Arts (Classics and ancient history), Bachelor

Our flexible Bachelor of Arts degree offers a wide range of over 50 majors and minors across humanities, social sciences, business, health, and science, enabling you to explore diverse interests while keeping career options broad. This interdisciplinary program allows you to pursue your passions alongside professional preparation.Select a primary arts major and complement it with secondary majors, minors, and electives from various fields, such as combining sociology and psychology with a Chinese elective, or pairing economics with English, or crime, justice, and legal studies with linguistics. Your primary major will appear on your academic transcript, showcasing your expertise to employers, and you'll receive support from world-class academics to shape your future.

In a Classics and Ancient History major you will study the ancient Greek and Roman worlds from the Mediterranean to regions as far afield as Britain and Persia. You will learn about the classical ‘reception’ of Greece and Rome in subsequent societies through the study of literature, art and popular culture and study how ancient Greek and Roman cultures have had a profound influence on later societies, including their political systems, art and writings, as well as many modern languages. In this major you will analyse how themes from classical mythology inform modern superhero tales and psychological theory, and how ancient empires and social institutions, such as slavery, have helped to justify both revolutions and dictatorships.

The rich choice of subjects available in the Classics and Ancient History major will teach you about gladiatorial games, epic heroes, the afterlife and ancient death rituals as well as Greek and Roman histories, mythologies, languages, art, archaeology, literature and societies. As well as being taught how to read and analyse ancient sources, you will be trained to analyse films, television and other modern interpretations of the ancient world. These textual analysis skills will enable you to better understand aspects of ancient cultures including warfare, gender roles, social status and ethnic identity. Upon completion of this major you will have a solid understanding of the ancient world, as well its importance for later history and contemporary society. 

This major spans the period 800 BCE to 200 CE, and particularly concentrates on archaic and classical Greece (700-323 BCE) and Rome in the late republic and early empire (100 BCE-100 CE).