What Is Classics? Classical Studies, Methods, Funding, and Careers

Classics, also called classical studies, is the study of classical antiquity: the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, and material remains of ancient Greece and Rome. It is one of the oldest organized fields in the modern university, and one of the most methodologically varied, because answering a single question about the ancient world may require reading a damaged papyrus, comparing medieval manuscripts, interpreting an inscription, and placing the result in a wider historical argument. This guide explains what classics is as a research discipline, how its subfields and methods work, what digital resources such as the Perseus Digital Library and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae contribute, how the field is organized and funded, and what research offices should know when supporting it.

What Is Classics?

Classics is defined by its object of study rather than by a single method. Its core is the Greek and Latin languages and the texts written in them, but the field extends to everything that helps explain the ancient Mediterranean world: its political and social history, its religion and philosophy, its art and architecture, and the physical evidence recovered from the ground. In practice a classicist is usually trained first as a reader of Greek, Latin, or both, and then specializes in a question, a period, or a body of evidence.

Three features distinguish the discipline:

• Close attention to language. Most arguments in classics begin with a text read in the original. Fine points of vocabulary, syntax, meter, and style are treated as evidence, not decoration.
• Fragmentary and mediated evidence. Very little ancient writing survives in the form its authors produced. Texts reach us through centuries of copying, and many works survive only in part. A great deal of the discipline’s craft is about deciding what an ancient author most plausibly wrote and what the surviving evidence can support.
• Long reception. Greek and Roman texts, images, and ideas have been read, translated, adapted, and contested for more than two thousand years, and how that happened is itself a subject of research.

The terms “classics,” “classical studies,” and “classical antiquity” are used closely together but not identically. “Classical antiquity” names the historical period, “classics” and “classical studies” name the academic field, and usage varies by country and by department. Some departments emphasize language and literature, others ancient history or archaeology, and many combine them.

Subfields and Approaches

Classics is better understood as a cluster of connected subfields than as one method. The boundaries are porous, and many scholars work across several.

• Philology. The study of language in written texts. In classics it covers the Greek and Latin languages, their grammar and history, and the establishment, interpretation, and commentary of texts. The word “philology” is also used more broadly for the careful study of texts in any language; see What Is Linguistics? for the study of language more generally.
• Literary study. The reading of epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, oratory, and philosophy as literature, including genre, narrative, and rhetoric. It shares questions with literary studies but works from ancient languages and conventions.
• Ancient history. The reconstruction of Greek and Roman political, economic, social, and military history from texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri, and archaeological evidence. It overlaps with history, while keeping a strong emphasis on source criticism for a period where evidence is sparse.
• Classical archaeology. The study of material culture: sites, buildings, pottery, sculpture, and everyday objects. Modern field and laboratory practice is described in What Is Archaeology?.
• Art history. The analysis of Greek and Roman visual arts and architecture; see What Is Art History? for the wider field.
• Ancient philosophy. The study of thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle and the later schools, in both classics and philosophy departments. See What Is Philosophy? for the broader discipline.
• Ancient religion. Cult, ritual, myth, and belief, which connects classics to religious studies.
• Reception studies. How classical texts and ideas have been interpreted, translated, staged, and reused across later periods, from medieval and Renaissance readers to modern literature, film, and politics.

Methods

Because the ancient evidence is partial and often damaged, classics relies on a set of specialized methods for recovering, dating, and interpreting it.

Textual criticism

Textual criticism is the work of establishing what an ancient text most likely said, given that its surviving copies disagree. A scholar collects the manuscripts, records their variant readings, judges which readings are errors and how they arose, and prints an edited text with a critical apparatus recording the evidence. The Renaissance humanist Angelo Poliziano is credited with establishing early principles for evaluating manuscripts in 1489, and modern editorial practice developed through the philological scholarship of the 18th and 19th centuries. The product of this work is the critical edition, the standard scholarly form of a classical text. The choice of edition can change what an argument rests on, which is why classicists name the edition they use.

