Category Archives: New Publications

New Survey for Teachers in Ancient World Studies

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Figure 1: Generative AI in the Ancient World Studies Classroom Teacher Survey –
https://forms.office.com/e/NdTnesja9i

Do you teach any topic related to the ancient world? Do you have thoughts about generative artificial intelligence? Researchers in the Department of Classics at the University of Reading want to hear from you!

Thanks to a University of Reading Research Collaboration and Impact Fund (RCIF) grant, Jackie Baines and Edward A. S. Ross are carrying out survey research into the impact of generative AI in wider ancient world studies classrooms. If you teach about any aspect of the ancient world (broadly conceived), please take 10 minutes to complete the survey here (Figure 1).

Figure 2: iGAIAS: Investigating Generative Artificial Intelligence in Ancient World Studies.

This research is part of Jackie and Edward’s wider project iGAIAS: Investigating Generative Artificial Intelligence in Ancient World Studies (Figure 2). Their work explores ethical and effective applications for generative AI in ancient world studies to make them more accessible for classicists and the wider public. This includes an upcoming temporary exhibition in the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology on inherent biases about the ancient world in generative image AI. Research for this exhibit is supported by undergraduate students Shona Carter-Griffiths, Hannah Gage, and Jacinta Hunter.

Jackie and Edward have also recently published a new article on the first phase of their generative AI research in the Journal of Classics Teaching. This article discusses the generative AI ethics training sessions for ancient language students and teachers over the Autumn 2023 term.

Classics and Generative AI: New Resources and Opportunities for Staff and Students

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Figure 1: Baines, Jackie, Edward A. S. Ross, Jacinta Hunter, Fleur McRitchie Pratt, and Nisha Patel. Digital Tools for Learning Ancient Greek and Latin and Guiding Phrases for Using Generative AI in Ancient Language Study. V2. March 12, 2024. Archived by figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25391782.v2.

Over the past year, Jackie Baines and Edward A. S. Ross have been researching the ethics of generative AI in teaching Classics and ancient languages as part of their Teaching and Learning Enhancement Project (TLEP) “ChatGPT: A Conversational Language Study Tool.” Their work on this project has initially led to the Classics Department’s AI guidelines and citation guide, and now Jackie and Edward have produced a guiding phrases document and aseries of tutorial videos for staff and students about ethical and effective uses for generative AI.

The guiding phrases document is a compilation of digital learning tools, including generative AI tools, for learning Ancient Greek and Latin. With the help of undergraduate students Jacinta Hunter, Fleur McRitchie Pratt, and Nisha Patel, the Classics AI Testers for the project, Edward and Jackie prepared and tested 10 “copy-paste”-able prompts to streamline generative AI use for supporting ancient language learning. These guiding phrases are tailored for students of elementary, intermediate, and advanced Ancient Greek and Latin at the University of Reading, but they are also couched with tutorials on how to customize them for a more personalized experience.

In order to increase generative AI literacy and make current guidelines more accessible, Jackie and Edward have also prepared a number of tutorial videos about the ethics of using generative AI and proper methods for using these tools. A playlist of these videos is available here.

Figure 2: #STOPandTHINKbeforeyouGENERATE

Alongside these videos, Edward and Jackie will be hosting a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) workshop on methods for using a variety of generative AI tools to support ancient language teaching and for introducing generative AI ethics to students (Figure 3). This event is funded by a Council of University Classics Department (CUCD) Education Grant and is completely free to attend. There are also some travel grants available for local teachers intending to participate in-person. Please email Jackie Baines (j.baines@reading.ac.uk) if you are interested in a grant. If you are interested in attending, please sign up for in-person or online attendance here.

Figure 3: Using Generative AI to Support Ancient Language Teaching CPD Workshop.

Jackie and Edward have also surveyed staff and students in the Classics Department over the past year about the impact of generative AI on their studies. The results of the initial surveys will be published in the Journal of Classics Teaching shortly. The results of the second set of surveys will be presented at the Digital Humanities and AI conference.

