Weekend Reading: Latin for non-Romans

This week I’ve been learning about the methods which were used to teach Latin to non-Latin speakers in the Roman world. And to be honest, I’ve been giggling quite a lot. Sometimes loudly, in public places.

This wasn’t a purposeful research topic: it came about by pure chance. There I was, minding my own business in a South Shields charity shop, sorting through the books in search of old Pokemon annuals (ah, the joys of being a parent!), when a Latin book jumped out at me.

I was just a bit surprised. My local charity shops are great for old Jamie Oliver books and the occasional out-of-date AA Book of the Road, but it’s not often I see any Classics books at all, let alone a recently published book about ways of teaching Latin. So I quickly paid my £1.25 before any bands of marauding classicists could storm the place and snatch it from me, and hurried home with the furtive enthusiasm of someone with a socially unacceptable interest.

So if you’re in my Latin class, brace yourself for some changes. Who am I to argue with Fate?

There’s a lot in this book that I didn’t know – and Eleanor Dickey answers questions I never really thought to ask. It seems that the Greek-speaking adults of the ancient world were taught Latin through little dialogues, much like those cheesy tape-recordings which most of us remember from French or German lessons at school, when we learned how to go into a quaint little specialist shop and order something we would never want at home.

The non-Latin peoples of the Roman Empire were provided with sample dialogues about what to say when you go into a bath-house, how to ask directions to the right flat in an insula, that kind of thing. And, since one of the main reasons for Greek-speaking folk to learn Latin was to get involved with the practice of law, there were all kinds of staged arguments, simplified legal principles, and wise judgments of Hadrian. It’s all fascinating, non-elite stuff, which manages to be both cryptic and ludicrously familiar at the same time.

Take a look at this one, in which a shopper is haggling over the price of clothes. (Here the Greek translation which was on the right in the original manuscript has been replaced by an English translation.) How GCSE is this?!

But not all of the topics would be entirely suitable for your GCSE class. Here we’re taught how to deal with somebody who behaves badly when drunk:

I’m now planning on using infamiam maximam tibi cumulasti to replace my usual ‘Look at what the cat dragged in’.

And then we have some useful all-purpose insults, for when you get into a fight with a native Latin speaker:

Finally, a goodnight. Perhaps a little more controversial than the CBeebies bedtime song – but very Roman!

You can read more here. And if you’re interested, the book’s available on Amazon:

This week’s classical links from around the internet

News

Caligula on Netflix – Express

The impact of the Wall – News Guardian

Greek and Latin as Intangible Heritage – Neos Kosmos

Antiquities in Vogue Greece – The Fashion Spot

Amphora workshop in Rome – Archaeology News Network

Comment and opinion

Athena and common sense – The Paris Review

Catiline – the Musical? – In Medias Res

Gendered misbehaviour – Idle Musings

On porous boundaries and translating Homer – LA Review of Books

Twenty years of blogging antiquity – The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Everyone’s a Stoic now – Eidolon

Roman spring cleaning – Sententiae Antiquae

The insensitivity of Aeneas – Ad Astra Per Mundum

Hercules and hydraulic engineering – The Shield of Achilles

Classics and career diversity – In Medias Res

Life as a graduate classicist – Society for Classical Studies

Polybius as Forrest Gump? – War on the Rocks

Podcasts, video and other media

Highlights of Fishbourne – The Roman Palace at Fishbourne

Daily Life in Ancient Greece – The History of Ancient Greece

The Parthians, Caracalla and a wedding – Emperors of Rome

Watch the recorded OU/ACE Classics event – StudentHub

12.00 Introduction

29.00 The World of Greek Drama

1.02.00 Interview with Edith Hall

1.29.20 The Votives Project

1.56.50 Classical Studies at the OU

2.33.10 Classical Civilisation in your School