Hi Prof Dickey, thank you for sharing your time with us.

I am wondering, what does the manuscript history look like for these textbooks? Do we have any original material? Or else by what route have these works survived?

Thanks!

A question from /u/tiako:

"What period are they [the textbooks] from (second century?) and where are they from? Do they have any ghost stories? Or folklore?"

A question from /u/Vladith:

That sounds absolutely amazing. I've always wondered about the shift from Greek to Latin and then back to Greek in the Eastern Roman Empire. Was this "professional training" for Greek adults hoping to enter the Roman political elite, or was this part of the standard slave education for children?

A question from /u/majyka:

In Roma, puellae appellaverant de nomine patrorum - Filipe Iulii Caesari appellaverant, "Iulia Prima, Iulia Secunda," etc. Eratne eadem in Graeca? (Guessing on the word for, "Greece," the rest from memory. It's been over 10 years since I had a lesson - how'd I do?

I've always loved learning about this kind of "daily life" stuff - it feels very reassuring somehow to know that ancient people said the kind of stuff I say today. It's a very fascinating topic I didn't get much of during my time as an actual classicist, so I'm always really intrigued to learn more about it.

I hope this question isn't too terribly far afield, but learning about these textbooks (and especially seeing that lovely manuscript photo) has made me wonder: Do we know much about the use of these works after antiquity? Would they have been actually used by, say, Byzantines who needed to learn Latin for diplomatic purposes (or vice versa, or at all)? Why did these works end up being preserved?

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this AMA!

Where do you see yur future research going?

I remember I had to write a paper about the presentation of Caesar in the film Cleopatra and how it compared with reality (a very good topic as it requires real research). I looked for sources that realty with Caesar and I found one by a historian I can't remember, he was a minor Roman historian that wrote about the Civil War through interviews he did with Caesars troops. At the time, it made me interested in studying lesser known classical historians and bringing them into the light (before I found my true love ).

As such, Do you feel that we over emphasise the well known classical historians over other minor ones?

First of all, many thanks for doing this AMA. My questions are rather specific to my own personal scenario, so I suppose a few details would be necessary. I am in Year 13 and over the last few years have developed a strong interest in comparative historical linguistics, specifically both in that of Indo-European languages and of Pre-Indo-European languages (chiefly Etruscan and the various languages of Ancient Iberia). I am fairly certain that I wish to pursue an academic career in this field.

My first two questions concern my university choices. Funnily enough, for a while I actually considered applying to Reading almost solely because of you - it seemed to me that there really were not very many undergraduate Classics degrees with any focus whatsoever on linguistics. I did, though, eventually decide that Reading would not be right for me. I have already gone through the whole UCAS process and confirmed my choices, and my first few questions are about these.

1. As I said, I've applied for Classics, but for a while I was caught between this and Linguistics - with my desires of going on to an academic career in Ancient Historical Linguistics in mind, do you think that this was a good choice? Obviously, the particular course is important, so I will say that my offer is for Classics at Cambridge (much as I hate to fulfill the stereotype of 'how do you know someone's going to Cambridge? they'll tell you about it', it is relevant...)

2. That offer is a conditional offer depending on my grades; my insurance choice is an offer for Ancient Languages at UCL. As far as I could tell, this is the only university in the country to offer such a course; have you heard anything about its quality?

3. I haven't done any Greek yet, so will have to start it from the beginning at university; could I ask you what your personal thoughts are on what the best books/book to learn Ancient Greek are?

4. I understand that you seem to prefer an active learning style of foreign language teaching for ancient languages, more akin to the teaching of modern foreign languages, in opposition to the traditional grammar translation method (I would definitely agree with you, by the way). Would you be able to give me some pointers in terms of research to read comparing the effectiveness of these methods with specific relation to ancient languages?

5. Bit of a less serious question to finish with. I am right now in the middle of your excellent 'Learning Latin the Ancient Way' book, which I am greatly enjoying. Which of the various Latin-learning materials is your personal favourite, for whatever reason that may be?

Thanks again.

A question from /u/blarg15:

Tell us about the baths. We're they filthy dirty? How often was the water changed? How's they heat everything? We're there rampant orgies or is that just the movies?

What sort of sources are your favorites?

