Musings – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Rainbows

“If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton, who died last week, had a remarkable talent for making complicated things sound beautifully simple. The above quotation is possibly my favourite of hers, although it competes hotly with her all-time classic, “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

Ever the realist, with her feet firmly placed on the ground despite her stratospheric success and popularity, Dolly instinctively understood an inherent truth about life: that pleasure and pain are somehow connected. Whether it’s the first sip of a cup of tea when you are cold, getting into bed when you are particularly tired and sore or eating when you are ravenously hungry, there is a certain kind of pleasure that arises after pain. The pleasure is real, and it is enhanced by the contrast with what came before it. We don’t simply experience the pleasant thing; we enjoy and appreciate the change from one state to another We all recognise such experiences, even if we don’t normally think about them in philosophical terms.

Socrates noticed the same thing more than two thousand years ago. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates is sitting in prison on the day of his execution. His chains have just been removed and he rubs his leg, remarking upon the extraordinary inter-relationship between the pain he had been experiencing and the pleasure that has now replaced it. The conversation then meanders, in the usual Socratic style, into a much larger philosophical discussion about the relationship between pleasure and pain. His initial observation expresses exactly what Dolly Parton is saying: the pain is necessary in order to experience certain kinds of pleasures.

Plato returns to the subject in the Republic, in which Socrates considers people who have been ill and then become healthy again. Somebody who has experienced sickness may discover that being well is an extraordinary pleasure, perhaps one they had previously taken entirely for granted. The same applies to hunger, thirst and other physical discomforts. We often become much more conscious of pleasure when we have recently experienced its opposite. Nothing beats the relief and joy of feeling better after a nasty bout of illness, and the feeling is a useful reminder not to take our health for granted.

There is an interesting contrast here with the Epicureans, who really did place the absence of pain at the heart of their philosophy. Epicurus is often portrayed as the patron saint of hedonism, but his version of hedonism would probably disappoint anybody hoping for an excuse for endless feasting and debauchery. The Epicureans believed that the highest pleasure was essentially freedom from physical pain and mental disturbance. Once those had been removed, there was no need to keep chasing ever greater pleasures. Simple food, friendship, conversation and a life free from unnecessary anxiety were quite sufficient. In fact, Epicurus argued that many of the pleasures we pursue most enthusiastically are precisely the ones that eventually cause us pain. The sensible person therefore learns to distinguish between pleasures that genuinely contribute to a good life and those that merely create new desires, anxieties and discomforts. But for me, the Epicureans got it wrong.

There is a tendency, particularly when discussing resilience or personal development, to romanticise adversity. We tell ourselves that difficult experiences make us stronger, as though suffering were automatically a form of character-building exercise. It isn’t. Some things are simply awful. Some suffering achieves nothing except suffering, and there is nothing admirable about inflicting unnecessary misery upon ourselves or anybody else. But there is no escaping the fact that a certain amount of pain is unavoidable and I would go so far as to say essential for a fulfilled life.

Aristotle is (in my opinion always) rather more nuanced than Plato. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he argues that pleasure and pain are fundamental to the development of character. We should, he says, be educated from childhood to take pleasure in the right things and to feel pain at the right things. This is not quite the same as saying that we should seek out suffering; rather, Aristotle recognises that becoming a functioning adult involves learning how to respond appropriately to the inevitable difficulties of life. This, I would argue, is much closer to what Dolly Parton means when she says that the rain is essential for the rainbow to appear: it is not that one should court discomfort, rather that discomfort is an inevitable part of life, in which unexpected joy is often just around the corner.

This is where I think the ancient philosophers (and indeed Dolly Parton) have something rather useful to say to those of us involved in education. We spend an enormous amount of time trying to make things easier for children. Sometimes this is absolutely the right thing to do. A child struggling with a genuine barrier to learning needs support, not a lecture about resilience. A child experiencing serious distress does not need somebody to tell them that adversity builds character. But there is another kind of difficulty that we perhaps need to be rather less frightened of, and that is the inescapable fact that learning is difficult. There really isn’t any getting around this. You cannot learn a language without forgetting vocabulary, you cannot become good at mathematics without getting things wrong, you cannot write well without producing some truly dreadful first drafts. Perhaps most recognisably of all, you cannot learn to play an instrument without sounding absolutely appalling for quite a while: just ask anyone who has sat through a performance by a junior orchestra. You cannot, indeed, become accomplished or even merely competent at anything without going through the slightly humiliating process of being a beginner. We have just moved to an incredibly quiet cul-de-sac and therefore experience no through-traffic past our door; what we inevitably see a lot of is learner drivers being taken out on their very first day, hunched forward over the steering wheel and gripping it for dear life while they crawl along the road. They will no doubt be competent and confident before you know it, but those first, anxious forays are unavoidable for all.

When it comes to education, we have developed an extraordinary expectation that difficulty is evidence that something has gone wrong. A student finds a piece of work difficult and concludes that they are not clever enough. A parent sees their child struggling and assumes that the teacher has failed to explain it properly. A teacher notices that pupils are frustrated and feels pressure to make the task easier. Sometimes, of course, the task really is too difficult or the explanation really isn’t working. But sometimes the difficulty is precisely what is supposed to happen. As I have written before, some of the most effective learning strategies feel distinctly unpleasant while you are doing them. Retrieval practice is harder than rereading: trying to answer a question without looking at your notes is considerably more uncomfortable than looking at the answer first. Learning something properly involves a certain amount of cognitive friction, when the brain has to do some work.

There is a curious irony here. We want children to become resilient, independent and capable of coping with adversity, but we seem determined to ensure that they experience as little manageable adversity as possible. We remove every opportunity to fail, provide the answer before they have had time to think, intervene at the first sign of frustration and then wonder why young people become anxious when something eventually goes wrong.

The answer is not to make children miserable. Nor should we turn every minor setback into some sort of Victorian character-building exercise: God forbid. I have no desire to see children being deliberately deprived of support so that they can learn the valuable lesson that life is hard. What children do need, however, is the opportunity to discover that they can cope with difficulty. There is an enormous difference between being protected from every unpleasant experience and being supported through experiences that are difficult but manageable. The first teaches a child that difficulty is dangerous; the second teaches them that difficulty is something they can survive.

Aristotle understood another important part of this. Unlike the Epicureans, he did not believe that a good life consisted of maximising pleasure and eliminating pain. Human flourishing, he believed, was something more complicated. We become good at things by doing them: we develop courage by confronting things that frighten us; we develop self-control by learning to resist things we want. Virtue, for Aristotle, was not a collection of qualities that magically appear in somebody who has been told to possess them; it is something that is developed through practice.