The next stage of their research, now funded with an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP) grant, will focus on the biases present in generative image AI, specifically those related to the ancient world. The pilot study for this part of the project was completed by undergraduate student Shona Carter-Griffiths, and we are currently hiring a second-year undergraduate student to continue this work over Summer 2024 (Figure 4). If you are interested in applying for this role, please find the full details and application requirements here.

Figure 4: Gerard Butler with a Spear: Locating Modern Stereotypes for the Classical World in Generative Image AI

New book, ‘Scribal Culture in Ancient Egypt’, now available

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A new book titled Scribal Culture in Ancient Egypt, written by Niv Allon and Reading University’s own Hana Navratilova, has recently been published by Cambridge University Press.

This book, which is part of the series Elements in Ancient Eqypt in Context, seeks to characterize the scribal culture in ancient Egypt. The book draws upon texts, material objects, and archaeological evidence, and aims to build on current discussions in literacy, as well as literary and social history.

The book is free to download for a limited time, so we encourage everyone to have look!

 

Further details are available via the Cambridge University Press website here.

New book: A Citizen of Nowhere

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We are delighted to announce that Dr Hana Navratilova’s new book A Citizen of Nowhere, a biography of Egyptologist Jaroslav Černý, has recently been published. We spoke to Hana about her research and her thoughts on this latest publication.

Hana is both an Egyptologist and an historian. Both groups work along similar principles to forensic specialists, with only traces of past lives to provide insight. However, unlike the forensic teams, there are often traces modern scholars don’t know how to read yet. Experiencing places and landscapes provides valuable insight, however there are also reams of letters and documents to read. From governmental archives to private letters, from photographic record of artefacts to snapshots from a windy day on an excavation, there is much to disentangle.

As an Egyptologist, Hana works with ancient texts and artefacts from Egypt, to look more closely at ancient lives and how communities lived. Currently, she is working on a project that has a working title ‘biography of a pyramid’, which is concerned with monumental buildings and how the ancient Egyptians perceived and used them. But it asks other questions too – how does a building become a monument, and how may it die, and be revived again? From working sites to the sites of burial, worship and memory, to the sites of identity, to being material resources, to a transformation into heritage, the pyramids’ life runs a full circle illustrating humanity’s changing relationship with our history. There is a responsibility when talking and writing about past lives, and determining whose voice should be heard, and we owe it to the past to be open-minded and let it speak with its own voices: it may help to understand our present.

As an historian, Hana is not concerned only with the ancient world, but also in how we study it. Life-writing is well suited to the task of critical, but open-minded historiography, and Hana uses it in her own history teaching. Through life-writing one is faced with people and things as individuals and must ask demanding and uncomfortable questions. It is important to see events and other people from several different angles, which can bring us out of our comfort zone. Above all we must ask, what does ancient Egypt, its people, and its artefacts, mean for the modern world? Answering this requires a reading and re-reading of history, to reflect on how we use the past in our own lives and how we develop and replicate our research. Lives of researchers are relevant here, and this is where A Citizen of Nowhere comes in.

The new publication is a biography and chronological narrative of the Egyptologist Jaroslav Černý, who, like Hana, was an immigrant in the UK. The book was named A Citizen of Nowhere following Hana’s view that transnational lives have their place in our world and their stories are worth telling.

Congratulations to Dr Hana Navratilova on her exciting work. You can find A Citizen of Nowhere on the Peeters Publishers website.

Those wishing to explore Egyptology resources and records further can also visit the Griffith Institute Archive website.

New book: Latin Loanwords in Ancient Greek: A Lexicon and Analysis

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Professor Eleanor Dickey’s new book on Latin words in ancient Greek is being published by Cambridge University Press on June 15th. Colleagues interviewed her about this momentous (for her, at least) event and learned some surprising facts.

Q: How long is your book?

A: Over 700 pages.

Q: Goodness, why did you do a silly thing like that? You could have split it in thirds and gotten credit for three books!

A: You’re right, I admit it – but a dictionary isn’t easy to split up. Plus it’s not only a dictionary, but also a study of which words were borrowed and when and where and why. So when I thought about dividing it into multiple volumes, I had hideous visions of readers ending up with just one of those volumes and having the research questions but not the answers, or the answers without the questions. Or either without the references. When I was writing this book I spent a lot of time with a study of Latin loanwords published over a century ago by someone who split his work into two parts. He put the list of references in the first part, which has totally disappeared; as far as I can tell no scholar in my lifetime has ever found it. So no-one can understand what the abbreviations in the second part mean, and no-one can trace the sources. Therefore the second part is still cited, rather grudgingly, by people who would much prefer to cite its sources. I realise that this is one way to improve your citation index, but still I wouldn’t want anyone to feel about me the way people feel about that man. So I squeezed this book all into one massive volume to make sure that anyone who got hold of it would get the whole thing.

Q: Ah, I see. Your book is a service to scholarship, and that’s why it’s so big that no-one can afford to buy it – how much is it selling for, anyway?

A: I would prefer not to answer that question, if you don’t mind.

Q: Sorry. Maybe tell us some fun facts from your book?

A: The modern Greek word for ‘lettuce’ comes from the Latin word for ‘bitter’. Very appropriate, I think.

Q: Where does modern Greek come into it? I thought this was a book about ancient Greek?

A: It is about ancient Greek, but for each word borrowed, I look at how long that word survived, and about a quarter of the ancient Latin loanwords survive all the way into modern Greek. The modern Greek words for ‘sausage’ and ‘belt’ and ‘bird’ and ‘yellow’ are also from Latin.

Q: Good heavens, why were they borrowing words like that? Didn’t the Classical Greeks have words for those things?

A: Yes, they did, but those words got replaced by Latin borrowings, because during the Roman empire Greek speakers thought Latin was really cool as a way to express some kinds of ideas. Not everything, just certain things. Like today, for many English speakers, French has cachet for naming items of food and clothing, but not for football terminology. For the Greeks, Latin also had cachet for food and clothing, but not for boating or farming terminology. Most cultures seem to feel that foreign words are cool for food and clothing, in fact.

Q: Yes, like coq au vin and haute couture. What other topics caused the Greeks to reach for Latin words?

A: They loved borrowing words for titles of officials in the imperial bureaucracy; you just couldn’t be properly bureaucratic without a Latin title. This was a bit of a problem in late antiquity, when the Latin-speaking half of the empire basically disappeared and the Greek speakers who needed Latin titles were cut off from the Latin speakers who would normally produce them.

Q: But couldn’t they just go on using their old Latin titles?

A: Not always, because you know what bureaucratic types are like. They love reorganising things, and they want everyone to see that they’ve reorganised things, so they need to find new titles to make people notice.

Q: I see. So what did they do?

A: They made up their own Latin titles by putting together Latin words. For example, the Romans had a set of titles starting with a meaning ‘from’, like a secretis ‘from secrets’, that is, the person in charge of secrets. So the Greeks made the title a brevis ‘from letters’.

Q: How do you know they didn’t take that from the Romans? Even if we don’t have it in Latin, surely that could just be an accident of survival?

A: Brevis belongs to the third declension, and a takes the ablative, so a Roman could never say a brevis; it would have to be a brevibus.

Q: Oh yes, of course. I knew that. Er, what’s your favourite Latin loanword?

A: Aditeusantes, aorist participle of aditeuo, which means ‘having entered into an inheritance’.

Q: That looks awfully Greek; are you sure that’s a Latin loanword? What Latin word do you think it comes from?

A: It comes from adeo ‘enter’, but you’d never know that to look at it. The Greeks knew, though, because they wrote aditeusantes in Latin letters.

Q: Wow. Where can we find out more?

A: Try Cambridge University Press’s page for the book, or their blog post, which is a bit more serious than this one.

‘Learning Latin the Ancient Way’ translated into German

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A German translation of my book Learning Latin the Ancient Way (Cambridge 2016) was published last month by the Swiss press Schwabe with the title Latein lernen wie in der Antike. It’s a fantastic translation, in places better than the original, and so far it has been quite a hit, with the German Classicists’ Association (Deutscher Altphilologenverband) naming it their Publication of the Month. So I am super pleased!