Greetings, Professor. Thanks for doing this! What is the most surprising thing you have learned about ancient Rome as a result of your research?

Thank you for coming!

The source itself raises all sorts of questions, but one I am particularly interested in is whether you can detect anything of the attitude of these Greek speakers towards learning Latin, given that the Greek sense of cultural superiority was so wrapped up in their language. Do imperial officials or soldiers make any appearance (I'm thinking if something analogous to their appearance in Apuleius)?

Hi Eleanor. University of Reading alumni here. Roman history is something I would like to know much more about, sadly my knowledge is very slim - what's a good place for a 'beginner' to start educating themselves with?

Also bonus question. St Patrick's Hall motto is 'facta non forma' - which I always assumed is just gobbledygook made up by some former resident to make the hall look more prestigious - or does it actually have a Latin translation?

I understand that ancient Roman primary education was somewhat brutal. What would be the age when children would start using textbooks?

Thank you for your time.

Christianity, Judaism, Islam have their heretical movements, in Roman religion and/or philosophy was there anything similar in terms of an orthodoxy and competing unorthodox beliefs?

Is it accurate to say that most persons in the Roman empire were farmers? Is it true that the influx of foreign slaves from the mid-late Republican conquests destroyed farming by small-landowners in Italia? Have any accounts of small landowners survived from this period? Thanks for doing this.

Why do you have to travel around? Isn't this exactly the kind of thing the Internet was invented to solve?

Have any of the texts you translate mention Cyprus? If so, what do they say about the island?

Do you by any chance know how scholarly medieval Europeans (lets say from the 900-1300) learned Greek?

I remember in the book "Sailing to Byzantium," Colin Wells talked about how hard it was for Petrarch to be taught Greek by Barlaam of Seminara. Wells said this was because such Greek teaching material that we all have now hadn't been created or collated yet.

Which of course, makes me wonder how did Liupund of Cremona in the 900s learn Greek? Since it seemed he could communicate very fluently with the court of Byzantium.

Is it presumed that any westerners who knew Greek were raised in a bilingual environment since they were children, or is Wells wrong and that there were still materials for learning Greek from a western language in this time frame?

This is super interesting, thanks for doing the AMA. I have a few questions...

How far back into the Republic do your manuscripts go? Any from the time of Hannibal / Scipio? What are some of the oldest Roman sources you've studied?

Have you ever come across a manuscript that had information that was completely new to modern historians? (I'm including 'minor' stuff, say a recipe or something like that). Basically how well studied had the manuscripts been before you got your hands on them?

I'm kind of inching carefully towards the idea that we might discover works that had been lost since antiquity. It has been explained to me that we're 99.999% certain that we won't find Tacitus on Caligula in a complete form somewhere, there is a hope in the back of my mind that some previously unstudied letter or manuscript perhaps quotes him and we could find new information that way. Has anything like that happened to you? Is it likely?

Thank you

Hello professor,

I would like to ask if by chance you happen to know Belgian prof. dr. in Roman law Laurent Waelkens from the Catholic University of Leuven. I studied pandectarum under him and his passion and interest for old manuscripts, with their glossaries, comments and illuminations has taken hold in me by no small measure since. He also travelled (travels) around Europe extensively to search for and translate old texts. Perhaps you might have met!

More to the point, I would like to ask for your opinion on 'hineininterpretierung' and how it affects your work.

Especially in the field of legal history, it is of preeminent importance to clearly translate the words and concepts in old texts without thereby imbueing them with additional meanings, connotations or contexts that were not necessarily of the time. (In some cases, doing exactly this, a benign misinterpretation, created significant leaps forward in legal history by invoking totally new concepts with supposed roots in classic Roman law (e.g. usufructus and the percipience of modern property categories, or a humanist basis for the old roman legal command of 'excisio' when a mother with unborn child would come to pass. It is interesting, at least!)

I would like to hear your opinion on this stance and what techniques you tend to apply, if any, to be as truthful as possible in your translations.

Thank you!

How do you explain the ablative absolute?

Very, very interesting. How did these textbooks survive?

Cheers for this Prof. Dickey. I gather students in the east would study Vergil: at least I recall seeing one papyrus from Oxyrhynchus where someone was practising their Latin by writing out Vergil, and Byzantine authors regularly cite Vergil.

Here's the question: do we have much evidence on which other Latin authors they read, if any? Which genres?

I am having a difficult time imagining what drunken relatives were stereotyped as back then. Would you please include an example of such an exchange? Paraphrasing is fine.

Have you translated any Latin grammars of non-hegemonic languages, such as the Gaelic languages? If not, do you know of any online resources of these kinds of works, particularly grammars that early modern scholars might have consulted?

Latin still takes a big part in some European education system, how would you explain its relevance in this 21st century?

Have you found "additions" to the textbooks by students (whether they be written in answers or doodles)? If so, what kind of picture of the users of these texts do the additions paint?

It's an honour to have you here, Prof. Dickey! I'm sorry for my lateness, but I do have a couple of questions, if you have the chance!

1. First off, the only book I actually own on Roman education is Bonner's Education in Ancient Rome, which I admittedly have not yet had time to read cover to cover. It does suggest, however, that the Romans had a sort of rudimentary public school system. Was that so, and if it was the case, how available was it? Upper class children certainly have used tutors, but was the education in these institutions at all comparable?

2. Was there any availability for education in the Roman world to more rural families? I'm currently translating a pastoral novel (Daphnis and Chloe, written in 200ish CE), and the shepherds in it, while a work of fiction, were able to at least teach the main, aforementioned, characters basic literacy and "as much other education as they could," which I found to be astounding. Was that normally possible?

3. What's your favourite time period within the Roman world to study?

Thank you so much!

Hi Eleanor! You taught me in Exeter in 2012 - thanks for your amazing teaching!

Having read a great number of such texts now (for what your Hermeneumata books have been a lifesaver), I am amazed at how many of them were so un-user-friendly; being in the target language, for a start, is surely blatantly problematic (Dositheus being the obvious exception). Does this lead us to conclude that any Roman learning another language (presumably Greek) would have needed a teacher of some kind. I suppose my question is whether it was even possible to be an autodidact in ancient Rome?

Hey there, what ancient sources give the best impression of domestic life in late antiquity?

So the textbooks you translated were for students learning Latin?

Thankyou for answering our questions!

How far do you consider an understanding of an ancient language necessary to fully appreciating the history and culture of the period?

Salve professor, and first many thanks for your book on Ancient Greek scholarship - got me out of many a sinkhole of confusion while researching.

How has your research influenced how you teach in day-to-day circumstances, if at all?

Have you ever had an opportunity to visit the Vatican? How much of what you translate is religious in origin?

Hey Professor, I'm an undergrad in Classics right now. I'd like to ask you what are some of your favourite Latin texts you've read that aren't necessarily very well know. I personally would like to improve my own Latin skills, but I don't want to be reading something that I will come across in a class.

Also, what were some of the more interesting/peculiar Latin or Greek texts you translated? I'm currently reading Lucian right now, and well, he has quite the sense of humour. Thanks for taking your time to answer our questions here!

In your research, did these textbooks cover any music?

Music history textbooks briefly cover music before the invention of Gregorian Chant. Do we know how music was used in everyday life?

I hope this isn't too far from your field!

Hello! I am graduate student in classics currently working on a project in archaic greek apoikism have a question about bilingualism. You see to be predominately interested in the Late Antique period, but I was curious as to whether there are any good sources or particularly impactful evidence for archaic bilingualism (primarily amongst Greeks but also Etruscans and Carthaginians)?

No particular questions, Professor Dickey. Just wanted to say that I admire your scholarship.

Did you find anything on the peoples of the British Isles? If so, what was the most intriguing/unusual thing?

Hi! I took courses on Latin in both high school and college. I'm interested in continuing my education in that regard. Are there any resources you can recommend?

Did you find that the language changed a lot across the centuries? (I can barely read old English)

Secondly, people make generalities of nationalities all the time. In reading all those odd snippets from Romans, did you end up with any sweeping opinions about what sort of people Romans were (e.g. immoral, rational, fun, serious, etc...)

As an Italian I find your enquiry very interesting, and the subject itself makes me curious to read your book.

May I ask you what century are these textbooks from? And were their authors likely to be Italic or Greek?