We cannot remove every difficulty from the lives of the children we care about, although many of us try. At some point, they will fail an examination, lose a friendship, be rejected for something they wanted, make a terrible decision, get something spectacularly wrong or discover that somebody else is better at something that they desperately want to be the best at. We cannot protect them from this. What we can do is to help them to understand that these experiences are not evidence that they are broken.

No ancient philosopher ever argued that suffering is inherently good: for them, philosophy was by definition the pursuit of the good life. But many of them have explored the idea that pleasure and pain, success and failure, confidence and uncertainty are not separable parts of human existence. Rather, we learn to appreciate one partly through experiencing the other, and we learn what we are capable of by occasionally discovering the limits of what we can currently do.

Perhaps that is why the metaphor of the rainbow is so enduring. We certainly shouldn’t wish for misery merely so that we can enjoy the happiness that follows it. But the metaphor captures something important about contrast. If everything in life were effortless, comfortable and immediately gratifying, we would have very little opportunity to discover what we are capable of overcoming. While we don’t need to go looking for the rain, perhaps we should be rather less wary of it when it comes. Many of the ancient philosophers said this in one way or another. Dolly Parton just happens to have expressed it rather more beautifully.

Results Day

There are very few pieces of paper capable of making a sixteen-year-old cry before breakfast, making their parents feel physically sick and causing an entire family to wake up several hours earlier than usual, teenagers included. A GCSE results sheet is one of them.

This morning, thousands of teenagers will have collected a handful of numbers that they have spent months, sometimes years, believing will tell them something fundamental about themselves. For some, those numbers will be a source of enormous joy and pride. For others, they will be a bitter disappointment. Most will fall somewhere in between, opening their results with a mixture of relief, excitement and mild bewilderment. What fascinates me is the disproportion between the importance we attach to results on this particular day and the significance they are likely to have in the lives of the people receiving them.

I do not mean to suggest that GCSE results are unimportant. That would be a rather glib thing to tell a sixteen-year-old who has just discovered that they have missed the grade they needed for the college course they wanted to pursue. Results have consequences: they can determine which subjects a student can go on to study, which courses they can access and, in some circumstances, which opportunities are available to them. Academic attainment at sixteen is also associated with a range of later outcomes, including employment and earnings, and there is evidence that GCSE results can be particularly consequential for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

So no, I am not going to tell disappointed students that their results “don’t matter”. They do matter. What I would like to suggest is that they don’t matter in quite the way that they currently think they do.

Sixteen is an extraordinarily young age at which to receive what feels like a definitive verdict on your intellectual capabilities. Yet this is exactly how examinations can come to feel. A student who has spent years being told that they are clever may look at one disappointing result and conclude that they have somehow been exposed as a fraud. Another who has always struggled may see a low grade as confirmation of something they have already come to believe about themselves. Even the student who gets a collection of grade 8s and 9s can be convinced they are a failure, if their parents have set them the heinous target of a perfect set of 9s.

A GCSE is an assessment of what you knew and could do in a particular subject, at a particular age, under a particular set of circumstances. That is, as it happens, a useful thing to know. It is not, however, a comprehensive psychological assessment. Your GCSE results cannot tell you whether you are going to be kind, funny, interesting, resilient, creative, courageous, generous, successful or happy, nor can they tell you what you are going to be good at for the rest of your life.

I am always struck by how little we remember about other people’s results once a few years have passed. Ask somebody in their thirties or forties what their school friends achieved at GCSE and most will struggle. They may remember the person who got a clutch of top grades and went on to medical school. They may remember somebody who failed spectacularly and was devastated at the time. They may remember their own results with surprising clarity (although these days, for my own part, I have to think quite hard about it). But the grades of the vast majority of the people they sat beside in the classroom have disappeared completely from memory.

This is particularly strange when you consider the emotional intensity of results day itself. At sixteen, it can seem as though everybody will remember what you achieved forever. The grade you received in English literature can feel like a permanent addition to your identity. You can almost hear the adults around you mentally filing you away: bright, average, disappointing, exceptional. Yet life has a rather irritating habit of refusing to respect these classifications.

People evolve. They discover things they did not know they were interested in. They meet people who alter the course of their lives. They leave school and discover that they are suddenly rather good at something nobody had ever noticed before. They fail at things they expected to succeed at and succeed at things they had assumed were beyond them. They make spectacularly bad decisions and, occasionally, spectacularly good ones. Some become doctors. Some become plumbers. Some become teachers. Some become artists. Some start businesses. Some spend twenty years doing something they thought they would love before deciding that they hate it and changing direction completely.

When I was sixteen, I had no idea what my eventual career would be. I certainly could not have predicted that I would spend my adult life teaching Latin. Had somebody shown me a list of the things that I would eventually do, I would probably have assumed that most of them belonged to somebody considerably more organised and sensible than me. Life does not unfold according to a careers questionnaire completed at sixteen. (I think the one I did told me I should be an analyst: I have still got absolutely no idea what that is).

There is a tendency, particularly on results day, to divide young people into winners and losers. Newspapers love photographs of teenagers holding up results sheets with enormous grins, surrounded by delighted parents and teachers. There is nothing wrong with celebrating success, and students who have worked hard and achieved the grades they wanted deserve every bit of the celebration they receive. But the visual language of results day can be rather unforgiving. One group gets to stand outside the school holding their grades aloft. Another group quietly disappears home, perhaps feeling that they have failed at something considerably larger than an examination. The reality is much messier. One student can achieve excellent grades and be miserable; believe me, I’ve met dozens of students like this and my heart aches for them. Another student can achieve disappointing grades and feel liberated. I always think of Robbie Williams, who got the call to say he had been selected to join a new boy band called Take That, just a couple of days after he had received his frankly atrocious GCSE results. Some students get exactly the results they wanted and discover six months later that they have chosen the wrong course. Others can miss their grades, take a different route and eventually find themselves thriving doing something they would never have considered had everything gone according to plan.

This is not an argument for pretending that educational achievement is irrelevant. Quite the contrary. Education opens doors, and some doors are considerably harder to open without particular qualifications. The point is that a door is an opportunity, not a destiny. GCSE results can influence the route you take through the next few years without determining where you eventually end up.

Perhaps this is why I find results day so emotionally complicated. It is entirely reasonable to be proud of a good result and entirely reasonable to be devastated by a bad one. What is unreasonable is to imagine that either response tells us very much about the person standing in front of us.

