Bachelors of Arts in Classics

The Department of Classics at Cornell is one of the oldest in the country. It offers both the traditional core training in the languages, literature, philosophy, art, and history of ancient Greece and Rome, alongside newer approaches developed from the comparative study of Mediterranean civilizations, peace studies, gender studies, visual and material culture studies, critical theory, and anthropology. The broad range of instruction includes courses offered by professors with appointments in the Departments of History, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, History of Art, Linguistics, and Near Eastern Studies, and in the Programs of Archaeology, Medieval Studies, and Religious Studies. The department offers a wide variety of classical civilization courses in English translation on such subjects as Greek mythology, ancient medicine, ancient religion and magic, early Christianity, and Greek and Roman society; ancient epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, satire, novels, love-poetry and scientific treatises; Periclean Athens, the Hellenistic Mediterranean, Republican Rome, the Roman Empire, and Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic philosophy. These courses are designed to introduce aspects of classical antiquity to students with very divergent primary interests. Courses in art, archaeology, and dendrochronology explore the visual and material culture of the ancient Mediterranean, from the Bronze Age Aegean and Archaic Greece to Hellenistic Egypt, Augustan Italy or the Byzantine Empire. These courses make use of the university’s large collections of ancient ceramics, sculpture, and coins, and of reproductions of sculptures, inscriptions, and other ancient objects. For example, since 1976 over 500 Cornell students have worked in the Aegean Dendrochronology Project’s laboratory, measuring the annual rings on thousands of samples of wood and charcoal, and using the rings to date structures as old as 7000 BCE. In the vacations selected students have participated in collecting trips around the eastern end of the Mediterranean (dendro.cornell.edu), and have visited ancient sites in Greece and Italy, as well as collections of antiquities in the United States. Students who wish to gain first-hand archaeological experience may also join one of several summer Cornell-sponsored field projects in Greece and Turkey. Students have also worked closely with Cornell’s collection of plaster-casts, helping to clean, digitize, and catalog them as well as preparing exhibits. The study of language is a vital part of classics.