Latin Set Texts – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Last-minute help?

This is the first of two remarkably busy weeks working with a very large number of Year 11s during their school holidays, preparing for the forthcoming GCSE examinations. Many of these students have approached me in just the last few weeks seeking help, and it is remarkable how much can be achieved in a short time prior to the final exams.

Many clients are surprised by the assurance that help can be worthwhile at this late stage. Many contact me in a state of panic or near despair, convinced that the situation is unsalvageable and unsure why they’re even asking for my advice. Yet within a few weeks it is possible to have an impact on a student’s confidence and their attainment, so long as you know what to focus on.

First and foremost, it is essential to assess the particular areas with which a student is struggling. This in itself can be a challenge, since many students (and certainly their parents) can struggle to identify where the problems lie. Students often present with nothing more than the fact that they need help with “the grammar”, so I rely largely on my own detective work to get to the bottom of what can be done to improve the situation. At a late stage of intervention this may well not mean delving into complex material, nor indeed trying to ask them to learn basic fundamentals. At this stage, it’s about identifying and selecting some concrete things to address that will gain them a win.

One thing that can be tackled head-on is their performance in the grammar questions, which make up 10% of their language mark. The examiner is remarkably repetitive and we are now in possession of enough past papers to prove this concept. Showing students every single past paper in quick succession, focusing entirely on the grammar questions and demystifying what it is that the examiner is looking for in their answer can be a real game-changer. In just one session it is usually possible to help get most students to the point where they can achieve 8 or 9 out of 10 in that section. To achieve full marks, students require a whistlestop tour of the uses of the subjunctive, which is a question the examiner has asked every single year, and that can take up another session or two. The uses of the subjunctive are another relatively easy win because most exam papers contain at least 5-10 sentences containing one of these constructions, so an understanding of how to translate those clauses gains them a significant margin.

There are further gains to be had if we have time to look at several practice papers as they can be coached on the types of phrasing that come up on a regular basis. I have identified a collection of common phrases that appear on exam papers with striking regularity, and a student who is perhaps overwhelmed with vocabulary learning can benefit from focusing their revision on these phrases. In addition, I have a list of high-frequency words that come up time and again on exam papers. Focusing on the high-frequency words will not gain a student a top grade in the exam (you need all the vocabulary for that!) but it can be a real game-changer for students who are struggling at the pass-mark.

Some students come to me for help with the literature and the majority of the time it is because they are completely overwhelmed by how to go about committing the texts to memory. I have written before on the fact that too many teachers tend to assume that students have the knowledge, experience and skills to rote-learn vast quantities of material without support, but in my experience, this really is not the case. My grades went up significantly when I started to assume that students did not have this knowledge and I taught them explicitly how to go about the process. Likewise, my grades went up when I took the risk of allowing them short bursts of class time to make a start on the process – this afforded me the opportunity to model the process and then monitor them using it. Many students are resistant to advice when it comes to study skills, so it’s important to ensure that they do give effective methodologies a chance so that they can be converted to the process. If left to their own devices, many students will ignore the suggestions made by their teachers, attempt to do it their own way and fail.

I am finding the work that I am doing immensely rewarding. Just this week I had a particularly heartening message from a client saying that her son is really seeing a difference. “He’s just said to me “ a few weeks ago I wouldn’t have had a clue and now I am getting them all right”. So grateful.” This particular student has been through exactly the process I have outlined above – I took him on a whistlestop tour of the uses of the subjunctive, we reviewed all the grammar questions on past papers and now we’re onto as many practice papers as we have time for, tackling some further easy wins such as time phrases along the way. Once the student is on board with the notion that it is never too late to turn their performance around, it’s quite remarkable what can be achieved.

The reluctant Luddite

I am anything but a Luddite. Technology is remarkable and wonderful and I could not be luckier to have been born in the late 20th century and have the privilege of seeing our access to the written word proliferate thanks to the digital world.

As someone cursed with poor (and increasingly deteriorating) eyesight, I thank my lucky stars on a daily basis for the advent of smart screens, giving me the power to choose the nature, size and resolution of fonts, not to mention the simply glorious dawn of the audiobook. The younger among you will not recall, but the reading options for people with poor eyesight even just 20 years ago were dismal: a vanishingly small number of books were put onto audio CD and very few places stocked them. These days, the best actors are squabbling over the reading rights to books. Not long ago, I listened to a simply perfect narration of The Dutch House by Ann Pratchett, read by some chap called Tom Hanks. In a world where current research seems to indicate a worrying downturn in children reading for pleasure, I support any and all routes for them to access stories and tales, by whatever means.

As a result of all this, I always feel slightly uncomfortable when I find myself making a case against digital technology. I am the last person to criticise for I acknowledge and appreciate the huge benefits that the advent of the internet and digital technology have brought to me. Not only could I not do my job without them, my life would be infinitely poorer and less diverse. Yet one must always be cautious of what one is throwing away, and when it comes to children’s development of literacy we should be particularly so. First and foremost, we should be hyper-focused on the best ways of helping children to learn to read and write.

In January, the Guardian highlighted that “a ground-breaking study shows kids learn better on paper than on screen,” but the truth is that this information has been out there for at least two decades. Modern cognitive science evidences that motor and sensory aspects of our behaviour have a far-reaching impact on our knowledge and recall. Of course it does. Our brain is an embodied phenomenon that makes sense of the world through the physical data it receives. In a study carried out way back in 2005, subjects were shown a series of words and asked to indicate whether each word was positive or negative by moving a joystick. Half of the subjects were told to indicate that a word was positive or “good” by pulling the joystick towards their bodies, while the other half were told to indicate “good” by pushing it away. A consistent correlation was observed between meaning and movement: the quickest, most accurate and most confident responses were produced by the subjects who were told to indicate “good” by pulling the joystick towards themselves, and to indicate “bad” by pushing it away. The hypothesis is that this relates to our natural embodied state – what’s “good” feels natural drawn physically towards us, what’s “bad” feels like something we should naturally push away. This direct and inherent involvement of the body and senses in our cognitive processes helps to explain how writing by hand (as opposed to on a keyboard or a tablet) helps us to learn letters and words most efficiently. The fact that forming letters by hand is superior to doing so with the use of technology is well accepted among cognitive scientists and literacy specialists.

Furthermore, it is not just the early-years essentials of learning to write that are supported by the process of hand-writing. A study in 2021 compared subjects’ recall of words learned either by typing or writing by hand and found that recall was better when words had been learned using a pen and paper. In another study, a small group of adults learned symbols from an unfamiliar language that they then had to reproduce with either a pen or a keyboard. When they had finished learning the symbols, there were no differences in recall between the two methods, but the keyboard users forgot a significant amount of what they had learned as time passed. In other words, the process of handwriting the symbols was much more effective for long-term recall. Evidence for the effectiveness of handwriting over typing when it comes to learning is now pretty overwhelming and neuroscientists suggest that learning with a pen and paper is better because it is more “embodied,” meaning that it involves more complex sensory-motor feedback for each letter as it is written down. This complexity leaves a more distinctive blueprint in our memories and hence makes things easier to memorise and recall.

I have written before on a methodology I teach to help students to learn their set texts off by heart. The process involves writing down the first letter of each word and works only if students do so by hand. The effectiveness of the method is increased hugely if the student can be persuaded to say the whole word aloud as they write the letter. So, to learn the opening line of Portia’s speech to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, students would say out loud “The quality of mercy is not strained” while writing the letters “T q o m i n s” in time with their articulation of the words. The physicality of the process and the immersive nature of writing, saying and repeating is quite remarkably powerful and I have never had a student fail to learn the texts using this method.

The data and current research on the importance of physical texts and handwriting have not gone unnoticed. Sweden, a country often cited as superior to ours when it comes to education, experienced a downtrend in literacy levels from 2016 onwards and is back-peddling wildly on their roll-out of digital technology in schools, returning to a focus on physical books and handwriting. What’s worrying for me is that the trend may be going in the opposite direction in the UK. Perhaps most worrying of all, the major examination boards have all indicated their desire to move towards digital examinations, despite the overwhelming chorus of dismay from Headteachers across the country who know that they simply do not have the infrastructure to support such a move. It is unsurprising that examination boards want to push the digital model, as the current process of collecting and digitising examination scripts no doubt costs them a fortune; but beyond the logistical nightmare for schools that the digitisation of examinations will present, I genuinely fear for the impact on students’ literacy and understanding. A move towards digital examinations will push schools further down the road of letting students do everything on screen (many private schools and well-funded academies are already there) and the effect on their learning will be catastrophic. Some of the students I work with are already in this position and their grasp of the texts they are learning is woeful; their teachers allow them access to a simply overwhelming number of documents, all of which they are expected to have the skills to access and draw information from, when in reality they have little to no idea what’s actually in front of them and how that relates to what they need to commit to memory.

So I find myself a somewhat reluctant Luddite, telling my students to reach for a notepad and pen and encouraging them to form letters on a page by hand. The irony in the fact that I am doing so over Zoom is not lost on me, but here’s the thing: technology is incredible, it is life-changing, it is illuminating, it is wonderfully democratic and a great leveller for those of us with physical disabilities. We must, however, be circumspect with how we use it and thus ensure that we do not unwittingly lose more than we gain.

Casual misogyny: Love and Marriage (WJEC/Eduqas)

I’m no expert when it comes to the Roman view of women. My specialist area was neoplatonic philosophy, so I would never lay claim to having a thorough and intimate grasp of this field, nor did I take any particular interest in feminist readings of ancient literature (indeed, I recall being specifically warned off it as a research area – by men, it may not surprise you to know). All of that said, as a trained Classicist I have read a fair number of sources that discuss women and/or their behaviour – for better or for worse. The current prescription for the WJEC/Eduqas GCSE specification includes a group of texts to which they have given the title “Love and Marriage” and I am working with a few students who are studying them.

One of the most important things to grasp as a Classicist, in my opinion, is that women were broadly considered to be inferior to men in the ancient world. I think we all need to get over that casual misogyny, if we’re not going to spend every moment of study being triggered. There is no point having a panic attack every time this inescapable fact comes back on our radar, just as there is no point in doing so when we are reminded that in the ancient world the existence of slavery was considered to be completely acceptable. What we must do, on the other hand, is address these facts head-on. Never let anyone tell you that Roman society was advanced and civilised; when compared to our own, their society was cruel and grossly unfair, and those who would seek to say so are utterly deluded. One does not have to admire something to be fascinated by it.

The first thing to note about the collection of texts selected by WJEC – and indeed, about the overwhelming majority of sources that discuss women in our possession – is that they were written by men, and (largely) for men. Hearing women’s voices is extremely difficult, although I find it disappointing that WJEC did not even try to do so. They have included some visual source material as part of the “Love and Marriage” prescription, but they did not elect to include the graffiti and politicised slogans penned by women, which would have been a nice nod towards the fact that we do, at least, have those as direct evidence of women’s opinions. What we do have in the prescription is a collection of paintings and sculptures depicting the marriage ceremony. And yes, I know the prescription is called “Love and Marriage”, but given that the rest of the sources are fundamentally about women, it wouldn’t have taken much of a stretch of the imagination to make it considerably more interesting and inclusive.

The first text in the collection pretty much encapsulates the nature of a wealthy woman’s expected ideal life in the Roman world. It is an epitaph, so necessarily idealised, and sums up the manner in which women were expected to conduct themselves and their lives:

hospes, quod dico paulum est; asta ac perlege.
hic est sepulcrum haud pulchrum pulchrae feminae:
nomen parentes nominarunt Claudiam.
suum maritum corde dilexit suo.
natos duos creavit: horum alterum
in terra linquit, alium sub terra locat.
sermone lepido, tum autem incessu commodo,
domum servavit, lanam fecit. dixi. abi

Stranger, what I have to say is brief; stand still and read it through.
Here is the not very beautiful tomb of a beautiful woman:
Her parents gave her the name Claudia.
She loved her husband with all her heart.
She bore two sons, one of which
She leaves on this earth, the other she placed beneath the earth.
Of charming conversation, and indeed of elegant step,
She looked after the home, she spun wool. I have spoken. Now go on your way.

It is surprising how hard one has to push young students to articulate how and why this epitaph is perhaps (to use modern parlance) problematic in terms of what modern women might expect for themselves, their lives and their legacy. I don’t know what the kids are into these days, but unless I am very out of touch then I am guessing that housekeeping and wool-spinning is not necessarily top of a 21^st century girl’s list of ambitions (that said, crochet is apparently making a comeback). What is most notable to me about the epitaph is its coldness: Claudia’s achievements are those expected of a good wife and mother: nothing more, nothing less. She loved her husband with all her heart – there is no mention of that being reciprocated. The only personal attributes mentioned are those of the ideal desirable woman – she looked good, she conducted herself appropriately and made polite conversation. As my mother legendarily said to some considerable awkwardness at a dinner party in the 1970s, “women have been making intelligent conversation at these kinds of dinner parties for centuries, and look where it’s got us”. Indeed.

The other texts in the collection which discuss marital relations fall very simply into two categories: marriages in which the woman behaves herself in the correct manner, and marriages in which she doesn’t. Pliny’s Letter to Calpurnia Hispulla is a simply toe-curling account of his successful match with the 15-year-old Calpurnia the Younger, who is by all reports simply delighted to be married off to Pliny, who was in his mid 40s. (This, I am happy to report, does get something of a reaction from students). In addition to keeping the household in order as one might expect, Pliny reports that his young (indeed, by modern standards, child) bride is learning his speeches off by heart and even setting them to music on the lyre. We are also told that she “sits hidden behind a curtain” so she can hear him perform in front of his friends. Lord knows what this youngster truly thought of her marriage – we have some letters (not included in the prescription) from Pliny directly to her but none (of course) from her to him. Not that she wouldn’t have written them, you understand, but nobody would have considered them worth publishing or preserving for the future.

Cicero’s report of his brother Quintus’ marriage, by contrast, gives the picture of a most unsuccessful match, with the wife portrayed as a thoroughly unreasonable and difficult woman. Quintus is – of course – an absolute model of decency and Cicero is dismayed at the behaviour of his sister-in-law. Not as dismayed as Seneca, mind you, who in the text nicknamed Changing Morals makes it clear that pretty much all the women in Rome are loose and immoral, hell-bent on taking as many lovers as they can possibly fit into their day and totally lacking in any kind of decency:

num iam ulla repudio erubescit, postquam feminae quaedam illustres ac nobiles non consulum numero sed maritorum annos suos computant? … num iam ullus adulterii pudor est, postquam eo ventum est ut nulla virum habeat nisi ut adulterum irritet? pudicitia argumentum est deformitatis. quam invenies tam miseram, tam sordidam, ut illi satis sit unum adulterorum par?

Is any woman today ashamed of divorce, now that some distinguished and noble ladies count their age, not by the number of the consuls but of their husbands? … Is there no longer any shame in adultery, now that things have reached the point that no woman keeps a husband except to frustrate her lover? Chastity is now a sign of ugliness. What woman will you find so wretched, so undesirable, that for her a single pair of lovers is sufficient?

According to Seneca, Roman women were frankly rampant and if Catullus’s account of his lover, Lesbia, is anything to go by, then he’s not wrong. It is always worth telling students that the poems included in the selection are amongst Catullus’ tamest works, many of which would not make it onto the A level syllabus, never mind the GCSE. I’ll never forget being frankly agog at a lecture on Catullus during my first year at university – I wasn’t aware that university lecturers knew about those kinds of things or indeed used that kind of vocabulary. The very fact that Catullus’ lewd works appear to give us glimpses of undeniably empowered, liberated women in Rome only serves to make our inability to connect with their true voices all the more frustrating.

Passionate love affairs do not always run smoothly, and the WJEC collection also includes a poem by Catullus about being rejected by his lover, plus another by Horace in the same vein. They both speak of the pain of rejection and the account by Horace includes a possible reference to a desire for violent revenge upon his ex. Two extremely short poems, one by Catullus and one by Martial, both describe feelings of both love and hate for one woman and explore the idea that the poets can both love and despise their female partners at the same time.

difficilis facilis, iucundus acerbus es idem:
nec tecum possum vivere, nec sine te.

Unbearable, agreeable, you are pleasant and repulsive just the same:
I can live neither with you, nor without you.

The WJEC selections make an interesting collection, albeit with the disappointing omission of any kind of female voice. What we are left with is the male perception of women, which is without doubt of interest in itself. How men perceive women and set out to control them is the scenery that forms the backdrop to so many societies, including our own. One of the things that makes the study of the ancient world so interesting and so worthwhile is the opportunity to look at this frankly and from a position of relative progress.

The Wedding Ceremony, State Hermitage Museum, S.Petersburg

What’s wrong with GCSE Latin?

Sometimes you have to step off the treadmill to reflect on what is wrong with the system. After 21 years of preparing cohorts of students for Latin at GCSE level, it has taken me a year or so off the hamster wheel to reflect upon what is wrong with it and how the examination at GCSE level is fundamentally flawed.

To understand how the Latin GCSE fails our students, we first of all need to reflect upon what the purpose is of studying Latin – without this, the decisions made by the exam boards will seem even more incomprehensible than they actually are. First and foremost, forgetting any wild claims to promote excellence, increase vocabulary or whatever else we tell ourselves about our subject, the purpose of studying Latin is to train students to be able to read real Roman texts. This is the end goal and everything else is broadly irrelevant. This inescapable reality is – I believe – why both exam boards and QCA are so irrevocably wedded to the notion that students must study a substantial proportion of “real” Latin texts in order to gain a basic qualification in the subject.

Let us reflect for a moment on what this actually means. Unless a child has attended prep school and studied Latin from Year 5 or 6 onwards, students will have started Latin as a beginners’ subject in Year 7 and will be unlikely to have had more than one hour’s tuition per week in the subject. This may increase margially in Years 8-9, but not by much. Within that space of time, the exam boards are expecting a student entering Year 10 to be prepared to study real Latin texts, a frankly laughable notion. Imagine expecting a student of French to read and understand Voltaire or Maupassant during their GCSE course, when they are still wrestling with the fundamentals of the language.

The argument is often trotted out that modern language students have more to contend with, because they have to work on a wider variety of skills: Latin – being a dead language – does not require students to be tested on speaking or listening. Agreed, these skills take up a huge amount of teaching time for modern linguists that we do not have to dedicate when it comes to an ancient language. Believe me, however, this is more than made up for by the linguistic content required. My first Head of Department once quipped, when I mentioned to him that one of my Year 10 students had suddenly asked when we would learn to tell the time in Latin, that I should have replied “when you have learnt the pluperfect passive subjunctive.” He had a point. (He was right, by the way: the pluperfect passive subjunctive is required at GCSE). Rod, who had only ever taught French and German, had seen the list of grammatical constructions required for GCSE Latin and it never failed to astonish him.

Now that I am on the outside of the school system, working with a large number of GCSE candidates from a variety of schools, I am being exposed to a broad range of approaches from each school. Most of them do what I did and plough through as much of the GCSE language content as they can during the first two terms of Year 10, then start tackling the literature texts in the final term of Year 10 and throughout Year 11. This is the best we can do. I have come across one school that takes longer over the language then expects students to have gained enough linguistic knowledge to tackle the set texts very quickly due to their broader knowledge-base; this is frankly nonsense, given that the language required for the texts goes way, way beyond that required at GCSE for the language paper. Some schools start the texts immediately and encourage students to work on them from the very beginning, but this is rare.

For the unintiated, let us be clear: GCSE candidates do not have anything like the linguistic knowledge required to study the real Latin texts that are prescribed for the GCSE. The only way they can cope with and even borderline understand the texts is to learn the English translation off by heart, a simply mammoth rote-learning task. This is what I spend much of my time supporting students with as many are not given the tools and the skill-set to do this on their own.

This year I had something of an epiphany when working with a handful of independent students. Why do we do it? The requirements for Latin GCSE are so unrealistic that I would go so far as to say that the qualification is wildly inappropriate. My belief that this is the case means that I no longer encourage students to take the qualification as a supplementary subject: it simply is way too much to cope with on top of their regular studies. I do not say this lightly, not least because it will mean I miss out on a significant amount of potential tutoring work. But the truth must be told, and parents of students who have a desire to study Latin independently need to think very long and hard about the reality of what that means and whether they are prepared for the sheer slog that it will entail.

So long as the texts required for GCSE go far beyond the students’ linguistic skills, the only way to prepare for the examination will continue to be to learn the texts off by heart. I shudder to think the number of wasted hours that has been spent on this. One of my skills as a tutor is in helping students with this process, because there are indeed ways in which it can be made less arduous and more manageable. I shall continue to do this, to assist students in their quest to attain top marks in the qualification for which they have been entered. But really – what are we doing it for? Is it really the best way to prepare students for a future in the subject? I do wish QCA and the examination boards would take a long, hard and realisitc look at what they are demanding from 16-year-olds and face up to the reality that their examination in its current form is not really fit for purpose.

Critiquing literary criticism

As we approach the second and final GCSE literature exam and as I continue to work with a huge number of Year 11s preparing for the verse paper, I cannot help but feel a little depressed about how difficult students seem to find the process of stylistic analysis. There is no other area in which I have observed even the most brilliant of scholars to be floundering so badly. So what are we getting wrong when it comes to the teaching, or is this aspect of the exam just insurmountably difficult?

Before I make my observations I wish to say that I include myself and my own teaching in what I have to say. Throughout my career I have watched students struggle with this aspect of the examination, so my observations of my tutees who are now wrestling with this are in no way meant to imply that I think I was “getting it right” when I was at the chalkface – indeed what follows is definitely a criticism of myself and my own approaches. How I have tackled the teaching of literary criticism evolved and improved over the years and my focus now with tutees is different from how I might have approached the problem 20 years ago, but students in my class struggled just as much as I see my clients struggling now. I believe this is something that all of us in Classics education need to do better and the more I think about it the more I believe we are woefully lacking in ideas when it comes to what to do.

Below are a couple of key observations of what seems to happen in Latin classes (including my own in the past) and which I think might be compouding the difficulties that students have with this particularly challenging element of the syllabus.

First of all, many schools massively over-teach technical/rhetorical terms. This mistake is encouraged by the resources published by ZigZag, used in Classics departments across the country, which start the process of literary criticism with a baffling list of rhetorical devices which (it is implied) students must have a grasp of before they even embark on the process of responding to the literature.

A ZigZag resource I was sent for review started with 16 pages of explanation of various terms from anaphora to polyptoton, each with an accompanying activity. Students are expected to learn the meaning of all of these devices and then learn to spot them in the Latin. Full disclosure: I used to do this. Why? I have absolutely no idea. It was stupid. I probably did it partly because everybody else was doing it. Also, like many other Classics teachers, I rather like literary devices and personally gain quite a lot of geek-filled pleasure from spotting them in everyday language and popular music. He watches afternoon repeats and the food he eats is a zeugma in a song by Blur from the 1990s; you held your breath and the door for me is another great one in a song by Alanis Morisette. But do students need to know any of these stylistic terms to gain full marks in the literature questions? No, they don’t. A brief look at any mark scheme makes it clear that technical terms offer little advantage other than time-saving; if a student calls something an anaphora rather than just “repetition at the start of a line/clause” it won’t gain them any more marks. Furthermore, the mark scheme’s expectation is that students answer the question with a plausible response as to why the author did what he did, rather than simply play a game of spot-the-device. The examiner doesn’t want to see “there is anaphora in these lines”. What he wants to see is something like, “the repetition of ter … ter (three times … three times) at the start of these two lines highlights Aeneas’s desperation to embrace his father, which he tries to do in vain”. No technical terms are required – students must simply consider why Virgil chose to repeat the word ter at the start of the line. In my experience, teaching students to spot the technical devices is counter-productive: it makes them think they have made a valid point when they haven’t because they have used a clever word.

The second thing I think we get wrong is to give students too much complex information. Many of my tutees have admitted that their notes are so jumbled and full of information (and technical terms) that they can’t make any sense of them. To ask a 15-year-old to take clear, decipherable notes on such a complex topic which they will then be able to learn and apply in an examination situation is asking rather too much in my opinion. Allied to this is my belief that “learning the style notes” is simply not possible. There is way too much literature to make this a viable approach. Students instead must learn to respond to a section of the literature and say some sensible things about it under pressure.

In recent years I have tried to teach students to look for really basic techniques and encourage them to think about the author’s craft using a simple acronym: MRSVP

Meaning
Repetition
Sound
Vivid (= historic) present
Position

Meaning is at the top because students must always be able to tell the examiner what the word means (and therefore why the author has chosen to repeat it or promote it or whatever). However it is the other four points that students need to be using to be talking about style. They are things which are relatively easy to spot – is a word repeated? Has it been put at the start of a line or next to another word for a reason? Is there a sound repeated for a reason? These are the basic fundamentals of the kind of literary criticism that the examiner wants to see.

I am confident in my use of this method as a few years ago I shared it at a training day which was being run by an OCR examiner. Not only did he describe it as “brilliant” but he started using it himself – indeed, it was included in his materials at the next training session I attended. However, in my experience it is no silver bullet. I have taught the acronym to every cohort of students in my final years at the chalkface and they still found the process incredibly difficult. Now I have had time away from the chalkface to reflect, I think what I was getting wrong is not being explicit enough in training them in the process of “seeing” these things in a text. If I had my time again I would dedicate a part of a lesson to each individual device and give students multiple sections from the text and ask them to spot it – “which words are repeated in this passage?” or “find the historic present verbs in this passage.” I would then use that task – spotting one of the basic stylistic methods in a familiar passage – as a regular Do Now at the start of every lesson. Until they were frankly sick of it.

I think it was this lack of very explicit training that was the mistake on my part – finding examples seems such a simple task to a subject expert and we must remember that it is not: children need to practise how to do it. One of the most interesting things about teaching is the process of constant reflection and asking yourself how you could do something better; it is somewhat frustrating that these thoughts are coming to me with perhaps even greater ease now I have had some time away from the chalkface to reflect. I hope perhaps that others will read this and consider applying my ideas.

The use of the historic present in Echo & Narcissus: OCR GCSE set text

This week my blog continues to be inspired by a random question which was sent to me via WhatsApp by a student:

Hi! I’m doing my Latin GCSE next week, and I was wondering … how to recognize the historic present, as I’ve tried to simply learn the words … however thats not quite working and I was wondering if there were any specific sign posts to signify that it is the use of the historic present. Thank you!!

A fortnight ago I examined the prose texts currently being studied in the overwhelming majority of schools and last week I covered the Virgil text. Here I shall take a look at Echo & Narcissus, the longest text in the alternative verse selections for 2023 and 2024. For details on the historic present in general and why I believe that students find it trickier than we might imagine, please refer to my original blog post on the prose texts.

Examples of the historic present in Echo & Narcissus

The set texts opens with a historic present verb, although it is important to remember that this is not the beginning of Virgil’s narrative – the GCSE set text is an extract from a very long work called The Metamorphoses. Still, the very first word of our text is not only in the historic present but is a promoted verb: aspicit hunc trepidos agitantem in retia cervos: she catches sight of this man, driving frightened stags into his nets.
The next occurence of the historic present, when Ovid jumps out of his past narrative for effect is here: sequitur vestigia furtim: she follows his footsteps stealthily. The same verb is repeated in the same form in the line below – repetition occurs throughout the text and is part of the game that Ovid is playing with the idea of echo and reflection throughout the text.
The next clear example is when Narcissus first responds to Echo: hic stupet: he is amazed. His reaction continues in the historic present for this entire section, with dimittit, clamat, vocat, respicit and perstat all in the historic present, making vivid the young man’s bewliderment as he hears his words repeated back to him.
Echo’s joyful response to Narcissus also uses the historic present, when she acts out the words she is able to repeat (let us come together): et verbis favet ipsa suis: and she herself follows her own words.
When it comes to Echo’s response to her rejection, the entire passage which describes her feeling rejected, hiding in the woods, covering her face with leaves and wasting away into a non-corporeal entitry is all written in the present tense.
The poem slides back into the past tense briefly to describe Narcissus tiring from the heat and hunting, before jumping back into the present tense to describe him quenching his thirst at the spring and his second thirst (for his own reflection) coming upon him: dumque sitim sedare cupit: while he wishes to quench his thirst is the first example, then dum bibit (while he is drinking) and spem sine corpore amat (he falls in love with hope without substance). The present tense verbs then continue for the enstire description of Narcissus’s love for himself; many of them are repeated in different forms as Ovid plays around with the idea of reflection throughout this section. Ovid does not return to the past tense narrative until his exclammation irrita fallaci quotiens dedit oscula fonti: oh how often he gave kisses to the deceitful spring. He then returns immediately to the present tense when he returns to his game of reflection: quid videat nescit, sed quod videt: he does not know what he is seeing, but what he is seeing … and oculos idem qui decipit incitat error: the same delusion which deceives his eyes provokes them.

A section of the painting “Echo and Narcissus” by John William Waterhouse; it is held at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool

The use of the historic present in Virgil Aeneid VI: OCR GCSE set text

This week my blog continues to be inspired by a random question which was sent to me via WhatsApp by a student:

Hi! I’m doing my Latin GCSE next week, and I was wondering … how to recognize the historic present, as I’ve tried to simply learn the words … however thats not quite working and I was wondering if there were any specific sign posts to signify that it is the use of the historic present. Thank you!!

Last week I examined the prose texts currently being studied in the overwhelming majority of schools – Sagae Thessalae and Pythius. I started with the prose texts because the student enquiring asked specifically about the Sagae text, plus the prose exam is imminent, on May 26th. From my work with a wide range of tutees it seems that there is a more even split between students who are studying the Virgil text and those who are studying the Amor texts – Echo & Narcissus plus the three shorter poems – so I am going to look at both selections. This week my attention is turned to the Virgil.

For details on the historic present in general and why I believe that students find it trickier than we might imagine, please refer to my blog post from last week.

Examples of the historic present in Virgil Aeneid VI

The first thing to note is that much of the whole text is written entirely in the present tense, where Virgil is describing what this area of the Underworld looks like or when he is using direct speech, both of which occur throughout the selections on the specification. It is only the examples I highlight below that should be classified as historic present.

The first concrete example of the historic present occurs after Virgil has begun to describe the events observed by Aeneas in the past tense in lines 313-314, then suddenly switches into the present in lines 315-316:

navita sed tristis nunc hos hunc accipit illos,
ast alios longe summotos acrcet harena.
But the grim boatman takes now these, now those,
while others he pushes away, driven off far from the sand.

Virgil has already created a sense of pathos in the previous lines, describing the souls begging to be allowed across the Styx; here the arbitrary and callous nature of Charon is heightened by the historic present verbs.

The next example is in line 384, where the continued journey of Aeneas and the Sybil is given in the present tense, which then switches back to the past narrative in the lines that follow:

ergo iter inceptum peragunt fluvioque propinquant.
Therefore they continue the journey [they had] begun and approach the river.

In line 387 Charon’s aggressive greeting to Aeneas and the Sibyl is also introduced in the historic present:

sic prior adgreditur dictis atque increpat ultro
First he addresses them thus with words and rebukes them spontaneously.

The next example occurs in line 407 where Charon has been affected by the Sybil’s response:

tumida ex ira tum corda residunt.
Then his heart calms down from its surging anger.

Charon’s immediate response is then enlivened by a series of numerous historic present verbs in lines 410-413:

caeruleam advertit puppim ripaeque propinquat:
inde alias animas, quae per iuga longa sedebant,
deturbat, laxat foros. simul accipit alveo
ingentem Aenean.
He turns around his dark blue craft and approaches the riverbank, then he drives away the other souls , who were sitting along the long benches, and he clears the gangways; at the same time he receives mighty Aeneas into the boat.

The description of Aeneas climbing into the boat then reverts to the past tense narrative, before the next action of Charon in line 416:

incolumes vatum virumque … exponit
He puts ashore both the priestes and the hero, unharmed.

The next example is not until line 703 where Aeneas catches sight of the more pleasant aspects of the Underworld:

interea videt Aeneas
Meanwhile Aeneas sees …

This is done again in line 710 when Aeneas’s response to the sight of numerous souls is one of strangeness and fear:

horrescit visu subito …
Aeneas shudders at the sudden sight …

The promotion of the verb and the use of the adverb subito further heightens the vividness of this descrption.

The actions of Anchises where he takes hold of Aeneas and leads him to a position where he can better see the march of future souls is the final use of the historic present, in lines 753-754:

dixerat Anchises natumque unaque Sibyllam
conventus trahit in medios turbamque sonantem,
et tumulum capit …
Anchises had spoken and he takes his son and the Sibyl alongside him into the midst of the assembly and the murmuring crowd and chooses a mound …

The soul of Anchises with Aeneas and the Sibyl at the entrance to the underworld; by Biagio Manfredi — *Getty Images*

The use of the historic present in Sagae Thessalae and Pythius: OCR GCSE set texts

This week’s post is inspired by a random question which was sent to me via WhatsApp by a student:

Hi! I’m doing my Latin GCSE next week, and I was wondering … how to recognize the historic present, as I’ve tried to simply learn the words in Sagae Thessalae however thats not quite working and I was wondering if there were any specific sign posts to signify that it is the use of the historic present. Thank you!!

Students do find historic presents hard to spot and I believe there are a variety of reasons for this. Firstly, something we Latin teachers perhaps fail to address is that students are specifically taught by their English teachers that a change of tense is a very bad thing. They get marked down for it. In the ancient world, by contrast, a switch in tense was considered fine writing and done for deliberate effect; I do wonder whether the modern view that it is poor writing inhibits our students in their ability to respond to it.

A technical reason students find it hard is that most of them are not taught morphology in detail. Certainly I did not have the teaching time to enlighten students as to the details of all five conjugations and how their stems change, so students’ ability to spot the difference between a present tense of a 3^rd or mixed conjugation verb and its perfect tense, and indeed the difference between a present tense verb and the future tense of the 3^rd, 4^th and mixed conjugations will probably be hazy.

One possible approach is to scrupulously translate historic presents in the present tense, but given our modern disquiet with switching tenses this can end up spoiling the narrative as a whole in translation. Another solution is to mark them up in the text, and the version of Sagae Thessalae which I have borrowed and adapted from the inimitable Mark Wilmore does exactly that – all historic presents are marked with an asterisk.

It is important for students to bear in mind that not every present tense verb will be in the historic present. A historic present is defined as a change into the present tense when the narrative is taking place in the past. As a general rule, therefore, direct speech doesn’t count, as the present tense is probably simply a report of exactly what was said. Nor does it count if the entire narrative is written in the present tense, although of course if an author decides to write an entire narrative in the present, then that in itself is done for effect. But what you’re looking out for for the historic present is a sudden switch into the present tense within a past-tense narrative. This is done deliberately to make the scene vivid.

Given the imminence of the literature examinations and the fact that this student who contacted me is probably not the only one struggling with this, I have decided to do a quick sweep of the main set texts and point out the historic presents in them. This week I am looking at the prose, which is being examined on May 26^th – I will look at the verse texts next week and the week after.

Examples of the historic present in Pythius

Most of Pythius is written in the past tense, but a series of historic present tense verbs towards the end highlight Canius’s bewilderment and panic as he realises he’s been conned: invitat Canius postridie familiares suos. venit ipse mature. cumbam nullam videt. quaerit a proximo vicino num feriae piscatoram essent: on the next day, Canius invites his close friends; he himself comes over early; he seems not one fishing boat; he asks his nextdoor neighbour whether it was a fishermen’s holiday. Note that three of the verbs are promoted also, which further strengthens the vivid effect.

Examples of the historic present in Sagae Thessalae

Sagae Thessalae is peppered with verbs in the historic present; below is a summary of them:

medio in foro senem conspicio: I catch sight of an old man in the middle of the forum.
animum meum commasculo: I strengthen my spirit. Actually the verb means something like “make manly” – Thelyphron actually tells himself to “man up”.
et statim me perducit ad domum quandam: he leads me at once to a certain house. perducit is also a compound verb – the preposition per glued onto the front of it also makes the action more vivid.
ubi demonstrat matronam flebilem: where he points out a weeping woman.
mustela terga vertit et a cubiculo protinus exit: the weasel turns its back and goes out of the bedroom immediately.
somnus tam profundus me repente demergit: a sleep so deep suddenly overwhelms me.
cadaver accuro: I run over to the corpse.
omnia diligenter inspicio: nihil deest: I carefully inspect everything: nothing is missing.
ecce! uxor misera flens introrumpit: look! The wretched wife burst bursts in, weeping. Here you could talk about the emphatic interjection ecce! as well as the historic present verb.
reddit sine mora praemium: she hands over my reward without delay. Here you could mention the fact that the verb is promoted as well as in the historic present.
immitto me turbae: I push my way into the crowd. Here again you could mention the fact that the verb is promoted as well as in the historic present.
et surgit cadaver et profatur: and the corpse rises up [and] speaks out. The use of polysyndeton (repeated conjunctions/connectives) further dramatises these historic presents.
respondet ille de lectulo et … populum sic adloquitur: he responds thus from the bier and addresses the people in this way. The first of these two historic presents is promoted also.
igitur ignarus exsurgit … ianuam adit: therefore he unwillingly gets up … [and] goes to the door.
sagae ceram … ei applicant nasumque …. comparant: the witches attach wax to him and fit on a nose.
temptare formam incipio. manu nasum prehendo: sequitur; aures pertracto: deruunt: I begin to examine my appearance. With my hand I grasp my nose: it comes off. I touch my ears. They fall off. Here you could talk about the tightly-packed sequence of historic presents. I would also mention the literal meaning of sequitur – his nose “follows” his hand as he takes it away from his face.
et dum turba … me denotat … effugio: and while the crowd identifies me … I make my escape. Mention also that denotat is a compound verb.