Classics and French

Classics and French brings together two of the richest intellectual traditions available to a humanities student. Classics encompasses the languages, literature, history, philosophy, religion, and art of ancient Greece and Rome, a civilisation whose influence runs through virtually every subsequent European culture. French opens access to one of the world's great literary and intellectual traditions, from the medieval troubadours through Descartes, Rousseau, Flaubert, and Proust to contemporary Francophone writers from across the globe.

Studying both allows you to trace the deep roots of European culture and to understand how classical heritage has been absorbed, reimagined, and contested from antiquity to the present day.

At the University of Oxford, this four-year, full-time programme involves extensive study of major literary texts in both traditions alongside rigorous linguistic training. You will work in Latin and ancient Greek on the classics side, reading the canonical authors in their original languages while also engaging with history, philosophy, and art. The French strand develops your spoken and written proficiency to a high level, alongside literary and cultural study from the medieval period to the present.

The combination allows you to examine directly how classical literature and culture shaped their French counterparts, to compare texts across both traditions, and to engage with the question of classical inheritance in the modern world. Oxford's tutorial system provides intensive intellectual engagement with your subject. A typical entry tariff of 184 points reflects the very competitive admissions process.

Graduates with this combination go on to careers in law, diplomacy, publishing, journalism, academia, translation, cultural organisations, education, and the civil service. The combination of linguistic precision, literary breadth, and historical depth is genuinely distinctive. Many graduates continue to doctoral study in classics, French, comparative literature, or related fields.