Three years ago, when Abigail Geffken was at the beginning of high school, her mother asked her a question: If she didn’t have to think about impressing colleges, how would she spend her time?
For Ms. Geffken, the answer was easy.
“I’d be reading ‘The Iliad,’” she said. And she’d be reading it in its original language, she informed her mother. Ancient Greek.
Why We Wrote This
Ancient Greek, it turns out, is not dead – not quite. Indeed, with the classics getting a boost from everything from TikTok trends to this month’s Christopher Nolan blockbuster film “The Odyssey,” a small group of devotees is trying to understand the Athenians in their own tongue.
It’s “such a beautiful language, just the way the alphabet looked,” she recalls. “I just was so fascinated by it.”
So, for the next two years, Ms. Geffken studied ancient Greek with an online Christian classical education school called Scholé Academy. And when she finished high school, she took a gap year to complete a third year of the language.
Ancient Greek, it turns out, is not dead – not quite. Indeed, as antiquity becomes new again, with the classics getting a boost from everything from TikTok trends to this month’s Christopher Nolan blockbuster film “The Odyssey,” a small group of devotees like Ms. Geffken are trying to understand the Athenians in their own tongue.
Justin Belote, for instance, a high school English teacher and poet from Staunton, Virginia, is fascinated by ancient Greek philosophy and history. His love for poetry led him to teach himself ancient Greek.
“To be able to read a language that people wrote sometimes thousands of years ago is … a wild experience,” he says.
During Lent, Mr. Belote met weekly with another teacher to read ancient Greek passages from the Book of John in the Bible.
He’s not alone in this theological inclination.
Emily Staunton/The Christian Science Monitor
Benjamin Dunning, a professor of the New Testament and early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, says he’s seen growing interest among students in applying ancient Greek to the Bible. In the past, he would have expected no more than seven students to register for his upper-intermediate ancient Greek class. Last semester, 12 students took the class.
Some of his students are training for the ministry, while others are historians. Some are just wrestling with religious concepts.
“I’ve been very impressed [with] the … students that I’m working with now,” Dr. Dunning says. “They don’t want to go quick and shallow. They really want to dig in and get into the text very deeply, and there’s only so far you can go when you’re working in English translation.”
Going deep is part of the philosophy of Scholé Academy, the school Ms. Geffken attended. The ancient Greek word scholé means “leisure.” But leisure doesn’t equal lazy, explains Edward Kotynski, the academy’s chair of languages.
The school is “trying to get that balance of going deeply and having discussions and making sure that we don’t have … lots of busy work,” he says.
Proponents of the approach say this relaxed-but-deeper thinking can be refreshing in a high-tech society with decreasing attention spans. Swiss German University reported that the average attention span on a digital device had fallen to 47 seconds in 2024, down from 75 seconds in 2012.
Learning ancient Greek takes a lot longer than 47 seconds.
Indeed, studying it, “requires you to think very deeply and just grow your attention span,” Ms. Geffken says.
During her gap year, she participated in the Catherine Project, an online forum that offers courses and reading groups focused on the classics. Her ancient Greek reading group included people of all ages joining from India, Texas, Brazil, and Portugal. Ms. Geffken says her classmates “were from very different walks … and stages of life, but who all wanted to talk about these books together.”
When she headed to Deep Springs College earlier this month for freshman orientation, she brought some of her own study books. She plans to become an ancient Greek and Latin teacher.
