Myths and Legends: A Classics Competition
The Classics Competition has run for over 70 years at the University of Leeds, and is a celebration of Classics, Reading and Performance. It’s a great opportunity to introduce Classics to school students already familiar with English, History and Drama, highlighting the links to their current subjects and developing their oracy/public speaking skills in an exciting way. For students already studying Latin and Ancient Greek, it’s a fantastic opportunity to showcase their reading skills to our judges!
Key Stage 3 students are invited to choose one (or two) of the categories, read up on the corresponding text or mythical characters and prepare their entries. Teachers will be encouraged to hosts in school "heats" in their own classrooms to determine finalists, and then asked to submit finalist entries during spring 2025.
All student finalists entering the competition and their teacher(s) will be invited to the University of Leeds campus in April 2025 to speak/perform their entry in front of a panel of University of Leeds academic judges, who will make their decisions and announce our winners!
[The Classics Competition] was one of the highlights of my secondary school experience. I can still remember the opening lines of the first piece I recited, aged 12. I took part again several years later (reciting part of Ariadne’s speech from Catullus 64), which helped build my confidence in the subject. Most importantly, the competition made the idea of university seem accessible and exciting. And like the JACT Latin summer school (which was transformative for me), it showed me that there was a community of other people out there who cared about this stuff and were even willing to dedicate their lives to it.
- Professor Verity Platt (Department of Classics, Cornell University)
Read the privacy notice for this project.