The process behind this publication began in 2019, when a lovely woman named Marion Schneider contacted me out of the blue to say she wanted to translate the book to facilitate its use in German schools. Naturally I thought this was a great idea, and so did my publisher, Cambridge University Press; convincing Schwabe took a little longer, but eventually they came round, and I hope they won’t regret it. So early in 2020 I went to Würzburg to show Marion how the ancient line-for-line translation system works. After all, translating this book was not going to be simply a task of converting English to German. Much of the book consists of bilingual texts that were originally Latin and Greek in line-for-line equivalents, where I have replaced the Greek with English; Marion was going to have to replace the Greek with German, still keeping the original layout. This line-for-line translation is tricky to do in English, because of our fixed word order, and works better in German because of that language’s greater flexibility. So by the end of my session with Marion I was getting pretty jealous, because I could already see that her version of some texts was going to come out better than mine had.

For example, a schoolboy’s explanation of what one of his classmates did was originally written like this in Latin (left-hand column) and Greek (right-hand column), with the two languages lining up so that on each line the Latin and the Greek said exactly the same thing:

Sed statim Ἀλλ’ εὐθέως
dictavit mihi ὑπαγόρευσέν μοι
condiscipulus. συμμαθητής.

 

A literal translation of that into English, keeping the ancient line-for-line equivalent, would have looked like this and would not have made much sense:

Sed statim But at once
dictavit mihi dictated to me
condiscipulus. a fellow student.

 

So in Learning Latin the Ancient Way I had to do this (§2.1.7):

Sed statim But at once
dictavit mihi a fellow student dictated to me.
condiscipulus.

 

But because German allows a subject to follow its verb, Marion was able to match the ancient text more precisely, like this:

Sed statim Aber sofort
dictavit mihi diktierte mir
condiscipulus. ein Mitschüler.

 

Right after my meeting with Marion the pandemic hit, and I didn’t hear any more from her for so long that I thought she must have abandoned the project. But she was working away on it, and about a year later she sent me the complete translation. We took the opportunity to fix some mistakes in the original version; for example one of my emendations to a Latin text had turned out to be wrong, so it was handy to be able to eliminate that. And then Schwabe got to work, and I did not have to worry about the copyeditor’s queries or read the proofs or anything – Marion did all the work, and I get to enjoy the result!

Written by Professor Eleanor Dickey

Connecting Classics to its Wider Context

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Figure 1: Huijiao (Photo taken from https://baike.baidu.com/pic/%E6%85%A7%E7%9A%8E/2626692).

We were excited to hear that the Centre of Buddhist Studies at the University of Hong Kong has just published an English translation of Shi Huijiao’s The Biographies of Eminent Monks, edited by our PhD student, Edward A S Ross. Tianshu Yang (Jiechuang Institute of Buddhist Studies) was the translator. We asked Edward to share details of this exciting project with us. He reports as follows:

The Biographies of Eminent Monks is a compilation of the lives of over 500 Buddhist figures from 67 CE to 519 CE. This 14-chapter volume became the widely accepted basis for Chinese Buddhist, historical biography literature from the 6thcentury onwards. Extending from China’s first interactions with Buddhism to the Liang Dynasty (502-557 CE), the text of the Biographies of Eminent Monks discusses Buddhist figures well known during the time of Shi Huijiao (慧皎) (497-554 CE), the compiler and author (Figure 1).

Since it does not discuss the Mediterranean world, the relevance of this text to Classics might seem slight, yet there are interesting connections to the west buried in the life stories of these monastics. Since Edward studies ancient Central Asia, he was particularly interested in the monastic figures who came from and visited the so-called “Western Regions.” 47 of the 532 figures mentioned in the text hold ethnic or geographical origins to the west of East Asia, be that Central or South Asia (Figure 2).

