcome for those who earn a PhD? If someone "strikes out" in the academic job market, is there a stigma for having left academia? I know academics in my own life who did this and seem to have struggled with it mentally.

So what do the majority of PhDs who fail to secure tenure track positions actually do?

3. Conclusion

These are my two primary questions.

Outside of grad school and career questions, one of my biggest goals is to become a traditionally published author of genre fiction. To that end I have already completed on approximately 80k word manuscript as an apprenticeship piece. My skill and understanding have improved massively, and I plan on outlining and writing another through the end of 2026 and 2027.

One thing that gives me pause is that if the path of tenure track professor and successful, widely-known fiction author were open to me (both slim odds IRL, but this is a hypothetical,) I would readily pick the path of a fiction writer. As I've entered adult life, I realize that having the time to write is very, very valuable, so I try to protect that and take advantage of it as much as possible.

Herakles is usually shown with a lion skin and a club. The lion skin, λεοντή, comes from λέων (= lion) and refers to the Nemean Lion, which Herakles killed as one of his labours. His club is called ῥόπαλον. These are probably the easiest ways to recognise him.

Poseidon is a little more complicated. Hellenic gods were rarely associated with only one thing. Poseidon was connected with the sea, earthquakes, horses, and more, so he could appear with several different attributes.

Here, the strongest clue is the fish he is holding, probably a dolphin. The figure also has the familiar divine pose: a bare torso with a garment falling from the shoulder. This is especially common in representations of male gods. Goddesses, on the other hand, tend to be much more heavily clothed. Yes, even Aphrodite.

But what exactly is happening between Herakles and Poseidon?

When I was at my Christian primary school, we had two lessons on Greek mythology… One was watching the Disney Hercules film and the other was about how Zeus is basically the Christian god, Hercules is Jesus and Hades is Satan.

As the kid who voraciously read all of the books about Ancient Greece, Egypt, Rome that he could get his hands on, I was deeply conflicted that what my teachers were telling me contradicted everything I’d read.

Knowing what I know now, I’m still mad about it over two decades on.

Hi all,

Not sure if this is the right reddit to ask, but I'm looking for a good general history book on the Byzantine Empire. After reading through a bunch of classic Greek history and then Roman Empire stuff, I'm looking for a way into the Byzantines.

I checked the Reddit History thread that gets suggested, but that thread is 14 years old now. If there's another thread I should go mosey off to, let me know. But I figured I'd try here as well. Thanks!

I’m looking for modern critical editions of Greek works of criticism, specifically Plato and Aristotle, but Longinus and Demetrius are of interest too.

What publishers are considered the best for these writers?

I know there’s a tradition that Odysseus got Hecuba after the fall of Troy but what did he do with her? I mean, he didn’t take her on his journey, though that would certainly be a very interesting idea for a story.

Sorry for the rambling intro: I'm currently an MA student in Italy, and I've really enjoyed the courses I've taken in classical and medieval philology. Before starting on the rest of the assigned reading lists for these subjects, I read Tarrant's 2016 book: Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism, which I found both entertaining and certainly the most approachable intro to the discipline I've read so far. One thing stuck out to me though, which I haven't seen much discussion on - I'm paraphrasing from memory so I may be unintentionally misrepresenting what Tarrant wrote, but iirc according to him 'textual criticism' has become a bit of a 'dirty word' in US academia, with students being discouraged from pursuing it for their thesis/dissertation. So this leads me to ask anyone with experience studying or working in these departments, is this hyperbolic, or maybe no longer true 10 years later? Or have US departments moved away from textual criticism? If so, is this because it's viewed as unnecessary or unimportant, or because departments are content with how it is applied elsewhere? I'm curious to hear what your perspectives are.

I’ve been looking into the University of Florida’s distance Ph.D. programs in Classics, particularly the Latin and Roman Studies and Classical Civilization tracks, and I’d love to hear from anyone who has completed the program, is currently enrolled, or has firsthand knowledge of it.

For context, I’m a full-time Latin teacher with 10+ years of experience and currently teach through AP Latin. I also have a J.D. and teach as an adjunct in a separate field. I’m not primarily looking at a Ph.D. as a route to the tenure-track job market (I know how perilous that path is lol); I’d like to continue teaching while developing as a scholar, with particular interests in Latin literature, translation/reception, and potentially digital humanities/bibliographic work.

For those familiar with the program: What was your experience like? How manageable is it alongside full-time teaching? How rigorous is the language and research training, how involved are distance students with faculty and the department, and how much flexibility is there in developing research/dissertation interests?
I’m also curious about typical time to completion, the Summer Latin Institute, and anything you wish you’d known before starting.

Basically, would you recommend it, and to whom?

Thank you so much in advance!

Whether you are a student, a teacher, a researcher or a hobbyist, please share with us what you read this week (books, textbooks, papers...).

The first word in the Iliad is μῆνιν and the first word in the Odyssey is ἄνδρα. My impression is that most translations of the Iliad render μῆνιν as a definite noun, which strikes me as the only possible reading. On the other hand, while some translations of the Odyssey [e.g., Lattimore and Fagles] render ἄνδρα as an definite noun, others [e.g., Wilson and Mendelsohn] render it as indefinite. The former also strikes me as the natural reading, while the latter just seems ungrammatical, although I could construct an argument in favor of indefiniteness. Would a true classics scholar care to weigh in on this admittedly pedantic question?