Because of its focus on the past and on historical languages, the classics is a discipline that is particularly interested in translations and text alignment. Starting from a diachronic perspective, this contribution demonstrates how issues related to text alignment, present since antiquity, can be approached from a different angle and with entirely new opportunities thank to tools and methods developed in the field of digital humanities. By comparing examples from antiquity (e.g. Origen’s Hexapla from the third century CE) with modern projects based on treebanking and dependency grammar (e.g. the Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency Treebank [AGLDT] as part of the Perseus Digital Library from Tufts University), we shall present some new approaches and their potentials. In doing so, we shall also examine what status English has in these projects and how the different languages involved in each of them interact with English and/or with each other.