They're not using these languages as linguae francae, though. They're treating fluency in Latin and Greek as a mark of a scholar's preparation in the field of c

They're not using these languages as linguae francae, though. They're treating fluency in Latin and Greek as a mark of a scholar's preparation in the field of classics. (Less charitably, you might say they're using it simply as a shibboleth.) Seems kind of pointless to me, since AFAIK it's a matter of convention and institutional inertia that so many disciplines are grouped together under that label. I mean, if I'm a researcher in the bioarchaeology of Cretan olive cultivation, what have I got in common with a student of Attic tragedy, other than the fact that we both took Greek at some point and belong to the same university department?