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.

08/21/2026

"Who can complain about a summer blockbuster that brings Homer to theaters drowning in infantile schlock? If Christopher Nolan convinces people that time with the Odyssey is time well spent, I’m glad and grateful. Good books need all the help they can get. Like the Classics Illustrated series of my parents’ childhood (its Odyssey appeared in 1951), cinematic adaptations of ancient literature help recruit new readers to great works. I’m grateful to him for that.

Nolan made Sinon, a character from Vergil’s Aeneid, a key player in the action around the Trojan horse. That’s the clue that his movie is a Vergilian take on Homer, full of loss, grief, uncertainty, and regret. He models his Odysseus on Vergil’s pius Aeneas, a man of few words, self-controlled and loyal.

This choice shows thoughtfulness on Nolan’s part, and as someone who loves the Aeneid, I appreciate it. But it means utterly abandoning the Homeric Odysseus and his distinctive intelligence — something Vergil did not do. Homer’s Odysseus can spin a great story, devise (and see through) tricks, fight bravely on the battlefield, keep his men together, and get his wife and kingdom back – and do anything, including sacrificing the men and sneaking into the royal home and killing scores of people when he reaches home, to achieve the last item. Call it craftiness or resolute cunning, this is the core of Odysseus’ heroic character."

Keeping reading here: https://paideiainstitute.substack.com/p/pius-odysseus?r=527d0t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

08/13/2026

"The Odyssey, so everyone tells us, is full of monsters. But what if it’s not that simple? As a test case, I will take a close look at one of the poem’s most spectacular monsters, the Skylla, not any old monster, but, in the words of Mary Beard in her Odyssey podcast, a ‘six-headed dog monster!’ But is she? As we will see, she is much more, and less, of a monster than you might think. I will use my reading of this monster to make quite large claims about The Odyssey. So stick around."

Keep reading here: https://paideiainstitute.substack.com/p/are-there-really-monsters-in-the?r=527d0t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

08/11/2026

We are pleased to announce that we are now accepting applications to Living Latin in Paris, Paideia's winter break travel course on Medieval Latin!

🗓️ Dec 27th, 2026 - Jan 3rd, 2027
📍 Paris' Latin Quarter
🗣️ Spoken Latin
📚 For students with 1+ years of college-level Latin or equivalent
⚠️ Application deadline: Oct 1st, 2026

This year's course theme is "Knights in Shining Armor: Love, Romance, and Betrayal in Medieval Latin Literature", offering a condensed survey of Latin literature charting the rise of knighthood, the codes of courtly love, and the height of chivalric culture in medieval France. The program also includes a day trip to the charming city of Orléans!

Learn more and apply here: https://www.paideiainstitute.org/living_latin_in_paris

08/10/2026

We are excited to announce new workbooks and exciting changes to Paideia's Elementa Latin curriculum!

📚 Elementa: Foundations for Latin Textbook (3rd Edition). Introduces the basics of Latin vocabulary and morphology to contextualize English grammar instruction and boost literacy skills. Lessons on Roman history, culture, and mythology inspire curiosity for the ancient world. The 3rd edition includes improvements to lesson content and presentation, as well as a new section on common Latin phrases.

✏️ Elementa: Foundations for Latin Workbook (NEW!) A completely redesigned spiral-bound companion to the 3rd edition of the Foundations textbook. Unlike previous editions, this workbook is not a consumable version of the textbook. It is a true companion workbook, packed with all-new material: guided notes, additional exercises and review activities, vocabulary organizers, and dedicated space for completing textbook exercises.

✏️✏️ Elementa: Next Steps in Latin Workbook (NEW!) A spiral-bound companion to the 2nd edition of the Elementa: Next Steps in Latin textbook. Designed to support and reinforce learning, the workbook provides guided notes and additional practice for grammar lessons, along with dedicated space for reading comprehension responses, short essays, story translations, and other activities. The appendix also includes primary source texts presented in an accessible, student-friendly format.

Read more here: https://www.paideiainstitute.org/elementa_print

08/07/2026

"When I first encountered Mike Leigh’s film Naked, which reimagines The Odyssey as the wanderings of a brilliant, terrifying, working-class, near-tramp Northerner called Johnny, traveling aimlessly alone through central London at night, I was already developing my own, self-consciously iconoclastic view of Homer’s poem. Inspired by the work of the critic Edward Said on literature and imperialism, I wanted to read The Odyssey ‘from the perspective of its victims’ – the Cyclops, The Phaeacians, the conventional ‘bad guys’ the suitors. What happens if we view them, not through the narrow, moralizing eyes of Odysseus (and the vast majority of Homer critics), but on their own terms? In the case of the suitors, is there not the beginnings of a proto-egalitarian society on Ithaca, facilitated by the absence of the king? The suitors use the artificial, prolonged interregnum caused by Odysseus’ absence to create a community of equals, with any competition to find the winner of Penelope’s hand in marriage, a marriage which would restore hierarchy and threaten that equality, perennially postponed. For those who seek the origins of later Greek democratic norms in Homer, why not start here?"