 

Figure 2: Estimated places of origin for all 306 biographies with given locations. Points with white borders represent those with connections to the Western Regions (Image created by Edward A S Ross using mapping data from Google Maps (2020))

Shi Huijiao. The Biographies of Eminent Monks. Tianshu Yang, translator. Edward A. S. Ross, editor. Hong Kong: Centre of Buddhist Studies, University of Hong Kong, 2022.

Some come from as far west as Parthia, a region in Central Asia well known in the Mediterranean world. This reminds us how deeply connected different parts of the ancient world were to their wider global context. Whether through trade, war, or religious pilgrimage, people from the Mediterranean and Asian worlds did indeed interact. This is why it is important for those studying ancient history to broaden their source bases to garner a deeper understanding of the nuances of cultural interactions in the ancient world.

From the outset, the goal for this translation project has been to produce an open-access volume of Shi Huijiao’s The Biographies of Eminent Monks, so that these poignant stories and crucial aspects of Chinese Buddhist history are widely available to the English-speaking public, practitioners, and academics. The full ebook is available at https://www.academia.edu/90233933/Shi_HuiJiao_The_Biographies_of_Eminent_Monks_%E9%AB%98%E5%83%A7%E5%82%B3.

 

New exhibition: Black African Authors in the Roman Empire

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In celebration of Black History Month we are delighted to announce the launch of a physical exhibition in the Classics Department hallway (pictured below). Reading University’s Classics Department is committed to decolonising the curriculum and challenging our preconceptions of the non-white world. Our students Chloe Gardner (BA Hons. 2021) and Edward Gregory (current 3rd-year undergraduate) created an online exhibit about Black African Authors in the Roman Empire in the wake of the University’s launch of its Race Equality Review on 24 May 2021. COVID-19 restrictions did not permit a physical exhibit at that time so we have re-animated this project here.

BHThe three authors featured here are ancient African writers: Tertullian, a Berber; Terence, a Libyan; and Apuleius, a Numidian. These authors wrote broadly and across different genres, but each touched on the experiences of their people, even if in a satirical manner.

TertullianThroughout history, black and African voices have been silenced systematically to forge a narrative of white supremacy. By casting Western-minority groups as savage or uneducated natives, collective memory now recalls groups of people subdued and modernized by the West. Traditional practices regarding research and interpretation in the Classics discipline tend to reaffirm and strengthen the misconceptions associated with this flawed and dangerous narrative. The field of Classics has been dominated by white, male voices. Through telling stories relatable to them they created an echo chamber of information on the classical world. Perpetuating the idea of a white-washed ancient past is harmful, however, to all. In ignoring data and evidence for a society that was far more influenced by the East and South than was sometimes thought, Westerners have lost or hidden a wealth of knowledge, understanding and answers.

To read more about each of these north African authors and a suggested bibliography see our online exhibition at research.reading.ac.uk/curiosi/black-history.

Double International Distinction for our Professor Annalisa Marzano

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Author: Dania Kamini
Edits: Prof. Amy Smith and Prof. Annalisa Marzano
Date: 27 August 2021

The British School at Rome has elected our Professor Annalisa Marzano as a Research Fellow. This prestigious non-stipendiary position, which Prof. Marzano will hold for three years, provides another testament for her pioneering research in various areas of Roman studies, including Roman social and economic history, and the ideology, social function, and production of Roman villas as seen in the texts of ancient authors and archaeological remains. Prof. Marzano is an expert on Roman marine aquaculture and large-scale fishing, and her research has brought attention to the importance the exploitation of marine resources had in the ancient economy. Her publications explore and provide an original approach to ancient agriculture and horticulture, marine resources, continuity and disruption in the exploitation of economic resources, settlement patterns, the varied nature of capital investments, and trade. Her research has attracted international recognition, including her election as Member of the Academia Europaea last year, thus highlighting her dedication and crucial contribution to the discipline.  

This accolade quickly follows the publication of an Italian updated edition of Professor Marzano’s ground-breaking Harvesting the Sea: The Exploitation of Marine Resources in the Roman Mediterranean — published by Scienze e Lettere — in early July (http://www.scienzeelettere.it/book/50237.html)!  

