Graduate Program
Ancient History at Yale
Courses are available in a wide range of fields in Classical History, ranging from Classical Greece to Late Antiquity, visiting the Hellenistic World, Ancient Economics and Law, the Roman Republic and Empire and Ancient Religion along the way. There are also specialized methodological courses utilizing Yale’s impressive collections of ancient coins and papyri. For qualifying exams, you read from a specialized reading list, including a core of the greatest hits of the ancient world, such as Homer, Euripides and Aeschylus, or Virgil, Ovid and Tacitus. This provides for more rigorous training in the ancient languages than one might find in a traditional History department, while at the same time letting you to focus more on historical questions than a more traditional philological program allows.
Yale’s resources are superb, including (in addition to the wealth of material in Yale’s main libraries) a specialized Classics Library, the coin and papyri collections, and numerous electronic databases and other media. Furthermore, the generous Berkeley, Biddle and Woolsey funds provide ample opportunity to visit first hand ancient sites in the Mediterranean and beyond.
Graduate study in the Ancient History stream in Classics also provides great opportunities for teaching development, with opportunities to teach Greek and Latin at the beginning and intermediate levels and also to serve as a teaching fellow for classes in, inter alia, Classical Greek History, Hellenistic History, the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. This, in addition to the linguistic preparation, provides a firm foundation for the further pursuit of an academic career in either Classics or History departments.