Read more here: https://open.substack.com/pub/paideiainstitute/p/the-odyssey-naked?r=527d0t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

08/06/2026

"Why does the Odyssey end the way it does? It is extremely odd. Everyone knows that the poem involves the return of a man to his home, where he is reunited with his wife and son. Many know that the man, Odysseus, is King of Ithaca, and he must restore order in his kingdom. J.R.R. Tolkien used elements of the story for his Return of the King. But The Lord of the Rings does not close the way the Odyssey closes, with King Aragorn in a murderous rage, bent on killing not only the men who wooed his wife but their families as well, who have rebelled against the returned king. The intended butchery is the last thing Homer makes us see of Odysseus. He is only stopped from massacring his subjects by a lightning bolt from Zeus. The gods pass an act of oblivion for the death of the suitors, and impose a peace between the king and his people, and the poem is abruptly over.

If a divinely thwarted attempted massacre seems to jar as a finale – and after all, it appears that the ending is supposed to be happy, as Odysseus does reunite with his loving wife, and he seems to genuinely connect with his son and even revivify his aged old father – the beginning is no less strange. There are four books of the Odyssey where Odysseus doesn’t even figure at all – it’s instead about his son’s quest for news of him. That’s fine, you might say, writers do this sometimes – you build up suspense by talking about a character at length, before finally introducing him. Didn’t Dahl do this for W***y Wonka? Or Schiller for Wallenstein? You create a legend: then bring him onto the stage.

Yet Homer seems intent on doing precisely the opposite. Odysseus can’t even get up to “make” an entrance at all. Calypso has to go find him..."

Keep reading here: : https://open.substack.com/pub/paideiainstitute/p/the-return-of-the-smiting-king?r=527d0t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

08/05/2026

As the buzz and controversy over Nolan’s The Odyssey heats up, it’s time for those who have contributed reflections on the poem on In Medias Res over the last year to chime in.

In a virtual roundtable Paul Cartledge, Joy Connolly, Tatiana Eva-Marie () and IMR’s editor, Mark Buchan, will briefly outline their own highs and lows of the film, before engaging in a more general discussion of the controversies it has already ignited, and what it might mean for the future of Classics.

Join us on Sunday, August 9th at 12:30pm ET.

RSVP here: https://paideiainstitute.org/roundtable_on_christopher_nolan_s_the_odyssey

08/03/2026

Last week we welcomed our Living Greek in Greece students to Selianitika, Paideia’s Peloponnesian paradise! Our weekend trip to Mycenae called for the obligatory Lion Gate photo 🇬🇷

07/24/2026

Snaps from our Living Greek in Greece High School students' day trip to Delphi! Alas, no prophecies to report back on this time 🌞🐍

(photos by )

07/23/2026

"My students don’t like Odysseus.

Every few years for the past 25, I’ve taught a first-year seminar on the Odyssey and a set of works that interact with the Odyssey with a greater or lesser degree of tangentiality. We always start by reading the epic in English translation and discussing as we go. And increasingly, my students see Odysseus as a sham, a creep, an unfaithful husband who moreover loses all of his men and all of his ships on the way home, and who, conveniently, is always asleep when things go wrong. Clever yes, but narcissistic and self-serving and it turns out not all that good at his one job. Though my view of Odysseus is a bit more tempered than theirs, they have a point. [...]

At the end of my seminar, I’ve always made my students read [Willa Cather's] O Pioneers. They are usually confused. Unlike the other things we’ve read in class, it has no direct connection to the Odyssey, or indeed any work of classical literature (though there are echoes of Pyramus and Thisbe at one point). I spend about two weeks trying to convince my students that it’s a version of a Penelope story – not a direct retelling like Atwood’s Penelopiad, or an in-your-face re-imagining like A.E. Stallings’ “The Wife of the Man of Many Wiles.” It is a different version of the heroic narrative, an attempt to imagine what kind of narrative could be produced concerning the woman who stays home, manages the men in her life, and makes things work while what’s-his-name goes off getting into trouble and making up unlikely stories to extricate himself."

Keep reading here: https://paideiainstitute.substack.com/p/cathers-o-pioneers-and-penelope?r=527d0t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true&triedRedirect=true

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