Classics, BA (Hons)

Classics focuses on the languages of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, as well as their literature and culture. In this 3-year BA degree, you’ll study both ancient Greek and Latin, each at the level appropriate for you: we offer four levels—Beginner’s, Intermediate, Further, and Advanced—and by the end of the degree you will be reading unabridged works in the original language. Recently, texts taught at the Further and Advanced level have included letters by Cicero and Pliny the younger, Plutarch’s How to Study Poetry, Plato’s Phaedrus, extracts from epic poetry such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid, Euripides’ tragedy Helen, Aristophanes’ comedy Thesmophoriazusae, and Herodotus’ and Tacitus’ Histories.

Your Classics degree will be attractive to employers who can see that you have applied yourself to mastering challenging languages that require logical thinking, intellectual rigour, and creative adaptability. Your English grammar and syntax are likely to improve, making your written work more accurate, confident, and persuasive. And nothing compares to the thrill of being able to read texts in an originally unfamiliar language or deciphering artfully constructed arguments for yourself without the filter of a translation.