I know I can’t be the only one in this erudite group. I am a senior Classics and Greek major and will get my BA in May. I’ve been fascinated by Greek mythology since I was a child and my father taught me all of the stories behind the constellations. A smattering of Latin in high school was unsatisfactory, so I made sure to go to a college that included Greek among its departments. Over the last four years I’ve read Herodotus, Aristophanes, Sappho, Homer, and much of the Gospels in the original Greek and will be rounding out my college career with Julian the Apostate next semester. The first three authors named are my particular favourites.
I’ve travelled to Greece to see its art and ruins firsthand, a truly religious experience for me as the Neopagan in me believes that the gods are alive and well in their homeland. Classes I’ve taken include Women in Greece and Rome, Greek and Roman Values, Hellenistic Greece/Republican Rome, Greek Art and Archaeology, and Greek Magic and Medicine. I vastly prefer the Greeks to the Romans, but then, who doesn’t?
My speciality within the field is the literary classical tradition, that is how modern literature interacts with and includes the classics. My thesis paper is about the medium of graphic novels and why the classics seem to lend themselves so well to this format (see Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Frank Miller’s 300, and Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze for recent examples).
I’m entering Classics in university next semester (although I’m going to switch into History concentration in Ancient History soon, long story).
My main interest is egyptology and I’m in the process ahem of trying to learn to read Middle Egyptian. I love Greek and Roman history, myths and writings but I’m a dunce at languages (hence the out of Classics). I also especially love greek historians and philosophers such as Thucydides, Plato, Herodotus etc.
I’m an amateur nerd. I took four years of Latin in high school, and, thanks to my mad teacher, got some Greek stuff along with it. I’ve read a handful of Horace’s Odes, chunks of Caesar’s Gallic Wars and Cicero’s Catilinian Orations, and about half of the Aeneid in the original Latin.
A lot of the intellectual snobbery displayed by other classicists realy turned me off to classics in general. But now that I’ve gone a few semesters without any Latin or Greek in my life, I’m thinking about picking it up again. I signed up for a light classics/comparative lit course next semester, and I’m looking forward to it.
Man. Only three of us? I thought for sure the classics bug had bitten more than that. Oh well. We’ll just have us a lil classics party in here. Weeeooo!
I was a Greek & Latin major when I was in college. Spent the summer in Greece with the SPAN program (Student Project for Amity among Nations) doing independent research. Came back, finished my report for the program (basically a thesis) and moved to Colorado thinking I was going to transfer to the University of Colorado.
It’s ten years later now.
I never did go back. Got a job, made some money, forgot my Greek and Latin.
I have my BA in History (medieval) and Classics. I am predominantly a Latinist. Unlike safostarr, I vastly prefer the Romans and the Latin language. I’ve read most of saffostarr’s Greek list, plus just about every major Roman author (from the epitaphs of the Scipiones to Apuleius) and a fair number of the medieval ones, especially the historians and the theologians (St. Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Bede, Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury, John of Salisbury, Hildegard, etc. and etc.).
My specialty is in medieval lyric poetry. More specifically, I am interested in the transmission of classical rhetoric into Latin and Occitan poetry.
Good luck with Julian. I wrote my last paper in college on the rhetoric of the Misopogon, which I would highly recommend you read in Greek. It’s a fun read, and Julian has an excellent sense of humor and a truly offbeat but dextrous mind.
If everything goes according to plan, I’ll be going on to grad school in September to start my Long Evil Degree that dare not speak its name.
current student of Classics here, probably finishing in 2002 after 5 years.
No Greek at all (I can truly say that it’s all… well, never mind), but quite a bit of Latin. Read Ovid’s Heroides, Cicero’s 1st and 2nd oration against Catiline as well as some of his letters, A play or two by Plautus, a bit of the Gaelic Wars, and some Sallust (stuff about Catiline also, IIRC).
My story is also one of being very interested in the mythology when I was young. In HS I took Latin for all four years, and in fact my university sponsors a Latin Day each year which really encourages and supports Latin in VT high schools and was part of what made me choose my college.
Continued Latin in college, changed majors 5 times or so, and settled on the classics as a great way to incorporate a lot of the courses of study I had already pursued (Latin, music, physics, english, math, and history).
[shameless plug for my university]
And actually, as a plug for the University of Vermont’s classic program, let me just say that it is wonderful. Small department with 4-5 full time faculty, and we graduate about 4 people on average per year from the department (either with a classic civ. major, latin, or greek). Incrediably bright and involved faculty with many many interests (the head of the department is a fabulous musician and has translated all of Bach’s works and put them online on this fabulous web site. I’ve been to every faculty member’s house at least once (even the one I haven’t had as a prof yet), and blah blah blah… I’m rambling and making this way too long.
[/shameless plug for my university]
Anyway, long live classics, and yeah, a classics party sounds fun. I’ll bring the ambrosia.
I’m a physics Ph.D., a Visiting Scientist, and a Director of Technology Applications at a high tech firm.
But I’m also the author of a book on mythology, put out last year by Oxford University Press. So can I sneak in? I’ve always been interested in mythology, and I was in the last generation of Altar Boys that had to memorize the Mass in Latin. I studied Latin on my own until High School, when I formally studied it. The trouble is, I haven’t used it in years, so it’s pretty rusty. I have, however, read a lot of mythology in translation. Thank the gods for the Loeb Classical Library.
Yay! Big hugs to all my fellow classicists. Considering what a fascinating field this is, I have always found it a damn shame that so few people are interested in it anymore. Eonwe, I go to the University of Richmond and our department can be described exactly the same as yours. Very small, but quite wonderful. I, too, came to Classics after switching majors a dozen or so times – I started as an English and Theater major. I’m much happier this way.