On Being Smart

There is a peculiar kind of misery that belongs almost exclusively to children who are accustomed to getting things right. It is not the sadness of failing an examination after months of hard work, nor the disappointment of discovering that a coveted place on a sports team has gone to somebody else. It is the unsettling discombobulation of the first time you encounter something that you cannot do, despite having always assumed that you could do pretty much anything if you tried. For a child whose experience of school has consisted largely of praise, good marks and the reassuring knowledge that they are one of the clever ones, genuine difficulty or sudden failure can come as something of a shock.

This is one of the great misconceptions about high-achieving children. We tend to assume that bright children are the lucky ones, and of course, in many respects they are. Academic ability undoubtedly makes school easier. It can open doors, generate opportunities and bring the considerable satisfaction of discovering that you are good at something. Yet being academically capable is not an unqualified advantage. In some circumstances, being accustomed to success can make failure harder to bear.

As a tutor, I see this particularly clearly when students reach the point at which their natural aptitude stops being sufficient. There is usually a stage in a child’s education when things have to change. Perhaps the subject becomes more demanding, perhaps the examination requires a greater depth of understanding, or perhaps the student has simply reached the limits of what can be achieved without putting in some serious effort. For a child who has always found schoolwork straightforward, this can be profoundly unsettling. They have never needed to learn how to struggle.

Struggling, in fact, is a skill. That may sound absurd, but I genuinely believe it is one of the most important things that children can learn at school. We spend a great deal of time teaching young people how to succeed and considerably less time teaching them how to fail. Yet anybody can enjoy learning when everything goes well; the more useful skill is learning how to keep going when it doesn’t.

Children who have struggled academically from an early age have, at least in one respect, an advantage over those who have always sailed through. They have had opportunities to discover that failure is survivable. They have made mistakes, received disappointing marks, gone back and tried again. They may have become accustomed to asking for help. They may have learned, sometimes painfully, that not understanding something immediately does not mean that they will never understand it.

A child who has always been successful may have had very little reason to develop true resilience. I vividly remember the highly successful older brother of a school-friend, who had secured a scholarship to Eton College and was wildly successful at everything he did. He cried when he failed his driving test.

I am always more concerned when a student tells me that they have “never had to revise” than when they tell me that they have always struggled. The former sounds like an advantage, until you consider what happens when revision becomes necessary (which it inevitably will). If a student has reached their late teens having achieved excellent results simply by turning up, listening and possessing a reasonably good memory, they may have absolutely no idea how to study when the material becomes too extensive to absorb by osmosis. Suddenly, they are expected to retrieve, practise, organise, plan and persevere, and nobody has ever taught them how.

There is also a psychological problem. Children are extraordinarily sensitive to the identities that adults construct around them, and “clever” can become a particularly powerful one. A child who is repeatedly praised for being clever may begin to understand that cleverness is not simply something they possess but something they must demonstrate. Success becomes evidence that they are clever; failure therefore becomes evidence of the opposite. The stakes of getting something wrong are suddenly much higher than the mark on the piece of paper would suggest. Perfectionism is sometimes presented as though it were simply an admirable character trait taken to excess. After all, what could be wrong with wanting to do things well? The problem arises when “I want to do this well” becomes “I must not get this wrong”. The former encourages care and ambition. The latter can become utterly paralysing.

I have encountered students who would rather spend twenty minutes staring at a question than write down an answer they suspect might be wrong. They are not lazy and they are certainly not unintelligent. Quite the opposite. They have become so accustomed to being right that the prospect of being wrong feels intolerable. The irony is that their fear of making mistakes prevents them from doing the very thing that would make them better.

There is an enormous difference between high standards and perfectionism. High standards allow for imperfection along the way. Perfectionism does not. One says, “I want to produce something excellent.” The other says, “Anything less than excellent proves that I am not good enough.” That distinction becomes particularly important during adolescence, when academic performance can become tangled up with a young person’s increasingly complicated sense of identity.

The pressure does not always come from parents. Sometimes, it comes from the children themselves. Parents may be perfectly supportive and genuinely uninterested in whether their child achieves the highest possible grade, while the child is quietly placing enormous expectations upon themselves. They have spent years being told that they are clever and they have internalised the message. Being clever has become part of who they are, and losing that status can feel like losing something fundamental.

There is another peculiar phenomenon that can affect bright children: boredom. A child who understands new material quickly may spend considerable periods of time waiting for everybody else to catch up. If this happens repeatedly, they may develop the unfortunate habit of associating school with effortless achievement rather than intellectual challenge. They learn to expect that understanding should arrive quickly and that being confused is a sign that something has gone wrong.

This is one reason why genuinely challenging work matters, even for students who appear to need very little help. Bright children need opportunities to discover that there are things they do not yet know. They need to encounter problems for which the answer is not immediately apparent. They need to experience the slightly disconcerting sensation of being the least knowledgeable person in the room. They need to discover that other people can know things they do not know without this diminishing them in any way. They need an education rather than a succession of confirmations that they are clever.

This is one of the reasons I am rather suspicious of the tendency to praise children exclusively for their intelligence. It seems harmless enough, and nobody is going to object to being told that their child is bright, but there is a difference between saying “you are very clever” and “you worked that out beautifully”. The first describes an attribute. The second draws attention to what the child actually did. It is a small distinction, but over many years these messages accumulate.

There is, of course, a danger in taking this too far. Bright children should not be deliberately made to struggle merely to teach them a lesson. There is nothing virtuous about making education unnecessarily difficult, and a child who is capable of achieving highly should be allowed to enjoy that achievement. Nor should we romanticise academic struggle or pretend that every child who finds school difficult is therefore developing superior resilience. Struggling without adequate support is not character-building; sometimes it is simply miserable. The point is rather that children need a mixture of success and challenge. They need to know what competence feels like, but they also need to know what it feels like not to be competent yet. The “yet” matters. It introduces the possibility of change.

This is a particularly important lesson for bright children because, sooner or later, life will provide them with something that school has not. There will be a subject they cannot master immediately, a job they cannot do perfectly, a relationship they cannot control, a decision for which there is no obviously correct answer. Nobody is naturally good at adulthood. We are all improvising. The real curse of being bright is therefore not being intelligent. It is being allowed to believe that intelligence will always be enough.

A child who learns that mistakes are tolerable, that effort is worthwhile and that competence can be developed has been given something considerably more valuable than a string of excellent marks. They have learned how to learn. And when the day eventually comes when something does not come easily, they will be much less likely to interpret that difficulty as evidence that they have stopped being clever and much more likely to see it for what it actually is: the beginning of learning something new.

The Dangerous Myth of the “Natural” Student

“She’s just not a languages person.”

If I had a pound for every time a parent has said these words to me, I could probably have retired by now.

