If you have ever walked around campus, one of the highlights is the stained glass of Dodd Hall. But what’s in there? The answer in part is two lovely couches to nap on. The other is the classics department. The subject of classics involves the study of antiquity, mainly in the art, literature and history of Greek, Roman and adjacent Western civilizations (for example, Persia and Egypt). It’s a subject that’s known by the general public, but most folks don’t realize there is a whole department dedicated to it. I found out about the department my freshmen year from my favorite professor, an Ovidian scholar and one of my few professors that was a woman. Easily she is the smartest person I have ever met. I was in her Classical Mythology class, and in office hours she was talking about the subject. We were talking about her undergrad experience – when she told me she majored in classics and that it was a whole degree I was shocked. A whole degree dedicated to myth and culture seemed like a perfect fit for me. I found in that class that I was very good at myth and had a knack for the subject. To this day, I can still recite for you four generations of the Mycenaean cycle of myth. I had this professor my sophomore year as well, and by that time I figured out that I wanted to double major. I officially became a double major this summer, and I couldn’t be more excited.
The beauty of classics deals in a little bit of everything. You have the literature and writing aspects of it with mythology and the epics (the Odyssey, for example); you have the theatrical/drama side of it with the plays; there’s a lot of history in there, and oftentimes it intertwines a lot with myth; some of the most revered and respected art comes from classical civilizations. Now to a lot of people, the subject seems outdated and irrelevant, boring, rampant with old white men. While part of this is true in that white men are the majority and it can get boring on the history side of things, I think the mythology here is more relevant than ever. It is the cornerstone of our culture – whether it’s in the design of our most important government buildings, or democracy itself, our vocabulary, movies and television, it permeates all areas of life. I have developed a passion for the beauty of these stories and advocating for them. Drawing these timeless stories into the modern-day, it’s amazing how well they translate and how relevant they still are.
Besides just being relevant, this subject is fun. I know it sounds crazy — all these dusty old texts and languages you can’t understand being fun. Yet mythology is absolutely wild and random and ridiculous in the best ways. Apollo created dolphins from pirates! A lover of Aphrodite dies amongst lettuce and turns into an anemone flower! There’s cannibalism, talking horses, the first recorded occurrence of AI and drama worthy of Love Island. It is a major of limitless fun facts and weird trivia. Even better than that, I get to actually apply and use my English major in this major. Whether it’s breaking down or analyzing poetry, writing retellings of myth, creating my own or simply writing a bomb academic paper. Essentially, I remix them. For writing, I get to bring in that wealth of mythological knowledge both in my annotations and analysis of works and in root words or etiologies. An example of this is in my fiction class this semester. We had an assignment where we had to pick a myth or fable and retell it. So I chose the story of Medusa and set it in a modern #metoo setting. In this subject, I focus on women. I focus on the forgotten in these stories and histories. Classics isn’t what you think it is — it’s not just Percy Jackson or ruins, it is so much more.
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