Epigraphy

Epigraphy is the study of inscriptions: texts cut or written on stone, metal, pottery, and other durable surfaces. Inscriptions preserve decrees, laws, dedications, funerary texts, and records that literary sources often omit, so they are a primary source for ancient social and political history. The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, begun under Theodor Mommsen, has been published in Berlin since 1863 and is the largest collection of Latin inscriptions. Inscriptiones Graecae is the corresponding corpus for Greek. Digital photography and three-dimensional scanning now help scholars read texts worn by erosion.

Papyrology

Papyrology is the study of ancient manuscripts and documents preserved on papyrus and similar portable materials. Large caches of well-preserved papyri found in Egypt in the 1880s and 1890s turned the field into a systematic discipline. Papyri include literary works that are otherwise lost or known only through later copies, and also letters, contracts, accounts, and legal records that illuminate everyday life. The work combines palaeography (reading and dating ancient handwriting), reconstruction of fragments, and documentary history.

Numismatics, palaeography, and material analysis

Coins, handwriting, and objects are evidence too. Numismatics studies coinage as a source for economic and political history; palaeography dates and localizes manuscripts by script; and archaeological science contributes dating and materials analysis, all of which feed back into textual and historical argument.

Commentary, translation, and interpretation

Interpretation in classics is conventionally built on commentary: line-by-line scholarly notes that explain language, background, parallels, and problems. Translation is both a service to students and a form of scholarship, since every translation embodies decisions about how to read a text.

Digital Classics

Classics was an early adopter of digital methods, largely because its core corpora are finite, heavily studied, and written in languages that reward searching. Two resources illustrate this.

• The Perseus Digital Library. Perseus describes itself as a non-profit enterprise and a digital library for classical texts and materials, located in the Department of Classical Studies at Tufts University. Its Scaife Viewer hosted, as of November 2022, 2,412 works in 3,192 editions and translations, about 69.7 million words, with texts including Homer’s Odyssey, Plato’s Republic, Vergil’s Aeneid, and Caesar’s Gallic War. Perseus lists support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alpheios Project, and Tufts University, among others.
• The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG). Founded in 1972 at the University of California, Irvine, the TLG digitizes Greek literary texts from Homer to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and beyond, at a reported scale of roughly 110 million words. It has been searchable online since 2001 by members of subscribing institutions, while bibliographic information and selected texts are freely available.

Beyond these, digital classics includes searchable inscription and papyrus databases, linked-data gazetteers of ancient places, text encoding of editions, computational analysis of vocabulary and style, and three-dimensional modelling of sites and objects. These projects raise the same questions as digital work elsewhere in the humanities: standards for data and metadata, sustainability after a grant ends, and credit for editors and encoders. Digital history projects face the same issues, discussed in the history guide, and libraries host much of the infrastructure; see What Is Library Science?. Licensing matters too: some resources are open and others are subscription-based, so check access terms before building a project plan around one.

A Short History of the Discipline

The study of Greek and Roman antiquity never fully stopped in the West, but its modern forms trace to the Renaissance. From the 14th century, humanists such as Petrarch and Boccaccio helped revive the study of Greek and the recovery of classical texts, and humanist education spread from Italy across Europe. Textual criticism developed alongside this recovery, with Poliziano’s principles in 1489 and later rules for weighing manuscripts, such as those Jean Le Clerc formulated in 1697.

At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, a “new philology” made classical scholarship more systematic and scientific, with Friedrich August Wolf among its foundational figures. Archaeology also took a recognizable shape in the 18th century, with excavations at Herculaneum, resumed in the 1730s, among its roots. In the 19th century, large corpus projects such as the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (published in Berlin since 1863) systematized the collection of primary evidence. Professional societies followed: the organization now called the Society for Classical Studies was founded in 1869. Later developments have widened the field to include social and cultural history, reception, and the digital methods described above.

Societies, Journals, and Professional Standards

The main professional body for classicists in North America is the Society for Classical Studies (SCS). It was founded in 1869 as the American Philological Association and renamed the Society for Classical Studies in 2013. It is based at New York University, publishes Transactions of the American Philological Association (TAPA), and holds an annual meeting each January jointly with the Archaeological Institute of America, with hundreds of scholarly papers delivered. Other countries have their own societies, and there are specialist bodies for archaeology, papyrology, epigraphy, and ancient philosophy.