Every now and then somebody announces, with complete conviction, that their child simply “doesn’t have a languages brain”. They might say the same about the sciences. Whatever the subject, the sentiment is always the same: somewhere along the line, often years before they arrived in front of me, students have absorbed a mythology about what kind of learner they are. More importantly, they have already reached a conclusion about what kind of learner they are not.

The extraordinary thing is the certainty with which the students themselves then make those pronouncements. They are delivered not as opinions but as established facts, rather like informing me that they have blue eyes or are left-handed. “I’m just not academic.” “I’ve never been any good at languages.” “My sister got the brains.” There is no discussion to be had. The case, apparently, is closed. In many cases, they have reached this conclusion after spending no more than two or three hours a fortnight studying the subject.

Imagine hearing a fourteen-year-old say, “I’m just not a driving person.” Or, “I’m not really a mortgage sort of individual.” We would laugh, because those are things they have never seriously attempted. Yet children routinely write themselves off in academic subjects before they have even finished compulsory education. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, they have somehow become convinced that their intellectual destiny has already been mapped out.

I suspect that adults bear some responsibility for this. We are extraordinarily fond of describing children with labels. One child is “sporty”. Another is “creative”. Somebody else is “musical”. We speak warmly of “natural mathematicians” and “born linguists”. Children who succeed with apparent ease are praised for being clever, while those who struggle are reassured that “not everybody is academic.” All of this is done with kindness. None of it is intended to do harm. Yet, perhaps contrary to popular belief, children tend to believe what adults tell them.

The educational psychologist Carol Dweck became famous for distinguishing between what she called a “fixed” mindset and a “growth” mindset. Like all psychological theories, it has been over-simplified to the point of parody, and there is now a healthy academic debate about precisely how powerful those effects are. (Spoiler alert: not very, if you try to replicate them artificially). Nevertheless, the central idea has always struck me as reasonable and worthwhile. Children who believe that ability can develop through hard work generally respond to difficulty very differently from those who believe that intelligence is something fixed at birth. One group tends to interpret failure as evidence that they have more to learn. The other is far more likely to interpret it as evidence that they were never capable in the first place. The question is whether it is possible to actively encourage a growth mindset and the answer to date appears to be “no”. Like most important learning, the development of a growth mindset comes subliminally, from watching your parents and your peers, not from being told to get one. If your family lives and breathes it as their approach to life, then you are far more likely to develop one yourself. Like so many things in childhood, our earliest attitudes towards learning owe a great deal to simple good fortune.

Once you become aware that some students have more of a growth mindset than others, you begin to realise just how important it is. One student translates a difficult Latin sentence incorrectly and says, “Can you explain where I went wrong?” Another translates the same sentence incorrectly and sighs, “I told you I wasn’t any good at this.” The first student has made a mistake. The second has made a judgement about themselves. They are not remotely the same thing.

But there is another side to this story that is discussed rather less often. People assume that being labelled “clever” is entirely beneficial, yet I have taught plenty of students for whom this has become something of a burden. If a child grows up believing that success ought to come naturally, what happens when they finally encounter something genuinely difficult? Very often, they panic. Suddenly, they are no longer the child who always gets things right and that, when you think about it, is terrifying: it shatters their very sense of self. Rather than seeing challenge as an inevitable stage in learning, students whose identity has become bound up with being clever can begin to wonder whether they have somehow ceased to be so. It is one of the reasons why some exceptionally bright students develop a horror of making mistakes. Their identity has become entangled with effortless success. Yet genuine learning is rarely effortless.

As I explored a few weeks ago, one of the most important findings to emerge from cognitive science is that learning often feels considerably less successful than students imagine it ought to. Retrieval practice is frustrating. Spaced revision feels inefficient. Difficult questions expose weaknesses that many students would rather not confront. In other words, the very strategies that produce the strongest long-term learning are often the ones that make students feel least intelligent while they are doing them. Education has an awkward habit of rewarding perseverance rather more reliably than immediate brilliance.

One of the great privileges of tutoring is that I get to watch children change their minds about themselves. Contrary to what television dramas would have us believe, this does not happen in a single inspirational lesson accompanied by soaring orchestral music. It usually happens so gradually that neither the student nor I notices it at first. A child who once apologised before answering begins having a go without prompting. Somebody who announced in September that they “couldn’t do Latin” quietly translates a difficult passage by Easter. Nothing miraculous has happened. They have simply accumulated enough evidence to make their old story about themselves increasingly difficult to sustain.

This is why I have become rather wary of the word “gifted”. Of course, natural aptitude exists: anyone who has taught for more than about five minutes knows that children differ enormously in the speed with which they grasp new ideas. To pretend otherwise would be absurd. Yet, education is not a horse race in which the order established after the first furlong determines the final result. Children develop at different rates and excellent teaching can transform performance. So can hard work. So can discovering, perhaps for the first time, that making mistakes is not a catastrophe.

Perhaps the greatest danger posed by the myth of the “natural” student is that it persuades children to mistake who they are today for who they will always be. It encourages them to believe that ability is something to be discovered rather than something to be developed. Once that idea takes hold, challenge becomes threatening rather than exciting, because every struggle feels like confirmation of an identity that has already been decided.

I would much rather children left school believing something altogether different. By all means recognise talent when you see it, celebrate achievement and admire those who make difficult things look easy. But never allow a child to conclude that the boundaries of their ability have already been fixed. Childhood is surely far too early to decide what sort of learner you are going to be for the rest of your life.

In praise of boredom

One of the strangest conversations I have with parents takes place every summer. It usually begins with a degree of anxiety.

“What should my child be doing over the holidays?”

The question is perfectly understandable. Parents are bombarded with messages about the dangers of lost learning and the importance of maintaining academic momentum. The implication is often that six weeks spent doing anything other than educationally enriching activities represents an existential threat to their children’s development.

I understand the concern. Last week, I explored the evidence that long summer holidays can contribute to widening educational inequalities and the research in this area is difficult to ignore. Children do forget things over the summer and those from more affluent backgrounds often have access to experiences that continue to support learning long after schools have closed their doors. A knowledge of this can convince some families that it is their duty to be providing a plethora of enriching and exciting activities throughout the summer, in a desperate bid to avoid disadvantaging their children.

Yet there is a danger in taking this argument too far. If we are not careful, we can end up viewing every moment of childhood through the lens of educational productivity. The logical conclusion is absurd: a summer spent quietly reading, daydreaming, wandering around the garden and yes, complaining of boredom, becomes infinitely less valuable than one packed with endless organised activities and carefully curated experiences. In fact, the reality of learning and progress is a great deal more complicated than that.

One of the most persistent misconceptions about education is the idea that learning and development only takes place when somebody is active. Schools reinforce this impression because they are places where learning is expected to be visible. Exercise books are continuously filled with what we laughably like to call “evidence of progress” and the regular book checks I faced as a teacher, in which Senior Management went hunting for said “progress” is one of my least favourite memories from my time at the chalk-face.

Here’s the truth. The human brain is doing a remarkable amount of work when it appears to be doing very little. Neuroscientists have long known that memories continue to develop after initial learning has taken place and learning is not a single event but a dynamic process. Information is encountered, encoded, reorganised and gradually integrated into existing knowledge. Sleep plays an essential role in this process, but extended periods of reduced cognitive demand appear to matter as well. Far from switching off when formal education pauses, the brain continues to sort, organise and strengthen what it has already encountered.

Students frequently assume that more study automatically leads to more learning. In practice, there comes a point at which additional effort produces diminishing returns. The brain needs opportunities to process information rather than simply receive it. The brain is not a machine that performs best when operating continuously, rather it requires periods of activity and periods of recovery. Schools are designed to provide the former. Summer holidays, at their best, provide the latter. Anyone who has ever solved a problem while taking a walk will recognise the phenomenon. Many of our best ideas arrive not when we are concentrating intensely but when our minds are allowed to wander. Writers experience it, as do scientists, mathematicians and artists. We have all, I think, had the peculiar experience of abandoning a difficult problem only to discover that a solution presents itself hours later whilst we are doing something entirely unrelated.

Researchers have become increasingly interested in what is known as the brain’s “default mode network”, a collection of interconnected regions that becomes active when we are not focused on a specific external task. Although there is still much that we do not understand, this network appears to play a role in reflection, imagination, planning and the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. In other words, some of the brain’s most important work, the cognitive capability that defines us as a species, takes place when the brain appears to be doing nothing at all.

Boredom has a terrible reputation. Understandably, parents dread hearing the words “I’m bored” and children often speak of boredom as though it were a form of mild torture. Yet, boredom may be considerably more useful than we give it credit for. Psychologists increasingly view boredom not as a defect but as a signal. It tells us that our current situation is no longer sufficiently stimulating and encourages us to seek something more engaging. Without boredom, there would be little motivation for humans to explore, create or discover.

None of this should be taken as an argument against educational enrichment. Reading remains valuable. Museums remain valuable. Family outings remain valuable. Summer programmes and holiday clubs can be transformative, particularly for children who might otherwise lack access to such opportunities. What we should resist, however, is the temptation to view childhood as a continuous optimisation project. Not every hour needs to be productive. Not every activity needs to be educational. Not every moment of apparent idleness represents a missed opportunity.

Thinking back to my own childhood, I can remember long stretches of summer holidays that felt endless. There were no smartphones and no streaming services and entertainment was not available at the touch of a button. We had three television channels and they were not available 24 hours a day. If there was nothing worth watching, there was nothing worth watching; there was no infinite scroll waiting to rescue us from our own thoughts. Many of the activities I remember most vividly emerged directly from boredom. An improvised fashion show in which a group of us demonstrated the new and interesting ways that we could wear our PE kits (knee socks became evening gloves). Designing and building a showjumping arena in my back garden with a next-door neighbour. Collecting worms into an improvised wormery, courtesy of some grass clippings and a shoe box. (Don’t worry, my father made me release them). This is not empty nostalgia. Boredom acts as the bridge between passive consumption and active engagement. Faced with enough boredom, children begin to create their own solutions.

The challenge, of course, is that not all boredom is equal. There is a world of difference between a child who is bored in a secure environment filled with books, opportunities and supportive adults and a child who is bored because there is simply nothing available to engage them. This is one reason why discussions about the summer holiday can become so complicated. The same period of unstructured time that encourages creativity and independence in one child will reinforce disadvantage in another: during lockdown, we saw this in extremis and the educational gap between the haves and the have-nots is even wider as a direct result of that time.

The solution is not to eliminate boredom altogether, nor is it to ensure that every moment of the summer holiday is carefully programmed. Instead, the challenge is to create environments in which boredom can become productive pressure rather than a frustrating, inescapable trap. Perhaps this is where modern childhood has become particularly complicated. Many adults, myself included, worry that children spend too much time on screens, and their attraction is precisely because digital devices are extraordinarily effective boredom-elimination machines. In the modern world, the moment boredom begins to appear, it can be instantly suppressed with videos, games or social media. While there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these activities, one cannot help wondering how many opportunities for creativity and self-directed exploration disappear along with the boredom we so fear.

School Daze

Before reading any further, try a simple experiment. Think of a teacher from your school days. Not necessarily the best teacher you ever had. Not necessarily your favourite. Just the first one who comes into your mind.

I have no doubt that somebody came to you almost immediately. You may be able to picture the classroom. You may remember the sound of their voice, the clothes they wore or a particular phrase they repeated endlessly. You might even recall a specific lesson, despite the fact that years or even decades have passed since you last sat in front of them.

Now, try remembering what you ate for lunch three days ago. Chances are, you’re finding that rather more difficult. This curious imbalance lies at the heart of one of the most fascinating questions in psychology. Why do so many of us retain vivid memories from our school days while forgetting vast stretches of our adult lives?

As a tutor, I am frequently reminded of just how powerful these memories can be. Mention Latin and people often respond not with a discussion about language but with stories about school. Sometimes they remember an inspirational teacher. More often, they recall a terrifying one. They may remember little about the subject (most usually Caecilius est in horto) but they do remember the smell of the classroom and the location of the windows. Such memories remain remarkably persistent.

The human brain is not a recording device. Most of us intuitively imagine memory as something like a video archive, faithfully storing the events of our lives for later retrieval. In reality, memory is selective, reconstructive and deeply influenced by emotion. Not only is the brain constantly making decisions about what information is worth keeping and what can safely be discarded, it reconstructs those memories each time it brings them to mind. From an evolutionary perspective, the process makes perfect sense. A memory system that preserved every detail of every day would quickly become overwhelmed. Forgetting is not a flaw in the system, it is one of its most important features. The interesting question, therefore, is not why we forget so much but why we remember certain things so clearly.

One answer lies in emotion. Psychologists have long known that emotionally significant experiences are more likely to be remembered. This does not necessarily mean dramatic or traumatic events (although those are often disturbingly persistent). Embarrassment, excitement, pride, anxiety, surprise and even mild humiliation can all strengthen memory formation. School provides a quite remarkable number of opportunities for such emotions. The first time a child answers a difficult question correctly or incorrectly in front of their peers. The panic of forgetting a line in a school play. The pride and embarrassment of winning a prize. The horror of realising that homework has been left at home. The embarrassment of calling your teacher “Mum” in front of a class (actually, I’ve even been called “Dad”, which was interesting). Such experiences may seem trivial to an outside observer, yet they provoke heightened emotions at the time and hence become deeply embedded in our memory.

