Professor Eleanor Dickey and students publish new Latin and Greek texts

Some years back, while studying a fifteenth-century manuscript of a text she was editing, Eleanor discovered that it also contained a new text, one she’d never seen before. This was a set of 37 letters, presented both in Greek and in Latin without any indication of who had written or received them. Intrigued, she started reading.

Book Cover of Lettres Fictives d'un Humaniste: L'Enseignement du Grec A la Renaissance - Sous la direction de Eleanor Dickey

Lettres Fictives d’un Humaniste: L’Enseignement du Grec A la Renaissance – Sous la direction de Eleanor Dickey (2025)

‘I hear that you’re wasting your time and money. That you throw yourself into gambling and music and frequent parties. If you act like that, you’re going to end up hiring prostitutes – and everyone knows what kinds of damage they do to university students. I’m well aware how upset your father will be when he hears this; perhaps you will drive the poor old man to an early grave. That’s why I beg you to change your ways, because carrying on like this will completely discredit you.’

‘You shouldn’t trust every spirit, as the old proverb says. Because to put it simply, everything you’ve heard about me is wrong. I only do what everyone else does. Enjoying music and throwing oneself into it are totally different things. I flee from gambling as a little sparrow flees a hawk – no-one has ever seen me with dice! Just once a year there’s a party here, and all the students go to it together; is it wrong for me to do what everyone else does? If I didn’t go, I’d be called snooty. My father isn’t going to be at all worried about that. He knows me well and appreciates that one has to cut young people some slack. What happens only occasionally is excusable. And if there’s anyone who really studies hard, that’s me. I don’t say that to boast about myself, but because truth demands it and so that you will change your opinion of me, seeing as it’s wrong.’

Who was this student? What university did he attend, and when – antiquity, the middle ages, or the Renaissance? Why were his letters bilingual, and why were they preserved as a collection? These questions were perfect for answering as a class project, and in 2023 the Sorbonne University offered Eleanor a visiting professorship with a class of students eager to undertake that project. Each student took one or more letters to study and gave it an edition, translation and commentary. As they worked through the collection they found more and more clues to its origins, which turned out to be northern Italy in the fifteenth century. They also found more manuscripts of it: two in Paris, one in Karlsruhe, one in Copenhagen, and a sixteenth-century printed version of which a copy was conveniently located in Oxford. They studied letter-writing in the Renaissance and discovered that the student who speaks so eloquently in these letters never existed, nor did his family: the letters are purely fictional creations. And the class learned that fifteenth-century Greek students, lacking the textbooks we take for granted today, often studied bilingual texts: the letters had been copied as easy reading material for Greek learners. Examining the Greek letters, several students observed that this Greek was not really suitable to learn on, having been written by a fifteenth-century Italian who had failed to grasp several important points of Greek grammar. But it was better than nothing for learners who had no other easy Greek texts to hand, so they used it anyway. In 1548 one class of Greek students in Freiburg, Germany, became so fond of these texts that they published an ‘improved’ version of them as a class project; this was the origin of the printed version in Oxford.

Eleanor’s students took inspiration from the Freiburg class and decided that they too should publish their work on the letters as a book. Of course this required considerably more work than they had done in class, but this group were up for that challenge and happily produced not only publishable versions of their editions, translations and commentaries, but also an introduction explaining what they had discovered about the letters’ history. The Sorbonne put Eleanor in touch with Les Belles Lettres, a wonderful publisher who was able to produce the book less than a year after she handed it to them. Working with this publisher meant publishing in French, which made Eleanor a little nervous; although the class had been conducted in French, not only Eleanor but also quite a few of the students are not native speakers of that language. But the Sorbonne professors rallied around and corrected the French, resulting in a finished product that the authors are delighted with.

The book is published from 6th June 2025; for more information, see:

https://www.lesbelleslettres.com/livre/9782251457093/lettres-fictives-d-un-humaniste

‘Learning Latin the Ancient Way’ translated into German

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

Reading Classics welcomes Dr Sam Agbamu

Next week on October 19th we welcome a special speaker to our regular research seminar series.  Of course all our speakers are special, but Dr Sam Agbamu, who is currently at Royal Holloway, is about to join the staff of the Classics Department at Reading, in January 2023.  We are hoping that lots of students and staff will come to the seminar and welcome him!

Sam did his PhD at King’s College London, researching modern Italy’s use of the history of Roman imperialism in Africa, during its own imperial endeavours on the continent in the nineteenth and twentieth century.  Sam’s current research project, which he will pursue at Reading as part of his Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, is on the afterlives of the neo-Latin epic, the Africa, by the fourteenth century humanist Petrarch.  This poem recounts the history of the Second Punic War, and Sam is studying its role in transmitting ancient ideas about the continent of Africa into the early modern and modern era.  Sam’s other interests include anti-racist and anti-colonial approaches to the literatures and cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, and their receptions.  In spring term he will teach on our Part 2 module ‘Roman History: the rise and fall of the Republic’, and a new module on ‘“Race” in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds’.  Students are encouraged to sign up for the new module if they would like to, as there are still places on it.

Petrarch by Justus of Ghent (public domain)

Petrarch by Justus of Ghent (public domain)

 

 

Watch: Naked From the Knees Up – Ancient Latin Textbooks Rediscovered (by Prof. Eleanor Dickey)

On 8 November 2016, Prof. Eleanor Dickey gave a talk to the Roman Society entitled ‘Naked From the Knees Up – Ancient Latin Textbooks Rediscovered’. You may watch her talk here, courtesy of the Roman Society: