Oxford University’s classics department is considering a move that would allow classics majors to graduate without reading Homer and Virgil.
Classics faculty members are considering removing Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid from the first stage of the classics degree, according to the university’s student newspaper, the Oxford Student. If the works are removed from the section, called Moderations, nowhere else in the major are the foundational epic poems required to be studied.
Second-year classics major and student president of the Oxford Latinitas Project Jan Preiss said that implementing the change would be a “fatal mistake.” He said removing the works would deprive classics students of the most important works in their major.
“Oxford would be producing classicists who have never read Homer and never read Virgil, who are the central authors of the classical tradition, and most of classical literature, in one way or another, looks back to Homer and interacts with the Iliad,” Preiss said.
“Homer has been the foundation of the classical tradition since antiquity, and it is impossible to understand what comes after him without studying him first,” Preiss added.
Along with ditching Homer and Virgil, Oxford faculty are considering other reforms to make the classics major more accessible. Faculty leaders are attempting to decrease the difference in performance in the course between men and women and between students who have functional knowledge of Greek and Latin and those who do not.