Teachers frequently become part of this process. The teachers we remember are not always the most effective educators. More often, for better or for worse, they are the ones who made us feel something: who inspired us, frightened us, encouraged us, challenged us or infuriated us. Emotion acts like a preservative, signalling to the brain that a particular experience may be worth keeping long-term. Even now, my oldest friend and I can remember how terrified we were of our needlework teacher when we were 13. Her favourite method of crowd control was ritual humiliation. “Everyone gather round to see how badly Ros is doing this,” is a classroom memory we will both take to the grave. To this day, I genuinely wish I had found the courage to defend my friend and told that teacher exactly where she could shove it. Exclusion would have been 100% worth it.

School provides us with a series of novel firsts. Much of adult life is surprisingly repetitive and the very predictability that makes adult life manageable can make it difficult to remember. One Tuesday begins to resemble another. Childhood is different, since everything is happening for the first time. Our first day at secondary school. Our first examination. Our first close friendship, the loss of which can be our first taste of heartbreak. Our first major disappointment. Such experiences define our narrative. All of this helps to explain why our memories of school often feel so vivid. It was not necessarily that school itself was more memorable than adult life. Rather, our experiences in school were a plethora of firsts, which our growing brains identified as key events in our evolving self-definition.

In addition to the inescapable fact that our school days introduce us to a series of first-time experiences, it is also important to remember the profound effect that experiences have on us when they happen during our younger years. Psychologists have identified a phenomenon known as the “reminiscence bump”, one of the most intriguing findings in memory research. When older adults are asked to recall events from their lives, they tend to remember a disproportionate number from childhood, adolescence and very early adulthood. Memories from these years appear unusually durable. I have witnessed this first-hand as I have watched my parents age: both of them, now in their 80s, talk more about their childhood and their youth than they have ever done before. Researchers continue to debate exactly why this occurs, but it is a recognised side-effect of ageing and several explanations have been proposed. Our younger years are often characterised by major life transitions and significant personal development; we form identities, establish relationships, make important decisions and experience many of life’s defining moments. That period also coincides with a time when the brain is laying down new neural pathways and thus appears to be particularly sensitive to memory formation. I find this the most interesting part of current theory: many neurologists believe that the changes that the brain is going through during adolescence and our early 20s are as significant as those that happen during our first two to three years of our lives.

For all of us, education is not simply something we experience, it is the environment within which much of our identity is formed. For some people, the experience is something they never quite recover from, and a significant challenge faced by schools is managing the feelings and prejudices projected by some parents for whom school was a thoroughly traumatic experience. For some, school was such a place of struggle and of negative comparison of oneself to others that it becomes associated with entirely negative experiences. School is where many people first encounter challenge and failure and it can be difficult for some adults to let go of the powerfully negative associations they may have towards education as a result.

All adults inevitably revisit their own experiences of school when their own children join the classroom. This sparks memories and every time a memory is reconstructed, it is updated and made more vivid. The past remains alive because we keep returning to it. This process can sometimes create the illusion that we remember school more accurately than we actually do. Every act of remembering involves a degree of reconstruction and we do not retrieve memories so much as rebuild them. This helps to explain why siblings who attended the same school often remember it so differently. They are not recalling a shared objective reality: they are reconstructing experiences through the lens of their own emotions, personalities and subsequent lives.

As somebody who has spent much of my professional life working in schools, I find all of this both fascinating and sobering. Teachers rarely know which moments students will remember. The lesson that took hours to prepare may vanish entirely from memory, whereas a careless throwaway comment may still be remembered forty years later. I am painfully aware of this. Our school experiences occur at precisely the moment when our identities are taking shape, when all of our experiences are new and our emotions feel most intense. The result is a collection of memories that can remain astonishingly vivid for the rest of our lives.

Ghosts in the Machine

The last time I wrote about the professional use of generative AI was exactly a year ago. I had discovered that Chat GPT was surprisingly effective at constructing Latin sentences and was delighted that I could use it for such tasks as churning out examples of the ablative absolute. That’s about as far as I expected its capabilities to go and it already felt like a jolly useful gift.

Since then, I have made what I now realise is shamefully limited use of this quite remarkable tool. Only now am I just beginning to understand its full potential and the first epiphany has been that to experience those, one has to pay for it. Who knew? The fee is not huge, in fact I am currently working on the most affordable package which costs me £7 per month. With the work that it helped me to produce in just a couple of hours, it has already paid for itself one hundred times over.

Teachers, you must listen: if you have not already done so, make exploring the capacities of AI for resource-building a priority this summer. It will pay dividends. As this year’s GCSE Latin exams draw to a close and my attention is turned to the new set texts for the coming years, I promised myself that I would explore the possibility of using AI to generate materials. I have been blown away by what it can do.

Recently, I agreed with one of my lovely contacts that, during the summer holidays, he would give me some guidance on how to use AI to do this. Although I have started to have a go on my own, I still plan to meet with him, as the benefit of talking to someone who is much further down the road with something than you are is enormous. Simon Beasley, a fellow tutor and classroom teacher, has been using AI to generate resources, reduce workload and raise standards within his department for some time. I now understand how it is that the new generation of Classics teachers are pumping out such huge quantities of high-quality resources in their limited spare time. In my day (she says, waving her stick), I was doing so from scratch and I was pretty prolific in churning out stuff; these days, the sheer amount that my successors are able to produce is simply jaw-dropping. I had thought that they just had even less of a life than I did during my early years of teaching: I now appreciate that it is all thanks to AI.

So, what can it do and what are the pitfalls? Both questions are hugely important, because the use of AI is frankly dangerous unless you know what you’re doing. I don’t mean “know what you’re doing” when it comes to the AI itself — frankly, I haven’t got a clue what’s going on, how it does it and whether we are soon facing James Cameron’s rise of the machines. I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. What I mean is, you need to know what you’re doing in the subject you are asking it to help you with. Because, fellow humans, AI definitely can and does hallucinate. Ignore this at your peril.

