Why Classics? : Learn More Studying Classics in the modern day Learn More Newsletter : Read More Classics Department annual report Read More Pyrphoros : Read More Princeton's Undergraduate Classics Journal Read More 1 / 3 Start animation ▶ ︎ ︎ 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. Undergraduate Program Major or minor, study abroad, or join the Classics Club Graduate Program Tracks in Literature, Medieval Studies, History, Philosophy & Reception People Meet our faculty, students, staff, emeriti, visitors, and affiliates Courses Lectures, workshops, and seminars across subfields and disciplines Haubold and Helle's "Enuma Elish" reviewed in TLS "Fortunately, the introduction and thirteen accompanying essays make a masterly case for it as a remarkable example of carefully structured verse, and for its poet as a highly skilled and innovative writer. They leave no doubt that, technically and intellectually, Enuma elish was in its day a tour de force. Three thousand years later, this excellent little book helps us see why." Award Aditi Rao receives IHUM Fellowship Award Adriana Clark '27 awarded Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Events Apr 17 Special Event A New Translation of The Odyssey Daniel Mendelsohn in conversation with Yelena Baraz Thursday, April 17, 2025, 6:00 pm Location Labyrinth Books Apr 21 Lecture New Excavations at Pompeii: Seasonality and Non-Elite Lifestyles Allison Emmerson Monday, April 21, 2025, 4:30 pm Location East Pyne 010 Apr 24 Lecture What does Jean-Michel Basquiat have to do with Socrates, the Punic Wars & Hypatia of Alexandria? An interpretation of Jawbone of an Ass (1982) Gábor Betegh Thursday, April 24, 2025, 12:00 pm Location Scheide Caldwell 209 View All Events Faculty Publications Tiberius & His Age: Myth, Sex, Luxury, and Power - Edward Champlin, Princeton University Press, 2024Rome’s second emperor, Tiberius (42 BCE–CE 37), has traditionally been seen as a villainous hypocrite—treacherous, grasping, vindictive, and depraved. But in Tiberius and His Age, Edward Champlin draws on vast and diverse evidence to show that Tiberius was—and was seen by contemporaries to be—recognizably human and far more complex than the monster of the hostile tradition that began with Tacitus and Suetonius. Enuma Elish: The Babylonian Epic of Creation - Johannes Haubold, Sophus Helle, Enrique Jiménez & Selena Wisnom, 2024Acting as a companion to the poem, the book provides readers with the tools they need to explore Enuma Elish in greater depth. Essays cover important historical and contextual information, offer discussions of key topics and explanations of technical terms, as well as suggestions of relevant further reading. The book's interpretive and reflective approach, which pays special attention to questions of poetic style, intertextual resonance, and literary and cultural significance, encourages a greater understanding of the poem as a work of literature while remaining grounded in philology. Women in Martial: A Semiotic Reading - Ilaria Marchesi, Oxford University Press 2024Women in Martial is the first monograph to treat the portrayals of women in Martial's Epigrams in a systematic way. In this volume, Marchesi proposes a new method of exploring the cultural construction of femininity in the Flavian age, presenting an interplay between close readings of Martial's poems and their contextualization through legal, historiographic, rhetorical, and grammatical discussions.