Emma Williams: Latin tutor – Page 2 – Latin teaching and online tutoring

Curriculum Matters

Why do children study geography but not architecture? Why do they learn algebra but not tax returns? Why is Shakespeare considered essential while countless other writers are ignored? And why have I spent my career sharing knowledge of a language that nobody speaks any more?

The more time one spends in education, the stranger the school syllabus begins to appear. Most of us can remember questioning at least one subject during our own school days. We all sat wondering when exactly we might ever need trigonometry, struggled through poetry we did not understand or questioned the value of learning about oxbow lakes and the savannah. Yet beneath these familiar complaints lies a more interesting question. Why do schools teach the subjects that they teach? The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is history.

It is easy to assume that the modern curriculum is the result of careful planning by education experts. While it contents certainly are debated endlessly and frequently revised, many of the subjects that dominate the school timetable owe their current existence less to educational theory and more to historical accident, social change and centuries-old ideas about what an educated person ought to know. Few examples illustrate this better than Latin.

For much of British history, Latin was not a niche subject on the curriculum of a handful of schools. It was the curriculum in all schools. From the medieval period through to the 19th century, grammar schools existed primarily to teach Latin. The clue is hidden in the name. The “grammar” being taught was not English grammar but Latin grammar. Boys — and it was, overwhelmingly, boys — spent years memorising declensions, translating texts and mastering the language of scholarship, religion, law and government. Ancient Greek followed for the most academically successful.

By modern standards, this is downright peculiar. Why on earth did the system devote so much time to a language that was no longer spoken? Yet for centuries, Latin functioned as the language of educated Europe. Universities taught through it. Scholars published in it. Lawyers, clergymen and statesmen were expected to understand it. Mastering Latin was not an intellectual luxury; it was an essential qualification for participation in educated society.

Even after Latin began to lose its practical utility, it retained cultural prestige. Throughout the 19th century, proficiency in Latin and Greek remained one of the principal gateways to higher education and many professions. Even to this day, I meet people who remain firmly convinced that Latin is compulsory for entry into medicine or the law, when in fact this has not been the case for many, many decades. Classical education has retained its association with intellectual rigour, social status and membership of the elite, but in terms of its universality, the 20th century changed everything.

As education expanded beyond a relatively small privileged class, questions began to emerge about what schools were for. Were they intended to preserve the traditional academic culture? Or were they there to prepare young people for life in a rapidly changing industrial society? The answer increasingly favoured the latter. Science grew in importance, modern languages expanded, technical and vocational subjects gained ground. Latin was in retreat. This period of change is illustrated beautifully in The Browning Version, a play written in the late 1940s and turned into a film starring Michael Redgrave in 1951. In 1994, it was remade again in a version starring Albert Finney as the unpopular Latin teacher of ever-diminishing relevance. It is a deeply, quite agonisingly moving portrayal of a man reflecting upon a life of failure.

Today, Classics as a subject remains highly respected in the schools that teach it, yet only around 2% of state schools offer Latin and still fewer offer ancient Greek. What was once the backbone of the curriculum has become a rare specialist subject, offered to a vanishingly small minority of students. Whether one celebrates or laments that transformation largely depends upon one’s view of what education is for. Most people expect me to wax lyrical about the benefits of my subject, but I feel no need to do so. Instead, I would merely say this: no subject is taught merely for its utility. Most students will not use their mathematics beyond what they are taught in primary school, yet we still consider the acquiring of a mathematics GCSE as essential for all. The vast majority of students will not require a knowledge of the English language beyond the very basics of communication, yet no one would argue that this subject should be discontinued at the secondary level. All subjects lack a practical utility for most of us, yet all of us deserve the opportunity to be exposed to them.

The story of Latin is merely one chapter in a much larger curriculum story. Almost every subject in the modern programme of study arrived there for historical reasons that are far from obvious. Take geography. Today, it is regarded as one of the standard academic disciplines, and is included on the Russell group’s traditional list of facilitating subjects. Yet its prominence owes much to Britain’s history as a maritime and imperial power. Understanding maps, trade routes, resources and distant territories was considered valuable knowledge for a nation whose influence extended across much of the globe. In the 19th century, geography was not merely a subject about rivers and mountains; it was used to teach children about the British Empire and colonial administration. It was about understanding Britain’s place in the world. History followed a similar trajectory. For generations, the subject was often taught as a largely national story, designed in part to foster a sense of shared identity. Modern history teaching has become far broader and more critical (too critical for some), but its origins reveal how closely curriculum design is linked to wider social and political goals. The modern concern to teach our children about the sins of our forefathers is merely the latest iteration of this fact.

English literature offers another fascinating example., for the notion that all educated people should study literary works written in English is surprisingly recent. For centuries, the cultural prestige enjoyed by Latin texts far exceeded that granted to English authors. Shakespeare himself would probably be astonished to discover that generations of schoolchildren now analyse his plays in examination halls, something that we take as a given. The rise of English literature as an academic subject reflected the growing modernist belief that the nation’s culture could be explored through its own language and writers rather than exclusively through Classics.

Modern societies depend upon scientific knowledge and technological innovation, so the scientific curriculum has undergone profound changes in the classroom. Victorian students would scarcely recognise some aspects of today’s programmes of study, while many scientific ideas that were once regarded as essential have long since disappeared from classrooms. The same is true of mathematics. Although few school subjects seem more timeless, the mathematics taught in schools has changed repeatedly according to social and economic needs. Different eras have emphasised arithmetic, geometry, algebra, statistics and problem-solving in varying proportions. The question has never simply been how much mathematics children should learn but which mathematics they should learn.

Perhaps the most dramatic changes, however, can be found among practical subjects. Many readers will remember a time when boys and girls were routinely taught entirely different skills. Boys attended woodwork, metalwork or technical drawing. Girls learned needlework and “domestic science”. Such arrangements reflected assumptions about the adult life that these boys and girls would go on to lead, and now appear grotesquely segregated. When it came to teaching practical skills, schools were preparing children for highly gendered futures. The gradual disappearance of these distinctions, a process that was beginning even when I was at school, tells us a great deal about how society has changed. “Domestic science” evolved into “food technology” (an equally laughable title, in my humble opinion. Can’t we just call it cookery?) Craft subjects expanded into design and technology and children of both sexes learn technical drawing and draughtsmanship. Increasingly, schools have moved away from preparing boys and girls for separate roles and towards providing all students with access to a broader range of knowledge and skills. Hurrah for that.

Even so, debates about practical subjects have never truly disappeared. Every few years somebody asks why schools teach Shakespeare but not personal finance, or why students learn about chemical equations but not mortgages. Such arguments usually generate considerable public support because they appeal to a common-sense view of education. Surely schools should teach things that people will actually use?

This question quickly becomes more complicated than it first appears. The purpose of education has never been simply to provide immediate practical utility. If that were the case, subjects such as history, literature, philosophy, music and art would be impossible to justify, leaving our curriculum grossly impoverished. Schools do not exist merely to prepare children for their first job or their first mortgage application. How depressing would that be? Schools are tasked with introducing the next generation to the accumulated knowledge, culture and intellectual achievements of human civilisation. Hurrah for that also.

The modern curriculum remains the product of countless historical decisions and is currently undergoing yet another review courtesy of our (relatively) new government. At whatever time you look at history, the school curriculum reflects the priorities, anxieties and aspirations of previous generations as much as it reflects the needs of the present one. By the same token, subjects that seem permanent today may not appear nearly so permanent in another hundred years. Perhaps that is the strangest thing about school subjects. We tend to treat them as though they emerged naturally, like mountains or rivers. In reality, every school timetable is a historical document. Every subject occupies its place because somebody, at some point, argued successfully that it mattered.

Endgame

As I write, there is one more optional paper outstanding for the OCR Latin GCSE, albeit one that very few of my students will be sitting. By the time this piece is published, all of the examinations will be over.

For those of us who work in education, the end of the examination period marks not only the conclusion of a set of assessments, but also a kind of letting go. While we can explain, reassure, encourage and prepare, we cannot sit the papers for them. When the scripts are placed down on the desk and the clock begins its inexorable march forward, that student must go it alone. The weeks leading up to that moment are often characterised by a steady accumulation of worry. Students fear forgetting what they know. They fear difficult questions, poor sleep, unexpected illness and disappointing results. Even the most capable candidates are rarely immune. Indeed, some of the highest-achieving students often carry the heaviest burdens, acutely aware of the expectations they have placed upon themselves.

