Program Information

School: Dalhousie University
Faculty: Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
Degree: Bachelor; Honours
Field of Study: Classics and Classical Lang., Lit., and Linguistics, Gen.
Description: Classics is the study of the ancient Greeks and Romans: their myths, mysteries, and games, their epics, comedies, and tragedies, their languages, arts, and architectures, their religions, philosophies, and sciences. We examine how they constructed their relations to nature, literally created “history”, and discovered how terrible the human is. We learn their magic, blessings, and curses, their politics and laws, their social structures, and ways of making war. We look at their sex lives, how they died, and what they used for money. Classics tells the story of the rise and fall of their empires, and of what has indelibly lasted after imperial military and political forces collapsed. We investigate how what the Greeks and Romans became depended on encounters with the peoples, cultures, philosophies, technologies of war and peace, politics and religions of Egypt and North Africa, of Judea, Lebanon, and Syria, of Arabia and Persia, and of Tuscany and the Eurasian North. And Classics looks at how, out of those same meetings, new religions and philosophies evolved, giving us the literatures, arts, and politics of Greek, Latin, and Arabic Christianities, of Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic Judaisms, and of Islam. We start from the remotest origins of human history, make a long stop at the “Classical” period, become what some regard as decadent, and go up to the end of the Middle Ages. We are at home in Athens and Rome, in Constantinople and Istanbul, in Carthage, Alexandria and Jerusalem, in Antioch, Damascus, and Baghdad, in Cordoba and Palermo, in Paris, Oxford, Fribourg, and Cologne, and we encamp at Hadrian’s Wall, once the boundary of “civilization”. Languages, chiefly Greek and Latin, are both our pleasure and our necessity, but Classics is much more than the study of languages, its study lays the foundation of self-knowledge.
URL: Classics (BA) at Dalhousie University
Course Based: Yes
Length: 4 Year(s)
Cost per year:*
International: $18,458

Cost per year is based on the 2018-2019 academic year and includes the cost of tuition and incidental fees.

Admission Requirements

Grade for Entrance Previous Year (%)* 70
Prerequisites:*

These courses are intended as guidelines. Speak to your guidance counsellor to see what courses are offered at your school.

  •  Grade12 English 

Applicants are required to have English 12, and four other acceptable university-preparatory courses at the grade 12 level.