Ancient History and Latin

Ancient history and Latin together provide one of the most intellectually rigorous routes into understanding the ancient world. Latin is the language in which Rome's statesmen, poets, historians, and philosophers wrote, and gaining proficiency in it unlocks direct access to an enormous range of primary texts, from Cicero's political speeches and Virgil's poetry to Caesar's military histories and Tacitus's incisive accounts of imperial power. Ancient history situates those texts in their political, social, and cultural contexts, using a wide range of sources, including inscriptions, coins, archaeological evidence, and papyri, alongside literature, to reconstruct the societies of Greece and Rome and the worlds they knew and shaped.

At the University of Edinburgh, this four-year programme allows you to develop genuine proficiency in Latin alongside a thorough grounding in ancient history, in one of the UK's leading research universities. The programme includes a year abroad, giving you the opportunity to study classical civilisation or history in another country, which might mean time in Italy, Greece, or another institution with exceptional classical resources. Edinburgh's classicists and historians are active researchers, and the programme connects teaching to real scholarship in ways that give you insight into how knowledge of the ancient world is actually produced and debated.

Graduates pursue careers in academia, heritage organisations, museums and archives, education, publishing, the civil service, and law. The linguistic and analytical skills developed through the combination, particularly the discipline of working with Latin texts in their original language, are valued well beyond the field of classics itself. Many graduates go on to postgraduate study in ancient history, classical languages, archaeology, or related disciplines, and doctoral research in these fields attracts strong competition for funded places at leading universities.