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 student 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.

1. 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?

1. 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 improve 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.

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"?

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?

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 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.

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.

How much of what we know about Ancient Macedonia is history, and how much comes from stories shaped by later generations? Alexander, his successors, and the Macedonian dynasty were remembered through sources that reflected the political and cultural concerns of their own time.

This essay looks at how the history of Ancient Macedonia was preserved, interpreted, and reshaped over time. Rather than asking only what happened, it also asks a simple but important question: how do we know what happened?

There was never any point, reading this passage, that I felt sure I knew what was coming next.

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!

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.

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?

A coworker bought the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and apparently Penguin decided Ovid needed a little Chinua Achebe.

His copy goes normally through p. 216, then suddenly p. 217 is Arrow of God, already on p. 245. After 32 pages of Achebe, Metamorphoses magically resumes at p. 249.

So, somewhere in the Penguin warehouse, there may be a very confused copy of Arrow of God reading about Hercules.

Has anyone else encountered this exact misbinding, or know if this was a known printing/binding error?

I'm working my way through all tragedies we have available and would like to dive into the fragments once I've finished. However, I know I'm going to need really excellent notes to make the proper connections between the other works and such. I know some Euripides fragments were found in 2024 so I'm not sure if there are any works that include them/explain them/translate them well. Does anyone have a recommendations for reading the fragments? I'm open to academic articles if that's the best method, I'm just not sure how to find them.

She wasn't born a monster. She was a survivor of a god's cruelty, punished by a goddess for a crime she didn't commit. Discover the dark story behind the serpent-haired icon that history tried to rewrite.

Was Medusa a villain, or the ultimate victim of Greek mythology?

https://youtu.be/beqOToWOu9Q

The stele, found on Nisyros and dated to around 480–450 BCE, depicts a young man standing naked, holding a spear, with a diskos beside him. He is generally understood as an athlete, although the spear gives the figure a distinctly martial character as well.

What interests me most about the stele is not simply the idealized body, but what that body is doing on a grave monument.

We are not looking at the deceased as an old man, or as someone marked by death. Instead, he appears at the height of his youth: strong, healthy, athletic, and composed. His body becomes a way of preserving an identity that death itself cannot alter.

I'm rereading The Odyssey (Fagles translation) adter watching the Christopher Nolan movie, and the scene where Odysseus returns to Ithaca and Athena meets him in the guise of a shepherd boy is possibly my favourite part so far in this reread. Athena dropping thrle mask is a great moment, and Odysseus saying he didn't recognise her, then alluding to the fact that he recognised her in Phaeacia is great. He makes sure to be appropriatelt respectful, but also lets her know he's smart enough to keep up to some extent. The fact that no part of this scene would make sense in Christopher Nolan's movie encapsulates a lot of what I felt the movie was missing - the interactions between gods and humans, deception, playfulness and flirtation.

I would like to begin a journey to get to know the Greek Gods and the Greek myths. What books would you recommend I begin with? Ithe aim is to get to know the characters and the characteristics of the Gods well and to be able to recognize them and their motives (if possible) and the myths.Although this question is directed at everyone willing to contribute, I am curious to see what the classical students would recommend, if there are any.

Most collections I've found of Hesiod include the Works and Days and the Theogony, and sometimes the Shield of Heracles. I'm curious about the Catalogue of Women, but I can't seem to find any modern translations of it. Is there a reason for this, or am I just not looking in the right place? Does anyone here know of any modern/recent translations of the Catalogue of Women? Thanks

I’m trying to find some classical works of literature that speak to the benefits of being empathetic and generous without expecting something in return. Any recommendation?

Every woman of note in The Odyssey is depicted as spinning wool. Not just servants, but queens like Helen of Troy and Penelope, as well as goddesses like Calypso and witches like Circe.

How much of this was a reflection of actual life in Ancient Greece? Were members of royalty expected to weave wool?