This article reassesses the contribution of the late Renaissance scholar and teacher Petrus Victorius (Pier Vettori) to the reconstruction of the text of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, which has come down to us in what is often a highly corrupt form. It proposes an interpretation of certain abbreviations in the marginalia in one of Victorius's copies of the Aldine Eudemian Ethics which reveals them as recommending readings rather than recording them; it proposes that many more of those readings constitute his own conjectures than previously thought. The article goes on to suggest why Victorius never produced an edition of the Eudemian Ethics as he did of other Aristotelian works, despite returning repeatedly, over much of his life, to the task of improving this particular text. Victorius is revealed nonetheless as a highly creative—but also highly disciplined—textual critic, at least the equal of his nineteenth- and twentieth-century successors.

After beginning to teach a year 9 Latin class I noticed a distinct lack of engagement from the majority of the pupils. I decided to use four different adaptive teaching strategies to try to improve engagement from the class. After choosing the four strategies (grouping, questioning, input, and choice) I planned four consecutive lessons around the strategies and modern literature. The study showed that adaptive teaching strategies work best when teachers have good prior knowledge of individual pupils. Without this prior knowledge, I feel the two most successful strategies, grouping and input, would have been significantly less effective. The less effective of the four strategies, questioning and choice, could have been successful with more time and if they were used consistently throughout the teaching year. They both need time in order to develop the way in which they are used by teachers (specifically questioning) and by pupils (both choice and questioning), which is something I will be considering when starting my teaching career.

Following Janko's suggestion that two trimeters cited at Strabo, Geography 8.6.20 form a couplet from an unknown, possibly Aristophanic comedy, this note explores the resonance and meaning of the third citation contained in the same chapter of the geographer's work. It proposes that this third citation, which relates to a Corinthian hetaira's work at the loom and is possibly from either the same or a different comedy, contains a joke hinting at the Odyssey and alternative traditions regarding Penelope's chastity. This Odyssean echo thematically connects this citation to the comic trimeters, which also contain clear allusions to the Odyssey.

This paper describes four methodological proposals for rescuing from oblivion and highlighting women writers in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. In workshops employing a variety of active methodologies, students become acquainted with Greek writers like Sappho, Diotima of Mantinea and Aspasia, and their Roman counterparts, including Sulpicia and Agrippina the Younger, while also becoming aware of the authorship of these women writers and their lack of visibility. The proposals take the shape of activities aimed at fostering a vocation for science among baccalaureate students in Spain but can also be easily adapted to secondary and even higher education in other educational contexts.

‘Relaxed’ events are now common across the public Arts and Heritage sectors. Although designed with the needs of autistic children and their families in mind, they suit people with a range of access needs. Our project at The Open University asked: what would a ‘relaxed tutorial’ look like, and who might benefit from it? Across two years (2021–2023), tutors in the Department of Classical Studies at The Open University trialled a set of autism-friendly accessibility adjustments to live online tutorials for distance learners on a Roman History module. We found that relaxed tutorials were welcomed by students with anxiety disorders, caring responsibilities, chronic conditions and low confidence, as well as by autistic students. Since the project was concluded in 2023, relaxed tutorials have been rolled out across further Classical Studies modules at The Open University. Their principles and structure offer a new way of looking at accessibility adjustments which could be adapted to other teaching contexts and levels.

The Initial Teacher Training (ITT) Common Core Framework (CCF) requires all teachers to adapt classroom teaching to support all students (Department for Education, 2024). While the Department for Education's previously-encouraged concept of ‘differentiation’ was well-intentioned, in that tasks were meant to be graded to support and develop all students' learning in a class where there were many different levels of prior attainment, it tended to mean that in practice in the classroom different tasks were often set to cater to the supposed different learning attributes of students. Differentiation has now been superseded by the concept of ‘adaptive teaching’. Adaptive teaching is characterised by teaching that takes account of the range in prior attainment of students and anticipates barriers to learning by providing resources or specific support so that they may all achieve the same intended outcomes. Classics teaching is often characterised by the reading of large amounts of text, both in the original languages of Latin or ancient Greek or in translation. Students in the Classics classroom contain a wide range of prior attainment, cultural experiences and may have barriers to learning, such as Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. This article presents findings of how the use of a blended language approach, involving the digital parsing tools in the Cambridge Latin Course and Suburani Latin course books, improved the quantity of translation of Latin achieved by students of mixed prior attainment and encouraged a more effective use of classroom time to develop deeper comprehension and understanding of the translated texts.

This article investigates dictionary usage with Year 7 students of Latin. During my lesson observations I noticed how much students relied on looking up words in the dictionary when working on translation from Latin to English. I wanted to find out if there was the potential for a more interactive and/or memorable way for students to work with their dictionaries. This action research project was carried out in an all-boys, secondary, selective school. I noticed that when students were set to work on translation from Latin to English, they spent a significant amount of time looking up words in the dictionary at the back of the booklet. Often by the time they had looked up the word in question and then turned back to the translation, they had already forgotten the meaning of the word they had looked up. Additionally, the words they were looking for were words that they had already encountered several times but forgotten the meaning of since the last time they had looked it up or seen it. The research confirmed that merely copying the words that students looked up down multiple times helped them recall the vocabulary better than if they simply looked the words up.

During the course of my teacher training, I have encountered two distinct classroom contexts for oracy: a term that refers to the ability to express oneself in speech. At my first placement school, very few students were willing to answer questions or present arguments in front of their peers. Conversely, the majority of students at my second placement school are keen to demonstrate their knowledge, yet often speak over one another during discussion tasks. In both schools, dialogue is mainly directed towards the teacher; students rarely offer extended answers during lessons, and oral reasoning and argumentation generally take place as a precursor to written work. I therefore wanted to implement a sequence of lessons where the learning was intentionally carried out and measured through student talk and cooperation. In particular, I wanted to examine how far teaching specific oracy skills and providing informal scaffolded opportunities for presentational and exploratory talk can support the development of historical thinking skills in Year 7 (age 11): in other words, students' ability to consider multiple historical perspectives; to appreciate the difference between modern and ancient values; to critically engage with historical terminology, and to present and justify an argument. Students' responses were generally positive and engagement raised. I conclude with further thoughts about future practice.

After reading these volumes one can hardly conclude otherwise than that the study of urban space in Roman Italy is thriving. These large volumes, collectively exceeding 1,800 pages and comprising 86 chapters/articles (in addition to supplementary materials), include contributions in four languages – though, perhaps surprisingly, none contain contributions in German. The array of contributors suggests that even more modern languages could have been included, if desired. The authors range from early career scholars to renowned professors.

The new paradigm of ancient economic history that has dominated the last twenty years is based on New Institutional Economics; its key concepts are growth and transaction costs. It has succeeded in proving that the ancient economies were not static and in documenting the significance of ancient markets; but by excising labour, slavery, and exploitation from discussion, the conceptual limits of this paradigm are becoming apparent to more and more people. The volume edited by John Weisweiler on debt in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East is solid evidence that an alternative, non-neoliberal, paradigm is currently in the process of formation.1 The book is obviously an attempt to assess the validity of David Graeber's blockbuster book on debt for the study of ancient economic and social history.2 As with the volume on citizenship presented below, the fact that this collection of twelve essays ranges temporally from the archaic period to the early middle ages and includes Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern societies is an excellent illustration of a growing and encouraging trend in our discipline. This is a highly stimulating volume. The essays explore: the nexus between coinage, slavery, and warfare in various ancient societies; how quantified social obligations colonized various social, political, and intellectual fields; and whether Graeber's concept of the Axial Age is valuable for the study of ancient history. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Graeber's model seems to fit best the world of ancient empires (Roman, late Roman, and Sassanian), but seems to make less sense for the world of Greek poleis. This illustrates, yet again, the need for Greek historians to think seriously about the peculiarities of the Greek world and the appropriate comparisons.

The four books suggested for review in this article are very disparate; so what shall be attempted here is to bring them into conversation with each other, but also to explore what they reflect about recent scholarship and how they contribute to current debate.

