This article contains full editions with commentary of a selection from the ink writing-tablets discovered in the excavation of 2017, four letters written by or to the prefect Iulius Verecundus. The editions are numbered continuously from 890, following the sequence in Tab. Vindol. IV.1 and 2.

The first stone ashlar blocks of Greek architecture, those of the mid-seventh-century temples at Isthmia and Corinth, pose a problem for understanding the beginnings of Greek stone construction.1 Their peculiar feature is the presence of grooves plausibly explained as a way to move the blocks with ropes. Yet scholars disagree about how these ropes would have been used, and during what stage of construction. The first excavators of the two temples suggested that the ropes would have served to lift each block into place, and were subsequently extracted from the grooves once the block had been set against its neighbour. Later scholars dismissed this theory as both inconsistent with the evidence and technically impracticable, questioning whether lifting machines were used in Greek construction as early as the mid-seventh century. Currently, the widely accepted view holds that the crane appeared in the Greek world only in the late sixth century. An alternative hypothesis is that the grooves were cut early in the construction process so that ropes could be used to manoeuvre the blocks within the quarry. However, the ‘lifting’ theory continues to have its adherents. Clarifying the significance of these parallel grooves is thus a matter of some importance to the history of Greek construction. This article reassesses the alternative theses on the basis of a new examination of the evidence, and demonstrates that the idea that the grooves served for lifting is the most plausible. Furthermore, it argues that forerunners of the crane appeared in Greece well before the late sixth century. Finally, by examining how the blocks would have been manoeuvred into place after lifting, it contends that the grooves also served the purpose of placement, with a method anticipating the Classical period's sophisticated lever technique.

My experiences both as a learner and as a teacher of Latin have led me to the conviction that speaking Latin advances a more nuanced understanding of the language, and leads to an enhanced level of reading fluency and greater ease in engaging closely with the text. Even after having studied the language to any degree of competence in a passive capacity, bringing it into active use does not come without some investment of time and effort. With the intention of facilitating access to the benefits of speaking Latin fluently, I have set out some recommendations for those who would like to explore this approach, and put together an overview of its recent spread in formal teaching, and in research, around the UK and Europe. It is my hope that in drawing attention to the rapidly increasing number of initiatives, this article will promote cross-fertilisation of ideas between the disparate influencers in the field of Latin pedagogy.

This article reconsiders the possible statuary of the Pantheon in Rome, both in its original Augustan form and in its later phases. It argues that the so-called ‘Algiers Relief’ has wrongly been connected with the Temple of Mars Ultor and is in fact evidence of the association of the Divus Julius with Mars and Venus in the Pantheon of Agrippa, a juxtaposition which reflects the direction of Augustan ideology in the 20s b.c. and the building's celestial purpose. This triple statue group became the focus of the later Pantheon, and its importance is highlighted by the hierarchized system of architectural ornament of the present building.

Nearly every – no, every – Greek grammar and course book, even the most comprehensive (in English, at any rate), gives a very skimpy, perfunctory and unhelpful account — insofar as it gives any account at all – of what ‘aspect’ is and how exactly it is related to verb tense and time (which tend to be conflated). Most of the books and articles on the subject of the aspect of the Greek verb are accessible only to the professional philologist, and can't therefore be easily applied by non-specialists to the understanding of the actual usage of Greek writers or to the imitation of their usage when translating into their language. This article sets out to remedy this situation by giving a clear and (within limits) comprehensive explanation of aspect as it applies to the Greek verb.

The ‘insider-outsider problem’ has had little impact on the study of religion in pre-Christian Rome. Classicists generally assume that the modern idea of sacrifice as the ritual killing of an animal applies to the Roman context. This study argues, however, that the apparent continuity is illusory in some important ways and that we have lost sight of some fine distinctions that the Romans made among the rituals they performed. Sacrificium included vegetal and inedible offerings, and it was not the only Roman ritual that had living victims. Roman sacrificium is both less and more than the typical etic notion of sacrifice.

During my PGCE I had a class of eight students in Year 11 studying for the OCR GCSE in Latin who had to master knowledge of 475 words for their exams. Their recent unseen translations demonstrated weak performances due to poor vocabulary knowledge. On interviewing the students, most lacked a systematic approach to learning vocabulary. Since the end-goal of studying Latin today is more often the reading of ancient texts, the requirements for vocabulary learning differs from that of other languages. Composing sentences in Latin is an increasingly rare skill too. Thus by rarely needing to produce Latin, students have no means of actively practising the language. Whilst students often find learning vocabulary arduous, I found that with Latin students find it particularly difficult to retain knowledge. In the school the GCSE Latin lessons are teacher-led and mostly involve the dissemination of information for the students to record and process. The pressure of covering the exam syllabus and difficulty of integrating vocabulary activities into this class led me to the possible solution presented by Memrise.

A conventional certainty is that the first state-driven persecution of Christians happened in the reign of Nero and that it involved the deaths of Peter and Paul, and the mass execution of Christians in the aftermath of the great fire of July 64 c.e. The argument here contests all of these facts, especially the general execution personally ordered by Nero. The only source for this event is a brief passage in the historian Tacitus. Although the passage is probably genuine Tacitus, it reflects ideas and connections prevalent at the time the historian was writing and not the realities of the 60s.

Before the modern Restored pronunciation of Latin, the English language had an Anglicised system for pronouncing Latin, whose legacy is still quite clear in the modern language. This paper examines the English system of pronouncing Latin, and the collapse of that system in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This includes a short review of the history of the pronunciation of Latin in Britain from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century; a review of the rules and historical development of the English system, in the form it reached by the mid-nineteenth century; the reform of that system in the late Victorian era; and its erosion from the late nineteenth century and replacement with the Reformed pronunciation of Latin.

In a familiar passage at the end of Plato's Apology, Socrates offers an account of what he believes will happen to us when we die. As in the Phaedo, it is his impending death that prompts Socrates to speculate about the nature of the afterlife: as soon as his verdict is announced, Socrates turns to the jury to gloss on his sentencing. It was unprecedented, as far as we know, for a defendant in the Athenian court to end his trial by addressing the members of the jury, but the Apology has Socrates doing just that. While his defence in the Apology was already audacious, Socrates' closing speech appears even more provocative. Among other things, he declares that he has no reason to fear death, but that, on the contrary, the death penalty he received only moments before may well be considered a blessing. Socrates supports this claim with an argument in the form of a constructive dilemma: either death involves the cessation of consciousness, in which case our afterlife existence will resemble a single night of dreamless sleep, or after our death we will go to a place where all the dead are ruled over by just judges. Since either scenario constitutes a good state, death should be considered something good (40C5–41C7). This article will examine Socrates' argument in detail and discuss a number of salient problems that arise from it. Commentators have typically attempted to tackle the interpretative problems one by one, but I shall argue that they resist satisfactory resolution and instead alert us to an ironic reading of this passage.