At a School-wide ceremony in Memorial Hall, students from all forms were recognized for their athletic accomplishments during the 2025-26 Fall Term.
December 8, 2025
For Luca Bocresion ’26, Greek and Latin are more than courses — they’re a way of understanding the world and his place at and beyond St. Paul’s School.
BY IAN ALDRICH
It was late on a November night and Luca Bocresion ’26 was studying for his Fall Term finals when he received a phone call from his brother Jack ’24, a sophomore at Harvard University. The two are close — “I came to St. Paul’s partly because my brother was there,” Bocresion says — and FaceTime frequently. There’s the usual brotherly banter to their conversations, of course, but often their talk is dominated by their mutual love of Greek and Latin. How are your classes going? How has your command of Greek improved? What’s excited you?
This call was no exception. Jack pulled up the Iliad and asked his younger brother to start reading with him in Greek.
“We just started going through the text together, looking at the words, suggesting things to each other,” says Bocresion. “I loved it. He’s obviously at a higher level than me because he’s studied Greek in college, but I was able to keep up.”
That should come as no surprise. Like his older brother, Bocresion has made studying classical languages central to his life — and central to his experience at St. Paul’s. Beyond the fact that Jack was already at the School, Bocresion’s desire to come to SPS was bolstered by the strength of its Greek and Latin program.
In the three-plus years since arriving at St. Paul’s as a Third Former, Bocresion has only grown more appreciative of the School’s classical language offerings. A member of the Classical Honors Program (CHP), Bocresion has excelled in the curriculum, taking most of its classes. He’s especially fond of the classes he’s taken with Dr. David Camden, the Alexander Smith Cochran Chair in Greek Language and Literature.
“He’s insanely smart, and taking his Latin [4 Honors] class was honestly a transformative experience for me,” says Bocresion. “I’ve just never been in a class before where I felt the teacher had so much mastery, so much understanding and so much care for the subject. You learn something new literally every second of his class.”
My teachers, peers and the overall environment have truly set me up for success.
— Luca Bocresion ’26
The Bocresion brothers’ passion for the classics is largely self-started. Bocresion says neither of his parents were particularly attuned to Latin or Greek. In fact, it was the family’s New York City Greek neighbors who were the most excited about their interests. “They thought it was great,” he says with a laugh.
His passion for the classical world began young. An avid reader, he was 7 when he was introduced to the series Percy Jackson & Olympians. More expansive interpretive stories of famous Greek and Latin texts soon followed, and by the time Bocresion was in fifth grade he was studying Latin.
“The reason we have these stories today and the reason they’re still significant in our cultures is because they really address so many timeless themes,” he says. “Love, betrayal, honor, death even—they are all there.”
Bocresion’s deep interest in the subject extends beyond the classroom. He packs a particular passion for etymology and in his free time loves to compare various English translations of Greek texts to examine all the nuances of the original. There’s a thrill he finds in the work, the chance to dig deeper into a story and raise his own understanding of ancient Greek.
“To be able to read the original Greek is a very special experience,” he says. “The connotation behind every word — there’s so much more to explore than what’s in the English text.” Recently, for example, he read sections of the New Testament in its original Greek form and says it offered a whole “new perspective” on the text “and what the original authors were saying.”
Bocresion’s passions keep him busy in other ways, too. He co-heads the SPS Classics Society and over the summer represented the School at the National Junior Classical League annual convention in Oxford, Ohio. He’s also the vice president of the New Hampshire Junior Classical League, and this fall organized a team of 12 SPS students to travel to New Haven, Connecticut, to compete at the Yale Certamen, one of the biggest classics high school quiz contests in the country. The upstart crew, many of whom had never competed in a tournament like this before, did surprisingly well.
“We were sort of the underdogs,” he says. “We just barely missed the semifinals, which is unfortunate, but we were also going up against teams where many of the kids had competed in these tournaments for the last three years. So, I have to give ourselves credit.”
During the last two summers Bocresion has participated in archeological digs in Greece, and last March he took part in the biannual CHP trip to Greece and Italy, visiting Corinth, Epidaurus, Athens and other historic sites.
“It was a busy 10 days and we were moving around a lot, but it was awesome,” he says.
Awesome, in fact, is how Bocresion sums up his time at SPS as a whole. He’s considering studying classics or archeology in college and he feels strongly that the School has positioned him perfectly for the next phase of his life.
“As I’m wrapping up the Greek and Latin sequences at St. Paul’s, I am reflecting on my experiences and learning over the past three years, and I feel that I couldn’t possibly be better prepared for a wide range of studies in college, whether that be classics, comparative literature, archaeology, philosophy or linguistics,” he says. “My teachers, peers and the overall environment have truly set me up for success.”
Like the classics themselves, in other words, it’s all there.