Maeglin, thanks for the Julian recommendation. I actually don’t know exactly what my Greek professor has lined up for us to read next semester, but if it’s still open for us to suggest things I’ll jump in with the Misopogon.
Oo, CalMeacham, a book on mythology? I wants I wants I wants! I can never have too many books on mythology. Whose mythology do you focus on? Is it retelling or interpretation?
I started taking Latin on a whim, and then started Greek a little while later because I liked the professor. Just graduated last May, and now I’m in grad school for Math (yeah, I deserted the cause ) Anyway, I totally prefer Latin to Greek, and the Romans to the Greeks. They’re so much more fun. But that’s just me.
Anyhow, I just finished a quarter of Ab urbe condita, read most of book 1 and the tail end of book 5. It was pretty interesting. Don’t know if I’ll have enough time to do it again next quarter, but we shall see…
Anyhow, I thought Sappho was great, even if I had to check out a massive copy of Liddel and Scott to track down some of the variants on stuff. My professor and I read a few of her poems just for kicks last year, and we couldn’t get our hands on a dictionary with her own particular idiom. Also, Juvenal rocks.
I’m currently a high school junior. I’ve been taking Latin since 7th grade, and am at this point finishing up the last part of the AP syllabus. We’ve read selections from Martial, Cicero, and Caesar, and have studied Catullus in considerable detail, along with Ovid’s Metamorphoses (his Amores are the last poems we read as part of the AP course this year). Next year we will read Juvenal, among other things.
I have taken Greek since my freshman year. We have read some Sappho, a few Homeric hymns, and some Aesop (by way of Valerius Babrius). We also have read some miscellaneous strange stuff, like an engraving on a stele – some oath, bah, I can’t remember its name. Next year we read the Gospel of John, and then we will read Homer or anything else that interests us. (It’ll be the last two terms of our senior year, and Greek, while always optional, is especially optional at that point, so the classics department is pretty flexible.)
I like both languages, but then again, I seem to like languages in general, as I also take Spanish, and I would take French too, if we were allowed to take both French and Spanish.
SDP – Did you have anything in mind for what you’re going to request for your senior year? I’m interested in hearing it. I highly recommend Aristophanes. Intelligent toilet humour, if such things are possible. Lysistrata is a good one to go with for maximum understanding with minimum knowledge of surrounding history necessary. Plus, it has dildo jokes.
Herodotus also gets high marks, though his style is plodding and rather irksome to slog through. Still, it’s hysterical to see what the “father of history” passes off as fact – stories about Egyptian crocodiles with earrings and the phoenix come to mind. Not to mention his discussion of Spartans and their marijuana spas.
If you go with more Christian texts, read Revelations! I demanded this in the one flexible day we had in my New Testament Greek class this year, and I wasn’t disappointed. Vivid imagery and language, even better in Greek though it’s still fun in English. If someone can tell me how to fiddle vb code to let me do different typefaces, I’ll quote my favourite Biblical line in Greek, which is from Revelations.
Tenebras – I had the same problem with Sappho. Since so little literature survives in the Lesbian dialect it can be very difficult to find a reliable dictionary. My mini-copy of LSJ has worked pretty well for me, but it helps to have a rundown of the peculiarities of Lesbian grammar on hand as well (much as with Homer, where we needed several pages’ worth of Homeric grammar to help our poor Attic-trained minds to understand him).
Well, I’m a biology major in college, but I plan on getting a Latin minor. I did take 5 years of Latin in high school(starting in 8th grade obviously). We translated a little bit of everything, but my two AP years were the Aenied and then a year of Catullus and Ovid.
-Lil
Hehe… thought I’d resurrect an old thread (and what better than the Classicist thread?) to say that I’m going to an Ides of March party. Tee-hee…
Um… ok. So I’m a dork… But finals start next week! Booo!!!
So long as the thread is resurrected, I’d like to sing a little song:
Seeking the best, the highest our goal,
working for greatness through glories of old,
searching the realms of the golden past,
we follow the classics’ truths that last
In knowledge, truth, and fellowship,
we’re growing every day;
the friendly hand of JCL aids in every way.
In Rome’s proud steps we’re marching on
with every true colleague,
and forever we’ll hold
to the Purple and Gold
of the Junior Classical League.
BA in history (medieval) and a minor in Latin that just sorta happened, I swear.
Seneca is overrated tripe, except when he’s not. Despite the Latin, I’m not that much of a Classicist - the grandeur of Rome is fascinating, of course, but I lean more towards the period of roughly two hundred years that encompass the eight crusades.
I really have nothing worthwhile to contribute to this thread, other than to asseverate that lno is an illiteratus. And that I will be hearing any day this week whether I have been accepted into a classics PhD program at Columbia University. So, like, sacrifice and drink libations for me and stuff.
Pointless name drop because he’s the only famous person I’ve ever met and you all are the only people in the world that might care: I met Peter Brown once at a small intimate gathering of only about 50 people. Really an incredible man.
I’m more of an aspiring medivalist myself (at least these days: I’m still working throuhg various passions until I get a chance to go to serious grad school and have to settle down.)
I don’t suppose anyone here is familiar with William Stubb’s work on the development of the English constitution? 'Cause I wrote a kick ass midterm analysing it this last Thursday, and there isn’t anybody who seems to realy appriciate just how hard that was . . .
Oh yeah: good luck, Maeglin. We are waiting on my husband’s grad-school admission letters right now, and it is a harrowing experience. I hate Sundays because the mail dosen’t run.
Considering what a fascinating field this is, I have always found it a damn shame that so few people are interested in it anymore. Eonwe, I go to the University of Richmond and our department can be described exactly the same as yours. Very small, but quite wonderful. I, too, came to Classics after switching majors a dozen or so times – I started as an English and Theater major. I’m much happier this way.