Harvesting the Sea offers a fresh approach to a challenging as well as interesting area of research, which has long stood at the centre of scholarly attention. Since its first publication by the OUP in 2013, it has received excellent reviews. Prof. Marzano has been considered ‘the first [scholar] providing a synthesis on the Mediterranean basin in its wider commercial context’ (Botte, E. 2015. Exploiting the Sea. JRA 28: 684). Bringing together her teaching and research skills, Professor Marzano provides both an introduction to the relevant studies for those not familiar with the subject and a guide to the reformation of current research on ancient sources. Find an online version of the book here.

A book launch of Un Mare da Coltivare, the Italian edition of Harvesting the Sea, took place at the Parco Archeologico di Baia in Italy on 28th July 2021 and was livestreamed on the Facebook page of the Parco Archeologico dei Campi Flegrei (https://fb.watch/7jm2eq6VEf/). An international panel of scholars and researchers from Italy and Spain along with the publisher of the Italian version and the director of the Parco Archeologico dei Campi Flegrei presented and discussed the book. The event, which we were glad to share on our social media (https://twitter.com/UniRdg_Classics/status/1419619741346500608), attracted a wide audience including experts in the relevant research area and friends of the study of Classics.  

The location was indeed a great fit for the content of the book. The archaeological site of the Terme Romane of Baiae, in which the event was held, is a complex measuring more than 10,000 sq. metres on four terraces linked by ramps and staircases, which may have been part of the imperial palace of Baiae or, according to some scholars, a valetudinarium, an ancient Roman hospital. Some highlights from recent underwater archaeological investigations at Portus Julius, the first harbour that served as a base for the Roman western naval fleet at the northern end of the Gulf of Naples, were presented to those physically attending the book launch. The ancient waterfront of Baiae, with its magnificent villas, streets, tabernae etc. is today submerged due to the volcanism and bradyseism* that characterise the Phlegrean Fields. The area with the highest concentration of remains is protected as part of the archaeological park. If you look for a destination to add in your post-covid travel list, then Terme Romane of Baiae may certainly be a good choice, especially if you keep in mind that it is possible to see the submerged remains by booking authorised excursions and either snorkel or scuba dives!  

Don’t forget to follow Reading Classics on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for the latest news, and to subscribe on our YouTube account for a full list of videos and recorded research seminars.    

* Bradyseism is a technical term describing the gradual movement of the surface caused by underground magma chamber, especially in volcanic calderas. 

 

 

What Can a Dog Called Margarita Teach us About Ancient Rome? – Education in the Making.

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Interviewees: Prof. Peter Kruschwitz, Dr. María Limón & Prof Xavier Espluga. Interviewer: Bunny Waring

Date: 30th April 2021.

Today the Classics Department of Reading is delighted to announce the release of a special video called What Can a Dog Called Margarita Teach us About Ancient Rome? In this video Prof. Peter Kruschwitz (University of Vienna), Prof. Xavier Espluga (University of Barcelona) and Dr. María Limón (University of Seville) discuss the lettered world of ancient Rome and how ancient peoples interacted with the world around them. The video was filmed, directed and edited by James Rattee (https://vimeo.com/jamesrattee/videos) and includes digital footage from Prof. Matthew Nicholls’ Virtual Rome model.

Today we invited Peter, María and Xavier to discuss with us the motivations and methods of making this video and what is next for this interesting project on ancient inscriptions.

INTERVIEW

Bunny Waring (BW): Good Morning All. Thank you for joining us this morning to talk about your collaborative piece What Can a Dog Called Margarita Teach us About Ancient Rome? The Classics Department are very excited to share this work and we wondered if you could explain a little bit about your motivations for this project?

Thank you so much for this – it’s great for us to be back for a little while, albeit virtually. All three of us share the same passion: our enthusiasm for Roman inscriptions, especially inscriptions composed in verse. To us, those inscriptions are not just stones or pieces of metal that happen to have some poetry inscribed on them. They are carriers of art. They are visible, tangible manifestations of a universal artistic practice of Roman times, spanning the empire across time and space, with thousands of examples surviving to the present day.