Alongside the students stand their parents. Public discussion of examinations often overlooks them, yet many experience the season as a prolonged period of helplessness and worry. They can provide revision resources, quiet spaces and encouragement, but they cannot sit the papers either. They must watch their children navigate stress, self-doubt and exhaustion and, quite naturally, absorb all of those emotions themselves.

Teenagers are notoriously good at emotional projection. Adults who work with teenagers often report walking into a room feeling calm and leaving feeling worried, pressured, angry or overwhelmed, all without immediately understanding why. In psychodynamic theory, it is purportedly possible for someone to unconsciously induce another person to experience feelings that they themselves cannot comfortably hold; rather than saying “I feel anxious”, the anxious person behaves in ways that leave everyone around them feeling anxious. Psychoanalysts have long reported experiencing sudden feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, irritation or helplessness that seem to originate in the patient’s emotional world rather than their own, and they are trained to reflect on their own feelings after a session and identify whether those feelings may reflect those of their clients.

In a similar way, tutors can become vessels into which the worries of students (and indeed their parents) are poured. A student arrives at a session convinced they have forgotten everything. A parent sends a message late in the evening asking whether their child is doing enough. Another student worries that a single mock result has predetermined their future. A parent fears that one poor performance will close doors forever. Perhaps most significantly at this point in the process, a parent accepts their child’s report of a disastrously poor performance in an examination as gospel: in fact, as I have written about before, research shows that students are generally very poor at assessing their own performance.

One of the less discussed realities of educational work is that emotional labour forms a substantial part of the job. We carry confidence when students temporarily lose theirs. We maintain perspective when parents struggle to see beyond an approaching exam date. We absorb fears that we know are disproportionate while simultaneously respecting the fact that, to the person experiencing them, they feel entirely real. During the examination season, this responsibility intensifies. Every session acquires a heightened significance and every practice paper feels loaded with meaning. A student’s disappointment over a dropped mark is rarely about the mark itself, it is about what they believe that mark represents, which is weakness and failure. The role of the educator becomes part teacher, part interpreter and part custodian of perspective.

When I worked in schools, this experience was concentrated within a single cohort. There was a collective rhythm to the year. One group of Year 11 students moved together through the same milestones, the same assemblies, the same revision sessions and eventually the same examination timetable. Their anxieties often echoed one another. For better or for worse, there was a shared atmosphere in the classroom and across the school. The pressure was intense, but it was unified.

Independent tutoring has altered that experience in unexpected ways. Rather than accompanying a single cohort through a common journey, I now work with numerous individual students, whose educational lives rarely intersect. I work across two examination boards and across all the myriad of choices that their teachers can make (hence the variety of end-dates I mentioned in my opening lines). Their examination timetables differ, their schools differ and (to be brutally frank) the quality of the teaching they have received also differs.

The cumulative effect can be surprisingly profound. While a classroom teacher may be carrying the concerns of thirty students in a single year group, an independent tutor may be carrying the concerns of dozens of individuals whose worries arrive separately and require separate attention. There is no collective narrative, rather there are multiple overlapping stories, each wildly significant to the person who is living it.

This is not a complaint. On the contrary, it is one of the privileges of the profession. Trust is not given lightly, particularly by adolescents navigating one of the most scrutinised periods of their education. To be entrusted with those concerns is an honour. Yet it would be dishonest to pretend that educators remain untouched by them. This year, it has been particularly challenging, for we have also been in the process of trying to move house. We accepted an offer on our property back in February and since then we have been playing the horrifically stressful game of strategy with agents, solicitors and some very anxious, very inexperienced first-time buyers. At last, as of this week, it looks like the deal is about to go through. Given the period of anxiety-inducing uncertainty that we’ve been through during the run-up, I’m almost looking forward to the stress of packing.

As examinations take place, many teachers and tutors find themselves carrying a quiet sense of responsibility that extends beyond any rational measure of their influence. We know that success or failure does not rest solely on our shoulders. We know that students ultimately achieve through their own effort and ability. Yet anyone who cares deeply about their work will recognise the feeling. We celebrate their successes personally and experience their disappointments personally too.

