Greek/Latin

Greek and Latin together are the languages of classical antiquity, the twin pillars of the written tradition that shaped Western thought, literature, philosophy, law, and religion for two thousand years and continues to influence them today. Greek is the language of Homer, Plato, Thucydides, the New Testament, and the foundational texts of mathematics and science. Latin is the language of Virgil, Cicero, the Roman legal code, the Catholic Church, and the learned discourse of medieval and Renaissance Europe.

To read them in the original is to access these traditions at their source, encountering ideas and arguments that have been transforming thinkers ever since.

At the University of Glasgow, this part-time programme allows you to develop your competence in both languages at a pace suited to your circumstances. You will work through the grammatical structures and literary registers of ancient Greek and Latin, reading texts of increasing complexity and developing the close reading and interpretive skills that serious classical scholarship requires. A year abroad option is available, giving you the opportunity to study in another country and to engage with classical scholarship in a different institutional and cultural context.

Graduates of Greek and Latin programmes develop exceptionally rigorous analytical and linguistic skills that are valued across many professional fields. Education, academia, publishing, journalism, law, and the civil service are all common destinations. The ability to read primary texts in their original languages opens research possibilities that are unavailable to those who rely on translation, and many graduates continue to postgraduate study in classics, ancient history, philosophy, or related fields.

The combination of intellectual rigour and linguistic depth that mastery of Greek and Latin represents is one of the most demanding and most rewarding achievements in the humanities.