This art was produced by individuals from all runs of life, and it was produced in the city of Rome just as much as it can be found at Hadrian’s Wall, the shores of the Black Sea, or in the Roman settlement of North Africa. We can relate to these individuals very easily because they’re not just some remote elite: they are people with everyday occupations, everyday hopes and worries, everyday problems. Like (most of) us – the other 99%, so to speak, far away from the palaces and lives of the elite. What is more, these individuals inhabited the very spaces, geographically and socially, that we still inhabit today, along with all their challenges.

It’s neighbourhood poetry, it’s communal art. And it gives us the most direct, emotionally moving, and instructive access to the world(s) of ancient Rome.

Of course, we know how we ourselves, especially in an academic context, interact and engage with Roman inscribed material remains. But how did they do it? We were curious to find out! And then we got very lucky: the British Academy gave María the opportunity to get our joint research going, first through its visiting fellowship scheme, then through additional funding for this video. We are so grateful for their support, and we hope that this video will both repay them for their trust in our research and appeal and communicate to wide audiences just what incredible, valuable material we study in our desire better to understand the Roman world and its diverse cultures.

BW: How exciting to work on such an interesting topic! So I’m eager to know: why did you choose this particular inscription?

We wanted to make a number of strong, important points. About the way in which we perceive, in which we encounter the Roman world. About the way the ancient world is presented to us in museums, archives, exhibitions, and books. And we want to do so while racing a wide audience because what we have to say and offer is relevant to so many different audiences.

 

We want to enthuse new generations with our passion for Roman history, for poetry, for epigraphy. We want to give teachers the opportunity to expand the canon of teaching through the inclusion of poetry that students can easily relate to. We want to invite museums, collections, and policymakers to rethink their approach to the way in which these incredibly exciting, talking objects from the ancient world are displayed. What better way to achieve this than to choose a text that expresses, in such beautiful words, the grief of pet owners – whose faithful companion had died. We feel we all can relate to that, and we feel that this text alone opens up so many new ways of thinking about the Roman world and the people who “were” the Romans, than the ever-same repertoire of classical authors.

BW: There must be a lot of interesting stories out there?

There are several thousand inscribed poems surviving from across the Roman world. You find anything, from obscene graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, to epitaphs on funerary monuments, 110-lines long and erected in the desert of Roman North Africa. You find beautiful, outrageous, hilarious, thought-provoking pieces, but, of course, also the banal and uninspired. How else could it be: writing short(ish) poems was a shared pastime across the ancient world, and the pieces are just as varied as their authors – men, women, children. If you would like to see further examples, you may explore them in an easily accessible format here and here. The material truly is a hidden treasure waiting for its discovery.

BW: What was it like recording this piece? Would you recommend the process to others?

Haha, oh dear! Well… none of us are natural-born entertainers. We all were terrified and at first, we hated to see our faces and hear our recorded voices. But James Rattee, the producer and creative mind behind our video, did an incredible job to make us feel at ease, to make us look smart (within the limitations that we were painfully aware of), and make the video appealing to such a wide range of audiences. We hope that putting this video out there will make it available for generations to come – for pupils, teachers, academics, cultural managers, policy makers: it should entertain and be useful at the same time! It’s genuinely a piece of art.

 

BW: Well we all certainly agree with that, here in Classics at Reading University! Excellent work! Finally then, what is in store next for your project?

We want to do more. We want to reach out to schools, to those who design curricula, design teaching in schools and at university, to show them the potential and possibilities. And we want to transform the way in which inscriptions are presented and utilised in museums – there is so much potential wasted.

We are making first steps. But there’s much more work to be done. So, if you are interested, please do get in touch with us, and we will explore the potential for collaboration with you! And as we are still thinking about reaching larger audiences and improving educational materials we would be deeply grateful if viewers, students and teachers, from all over the world would send us their feedback, even in an informal way. And by all means do feel free to send us any kind of questions regarding how Roman communicate their feelings, emotions, fears, and concerns through their inscriptions.