This is why the final examination of the season often brings relief not only for students but also for those who have supported them. The relief is different, of course. Students are relieved because the challenge is over. Teachers and tutors are relieved because the waiting can finally begin. There are no more last-minute questions, no more urgent revision plans, no more attempts to compress confidence-building into the final twenty-four hours before an exam. The work has been done. The papers have been written and nothing further can be added.

The weight that educators carry during examination season is rarely visible from the outside. It does not appear in timetables, performance measures or inspection reports. It is measured instead in conversations, emails, reassurances and moments of calm offered to students who need someone to remind them that an examination is important but not defining.

Results day remains ahead, of course. There will be celebrations, surprises and occasional disappointments. Yet results day belongs to a different emotional landscape. The uncertainty of preparation has ended. The long months of revision have passed. Whatever happens in August, the students have already done the hardest part: they have walked into the examination hall and faced the challenge.

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 amised 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.

On Resilience

Today, many of my students are finishing their Latin exams. For some, the battle continues until just after half term.

Every year I have a range of clients, from those who quite enjoy the challenge of examinations all the way up to those for whom the fear is utterly crippling. Whichever way we look at the data, it does seem undeniable that anxiety among adolescents has risen sharply over the past decade across the developed world. Certainly in the 21 years that I spent in the classroom I witnessed an unquestionable spike in children presenting with anxiety; by the time I left, it was not unusual to walk down a corridor and find a child hovering outside almost every single classroom, all refusing to enter due to what they said was a fear of what would happen inside. Many parents are watching their capable, intelligent children unravel under the pressure of perfectionism, comparison and relentless digital scrutiny. In that environment, emotional resilience has become more than a fashionable phrase. Increasingly, it is an essential survival skill.

Recent research suggests that exam anxiety is now embedded in a wider crisis affecting adolescents. A 2025 study published in BMC Psychology described test anxiety as a “common form of situational anxiety” capable of seriously affecting both academic performance and mental health. The researchers found strong correlations between anxiety levels and a lack of emotional regulation in adolescents. At the same time, researchers are warning that the digital world surrounding teenagers may be amplifying these pressures. A systematic review published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2025 examined evidence that connected adolescent social media use and anxiety, concluding that significant associations exist between the two, even if the relationship is nuanced rather than universally causal. Heavy or compulsive use of social media appears to be closely associated with poorer mental wellbeing, disrupted sleep, diminished concentration and heightened emotional distress. A 2025 study in Computers in Human Behavior found that adolescents engaging in more than two hours of weekday screen time showed significantly greater mental-health risks, while passive scrolling in particular was linked to higher anxiety. For pupils sitting exams, those pressures can become combustible.

The old anxieties of adolescence were at least partly escapable. School ended in the mid-afternoon. Peer judgment, so essential to teenage development, did not continue relentlessly through the evening in the form of Snapchat conversations, TikTok videos or Instagram stories displaying apparently perfect (and often misguided) revision routines. Today’s students inhabit an always-on culture, in which achievement itself has become performative. Some teenagers are filming themselves revising under aesthetically pleasing lighting with motivational music and uploading it for public consumption. This is hugely concerning: young people are not merely under pressure to succeed, they are under pressure to appear successful. This phenomenon creates a loop of continuous social comparison, the feeling that one’s worth is measured constantly against curated versions of other people’s lives. During exam season, that comparison intensifies. Small wonder, then, that resilience is becoming central to our discussions about exam success.

Resilience is frequently misunderstood. It is not emotional coldness. It is not “toughening up”. Nor does it mean suppressing fear. Emotional resilience is the capacity to experience stress, disappointment and uncertainty without collapsing under them: it involves recovery rather than invulnerability. Most especially during GCSEs, when students are expected to sit multiple examinations in multiple subjects, it is inevitable that some of those examinations will go better than others. Resilience is essential, if students are to progress successfully through this testing marathon.

Many high-achieving pupils appear outwardly successful while inwardly fragile. Teachers increasingly describe students who attain excellent grades yet struggle to cope with setbacks that previous generations might have regarded as routine: a poor mock result, criticism from a teacher, rejection from a university course. Part of the problem lies in how success is framed. Young people absorb adult anxieties with remarkable efficiency. Politicians describe education as an economic battlefield, schools have to compete in league tables and universities are necessarily selective. Employers want experience and proof of concept.

The message heard by many teenagers is stark: fail now, fail forever. In reality, life trajectories are rarely so linear. Careers zigzag and ambitions evolve, so setbacks often prove formative rather than fatal. Certainly, I look back upon most of my failures with a sense that they came good in the end. Adolescents, lacking the long perspective of adulthood, experience examinations with an immediacy that can feel existential. Failure is something to be feared, not endured.

Resilience cannot simply be taught through assembly slogans or laminated posters reminding pupils to “believe in themselves”. (Dear Lord, I wish everyone would learn to accept this). Resilience must be cultivated. While schools, of course, have an important role to play here, they have nothing compared to the power of family.

If I could give one piece of advice to anyone who is worried about their children’s resilience, it would be to normalise struggle and discomfort. It’s important to let children see our failures as well as our successes: let them observe the struggle and the setbacks, let them see you come through them. Adolescents (and indeed anyone who suffers with anxiety in the longterm) often assume that everyone else is coping better than they are. High-performing families and indeed school cultures can unintentionally reinforce this illusion by celebrating outcomes while concealing vulnerabilities. But when students hear successful people speak honestly about setbacks and uncertainty, anxious feelings can become less dominating. Resilience develops when young people understand that disappointment can and must be endured. It’s a normal part of life.

Another factor is sleep, perhaps the most neglected component of adolescent wellbeing and one I have written about recently. Recent research reported by The Guardian found that teenagers are now sleeping less than ever, with screen use and social pressures among the key drivers of worsening sleep deprivation. The consequences include poorer mental health, academic difficulties and burnout. Exhaustion erodes resilience rapidly. A teenager revising until 1am while simultaneously doom-scrolling through social media is not building academic advantage; they are often dismantling their emotional capacity to cope.

There is also a wider societal question about what precisely we are preparing children for. Education policy tends to focus overwhelmingly on measurable attainment because attainment is easier to quantify than emotional stability. League tables cannot easily capture self-awareness, perspective or adaptability. Yet employers routinely identify resilience, communication skills and emotional intelligence as critical to career success. Universities also report undergraduates struggling with independence, stress management and perfectionism. One way of seeing examinations, therefore, is as a test of those skills as well as of one’s academic performance.

A resilient teenager is not one who never panics before an exam. It is one who can panic, recover and continue. Young people need opportunities to develop what psychologists sometimes call “distress tolerance”: the ability to sit with uncomfortable emotions without catastrophising them. That capacity should emerge gradually through ordinary experiences such as coping with setbacks, navigating disappointment and recovering from embarrassment, all things which every young person can and should experience. I know it is desperately tempting to try to protec them from it, but once we understand that these knocks that life brings are an essential part of our children’s learning, they can become a little easier to bear. The alternative is that adults become so desperate to protect their children from failure that they inadvertently make failure feel intolerable: when the failure comes, as it inevitably will, they will have no resources to deal with it.

Exam results matter. Of course they do. Educational achievement opens doors, expands opportunities and transforms lives. Pretending otherwise serves nobody. But the ability to withstand setbacks, regulate emotions and maintain perspective may matter even more in the long term. A young person who learns resilience acquires something more durable than a high grade: the confidence that difficult experiences can be survived. And that may well prove to be the most important lesson that their education can offer them.

Cropped version of a photo by Zohre Nemati on Unsplash

et tu, Brute?

“Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up
To such a sudden flood of mutiny.
They that have done this deed are honourable:
What private griefs they have, alas, I know not,
That made them do it: they are wise and honourable.”

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony’s speech in Act 3 Scene 2.

This week, although it is difficult to know why, I’ve been thinking about imperial assassinations. Goodness knows what has sparked these musings on rebellion, mutiny and the forcible removal of a leader, but something tells me that we have been here before and we will be here again.

Julius Caesar was famously assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC because many Roman senators feared that he threatened the Roman Republic. After winning a civil war and famously crossing the Rubicon, Caesar looked rather too comfortable at the top and a group of senators, including some of his closest allies, formed a conspiracy to murder him. They believed that killing Caesar would protect Rome from tyranny and restore the power of the Senate. In reality, instead of saving the Republic, the assassination led to further and prolonged civil wars and ultimately helped to bring about Rome’s future under imperial rule.

Given that the Roman empire was one of the most powerful political systems in history, it is easy to forget just how tenuous an emperor’s grip on power truly was. Roman emperors supposedly held absolute authority, but their position depended upon the support of the senate, the army and the praetorian guard. If any one of those groups withdrew their loyalty, even the strongest ruler could be swiftly removed from office. These days, a man in such a position is forced to resign; in those days, you simply got murdered.

During the height of the empire, particularly from the first to third centuries AD, emperors were commonly assassinated. It’s one of the things that I find students are most puzzled by, perhaps because they have fallen for Roman (particularly Augustan) propaganda and see Rome as exemplary of stable governance. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. One of the most dramatic examples of an emperor being forcibly removed from office was the assassination of the emperor Caligula in AD 41.

Caligula began his reign with enormous public support. The Roman people celebrated his ascension because he followed Tiberius, who was viscerally disliked, and he was also the son of the wildly popular general, Germanicus, who died very young. At first, Caligula appeared to be generous and charismatic, but his true colours soon became more than apparent and his behaviour towards members of the governing classes became cruel, erratic and humiliating. While ancient accounts may possibly exaggerate his faults (and the stories really are wild), nevertheless his relationship with powerful political groups certainly deteriorated rapidly and beyond repair. His popularity with the Roman people may have maintained his position for a while, but it was the praetorian guard who decided his fate when they assassinated him in his own palace.

The praetorian guard were an elite military unit stationed in Rome, whose purpose was to protect the emperor. By the same token, precisely because they had direct access to the ruler and were always armed, they also had the ability to dispatch them most efficiently. Following the murder of Caligula, many members of the senate wanted to restore the Republic again and abolish the office of emperor altogether, but their power by this time was weakened by the fact that they had already proved themselves impotent in the face of imperial power: most crucially, they lacked control over the army, but they also lacked popular support: the senators’ power had originally been brought down by populist leaders, who had exposed the undeniably self-serving systems set up by the ruling elite to perpetuate their own wealth and power. The decisive factor that ensured the senators were finished in all but name was the praetorian guard, who required an emperor to sign their pay cheques and indeed to justify their position. After Caligula was killed, the praetorians found Caligula’s disabled uncle, Claudius, hiding in the palace and proclaimed him as emperor. Once the military had backed Claudius, following the lead of the praetorian guard, the senate had no leverage to object. The removal of Caligula therefore demonstrates that, although the senate could support or justify the overthrow of an emperor, the men who carried the swords were the ones who decided things.

Another good example of an emperor being decisively removed from office is the fall of Nero. By AD 68, Nero had ruled for fourteen years. Initially he had been guided by capable advisers such as the philosopher Seneca. Early in his reign, he was relatively popular with the people because he sponsored games, artistic performances and public entertainments. His relationship with the senate, however, steadily worsened. Nero executed or forced the suicide of several senators whom he suspected of conspiracy, creating an atmosphere of fear among the traditional ruling aristocracy. His extravagant spending and controversial behaviour also damaged his reputation. But the decisive factor in Nero’s removal was his loss of military support. In AD 68, the governor of Gaul turned against him and shortly afterwards the Spanish governor, Galba, declared himself emperor. The praetorian guard abandoned Nero after being promised rewards by his Spanish rival: as a result, Nero had no protection in Rome, so the senate took the opportunity to declare him a public enemy and authorised his execution. Facing arrest, Nero was forced to take his own life, which was the traditional way for a condemned Roman aristocrat to make a hasty exit: these days, it’s called resigning for the good of the party.

Nero’s downfall once again highlights the importance of the army and the praetorian guard. The senate formally condemned him, but this action was only possible because he had lost the loyalty of the army in the provinces, who were demonstrating their growing political importance by supporting rival claimants such as Galba to the imperial throne. At the same time, the praetorian guard acted once again as chess-masters by switching allegiance when it suited their interests. Nero’s popularity amongst ordinary Romans may have delayed his downfall to some extent: ancient sources suggest that sections of the plebeians remained loyal to him because of his public entertainments and indeed because of his visible clashes with senatorial elite. But public support could not save an emperor once the military and political elite turned against him.

The emperor Commodus provides our final example of how imperial power could collapse. Commodus ruled from AD 180 to 192 and was the son of the respected emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Quite unlike his stoic father, Commodus became associated with corruption, extravagance and self-indulgence. He preferred gladiatorial games and personal luxury to responsible government and he increasingly alienated the senate by treating their traditional authority and governing experience with contempt. Commodus was quite the character and even participated personally in gladiatorial contests, something that aristocratic Romans found grotesque and degrading for a man of standing.

As Commodus became more paranoid and unstable, leading officials even feared for their lives and eventually members of his inner circle organised a conspiracy against him. An attempt to poison him failed, but ultimately the wrestler Narcissus was hired to strangle him in his bath. The senate immediately triggered the process known as damnatio memoriae, in which official images and references to a ruler were destroyed. This decisive removal of Commodus from public office again illustrates the weakness of emperors who had lost the support of the ruling elite. Although Commodus had attempted to maintain popularity with the masses through games and spectacles, this could not compensate for the hostility he faced among the senators and imperial officials. His death also demonstrates that conspiracies often emerged from within the imperial household itself. Following Commodus’s death, the empire descended into civil war, indicating that no ruler could govern successfully without military backing.

Throughout the height of the Roman Empire, the senate retained political importance but its power was limited compared to that of the army. Senators could legitimise or condemn emperors, as seen with Nero and Commodus, yet they rarely controlled events independently. The Roman army was ultimately the most significant force in removing emperors and the provincial legions frequently proclaimed their own generals emperor, especially during periods of instability. Military loyalty depended heavily on personal leadership and the promise of material rewards as a result of successful campaigns. Soldiers expected their leaders to provide financial bonuses as well as military victories: the two went hand in hand. If an emperor appeared weak, unpopular or incapable of expanding the empire, ambitious generals could and would challenge him. This military influence became even more obvious during the third century, when emperors rose and fell rapidly and the eventual collapse of the empire as we would recognise it became inevitable.

Within this monumental military might, the praetorian guard occupied a unique position due to their physical proximity to the emperor. Unlike distant legions, the guard was stationed in Rome and could intervene directly in palace politics. As seen in the case of Caligula, the guard was more than capable of assassinating the man with whose protection they were supposedly charged. Any passing similarities to UK cabinet members are, of course, entirely coincidental.

Babies and bathwater

A recent study reported in the press this week has apparently found that strict bans on mobile phones in schools have “close to zero” impact on student learning and show no evidence of improvements in attendance or online bullying. If we take such findings at face value and conclude that school phone bans are like to be ineffective, we are not only misreading the data but also misunderstanding the purpose of removing smart phones from our schools. The crucial point is not whether removing phones from the classroom instantly boosts results or turns around behaviour in schools that have problems; it is that schools have an opportunity to model healthier norms and support families in standing against what has become a tidal wave of addiction for the next generation.

The recent study cited in headlines found minimal measurable differences in academic outcomes or attendance between schools that banned phones and those that did not. Yet even the researchers themselves cautioned against interpreting this as evidence that bans are pointless. This is because educational outcomes (such as grades and attendance) are blunt instruments for measuring complex behavioural and psychological phenomena. Countless variables such as family life, socioeconomic conditions, prior attainment and curriculum quality cannot be neutralised simply by removing a device during school hours. Expecting a ban to produce immediate, measurable improvements is akin to expecting a single dietary change to transform long-term health overnight: I am currently trying to reduce my LDL cholesterol levels, and I don’t expect to see results in less than six months, nor do I necessarily expect to see them at all, as my high cholesterol may be genetic. (I strongly suspect, however, that my genetic inheritance might be a love of cheese rather than a fault in my liver’s ability to process lipids).

To understand why it is a good idea to remove smart phones from the school enviornment, let’s look at the broader research on smartphone use and adolescent wellbeing. A growing body of evidence points to significant associations between problematic smartphone use and mental health difficulties. For instance, research funded by the NIHR found that teenagers exhibiting problematic smartphone behaviours were twice as likely to experience anxiety and significantly more likely to suffer from depression and insomnia . Importantly, this research distinguishes between mere “screen time” and patterns of use that resemble addiction in the form of compulsive checking, distress when separated from the device and displacement or even rejection of other meaningful activities in favour of the device. It is this compulsive, immersive use that appears to be most harmful to young minds.