Scholarly communication in classics is mixed. Journal articles are important, but so are monographs, critical editions, commentaries, and edited volumes, and promotion criteria in many departments recognize them as full research outputs. When evaluating classicists, administrators and review panels should avoid applying citation-count expectations from the sciences; see the overview of the branches of science for how fields differ in their conventions.

How Classical Research Is Funded and Supported

Classics is funded mainly through fellowships, small grants, institutional support, and infrastructure funding for editions and digital projects, rather than through large team grants.

• The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Established in 1965, NEH describes itself as the only federal agency in the United States dedicated to funding the humanities. It supports individual and collaborative research, including fellowships and digital humanities projects. Its Summer Stipends program is a common route for individual scholars and involves institutional nomination limits; see NEH Summer Stipends and the two-nomination cap. Program names, deadlines, and terms change, so always check the current notice of funding opportunity.
• Private foundations. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supports humanities and arts research and infrastructure, and is among the funders Perseus lists; see Mellon Foundation humanities and arts funding.
• Other funders. Research councils, learned academies, and national institutes abroad run fellowships and project grants; the British Academy, for example, runs postdoctoral fellowships (see the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship).
• Institutional support. Universities provide research leave, travel funds, and library resources, which are the main costs in a field that depends on manuscripts, collections, and fieldwork.

Training and Career Paths

Training typically starts with several years of Greek and Latin, followed by a PhD that adds reading knowledge of modern scholarly languages (commonly German, French, and Italian), advanced work in palaeography, epigraphy, or another specialist method, and a dissertation. Many scholars pursue university teaching and research. Others work in museums and heritage organizations, libraries and archives, publishing, school teaching, digital humanities, and roles that value analytic reading and languages. The skills of careful textual analysis, multilingual research, and evidence evaluation transfer widely.

Classics in Research Administration

For a research office, classics has its own norms. Practical points include:

• Budget realistically. Typical costs are research leave and release time, travel to libraries, museums, and sites, image and reproduction fees, permissions, and specialist transcription, rather than equipment or large personnel lines.
• Plan for fieldwork and permits. Archaeological projects abroad depend on permits from host-country authorities and on rules for the study, export, and publication of finds; these can be slow and vary by country.
• Treat editions as outputs. Critical editions and commentaries represent years of work and should be recognized in assessment alongside articles.
• Check access and rights. Manuscripts, papyri, and images held by libraries and museums often carry permission-to-publish conditions, and digitized texts may be licensed.
• Plan sustainability for digital outputs. A digital edition or database needs a plan for hosting, metadata, and maintenance after the grant ends.
• Recognize interdisciplinary teams. Projects often combine classicists with archaeologists, linguists, computer scientists, and conservators; clarify authorship and credit conventions early.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is classics in simple terms?

Classics is the study of ancient Greece and Rome through their languages, literature, history, philosophy, art, and archaeology. It usually begins with reading texts in Greek and Latin.

Is classics the same as classical studies?

The two terms are used for the same academic field. Some departments use “classics” for programs centered on Greek and Latin and “classical studies” for programs that also admit study of antiquity in translation, but usage varies by institution.

What is philology?

Philology is the study of language in written texts. In classics it includes the Greek and Latin languages and the editing and interpretation of ancient texts.

What do epigraphy and papyrology study?

Epigraphy studies inscriptions on durable materials such as stone and metal. Papyrology studies manuscripts and documents on papyrus and similar materials. Both supply evidence that literary texts do not.

What are Perseus and the TLG?

The Perseus Digital Library, based at Tufts University, offers classical texts and tools. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, based at the University of California, Irvine, is a large digital corpus of Greek literature, searchable by subscribing institutions.

Who funds research in classics?

Mainly fellowships, small grants, and institutional support. In the United States the NEH is a major federal source, alongside private foundations such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, universities, and learned societies.

What is the Society for Classical Studies?

It is the main North American professional society for classicists, founded in 1869 as the American Philological Association and renamed in 2013. It publishes TAPA and holds an annual meeting each January.