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Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, classics traditionally refers to the study of Classical Greek and Roman literature and their related original languages, Ancient Greek and Latin. Classics also includes Greco-Roman philosophy, history, archaeology, anthropology, art, mythology and society as secondary subjects.

In Western civilization, the study of the Greek and Roman classics was traditionally considered to be the foundation of the humanities and has traditionally been the cornerstone of a typical elite European education.

The word classics is derived from the Latin adjective classicus, meaning "belonging to the highest class of citizens." The word was originally used to describe the members of the Patricians, the highest class in ancient Rome. By the 2nd century AD the word was used in literary criticism to describe writers of the highest quality.[1] For example, Aulus Gellius, in his Attic Nights, contrasts "classicus" and "proletarius" writers.[2] By the 6th century AD, the word had acquired a second meaning, referring to pupils at a school.[1] Thus, the two modern meanings of the word, referring both to literature considered to be of the highest quality and the standard texts used as part of a curriculum, were both derived from Roman use.[1]

In the Middle Ages, classics and education were tightly intertwined; according to Jan Ziolkowski, there is no era in history in which the link was tighter.[3] Medieval education taught students to imitate earlier classical models,[4] and Latin continued to be the language of scholarship and culture, despite the increasing difference between literary Latin and the vernacular languages of Europe during the period.[4]

While Latin was hugely influential, according to thirteenth-century English philosopher Roger Bacon, "there are not four men in Latin Christendom who are acquainted with the Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic grammars."[5] Greek was rarely studied in the West, and Greek literature was known almost solely in Latin translation.[6] The works of even major Greek authors such as Hesiod, whose names continued to be known by educated Europeans, along with most of Plato, were unavailable in Christian Europe.[6] Some were rediscovered through Arabic translations; a School of Translators was set up in the border city of Toledo, Spain, to translate from Arabic into Latin.

Along with the unavailability of Greek authors, there were other differences between the classical canon known today and the works valued in the Middle Ages. Catullus, for instance, was almost entirely unknown in the medieval period.[6] The popularity of different authors also waxed and waned throughout the period: Lucretius, popular during the Carolingian Renaissance, was barely read in the twelfth century, while for Quintilian the reverse is true.[6]

The late 17th and 18th centuries are the period in Western European literary history which is most associated with the classical tradition, as writers consciously adapted classical models.[11] Classical models were so highly prized that the plays of William Shakespeare were rewritten along neoclassical lines, and these "improved" versions were performed throughout the 18th century.[12] In the United States, the nation's Founders were strongly influenced by the classics, and they looked in particular to the Roman Republic for their form of government.[13]

From the beginning of the 18th century, the study of Greek became increasingly important relative to that of Latin.[14]In this period Johann Winckelmann's claims for the superiority of the Greek visual arts influenced a shift in aesthetic judgements, while in the literary sphere, G.E. Lessing "returned Homer to the centre of artistic achievement".[15]In the United Kingdom, the study of Greek in schools began in the late 18th century. The poet Walter Savage Landor claimed to have been one of the first English schoolboys to write in Greek during his time at Rugby School.[16] In the United States, philhellenism began to emerge in the 1830s, with a turn "from a love of Rome and a focus on classical grammar to a new focus on Greece and the totality of its society, art, and culture.".[17]

Though the influence of classics as the dominant mode of education in Europe and North America was in decline in the 19th century, the discipline was rapidly evolving in the same period. Classical scholarship was becoming more systematic and scientific, especially with the "new philology" created at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century.[22] Its scope was also broadening: it was during the 19th century that ancient history and classical archaeology began to be seen as part of classics, rather than separate disciplines.[20]

During the 20th century, the study of classics became less common. In England, for instance, Oxford and Cambridge universities stopped requiring students to have qualifications in Greek in 1920,[21] and in Latin at the end of the 1950s.[23] When the National Curriculum was introduced in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 1988, it did not mention the classics.[23] By 2003, only about 10% of state schools in Britain offered any classical subjects to their students at all.[24] In 2016, AQA, the largest exam board for A-Levels and GCSEs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, announced that it would be scrapping A-Level subjects in Classical Civilisation, Archaeology, and Art History.[25] This left just one out of five exam boards in England which still offered Classical Civilisation as a subject. The decision was immediately denounced by archaeologists and historians, with Natalie Haynes of the Guardian stating that the loss of the A-Level would deprive state school students, 93% of all students, the opportunity to study classics while making it once again the exclusive purview of wealthy private-school students.[26]

However, the study of classics has not declined as fast elsewhere in Europe. In 2009, a review of Meeting the Challenge, a collection of conference papers about the teaching of Latin in Europe, noted that though there is opposition to the teaching of Latin in Italy, it is nonetheless still compulsory in most secondary schools.[27] The same may also be said in the case of France or Greece. Indeed, Ancient Greek is one of the compulsory subjects in Greek secondary education, whereas in France, Latin is one of the optional subjects that can be chosen in a majority of middle schools and high schools. Ancient Greek is also still being taught, but not as much as Latin.

One of the most notable characteristics of the modern study of classics is the diversity of the field. Although traditionally focused on ancient Greece and Rome, the study now encompasses the entire ancient Mediterranean world, thus expanding the studies to Northern Africa and parts of the Middle East.[28]

Philology is the study of language preserved in written sources; classical philology is thus concerned with understanding any texts from the classical period written in the classical languages of Latin and Greek.[29]The roots of classical philology lie in the Renaissance, as humanist intellectuals attempted to return to the Latin of the classical period, especially of Cicero,[30] and as scholars attempted to produce more accurate editions of ancient texts.[31] Some of the principles of philology still used today were developed during this period; for instance, the observation that if a manuscript could be shown to be a copy of an earlier extant manuscript, then it provides no further evidence of the original text, was made as early as 1489 by Angelo Poliziano.[32] Other philological tools took longer to be developed: the first statement, for instance, of the principle that a more difficult reading should be preferred over a simpler one, was in 1697 by Jean Le Clerc.[33]

The modern discipline of classical philology began in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century.[22] It was during this period that scientific principles of philology began to be put together into a coherent whole,[34] in order to provide a set of rules by which scholars could determine which manuscripts were most accurate.[35] This "new philology", as it was known, centered around the construction of a genealogy of manuscripts, with which a hypothetical common ancestor, closer to the original text than any existing manuscript, could be reconstructed.[36]

Classical archaeology is the oldest branch of archaeology,[37] with its roots going back to J.J. Winckelmann's work on Herculaneum in the 1760s.[38] It was not until the last decades of the 19th century, however, that classical archaeology became part of the tradition of Western classical scholarship.[38] It was included as part of Cambridge University's Classical Tripos for the first time after the reforms of the 1880s, though it did not become part of Oxford's Greats until much later.[21]

The second half of the 19th century saw Schliemann's excavations of Troy and Mycenae; the first excavations at Olympia and Delos; and Arthur Evans' work in Crete, particularly on Knossos.[39] This period also saw the foundation of important archaeological associations (e.g. the Archaeological Institute of America in 1879),[40] including many foreign archaeological institutes in Athens and Rome (the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 1881, British School at Athens in 1886, American Academy in Rome in 1895, and British School at Rome in 1900).[41]

More recently, classical archaeology has taken little part in the theoretical changes in the rest of the discipline,[42] largely ignoring the popularity of "New Archaeology", which emphasized the development of general laws derived from studying material culture, in the 1960s.[43] New Archaeology is still criticized by traditional minded scholars of classical archaeology despite a wide acceptance of its basic techniques.[44]

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