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#elite. I don't remember if I encountered anything ancient Greek or Roman in high school- I probably did, but it didn't leave much of an impression on me. But I vividly remember sitting on the lawn in the first week of my sophomore year of college, trying to work my way through Richmond Lattimore's translation of the Iliad and finding it utterly impenetrable. I had no idea what was going on in the poem (the translation is pretty clunky) or why on earth this could possibly be considered a "great book." Who would have thought I'd spend a career reading, teaching, and writing about it ?!

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My first exposure to anything ancient Greek or Roman was probably the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan. I would classify this as lowbrow or non-elite because the books are widely available to young children in libraries and classrooms. They encourage students to explore ancient Greek mythology and culture through a more engaging medium. My love for the Percy Jackson series inspired me to explore more mature retellings as I got older, which eventually led to my interest in Greek and Roman Studies.

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I grew up reading a lot of different children’s adaptations of Greek mythology, but the ones I remember reading earliest are the Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus series and the Goddess Girls books. This genre of mythology for children is widely accessible and easily digestible by a young audience, and when I was reading them I remember being mainly interested in the characters and plot, less so that I was learning about Ancient Greece. Looking back, the amount of baseline mythological knowledge I absorbed from these books made it much easier to get in to studying Greece and Rome in an academic context when I got older. For example, even though the Percy Jackson books were slightly higher-brow and I stayed passionate about them for much longer, I remember reading Goddess Girls books in ~3rd grade about more niche female mythological figures like Hestia and Cassandra, which interestingly is probably a more in depth exploration of women in Greek myth than I would have gotten in some actual classics courses, especially more traditional ones.

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My grandparents had this specific copy of D'Aulaires Greek Myths. There is also a copy with a blue cover as well as a book of Norse myths. It was tucked on the bottom shelf in the back corner, so I would sit behind the armchair during boring adult discussion and page through the easily read and digested myths as well as full cover illustrations. I haven't reread it in a while but the fact that I never had any awkward questions for my parents about it makes me think that it's incredibly watered down. Thinking of it now, it's a very elite conception of the classics and it ends with the idea that the gods (Western civilization) will someday die and the world will descend into chaos. Accompanied is an illustration of a deteriorating and half-buried statue of Zeus. Back then, I largely read them the same way I would have read a collection of fairy tales, but I'm fairly certain that it does reinforce the same ideologies about classical/Western culture that we've been discussing.

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This book is the first exposure I remember having to anything ancient Greek or Roman, and I think it was around 4th grade. I loved the illustrations and reading the myths, and that year my family got a cat and I named her Athena because I'd spent so much time absorbed in this book. I feel like the book is easily accessible, especially with all of the illustrations, and similar to Maya, I was definitely more focused on the stories for their characters and fantastical nature, rather than the ancient Greek aspect. I will say, I remember feeling like having knowledge of Greek mythology got me social credit because it was what everyone talked about at that age--I felt like it made me cooler to be in the know. This baseline definitely helped me in my high school history classes too.

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I believe my fifth grade history class was my first major exposure to Greek and Roman studies, and, looking back, I am kind of blown away by how reminiscent the culture around that class was of problematic idealistic notions around the concept of classics. Fifth grade history was regarded as the hardest class in the entire K-8 school; so much so that there were actually three separate history classes; art/architecture, literature, and history. A solid third of the year was spent with units on ancient Roman architecture and bathhouses, Greek vases (that was the hardest unit and I can no longer look at pottery the same), gladiators, and a very abridged but still dense adaption of the Odyssey. In hindsight, there was a regard for the course as somehow deserving of three class slots and meriting the intense workload due to its content; that it was somehow a more use valuable of our time because it possessed some great wisdom that other history did not. For me, this falls in a middle ground between lowbrow and highbrow because while the actual content was of fairly non-elite difficulty for the average adult, the culture around it and treatment of it was incredibly highbrow.

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When I was 2, my family was living in London for the summer and my dad took me to the British Museum almost every day, where we saw artifacts from all over the world. My dad was a Classics major in college and a teacher, so I learned mostly about ancient Greece and Rome since he could tell me more than just what the museum displayed. As Schein said, museums are mostly aimed at the bourgeoisie, and we could only afford to get into the British Museum because it was free. We could only afford to stay in London at all because the university my mom taught at was paying so she could do research there. However, the fact that she was working at a university at all means my opportunity to be in London stemmed from elite circumstances. And of course, the British Museum itself is widely regarded as an elitist and colonial institution.

(I was also given the Usborne book Greek Myths for Young Children when I was a baby, but I don't think that counts as my first encounter with Greek or Roman antiquity because I doubt I retained much from that book before at least the age of 3.)

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Similar to Natalie and Maya, my first introduction to ancient Greece & Rome was children's chapter books, and Percy Jackson was the best. This is definitely lowbrow entertainment, because it depicts religious figures in the same world as bathroom humor and middle school drama. There's nothing inaccessible about it -- I believe the author actually wrote the series to help his son learn with ADHD, so the concept was to distill an academic topic into memorable anecdotes without any context.

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I remember picking up these Eyewitness books and flipping through the pages almost every time there was reading time in elementary school. This series is definitely "low-brow" and “non-elite” with its accessibility and ease of reading. However, the pictures were of real artifacts or at least fairly faithful reproductions which lend these books an undeniable academic value.

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Like several others have mentioned, my first exposure to anything Greek and Roman was also the Percy Jackson series. I believe I was about 10 when I first picked up the books and, like many kids of our generation, became completely obsessed with both the books themselves and with learning everything possible about mythology (Greek, Roman, and otherwise). I fed this obsession by checking out every book I could find on it in my school and public libraries. Because of how easily accessible these books made this knowledge for me, I would classify this a non-elite exposure. While the initial experience was very low-brow, it did encourage me towards other activities that would probably be classed as more high-brow, such as going to art museums to look at art from or depicting classical times.

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My first exposure to classics was D'Aulaires' book of Greek myths, which was my dad's copy from when he was a kid. I would have been no more than five at the time, maybe even younger. It is meant to be highly popular media, aimed to be accessible and pleasant to children, although in doing so it adds a lot of ideological problems.