About

Living Greek in Greece High School is the Paideia Institute's two-week Ancient Greek immersion program set in Greece, designed specifically for high school students. It is the sister program to Living Latin in Rome High School and shares the same pedagogical philosophy — treating an ancient language as living and spoken rather than as a grammatical exercise — but differs in one important structural respect: it explicitly welcomes complete beginners. Students who have never studied Ancient Greek, including those who do not yet know the Greek alphabet, are eligible and encouraged to apply. Instruction is differentiated by level, accommodating true beginners through students with a year or more of college Greek in the same cohort. No experience speaking Greek is required at any level.

The 2026 program runs from approximately late June through mid-July — arrival in Athens on the program's opening day, departure two weeks later — with students housed in twin or triple rooms at the Philippos Hotel in Athens during the program's first phase and at the Liberty Hotel in Nafplio during the second. All housing, meals, site admissions, and airport transfers are included in the $5,500 program fee; airfare is not. A chaperoned group flight from JFK to Athens is available. Full and partial need-based scholarships are available, with priority consideration for applications received by March 1.

The curriculum for 2026 centers on The Frogs by Aristophanes, a fifth-century comedy set in the underworld in which the god Dionysus descends to Hades to retrieve a great playwright for Athens. Students read across a range of Ancient Greek texts — Homer, Plato, the New Testament, Byzantine writers — situated within the broader Aristophanic context, and in 2026 have the opportunity to participate in a theatrical production of the play in Ancient Greek. A weekend trip includes travel to Epidaurus, where students visit archaeological sites, including some accessible only underwater, and attend a modern performance in the ancient open-air theater — one of the best-preserved in the world. The head teacher is Gene, a Berkeley classicist with an MA from the Polis Institute in Jerusalem who has been involved with Paideia programs since 2012 in roles ranging from participant to Rome Fellow to Assistant Director for European Operations.

For a high school student with any interest in ancient Greece — its language, literature, drama, philosophy, or archaeology — Living Greek in Greece offers something no domestic program can: two weeks of immersive language instruction in a country where the landscape, the ruins, and the living culture are continuous with the texts being read. The beginner-accessible structure removes the barrier that keeps most ancient Greek programs out of reach for students who haven't had the opportunity to study the language in school. It is the rarest kind of program — genuinely open to newcomers, intellectually serious, and set somewhere no classroom can replicate.