Classics Collection Library Subject Collection uri icon

subject description and guidelines

  • Cornell University Library maintains a major research collection covering all aspects of the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome: archaeology, history, political, economic, and social conditions, law, languages and literatures, epigraphy, philosophy, religion, science, daily life, etc. General chronological boundaries reach from the Bronze Age (ca. 2500 B.C.E. on Crete) to the fall of the Roman Empire in the west (476 C.E.). Geographically, the collection covers all areas that fell within the Greco-Roman cultural or political sphere during the period of Greco-Roman hegemony. The collection encompasses materials on all known ancient Greek and ancient Italic dialects and the non-Italic dialects of the Italian peninsula. The collection also includes the history of Classical scholarship in all periods and places.

constituencies

  • The primary users of materials in the collection are Cornell faculty, graduate students, visiting scholars, and undergraduate majors in the interdisciplinary field of Classics. Major research interests at Cornell include ancient philosophy, Greek and Latin literature and linguistics, Classical art and archaeology, epigraphy, Greek and Roman history and historiography, and the culture of Hellenistic Egypt. The Department of Classics includes faculty members with appointments in the Departments of Comparative Literature, History, Linguistics, and Philosophy. Classics faculty are active in the graduate fields of Asian Studies, Archaeology, Classics, Comparative Literature, Geological Sciences, History, History of Art, Archaeology and Visual Studies, Linguistics, Philosophy, Medieval Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Peace Studies and Peace Science, and Theatre Arts; the graduate field of Classics includes faculty members in the Departments of Asian Studies, History of Art and Visual Studies, Landscape Architecture, Near Eastern Studies, and Philosophy, as well as the Classics Department.