Over 50 years ago, when the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) was still in its planning phase, the team’s linguistic consultant, Dr John B. Wilkins, identified “awareness of the cultural context of the use of the language” as one of the core skills necessary for Latin reading fluency (Wilkins, J. B., (1969) ‘Teaching the Classical languages: towards a theory I’, Didaskalos).
Today, the idea that reading a language requires at least a basic understanding of the culture from which it sprang is considered uncontroversial, perhaps even self-evident. It is a core principle of the ACTFL World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages: students are expected to use the target language to ‘investigate, explain, and reflect’ on the relationship between cultural practices, products and perspectives.
The CLC was one of the first Latin textbooks to give such prominence to cultural learning. Over the decades the stories and language teaching evolved; the greatest change in the presentation of cultural material was the welcome addition of colored photographs. The material continued to be presented as short, authoritative lectures, in the voice of the books’ authors. It told students the contextual information they needed for the Latin stories to be readily understood.
In the intervening years, however, the pedagogy of our colleagues teaching history has moved on in leaps and bounds. Teachers of history no longer conceive of their role as “telling students what happened in the past”.
As British public historian Greg Jenner is fond of saying – including during numerous Twitter (X) spats – History and ‘The Past’ are different things. History is literally re-written every day. It is an interpretation of the past.
Many CLC fans were delighted when popular long running BBC television show Dr Who aired its episode The Fires of Pompeii, in which the eponymous Doctor lands in Pompeii and meets a familiar banker and his family. Over and above the pure joy of such a glorious geeky crossover, the popularity of this episode speaks to something that thwarts and frustrates so many of us who study history. We cannot do as the Doctor does and travel back in time to meet Caecilius, or anyone else for that matter.
The idea that historians have a mental TARDIS (the name of the Doctor’s time machine) and can access “what the world was really like” is a traditional way of viewing the discipline. Such a crusade for Historical Truth has, however, long been rejected by most historians. Avoiding blindly trusting my sources and challenging the idea that anyone knows “what really happened” were habits drilled into me from my earliest school history lessons, never mind during my history degree. Today, students are taught to be even more sophisticated historical thinkers. Their teachers encourage them to question the past and those who aim to reconstruct it, rather than simply rote learning lists of dates and facts.
In previous editions of the CLC, cultural material was kept short and simple, which had its advantages, but this also led to it being presented without invitation for debate or analysis. Students were not encouraged to wonder about how we know what we think we know. Nor was it highlighted that the stories too were constructs, the invention of modern interpreters of the past. As much as they might long to journey back in time, our authors do not own a TARDIS, so a critical dialogue between book and student is crucial.
For this reason we have overhauled the way the cultural material is presented, as well as working closely with academic specialists to try and ensure our thinking is up to date (although this has led to some curses when new discoveries are announced post-publication date!). Each main section of cultural material now has an overarching question which opens up a historical investigation. These questions are varied and designed to target a range of historical concepts and skills. Such questions are a key part of good historical learning:
[…] historical inquiry doesn’t need to be politically urgent or philosophically deep to be compelling. Questions probing the how and why of history acquaint us with the historicized humanity of those who came before us and the contingent surprises that they faced.
Whitney E. Barringer, Lauren Brand, Nicholas Kryczka (2023) No Such Thing as a Bad Question?
In Stage 2, for example, students are asked to consider ‘How did Caecilius’, Metella’s, and Grumio’s daily activities reflect and reinforce their different social statuses?’ .
The stories in each stage also touch on similar themes to these questions, and we envisage students integrating them into their understanding of how we imagine the past. Smaller sections of cultural material which support understanding of a particular story, but do not necessarily fit into the theme of the main culture section, are now presented next to the stories themselves. It is hoped that this closer integration will encourage a consistent focus on investigating, explaining, and reflecting on the cultural context of the Latin (to pick up the language of the ACTFL standards).
This sense of connection between culture and stories is also facilitated in the earlier books by the Talking Heads, figures who give first person accounts of elements of the material. These are usually recognizable characters from the stories, although some are more background figures, and Stage 12 has a unique modern ‘speaker’ imparting her archaeological knowledge. This speaker is actually modelled on one of our academic consultants, Dr Sophie Hay, much to her delight! Later in the books these Talking Heads become sources in translation. It is hoped that students will make a cognitive connection between the idea of sources ‘talking’ to us across the years, and also remember that the authors of these sources were humans with their own motivations and stories.
Finally, embedded throughout the material are Thinking Points. These varied activities check student understanding; ask them to recall material from earlier stages; develop their source skills; and make connections across the books, across the world and with the modern day. It is not imagined that teachers will use all of them but select those that target skills and knowledge that best suit their students and curriculum aims.
As I have said elsewhere, when we are teaching Latin we are not teaching students to be Romans. We are, I hope, teaching students to be linguists, classicists, historians or perhaps most desirable of all, effective critical thinkers. No doubt as history is re-written and we learn more about the past, the CLC will need to be updated again. And in the absence of a TARDIS, that future edition is going to be relying on the investigations of tomorrow’s historians; some of whom are sitting in today’s classrooms.
