- The speaker spent summer 2024 studying ancient Greek in Greece through a fully funded program at Ralston College, and is sharing the experience to encourage others to apply for the summer 2025 session (deadline mid-February). The program covers tuition, housing, and a monthly stipend through philanthropic funding, and the speaker has no financial incentive to promote it. What makes the program distinctive is its approach to ancient Greek as a living language to be spoken, heard, and embodied—not just decoded through grammar tables—and its conviction that learning the language fundamentally changes who you are, connecting you to one of history’s most creative civilizations.
Why Learn Ancient Greek
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Scholarly access to unmediated thought
- The speaker already knows classical Chinese and experienced firsthand how differently the Analects reads in the original versus English translation. The same or greater gap exists with Greek philosophy.
- Translations are often simply wrong: the speaker found a Loeb edition of Plato’s Republic that translated a passage as “democracy degenerates into democracy” when the Greek clearly says “oligarchy degenerates into democracy”—a basic error that changes the meaning of a core argument.
- Ancient Greek loses far more in translation than a language like French, making direct access to the original text especially valuable.
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Learning the language changes who you are
- The speaker argues that knowing a language reshapes your character and your relationship to the culture that produced it, not just your ability to read texts.
- Memorization illustrates the point: being forced to memorize classical Chinese poems as a schoolchild was not about storing facts but about becoming a more poetic person. The knowledge becomes part of your character.
- Ancient Greek was the foundation of one of the most vibrant intellectual cultures in history, and when Renaissance scholars recovered these texts using similar immersive methods, they sparked another enormous intellectual flourishing. Learning the language is a way of entering that tradition.
What Makes the Ralston Program Different
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You live in Greece while you learn
- The two-month summer program moves through the region where the texts were written: three weeks on the island of Samos, a week in Istanbul (Constantinople), and the remainder in Nafplio in the Peloponnese.
- Weekend trips visit major historical sites, and even after just a month of study, students can struggle through texts like the Gospel of John or Revelation in the caves and locations where they were composed.
- The speaker describes a sense that something of the original thought still lingers in these places, giving a more profound and embodied form of knowledge than studying from a classroom ever could.
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Pedagogy treats Greek as a spoken, living language
- Most classics programs teach ancient Greek as a science: memorize grammar tables and vocabulary, then decode texts. Ralston requires students to read aloud, speak, listen, and write—not just read silently.
- The reasoning is that the four skills cannot be cleanly separated: to truly read Plato, you must also be able to speak ancient Greek. The goal is intuitive understanding, the way you process English grammar without consciously thinking about nominative and accusative cases.
- A classics professor who attended the program revealed that after 20 years of reading Plato through conventional methods, he was still mentally translating—treating each sentence as a puzzle rather than absorbing it naturally. Ralston’s method aims to break through that.
- The speaker and other enthusiastic students spoke ancient Greek with each other outside of class, building intuition through daily use. Translation is treated as another form of mediation that disembodies the text; the program tries to move past it.
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The method has historical roots in the Renaissance
- This approach is not an eccentric modern invention. Renaissance scholars used the same immersive, spoken method to learn Greek, and it was that recovery of the language and texts that fueled the intellectual explosion of the Renaissance.
- The contrast is with the later German scientific approach of memorizing charts and tables, which Ralston deliberately rejects.
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The people running it love the tradition
- Many elite classics programs today are hostile to the traditions they teach, sometimes for legitimate reasons (misogyny, colonialism, etc.). The speaker acknowledges the value of critical engagement but argues that is not where you want to begin.
- Ralston attracts people who are deeply devoted to ancient Greek culture and the Western tradition that grew from it—“DieHard Fanatics” who will defend it thoroughly. The speaker sees this as a good starting point: absorb the tradition fully first, then decide what to accept or reject.
- That love for the tradition is contagious and shapes the learning environment in a way that a detached, critical atmosphere does not.
Practical Details
- The summer Greek program in Greece is one component of a one-year, fully funded MA in the Humanities at Ralston College. The remaining three semesters are spent on the college’s campus in Savannah, Georgia, studying the great books.
- The speaker completed only the Greek portion and returned to do lectures and interviews, but the full MA is available to those who want it.
- Applications for summer 2025 are due around mid-February.