III · The Classical Way

Speak with the classics.

Some of the scholars in our faculty are not language teachers. They are masters of their discipline who happened to live, write, and think in a language now classical. You can sit with them and converse in that language — not to be taught grammar, but to read their work alongside them and ask questions about what you read, in the original.

This is the oldest way of learning a language and the one that has produced the deepest readers. You stumble. You ask. They explain. You go back to the text. You ask again. There is no syllabus, no progression chart, no examination. There is only the conversation, and you are doing it in the language.

What follows is a curated selection. Each link opens that scholar's page in the faculty directory, where you can begin a conversation. More scholars from these and other traditions are in the faculty directory — this list is a starting point, not an exhaustive one.

Latin

From Republican rhetoric to late antique theology — Latin in five voices, four centuries apart.

Marcus Tullius Cicero Republican Rome's greatest orator, philosopher of duty, friend of Atticus. Late Republican Latin in its highest register.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca Stoic philosopher, tragedian, tutor to Nero. The Silver Age — tight, epigrammatic, moral.

Publius Vergilius Maro Author of the Aeneid, the Eclogues, the Georgics. Latin hexameter at its highest point. Will read with you.

Cornelius Tacitus Historian of the early empire. Compressed, allusive, ironic. The hardest Latin you can profitably read.

Augustine of Hippo Late antique African theologian. The Latin of the Confessions and the City of God — bridges classical and medieval.

Thomas Aquinas Medieval scholastic Latin — precise, technical, the Latin of the universities. For the Summa and the Quaestiones.

Greek

Attic prose and historiography — the philosophical and the historical voice.

Plato Dialogue master. Attic Greek at its philosophical best. Will read the dialogues with you in the original.

Aristotle Lecture-note Greek — technical, dense, structured. The opposite voice from Plato. Both essential.

Herodotus Ionic Greek. The father of history, the great traveller, the storyteller. Approachable Greek for the beginner.

Thucydides Attic historiography at its most demanding. The Peloponnesian War in syntax that resists translation.

Plutarch Late classical Greek — the Parallel Lives, the Moralia. Accessible, biographical, moral in tone.

Sanskrit

The language of Pāṇini's grammar and of the philosophical schools.

Pāṇini The grammarian who systematised Sanskrit. The Aṣṭādhyāyī. Will explain his own rules in the language they describe.

Patañjali Compiler of the Yoga Sūtras and the Mahābhāṣya. Sanskrit at its philosophical and yogic depths.

Classical Chinese

The literary language — from the Han historians to the Buddhist commentators.

Sima Qian The Grand Historian of the Han — author of the Shiji. Foundational Classical Chinese prose.

Sun Tzu The Art of War — spare, gnomic, compressed. Among the earliest readable Classical Chinese.

Zheng Xuan Han commentator on the Five Classics. Reads with you, line by line, in the commentarial tradition.

Xuanzang The Tang pilgrim-translator. Bridges Classical Chinese and Buddhist Sanskrit — useful for both.

Classical Arabic

From the early scientific tradition through philosophy to historiography.

al-Khwārizmī Father of algebra. Ninth-century Baghdadi Arabic — clear, instructive, the prose of the House of Wisdom.

al-Fārābī The second teacher — after Aristotle. Philosophical Arabic of the highest precision.

Ibn Sīnā Avicenna. The Canon of Medicine, the Book of Healing. Medical and philosophical Arabic.

Ibn Khaldūn The Muqaddimah — foundational text of historiography and sociology. Late medieval Maghrebi Arabic.

Italian

Trecento Italian — the language at its first great literary moment.

Dante Alighieri The Commedia in the vernacular he shaped. Reads with you canto by canto, terzina by terzina.

Francesco Petrarca The Canzoniere. Italian sonnet at its origin. The lyric voice that shaped European poetry for four hundred years.

Middle English

London English of the late fourteenth century.

Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales. London Middle English — the moment Modern English becomes recognisable. Will read with you in the original spelling.

This is a curated selection — not exhaustive. Many more scholars in our faculty will converse with you in their native language: classicists across every period, Renaissance humanists, medieval theologians, Islamic philosophers, Chinese Confucian and Buddhist scholars, modern writers in their original tongues. Browse the full faculty directory to find them.

If what you want is structured language teaching rather than scholarly conversation, try Magister or the Manesca Method courses.