Firstly, what it can do. I have been using Chat GPT to help me to prepare practice papers and revision questions for the new set texts. Rather wonderfully, it told me how to train it to do so. I asked it what to do and it told me that I need to give it as many examples as possible of past papers, which is no problem as I have them all: this in itself was the first revelation of being a paid user — you can upload a seemingly limitless number of files and it will read and analyse them in milliseconds. What then happens is you enter into an extended dialogue with it as you invite it to start generating what you want it to create for you. You critique its output and it learns as you do so. Even more wonderfully, it evidentially starts to develop its own instincts for what it is that you’re looking for and reflects this back to you. Furthermore, due to its capacity to “look” at multiple examples of past papers alongside each other in a way that the human brain struggles to do, it is able to point out patterns, quirks and minor changes in how the board have presented and structured the papers over the years, some of which I had never even noticed. The fact that it can do so in seconds is merely an added bonus. To be clear, it is actually generating the resources for you, right down to the fact that it can produce them as a Word document for you to download and edit. It’s unbelievable. I am still reeling from the excitement at what it can do.

Now, on to the pitfalls. There are three things that I think new users of AI need to be aware of in order to make safe and productive use of it. Firstly, Chat GPT is only as good as the instructions and the material that you provide it with. Computer scientists back in the 20th century had already developed the acronym GIGO, standing for “garbage in, garbage out”, summing up the principle that if flawed, incomplete or incorrect data is entered into a system, the resulting output will inevitably be just as flawed and useless, sometimes more so. If you’re not clear and explicit, and/or if you provide it with limited exemplars, you won’t get anything good out of your project. So far, so obvious.

Secondly, Chat GPT can and does hallucinate. I don’t know enough about how AI works to understand why, but it is the spookiest thing about it. In some ways, I guess it reflects how it is not merely a computer but a generative entity with the capacity to learn, one which mimics human thinking; humans go off at wild tangents and get things spectacularly wrong, and so does Chat GPT. Being of the capacity that it is, way beyond what a single human brain is capable of, it does so on a spectacular scale and you have to be aware of this.

For example, for my first project, I asked it to help me to develop some practice papers and questions for one of the new prose texts, which is an extract from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, the tale of Cupid and Psyche. I provided it with all the past papers from previous years on different texts, it analysed the board’s questioning style and created a style guide for how OCR formulates its exam papers. After a bit of back and forth with me pointing out what I felt it had got wrong, we were ready for it to start producing something for the new texts, so I provided it with the exact lines of the text that the board have prescribed. I anticipated no issue with this, having pasted the lines directly into the chat. Yet, when we were part way through the second paper, it told me that it thought “Juno’s speech” would be a good choice for the 8-mark style question. Now, I have prepared the new texts, but I do not yet know them well; despite this, I felt sure that to my memory there was no speech by Juno in the prescribed lines. I hunted through the published version of the prescribed text and then asked Chat GPT where it was getting what it called “Sections 14 and 15” from, since the board have divided the text into 13 sections only. It then cheerfully informed me that I was right: it had made up Sections 14 and 15.

This brings me to my third and final warning about my new best friend. It is remarkably charming and winsome. It is built to be agreeable and it rarely pushes back against you. It also presents its hallucinations as facts and, when you point out that it is talking out of its proverbial derrière, it cheerfully agrees with you. There is a danger here, perhaps in the same way that there is a danger when working with excessively amenable colleagues: you can end up in serious trouble, because there is nobody willing and able to tell you when you’re getting it wrong. To mitigate against this, I have learned is to poke it and challenge it robustly, to play devil’s advocate. Otherwise its capacity for people-pleasing could be quite catastrophic.

In my darker moments, I suspect that this is how it will take over the world. With a smile on its face.

On legends and identity

Legends occupy an uncertain territory between lived experience and imagination. Across the ancient world, people explained their origins through stories that blended fragments of history with self-conscious invention. Sometimes these traditions preserve genuine echoes of the past: archaeological discoveries at sites once dismissed as mythical, such as ancient Troy itself, have shown that beneath the layers of poetry there can indeed lie traces of historical reality. Yet legends can also reveal more about the societies that tell them than about the events they supposedly describe. They express the aspirations, fears, ambitions and identity of the people who weaved those tales. Few examples illustrate this more clearly than the Roman claim to Trojan ancestry — the belief that the people who built the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire were descended from refugees who escaped the destruction of Troy after the legendary Trojan War. It is something my students ask frequently: is it true?

For centuries, educated Romans accepted, celebrated and elaborated this tradition. According to the received version of the story, the Trojan prince Aeneas fled the burning city carrying his aged father Anchises on his shoulders and leading his young son Ascanius by the hand. A few survivors, the handful of Trojan citizens who had not been killed by the Greeks, went with him. After years of wandering across the Mediterranean sea, the travel-weary and traumatised survivors arrived in Italy, where Aeneas’s descendants would eventually establish the line leading to Romulus, the founder of Rome. The myth became one of the foundational narratives of Roman civilisation, immortalised most famously in the Aeneid, composed by Virgil during the reign of Augustus in the late 1st century BC.

The question that many of my students ask is whether there was any truth behind the story. Were the Romans genuinely descended from refugees from Asia Minor (modern Turkey), or was the claim merely a literary invention that helped the Romans to ally themselves with the ancient Greek heroic tradition that they so admired? Modern historians overwhelmingly regard the Trojan ancestry of Rome as mythical, yet the myth itself remains historically significant precisely because it reveals so much about Roman identity and about the ways that civilisations construct their own past and define their own identity.

The roots of the story stretch back into the complex cultural world of the early Mediterranean. The city of Troy, located in north-western Anatolia near the Dardanelles in modern Turkey, was long thought by many scholars to be entirely fictional, the invention of Greek epic poetry. That changed dramatically in the 19th century, when excavations led by Heinrich Schliemann uncovered the remains of a substantial ancient settlement at Hisarlik, now widely identified as the site of Troy and a UNSECO world heritage site. Archaeology has demonstrated that several cities occupied the site over many centuries, and one layer appears to have suffered destruction during the Late Bronze Age, roughly corresponding to the traditional period assigned to the Trojan War. Although historians remain cautious about treating Homeric poetry as literal history, there is now broad agreement that the legend of Troy’s destruction probably contained at least the distant memories of a real conflict in the eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age.

Yet even if Troy itself was real, that does not mean that the Romans were descended from Trojans. The earliest inhabitants of Latium, the region around Rome, were Italic peoples who spoke Latin, an Indo-European language closely related to other regional dialects. Archaeological evidence indicates a continuity of settlement and gradual social development in central Italy rather than the arrival of a conquering or colonising population from Anatolia. Early Roman culture seems to have emerged from interactions among Latins, Sabines, Etruscans and other Italian peoples over several centuries. There is no concrete evidence for a mass migration of Anatolians to Italy.

