2021 Classics For Everyone Prize Essay

I love computer science. I often find myself thinking about problems, or even creating new ones, and attempting to solve them with computer code. In the future, I dream to create software that can improve people’s lives and the environment around them. So if I love computers so much, why on Zeus’s green earth am I studying classics? Let me tell you...

Aside from computer science, another pretty cool thing I studied in high school was Latin. Taking my mom’s advice that the ancient language would be good for my English vocab and roots, I took Latin starting my 9th grade year, and continued on for all four years. At the beginning, I didn't even know who spoke the Latin language! That changed the next semester: then I at least knew it was those weird old Italian guys or something.

While not really having an interest in ancient world history, I still stuck with Latin throughout my four years, and if I’m being honest here, the reason at first was just because I heard so often that colleges really want you to stick with a foreign language all four years of high school, and so I thought, “hey, I’m already here!” That mentality changed through my sophomore English class, where I really enjoyed dabbling in Greek mythology through the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and, finally, the Inferno. The stories and characters of Greek mythology paired with the sometimes purposely funny–sometimes accidentally funny–writing of Homer and Virgil really sparked my interest in Greek and Roman mythology. I really wish I had paid attention the year before, the period where I wasn’t even sure who spoke that language where–you know–there are 10,000 vocab words for “kill” (yes, I’m still talking about Latin). Then, in my last year of high school, a funny thing happened. I started to really enjoy history! Modern world history, ancient world history, Roman history! The more I saw connections to modern day, the more infatuated I got with the over 2000 year old civilization.

Upon taking up an offer from my Latin teacher, I started to attend extra Latin readings of ancient sources, specifically of the historian Suetonius. I won’t lie, as a high schooler who struggled through translating Caesar’s Gallic Wars–a work written in language any common Roman would have understood–Suetonius’s descriptions of various emperors (we started with Domitian) largely went over my head. However, getting exposed to more “real Latin” text–the wild unbridled language where word order doesn’t really matter–and also hearing my teachers and other ambitious classmates work through these texts really made me appreciate the ancient sources: not just for the beautiful word patterns and imagery they composed (e.g. Virgil’s Aeneid in authentic Latin) but also for the immense historical detail these works included. The ancient texts made me feel much closer to a 2000 year old civilization than I’d usually feel on the average day.

As a double major, you would assume both majors would have something to do with and help my future career. And while they both do, it’s not so obvious the connection. Taking history and writing classes through the KU Classics department on top of my computer sciences courses, while challenging, pushes me to improve my critical thinking and reasoning skills. A large part of what I strive to get out of my college experience is a well-rounded education. Classics is an amazing way to accomplish just that while also learning about ancient cultures and civilizations, whose practices still influence our modern world in an assortment of areas.

Many complex topics today directly reflect the ancient Greek and Roman world’s issues. A great example is through a course I took over the winter: Ethics in Greek Tragedy. Through this course, I learned that the point of these ancient Greek tragic plays were certainly not to make you delighted after a happy ending. On the flip, they were not created just to bum you out either. The ancient tragedians used these spectacular plays as a means to shed light on complex issues using figures from Greek mythology. These scenes depicted by ancient tragedians certainly don’t feature a “perfect” character who does everything well and another who acted fully in the wrong. As the stories take you through violent, gruesome, and/or disturbing scenarios, you, as an individual are forced to weigh all of the actions of each character, and, in the end, then you still might kind of just make a guess as to who acted more right. This style of storytelling forces the audience to think deeper, and it leads to great development in critical thinking.

Another bonus of Classics is how many different ancient cultures you learn about. That’s right, it’s not just Greece and Rome! Considering the expanse of both the Greek (I’m counting Macedonian) and Roman empires at their respective heights, it would be almost impossible not to learn about the ancient cultures which these empires interacted with alongside discussing the Greek and Roman empires themselves.

Greece and Rome are everywhere in the modern day. The Roman senate and its political practices are the model of the U.S. senate today. The great ancient Greek democratic policies in Athens are a huge inspiration for foundational documents of the United States, as well as all over the world. Professions like law and medicine are riddled with Greek and Latin terms and ideas. Classics is everywhere, and studying it at the core, what the Romans, the Greeks, the ancient civilizations of our world were all about, allows us to think critically, tell stories, and most importantly, connect with cultures other than our own. Today, connectivity and a sense of global community are so important, and with hard diseases that try to divide us, a sense of togetherness is something to strive for.