Verse epitaphs are our main and very abundant source for responses to individual deaths. We can almost never know exactly whose attitudes or values they express, but we can assume that they embody attitudes and values that it was acceptable to express publicly. Many at all dates seek merely to commemorate the dead person or convey grief, but, from about 400 bce onwards, others adopt a position on the fate of the dead person, though often hedged with a cautious ‘if’. Very many possibilities emerge: they range from a plain denial that anything survives death, via claims that the dead person is now (e.g.) in the aither/in the home of the blessed/on Olympos/with the heroes, to, very rarely, declarations that s/he is now actually a god. Strangely enough, support for such claims is never sought in the fact of the dead person being an initiate in a cult that promised advantage in the afterlife. In all this we see not so much individual choices as the range of options available for individuals to believe in. But we must also suspect that belief in the more optimistic options can seldom have been as firm as in a society where such options were authoritatively endorsed and alternatives not publicly countenanced.

Writing in the first century ce, Columella delineates farming practice based on personal experience and observation. Roman attitudes towards slavery, truth, and torture are highlighted in a particularly graphic description of preparing the soil for sowing.

The Charles Keck reliefs on the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO, portray the triumph of white settlers over Native Americans, who are depicted as stereotypically aggressive and ‘barbaric’. Keck's sculptures invite comparison to the metopes of the Parthenon, which depict the triumph of Greek and Athenian ‘civilization’ over ‘barbarism’. The central focus of Keck's reliefs is Fortitude, an allegorical figure whose image throughout art history is indebted to depictions of Athena and Minerva, and who serves for the Nelson-Atkins as a modern American proxy for the Athenian goddess. As the Periclean building programme proclaimed Athenian superiority and had long-term cultural and economic impacts for Athens, the Nelson-Atkins is intimately connected to the economic and urban development of Kansas City, including its history of racist real estate practices, engineered by a founding trustee of the museum, which became a national model.

In the books reviewed there is a cumulative resistance to the normative discourse, shifting our attention away from the centre and to the margins. This might mean listening to marginalized women, from the poets themselves to characters in poetry, or people today who relate to those female characters’ experiences. It might mean pushing beyond spatial boundaries and encountering dislocation and disjunction in the hazy hinterland of the non-elite. It might mean moving the human to one side, so that nature and the nonhuman can come to the fore (and teach us about what it means to be human, along the way). These books give voice to suppressed groups including women, animals, and the land. They highlight axes of oppression, and give us tools to shift the balance of power: from the language we use to the way we relate to the world around us. And with stories of prophetic horses, sympathetic lions, and pensive pigs, their interpretations – as well as the classical tales they recount – are not to be missed!

Considering Roman art as a cumulative process could help resolve a small iconographical problem. Cubiculum N in the burial hypogeum under the Via Dino Compagni in Rome (c.350–75 ce) features a series of figure scenes referencing the exploits of the mythological hero Hercules. One of these scenes, presently entitled Hercules Slaying an Unknown Enemy, has no direct equivalent in extant Roman art and so has proved difficult to identify. This article suggests that Hercules’ battle with Cacus is most likely the incident referred to here. This is because Antonine medallions and coins, and third-century Roman sarcophagi, use imagery associated with the Cacus story that collectively could have contributed to the design of the Unknown Enemy panel. Further, identifying the defeated enemy as Cacus fits in with, and indeed helps to clarify, programmatic themes and associations already established in the other figure scenes in this funerary chamber.

We start this survey in Italy during the early first millennium bce; a context on which Seth Bernard's new monograph offers an exciting, and in several respects transformative, contribution.1 Its general claim is that, while Rome did not develop a historiographical tradition until Fabius Pictor, there was a keen and pervasive interest in history across ancient Italy, since the early Iron Age, which played out across a wide range of venues and media. The brief of the historian must be to jettison any hierarchical approach to the interplay between textual and archaeological evidence, and to take as broad a view on what history amounts to as possible.

The present article will reconsider the historiographical value played by the 182 bc Antigonid military ritual – known as Xanthika. Firstly, in order to appraise ancient historiographical adaptations and modern analytical shortcomings, this article will retrace extant ancient sources and, secondly, its current state-of-the-art. Thirdly, the original Polybian treatment will be discerned from its Livian adaptations, and historiographical distinctions will be proposed for each version. Fourthly, the Xanthika will be reconsidered as a key historiographical device through which Polybius coupled the Hellenic themes of Alexandrian legitimacy, deep-rooted tyrannical discord, and irreversible royal decadence within a larger narrative of the Roman ascendance towards world dominance.