The Princeton Classics Department investigates the history, language, literature, and thought of ancient Greece and Rome. We use the perspectives of multiple disciplines to understand and imagine the diversity of these civilizations over almost two thousand years and to reflect on what the classical past has meant to later ages, and to our own.
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Major or minor, study abroad, or join the Classics Club
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Tracks in Literature, Medieval Studies, History, Philosophy & Reception
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Meet our faculty, students, staff, emeriti, visitors, and affiliates
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Lectures, workshops, and seminars across subfields and disciplines
Meet Peter Kelly: Revealing patterns between ancient and modern literature
In this Q&A with the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, Peter Kelly, assistant professor of classics, explores the conversation between art and literature in both ancient and modern times, illuminating their relationship to contemporary environmental and political concerns.
Events
Faculty Publications
Cicero: A Very Short Introduction
Yelena Baraz, 2026
In this Very Short Introduction, Yelena Baraz presents a concise and integrated account of Cicero's life and accomplishments, locating him within the political and intellectual contexts of his time. It shows that in all his pursuits Cicero saw himself as a mediating figure: between theory and practice, philosophy and politics, Greek and Roman, and among political interest groups. Baraz tackles each area of Cicero's activity on its own terms while showing how overarching ideas and priorities permeate the apparently separate endeavours.
Artificial Intelligence and Greek Philology
Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold, 2025
This open-access volume introduces readers to Logion, the first deep neural network designed to support philologists in editing Greek texts that have reached us via manuscript transmission. The model offers suggestions for how to fill lacunae; it also helps identify and emend portions of text that seem to have been corrupted in the process of textual transmission. Overall, this volume seeks to encourage a broader dialogue between artificial intelligence and Greek philology and to present an actual model for the use of machine learning in elucidating premodern texts.
Intellectual Property: Learned Slaves and Educated Freedmen in Republican Rome
Harriet Flower, 2025
Slaves and freedmen played an important yet understudied role in the literary culture of the Roman Republic. Though their work went largely uncredited, they fulfilled vital roles as editors, researchers, and collaborators in the service of Rome’s literary and political elite. Intellectual Property tells the stories of these gifted and highly educated young men, from Licinius the flute-player, who shaped the rhetorical style of the orator Gaius Gracchus, to the grammarian and teacher Tyrannio of Amisus, who was brought to Rome as a war captive.