Princeton Classics
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.
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Major or minor, study abroad, or join the Classics Club
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Tracks in Literature, Medieval Studies, History, Philosophy & Reception
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Meet our faculty, students, staff, emeriti, visitors, and affiliates
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Lectures, workshops, and seminars across subfields and disciplines
Supratik Baralay appointed assistant professor of Classics
Princeton Classics is elated to announce the appointment of Dr. Supratik Baralay to a new tenure-track position as assistant professor of Classics. An ancient historian specializing in Parthian imperialism and Silk Road studies, Dr. Baralay marks a significant expansion in the department’s scope of teaching and research.
Faculty Publications
Tiberius & His Age: Myth, Sex, Luxury, and Power - Edward Champlin, Princeton University Press, 2024
Rome’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.
Acting 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 2024
Women 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.