Princeton Weekly Bulletin, February 23, 1998
Perennially relevant
250 to 300 undergraduates enroll in Classics Department courses each semester
By Caroline Moseley
The study of Classics at Princeton is as old as the institution. In 1748, college president Aaron Burr declared, "None may expect to be admitted into College but such as being examined by the President and Tutors shall be found able to render Virgil and Tully's Orations into English; and to turn English into true and grammatical Latin; and to be so well acquainted with the Greek as to render any part of the four Evangelists in that language into Latin or English; and to give the grammatical connexion of the words."
While Princeton's classical admission standards have eased since 1748, the study of Greek and Latin language and literature still flourishes on campus. According to department chair Josiah Ober, who is David Magie Class of 1897 Professor of Classics, there are 250 to 300 undergraduates enrolled in departmental courses at any given time. That figure includes about 20 majors, he says, and 25 graduate students.
The department offers both Latin and Greek language courses, "starting from scratch," says Ober. There are beginning courses, as well as intensive beginning courses -- known familiarly, he says, as "Turbo-Greek" and "Turbo-Latin." After students have achieved a certain level of proficiency, they have the opportunity to read the works of writers whose names evoke today the Athenian agora and the Roman forum: Plato; Aristotle; Cicero; poets such as Horace, Hesiod, Pindar, Ovid, Juvenal; historians such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus; playwrights such as Aristophanes, Sophocles, Plautus; philosophers such as Lucretius and Seneca; and, of course, Homer's Odyssey and Vergil's Aeneid.
Students are "encouraged to spend at least one summer in Greece or Italy," says Ober -- perhaps at the American School for Classical Studies in Athens or the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome. "There's even a program at the Vatican in spoken Latin," he says.
Self and society
For those interested in the ancient world but unfamiliar with ancient languages, the department offers numerous courses taught through English translation -- courses in classical mythology, literature, drama, and history. Many of these are cross-listed with other departments, such as Edward Champlin's The Roman Republic, also offered by History; and Self and Society in Classical Greek Drama, taught by Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature Froma Zeitlin and also offered in Comparative Literature.
Many Classics courses are part of the graduate Program in the Ancient World and the undergraduate Program in Hellenic Studies. It is through the latter program, Ober points out, that interested students can study modern Greek -- a language "that bears much the same relationship to classical Greek as Italian bears to Latin or modern English to the language of Chaucer."
And, says Ober with a smile, "There's always something new in the Ancient World." He points to such courses as this spring's The Other Side of Rome, taught by Assistant Professor Andrew Feldherr. "This course examines the darker aspects of Roman society," says Ober, "its complexity and disorder." Students discuss "gender, sexuality, conspicuous consumption and ethnicity" in Imperial Rome, as well as "gladiatorial combat and beast games. "The Romans had a rich taste for spectacle," he comments.
Also on offer this spring is The Origins and Nature of English Vocabulary (cross-listed with English), taught by Visiting Lecturer Joshua Katz. The course will cover "Proto-Indo-European prehistory to current slang," says Ober, with "emphasis on the Greek and Latin component of English vocabulary."
Princeton Classics Web Project
And what might the great teacher Socrates have made of some of today's pedagogic novelties -- such as the Classics Department web page, which boasts the Princeton Classics Web Project? Here, besides information on Princeton faculty, courses and seminars, classicists access information on classics courses around the country and the world. Also available is a guide for instructors who wish to put course materials on the web, and an exhaustive guide to electronic resources for classicists, such as the Library of Congress Classics Resources Home Page, and Diotima, which lists resources on women and gender in the ancient world.
Ober himself will be teaching The Greek World in the Hellenistic Age (cross-listed with History). At Princeton since 1990 and department chair since 1993, Ober is a scholar of Greek history 750-150 BC -- a period that includes such luminaries as Pericles, Demosthenes, Plato and Aristotle. An authority on Athenian political, social and intellectual history, he is completing a book to be called "Political Dissent in Democratic Athens."
Department for everyone
What continues to attract students to classics today, in a curriculum rich with more recent and more clamorous languages and literatures?
"There are as many reasons as there are individuals," observes Ober. "Some students are interested in political systems, some in literature, some in history, some in folklore, some in linguistics, some in art and archaeology." No modern American, he believes, can fail to "engage the classical heritage in some way. Our political and literary values have developed as a response to classicism, whether we appropriate the ancients or reject them." The long shadow cast by Greece and Rome makes the study of classics "perennially relevant."
So relevant, he believes, that "Classics is really a department for everyone." He urges the University community to attend the department's public lectures -- three this spring -- and, of course, to visit that agora and forum of the '90s, the Internet: http://www.princeton.edu/~classics/.