The Paideia Institute

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The Paideia Institute

Promoting the study of the humanities through innovative, experience-based education and abroad.

The Paideia Institute for Humanistic Study is a non-profit organization with the mission of promoting the study of the humanities through innovative, experienced-based educational programming in the U.S. Founded in 2010, the Institute currently attracts students from the best universities across America to its Latin and Greek language programs each summer. Additionally, the Institute partners with high schools and universities to design customized educational experiences abroad for their students in Western Europe. Paideia staff members all have advanced degrees in their field and extensive experience in the countries where we operate. Paideia is committed to providing American students with authentic experiences abroad. We strive to surpass the ordinary study abroad experience and put students into supervised but direct contact with the cultures they study. All of our programs have the goal of providing experiences that integrate history, literature and language with the students’ direct experience of foreign cultures. Paideia students can be found reading Pliny the Younger’s description of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius from the top of the volcano itself or shopping for dinner ingredients in the open-air markets of Rome with Catullus in their pocket. We take a personal interest in every student we teach and are committed to showing them how a subtle appreciation of the humanities can make their lives fuller and richer.

10/08/2026

"A college acquaintance of mine, and a trainee officer in the army, once told me he had always found something ideologically suspicious about The Odyssey. Why on earth would you glorify a hero who leaves for a war with all his troops and somehow returns alone? The poignancy of it is at work in the wonderful poem of Y. Chouliaris, entitled ‘Fast Food Classics’:

The Iliad: They went away.
The Odyssey: He came back.

We have a joke and an anti-war poem at once, the comic and tragic combined. Freud would tell us our laughter is released by the vast psychic expenditure we save from slogging through 48 books. Phew. But the tragedy comes in the pithiness of ‘he came back’, which links time saved to the vast loss of human life, not just in the Trojan War, but in Odysseus’ return too: the deaths at Troy, the deaths on the way home, all sandwiched between the plural ‘they’ and singular ‘he’."

Keep reading here: https://paideiainstitute.substack.com/p/the-odysseys-victims?r=527d0t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

10/01/2026

Join the Paideia Institute this Sunday, October 4th at 12:00pm ET for a free online lecture with Prof. Adrian Kelly on “The Poetry of Violence: Homer and the Archaic Age.”

The Iliad is one of the most violent works to survive from the ancient world, with nearly a third of its 15,000 verses devoted to combat and vivid accounts of killing. In this lecture, Prof. Kelly will explore how Homer’s original audiences—many of whom had direct experience of warfare—may have responded to these depictions of battle.

Drawing connections between ancient epic and modern research into veterans’ experiences of combat, he will consider why humans take pleasure in representations of violence, what this reveals about Homeric audiences, and what the Iliad can teach us about humanity’s complex and enduring relationship with warfare.

RSVP here: https://www.paideiainstitute.org/the_poetry_of_violence_homer_and_the_archaic_age

09/25/2026

🍎 We are proud to share three stories from Paideia's 2026 Teaching Literacy with Latin summer camp program!

Every year we award ten grants to outstanding high school students so that they can create Classics-themed summer camp programming for younger learners in their communities.

This summer, grant recipients Alex, Charlie, and Alice went above and beyond with their Latin and Ancient Greek summer camps in NYC, Maine, and China.

Read their stories here: https://paideiainstitute.substack.com/p/meet-paideias-2026-summer-teaching?r=527d0t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

09/18/2026

"Papyri tell us several different things. Most famously, some papyri contain bits—sometimes very extensive bits—of otherwise unknown but famous lost Classical literature: pages and pages of the lyric poets Sappho, Alcaeus, and Bacchylides; a nearly complete comedy by the dramatist Menander called Dyscolus, or The Grouch; and Aristotle’s history and description of the Athenian government, the Constitution of the Athenians. Extensive finds of new literature like this were always rare and at this point can only come from new excavations. [...] Much more common are smaller finds: a few scraps or columns of an interesting but unidentifiable bit of a history, philosophical work, epic poem, or the like."

Keep reading here: https://paideiainstitute.substack.com/p/the-newest-ancient-greek?r=527d0t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

09/17/2026

The Paideia Institute is pleased to launch the call for submissions to the Fall 2026 issue of Ephebeia: A Youth Classics Journal, our online journal showcasing the best academic writing on Classics by high school students.

And we're launching the journal's first cover art contest! 🎨

The submission deadline for essays and artworks is October 1st.

Full submission guidelines here: https://www.paideiainstitute.org/ephebeia

09/16/2026

NEW online courses! This fall we are excited to offer two 10-week courses designed for Classicists who are interested in expanding their knowledge of Art History:

🏛️ History of Ancient Greek Art: From Geometric Greece to the Hellenistic World | Wednesdays at 8:00am ET

This course offers an introductory survey of Ancient Greek art, tracing the development of Greek visual culture from patterned pottery and early mythological scenes to monumental temples, lifelike sculpture, the Parthenon, images of gods and heroes, portraits of Alexander the Great, and the dramatic art of the Hellenistic kingdoms.

✨ Reading Byzantine Art: Greek Words, Sacred Images, and Visual Theology | Mondays at 1:00pm ET

This course teaches students how to “read” Byzantine art by combining close visual analysis with short passages and key terms in Greek and Latin. We will examine icons, mosaics, manuscripts, church decoration, inscriptions, and liturgical objects, asking how images communicated theology, authority, devotion, and presence.

Both courses are open to ALL LEVELS.

Enroll by September 20th here: https://www.paideiainstitute.org/telepaideia

09/15/2026

The Paideia Institute Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of The Pope's Latinist, a biography of Fr. Reginald Foster, O.C.D. by John Byron Kuhner this upcoming Christmas season.

Fr. Foster, known to his students as "Reginaldus," served as Latinist to four popes and taught Latin in Rome for four decades. His famous and beloved spoken Latin summer course formed generations of Latin teachers and inspired the founding of the Paideia Institute in 2010.

We are assembling a collection of photographs of Fr. Foster to be included in the biography. If you have high-resolution photographs that you would like to contribute to the book, please share them with us here: www.paideiainstitute.org/popes_latinist

09/14/2026

Stoicism is usually described as a “popular philosophy” or “a philosophy for life.” Thus it has always had wide appeal, stretching from St. Paul and the Roman emperor to current novelists as well as teachers and students (and their social media accounts) today.

Through close readings of certain fundamental authors, this course will help us understand the promise and limits of the Stoic school of philosophy. Though we will situate the Stoa in its original Athenian context, our focus will be on the Roman imperial period, which continues to inform our own.

🕗 Sundays at 2:00pm ET

🗓️ September 27th - December 12th, with a one-week break

💻 Synchronous online instruction

👥 Small classes of no more than five students

📚 No language prerequisites, open to all!

⚠️ Enroll by September 20th!

Register here: https://www.paideiainstitute.org/roman_stoics_fall_2026

09/11/2026

"The funniest moment in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is central to his entire artistic endeavor. Odysseus and his men have entered the cave of the Cyclops, helped themselves to his cheese, and thus already flaunted ‘Zeus’s law’. Some men get eaten, the Cyclops gets blinded, and only then does the giant start to speak. ‘He can speak!’ one of the men barks in surprise. ‘Perhaps we should reason with him?’ ‘It’s a little too late for that’, Odysseus drily responds.
And therein lies the audacity of Nolan’s vision. He has given us a world where there is, of course, reason, as well as reason’s evil twin, trickery. But they are more or less irrelevant. Greek civilization has collapsed in on itself, and imminent destruction is unavoidable. So what would reason, or trickery, be for? In Homer, the blinding of the Cyclops causes the delays that are the poem, setting up the elemental wrath of the sea-god Poseidon toward the homecoming of the hero. In the film, the Cyclops episode previews the broader ending the film tells of, but chooses not to depict: the demise of the Greek world, soon to be destroyed by the ‘Peoples of the Sea’. [...] Nolan’s Greeks are blind to the powers of self-destruction inherent in their own seafaring culture. Far from a civilization built on reason, the Cyclops episode suggests their own culture self-servingly links exploration to violence, with reason turned to only as an afterthought. Odysseus already half-knows this after the fall of Troy, and stops playing the rationalist game. It’s a little too late for that."

Keep reading here: https://paideiainstitute.substack.com/p/winning-the-homecoming-losing-the?r=527d0t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

09/01/2026

After an epic summer at the movies, it's time to read the source material!

Join us this fall term for Paideia's 10-week reading course on Homer's Odyssey in translation, no Ancient Greek skills required. Led by In Medias Res Editor Mark Buchan, we will read two Books per week and devote the latter half of the course to discussion on how Nolan has changed, adapted, or reworked the epic poem.

🕗 Mondays at 7:00pm ET

🗓️ September 27th - December 12th, with a one-week break

💻 Synchronous online instruction

👥 Small classes of no more than five students

📚 No language prerequisites, open to all!

⚠️ Enroll by September 20th!

Register here: https://www.paideiainstitute.org/the_odyssey_fall_2026

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75 Varick Street
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http://www.paideiainstitute.org/

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