100) General Education credit & Humanities/Arts.
99) 1 1/2 times the credit for only 50% more work.
98) Individual attention from faculty and teaching assistants.
97) Small classes.
96) Competing in decathlon or heptathlon, avoid embarrassment of not knowing how many events left.
95) Great background for learning all the Romance Languages derived from Latin.
94) Learn why Plato has character say "all men are pregnant, Socrates."
93) Medea: "I would rather stand in battle three times than bear one child."
92) Take myth with Dr Chitwood.
91) Use understanding of Latin in uncle's will to gain advantage over idiot cousins.
90) Greek Tragedy much more interesting in original.
89) Catullus: consider the social function of poetry of praise or blame.
88) Become a better writer.
87) Ability to read names on vases big advantage in hooking up in museums.
86) By learning about Greek & Roman culture understand much more of the literature & film of the
last couple of hundred years, produced by people steeped in the Classics.
85) Great cartoons on walls & doors in Classics Dept.
84) Learn about apparently hyper-modern facets of recent literary theory anticipated by Greeks.
83) Read New Testament in early & extremely influential form; Greek is easy, & you can impress after only a year.
82) Democracy.
81) Go on summer archeological dig (Greek/Latin not required but can't hurt).
80) Be ready if starship tachyon beams create temporal anomaly reversing flow of time stream.
79) Become less ignorant: stop thinking the novel was invented the day before yesterday.
78) Avoid discovering Classical Studies only late in your USF career: much better to start as
a freshman or sophmore.
77) Homer: worth learning Greek for all by himself.
76) Greek alphabet is no big deal; only a few letters are different from English, & they're
easy to learn.
75) Ted Turner was a Classics major
74) Pizza Lunches by Eta Sigma Phi for visiting speakers.
73) Regular assignments & quizzes may form nice contrast to your other courses.
72) Tastes great, less full: after first year, courses are like great English or History
courses, but not as hard to get into.
71) Take Livy with Dr. Noonan.
70) Win bar bets: translate Latin on dollar bill.
69) Catullus: learn Latin obscenities and be able to diss without danger.
68) Discover lost consonants.
67) Famous speakers/ readers of Greek: Cleopatra, Nietzsche, Marx, Ted Turner, Jerry
Brown, Ron Cameron, Jean-Luc Picard ("Darmok" episode with alien who speaks only in myth).
66) Make sure the future does not forget past.
65) Recent Colorado court cases debate Greek views of gender & sexuality.
64) The Greeks and Romans were just like us/The Greeks and Romans were notat all like us.
63) By studying an "inflected" language, in which each syllable is important, become better, more observant reader of all texts & documents.
62) Be smarter than guy who told Senator Paul Simon, "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ it's good enough for me".
61) Tale of two brothers: Billy Bulger took Greek, became President of Massachusetts. State Senate and
then of University of Massachusetts., "Whitey" Bulger didn't, became mobster now indicted & on the lam.
60) By studying a language so different from English, reapproach English with greater
appreciation of nuances of diction, style, & sentence structure.
59) Ours is not like any high school Latin class.
58) Learn what famous Latin writers are not DWEM's (dead white european men) but Africans.
57) Understand Florida state motto.
56) Familiarity with Greek letters give you tiny advantage in math class.
55) Job opportunities as Latin interpreters for Dan Quayle on trips to Latin America.
54) Learn why Shakespeare & contemporaries were so fond of Senecan drama.
53) Free food after great archaeology lectures.
52) Second-year Latin classes read Catullus. Vergil & other neat stuff.
51) Learn why Mad Max is actually Achilles Down Under.
50) Law schools love Latin & Greek.
49) Medical schools do not dislike them.
48) Understand names of plants, or name new plants after yourself.
47) Without a need for language lab, move quickly to study of interesting texts in the original.
46) Do the Vulcan mind-meld on odd, interesting, influential people who've been dead 2000 years.
45) In Cicero's Pro Caelio, learn Cicero's theory of how a young person who gets in trouble shouldn't be blamed for it.
44) Help sibling prepare for SAT's.
43) Plato & Aristotle!
42) Learn from Ovid how to make friends of the opposite sex in public places.
41) Regular assignments & quizzes form nice contrast to your other courses.
40) Robert Kennedy quotes "favorite poet" Aeschylus from memory in famous speech after killing of Martin Luther King.
39) Sappho: "Some say a host of cavalry is the finest thing: I say it is the one you love".
38) Take Greek with Dr. Campbell.
37) After you learn Greek & Latin roots of many English words, that sense of confusion & alienation you feel most of the time will be slightly reduced.
36) Third-year Greek/Latin = rotating series of major authors, periods, or genres.
35) Add classical allusions to that screenplay you're writing (brother of director of Fatal Attraction and 9 1/2 Weeks is famous classicist).
34) Be in a class full of smart people who really want to be there.
33) Contemplate (as Hayden White does) the philosophical implications of the middle voice.
32) Many fascinating texts deal with issues of power, gender, mortality, love, knowledge, madness, divinity, mortality, courage.
31) Your father had this great blue-haired Latin teacher and will get all wistful when he hears you're taking it now.
30) Your father never had Latin and will be intimidated by you and stop bothering you about your blue hair.
29) Invaluable tools for study of antiquity or middle ages, or work in history, religion, philosophy, linguistics, archaeology, romance language & literature, art history, early music.
28) Learn how Catullus & Ovid colonized your subconscious 2000 years ago, by helping to predetermine your attitudes toward romantic love.
27) Classics Department open from 8-5 PM; meet your friends at the Eta Sigma Phi Bulletin Board.
26) Appreciate the beauty of a language whose marked word-forms allow greater freedom of poetic word-order.
25) Become qualified to make up your own mind about Black Athena.
24) Having studied Greek & Latin participles, your writing will be free of those embarrassing dangling problems.
23) Bill Clinton had four years of High School Latin; get intern job in Washington!
22) Third-semester Greek reads Plato.
21) Correct misguided high school ideas about "tragic flaw."
20) Greek Etymology: androgyny, basilica, Borg, diameter, gigantic, gubernatorial, gymnasium, deictic, agnostic, hedonism, thanatopsis, hippopotamus, catastrophe, crisis, kaleidoscope, cacophony, lithograph, macrobiotic, martyr, metaphor, Nike, necrophiliac, oncology, oneiromancy, opsimath, homogeneity, holocaust, pedagogy, rhythm, synonym, synchronic, tautological, hydrophobic, hyperbole, phenomenon, psychiatric, pseudopod, character, chiasmus, chiropodist, Christ, Xerox.
19) Fourth-semester Greek usu. reads Homer, Herodotus or Euripides.
18) Medieval Studies people explicitly recommend Latin.
17) Seneca's Phaedra ends with that great dismemberment scene.
16) Those who cannot remember the past are doomed.
15) Win admiration in weight room by explaining terms latissimus dorsi and erector spinae.
14) Winkler: "Nabokov and Borges have nothing on Apuleius."
13) "Perseus Project": great multi-media database of Greek material & literary culture on CD-ROM and on www.
12) Most people find Ovid's Metamorphoses fun & funny, but also full of serious questions about power, gender, violence, the universe, and narrative.
11) None of those pesky silent letters.
10) Take Classical Civilization classes and feel like you have a tiny advantage (more seriously, you do have an advantage talking your way into our many full upper division classes).
9) The past is a foreign country, but you can bring your own water.
8) Look at a really dysfunctional family: read any Greek tragedy.
7) 2500 years ago Greeks theorized that matter was made up of atoms.
6) Sophocles' Oedipus is complex.
5) Contemplate how sentences in any language create and then fulfill or frustrate expectations.
4) Go to Rome for the summer program, Greece for the summer or during your junior year.
3) Rhetoric: learn to make weaker argument the stronger (or spot someone doing same).
2) Necromancy, witchcraft & exorcism reportedly much more effective in Latin.
1) Why did you go to the University of South Florida, if not to take what you want?