The Trojan story appears instead to have developed gradually through contact with Greek culture. From the 8th century BC, Greek colonies spread across southern Italy and Sicily, bringing Greek language, religion and literature into close contact with the peoples of the Italian peninsula. As Rome grew in power, Roman elites became increasingly fascinated by Greek civilisation. Greek mythology provided a rich reservoir of heroic narratives through which emerging states could interpret their origins and ambitions. As I like to point out to my students, every educated Roman would have been steeped in the language and the stories of Homer, in a similar fashion to how the educated elite were steeped in the bible during the Renaissance. The heoric stories were central to the identity of every well-informed Roman.

Aeneas appeared as a relatively minor figure in Greek epic tradition, long before the Romans adopted him. In Homer’s Iliad, he is presented as a Trojan noble favoured by the gods and destined to survive the war. Greek writers later elaborated stories about his wanderings after the fall of Troy, and by the 6th century BC some traditions had linked him with settlements in Italy. The Romans eventually embraced and transformed these stories into a national identity.

This transformation reached its most influential form under Augustus. Emerging victorious from decades of civil war, Augustus sought not only political authority but ideological legitimacy. Rome needed a story to explain both its greatness and its suffering. Virgil’s Aeneid supplied that story with extraordinary literary power. Written between approximately 29 and 19 BC and (we think, at least) at the behest of Augustus, the poem deliberately echoed Homer while presenting Rome under Augustus as the culmination of a divine historical destiny.

In Virgil’s telling, Aeneas embodies virtues that the Romans admired deeply: duty, endurance, piety and self-sacrifice. He is not merely a wandering exile but the chosen instrument of fate. The sufferings of Troy become the prelude to Rome’s future empire. Jupiter himself promises that from Aeneas’s descendants will arise a people destined to rule the world, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos: to show mercy to those that submit and to grind down the resistors in war. The poem thus transformed a refugee narrative into a self-conscious justification of imperial rule.

The political usefulness of this mythology was immense. Augustus claimed descent through his adoptive family, the Julii, from Aeneas’s son Ascanius, also somewhat handily known, we are told, as Iulus, a monumentally twisted fudge by Virgil, which has always amused me. Since Aeneas was said to be the son of the goddess Venus, the Julian line acquired divine ancestry, which Augustus referenced in his statuary and architecture. It elevated him above ordinary politics and linked the new imperial regime with a sacred and thus unquestionable destiny. In this sense, the Trojan myth functioned less as objective history than as ideological theatre, something which Augustus and those around him turned out to be phenomenally good at. Yet it would be mistaken to dismiss the myth simply as cynical propaganda. The Romans genuinely cared about ancestry and tradition, and many educated Romans seem to have accepted the Trojan story sincerely, or at least treated it as culturally meaningful.

Ancient attitudes toward myth differed considerably from modern expectations of historical accuracy. Myth and history were not always sharply separated categories. A story could be morally, spiritually or politically “true” even if its factual basis was uncertain. Roman authors occasionally displayed scepticism about legendary traditions, but they rarely rejected them outright. The historian Livy, writing during Augustus’s reign, admitted the uncertainty surrounding Rome’s earliest past while still recounting the traditional narratives. In the preface to his history of Rome, he observed that accounts of the remote past are “more fitted to adorn the creations of the poet than the genuine records of the historian.” Yet he proceeded to include them because they formed part of Rome’s cultural inheritance.

The appeal of Trojan ancestry also reflected Rome’s complicated relationship with Greece. Roman elites admired Greek art, philosophy, literature and education profoundly. At the same time, Rome was busy conquering the Greek world and often sought to define itself as distinct from and superior to Greek culture and its values. Claiming Trojan descent offered an elegant solution to this cultural cognitive dissonance. The Trojans belonged to the heroic universe of Greek epic, granting Rome prestigious ancient connections, but they were not themselves Greek: in fact, within Homeric tradition, they were indeed the enemies of the Greeks. Rome could therefore position itself as both heir to and rival of Greek civilisation. There may also even have been diplomatic advantages to the myth. Throughout antiquity, claims of shared ancestry could shape alliances and political relationships. Roman leaders sometimes invoked Trojan connections when dealing with eastern Mediterranean cities that traced their own histories back to the Trojan world. Mythology could function as a form of soft power long before the modern term existed.

Modern scholarship has approached the Trojan question from several directions, including archaeology, linguistics, comparative mythology and most recently genetics. None has produced convincing evidence that supports a literal Trojan origin for the Romans. Linguistic evidence is particularly important. The language associated with Bronze Age Troy remains uncertain, although scholars often connect the region with Anatolian languages such as Luwian, which belonged to a separate branch of the Indo-European language family. Latin, by contrast, evolved firmly within the Italic branch of languages. This strongly suggests that the ancestors of the Romans developed within the Italian peninsula rather than migrating from Anatolia in historical times.

Modern genetic studies likewise indicate that the population of ancient Italy was shaped by complex patterns of migration and interaction extending over millennia. Like most Mediterranean peoples, the Romans emerged from multiple layers of ancestry. While it is entirely possible that individuals from Anatolia reached Italy through trade, warfare, slavery or selective migration, there is no evidence for a distinct founding population. The Mediterranean was interconnected long before Rome’s rise and human mobility was common. But this broad interconnectedness differs greatly from the dramatic national migration imagined by Rome’s foundational myth.

Myths are not rendered meaningless simply because they are not literally true. In many respects, the Roman belief in their Trojan ancestry accomplished precisely what successful national myths are meant to accomplish: it gave people a shared story about who they were and why their civilisation mattered. The myth linked suffering with destiny, exile with triumph and destruction with renewal. Troy’s fall became the necessary precondition for Rome’s greatness and gave people the hope that greatness can come from indescribable suffering. This theme resonated powerfully with Roman political culture, especially during periods of upheaval, of which there were many. The late Republic had witnessed civil wars, assassinations and social collapse. Virgil’s description of survivors who carried the memory of a ruined homeland toward a future empire possessed enormous emotional force: it allowed the Romans to imagine their hardships as part of a larger, providential narrative.

The endurance of the Trojan myth also reflects the extraordinary influence of Virgil’s poetry. The Aeneid became one of the foundational texts of European civilisation and has been studied continuously for two thousand years. Medieval and Renaissance writers treated Aeneas not merely as a fictional character but as a symbolic ancestor of European political order. Even in modern times, the image of Aeneas fleeing Troy remains one of antiquity’s most recognisable scenes.

Legends rarely survive for millennia unless they speak to something deeper than mere fact. The Roman Trojan myth endured not because it accurately described population movements in the Bronze Age, but because it expressed how the Romans understood themselves. Like many origin stories, it blurred memory, imagination, politics and poetry into a narrative powerful enough to outlive the empire that created it.