Classical Civilization Department

Classical Civilization is available in the Sixth Form at AS and A2.

Even the most cursory look at modern-day life reveals our huge debt to classical antiquity. In one celebrated scene of a cult Monty Python film, the question is posed: ‘What have the Romans ever done for us … aside from the aqueducts, the roads, rule of law, schools, and medicine?’ The Roman occupation of British soil for nearly four hundred years has left innumerable traces of their direct involvement in the development of British society: their (straight) roads crisscross our landscape, ruins of their centrally-heated villas survive, and many of our major cities are known by the names given to Roman settlements on the same sites.

Nevertheless, our debt to the Greeks is possibly even greater: while the Romans were engineers and a redoubtable military force, the Greeks were thinkers, giving us philosophy, economics, theatre, and a belief in freedom of thought and speech. They also fundamentally shaped our political structures and our assumptions about democracy. It is no exaggeration to say that the Greeks had a totally new conception of what human life was for, and that it was they who showed for the first time what the human mind was for.