Eleanor Dickey Latin classes during the Roman empire Latinitium.com

LATINITIUM.COM
Guest post by Eleanor Dickey, professor of Classics
at the University of Reading, England
LATIN CLASSES DURING
THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Two thousand years ago, when the Romans ruled a vast empire whose inhabitants spoke all sorts of dierent languages, many of those in-
habitants wanted to learn Latin. So they signed up for Latin classes, where
they learned using textbooks containing little dialogues about everyday
life. ese dialogues are in some ways remarkably similar to texts used to-
day to teach modern foreign languages, introducing learners to Roman
culture along with Latin: they illustrate how to use the public baths, the
banks, the markets, the temples, the lawcourts, etc. Here is one about visi-
ting an ailing friend:

e two-column format of this text is original, though the translation was
originally into Ancient Greek rather than into English. For unlike their
modern counterparts, the ancient learners’ dialogues are all bilingual,
with a running translation in the students’ native language. e transla-
tion matches the original line for line, so that the learner can understand
exactly how the original means what it means. is works better with An-
cient Greek than it does with English, because of the xed word order of
English, but I’ve managed to keep the line-for-line format in all but two
lines of the passage above.
An ancient Latin textbook as it appeared in the fourth century AD (reconstruction).
e reason learners needed bilingual texts was that in antiquity writers did
not leave spaces between words; they also did not normally use punctu-
ation or capitalization. It is not too dicult to read one’s own language
in that format, but reading a foreign language is really tough, since if you
don’t know where the words begin and end, you cannot use a dictionary.
And without a dictionary you have no hope at all with a monolingual text.
e extract below is written with both the Latin and the English in the an-
cient format: can you work out what it says? (Hint: the dialogue is about
someone who claims another person owes him money; as in the previous
passage quoted, parentheses indicate words in the English that are not
actually present in the Latin.)

Among the dialogues are many about going to school, such as this one: