Undergraduate courses offer concentrated attention and study of important individual historians and poets of the classical world, such as Plato, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Pindar, Cicero, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, Lucretius, Horace, Vergil, Ovid, Catullus and Propertius. Graduate courses are similar in content to the undergraduate courses but study and research is at the much deeper, more intensive graduate level. Texts of all important classical authors in variant editions and in English translation form an important part, more than half of the overall collection in Classics. Bi-lingual editions with translations into other western European languages are purchased occasionally. Secondary materials are collected in all main western European languages.
Special effort is made to purchase the original text on which a secondary work is based.
Important monographs published in eastern European languages are very selectively purchased. Collecting emphasis is on current publications, but reprints and retrospective material is acquired on special request and when available. All areas within the political and cultural sphere of influence of ancient Greece and Rome are considered. Major collecting emphasis in on university presses, learned societies and specialized trade publishers. Several programs offered by the Department of Classics relate to other disciplines such as Philosophy, Religious Studies, History of Art and Architecture, Archaeology, History, as well as the more specific History of Science, Sociology, Economics, and Political History.