Other studies reinforce this pattern. Reviews of digital media use consistently show associations between heavy engagement and increased symptoms of anxiety, depression and isolation, while clinical research links intensive social media use even with suicidal ideation. Longitudinal studies suggest that adolescents with increasingly addictive patterns of screen use are two to three times more likely to develop suicidal thoughts over time. These findings are not trivial. They point to a behavioural ecosystem in which smartphones are not neutral tools but powerful, psychologically immersive experiences that can shape mood, identity, and social experience.

Government-commissioned reviews have noted concerns about severe harms including bullying-related distress and premature death among young people in digital environments. Parliament has examined evidence that cyberbullying via smartphones can lead to self-injurious behaviour and suicidal ideation. While causation is complex and multifactorial, coroners’ reports in the UK have increasingly referenced online experiences, including exposure to harmful content and sustained digital harassment, as contributing factors in youth suicides. Most famously thanks to her grieving father’s tireless campaigning, Molly Russell’s death was linked directly by the coroner to “the negative effects of online content”. It would be irresponsible to ignore this accumulating body of concern simply because a short-term study fails to detect immediate improvements in outcomes.

Moreover, the effects of smartphones extend beyond mental health into the texture of daily life. Young people now spend several hours a day on their devices, often displacing sleep, face-to-face interaction, and focused attention. Many platforms, driven by algorithms optimised for engagement, deliberately encourage habitual checking and prolonged use, creating feedback loops that are difficult for adolescents to regulate: frankly, they are difficult for adults to regulate. I chose to step away from social media entirely for personal use and the platforms I maintain for business I have removed from my phone, so that I can only look at them on a laptop: this helps to mitigate against their addictive nature, which is palpable and undeniable. The addictive design of social media platforms is driving a broader shift in how young people experience boredom, social interaction and cognitive effort. Schools, as institutions dedicated to learning and development, cannot simply ignore this shift, indeed they are experiencing the fallout firsthand. Ask any teacher (myself included) who has worked with young people both before and after the advent of smart phones and they will tell you: smart phones are detrimental to children’s ability to focus and concentrate. They are a net negative.

This is where the true rationale for banning phones in schools becomes clear. It is not about improving outcomes, it is about creating a protected environment in which alternative norms can be experienced and practised. Schools are one of the few spaces where society can collectively decide how young people spend their time. By removing phones, schools model a way of being that prioritises sustained attention, face-to-face interaction and engagement with the immediate environment. These are not trivial skills: they are foundational to learning, relationships and mental health, and they may not be being modelled at home.

Critics might argue that such modelling is paternalistic or authoritarian, but this fundamentally misunderstands how behavioural norms are formed. Young people do not develop their habits in isolation, they are shaped by their environments. If every space they experience, including their classroom, is saturated with digital distraction, then the idea of focused, device-free engagement will seem completely alien to them. Conversely, if schools consistently enforce phone-free environments, they can provide a counterweight to the rest of the day. Over time, this can help recalibrate expectations about when and how phones are used. Even if the measurable impact on grades is initially small, the long-term cultural effect may be substantial.

Equally important is the role that schools can play in supporting parents. Many parents currently feel overwhelmed by the challenge of managing their children’s phone use, particularly given the social pressures involved. If one child in a friendship group is allowed unrestricted access, others will quickly follow. School policies can shift this dynamic by creating a shared baseline and encouraging parents to listen to the instincts that are telling them that these devices are a threat to their children. When phones are banned during the school day, it becomes easier for parents to enforce limits at home, knowing that expectations are consistent across the community. In this sense, school bans are not isolated interventions but part of a broader ecosystem of guidance and support. The messaging becomes clear that smart phones are a cause for concern, in the same way that alcohol anc cigarettes are a cause for concern: while schools can’t prevent all children from discovering the highs that can be found via alcohol and nicotine, they can at least model the principle that these substances are problematic and undesirable.

It is also worth noting that the absence of immediate measurable benefits does not mean the absence of meaningful effects. Some studies have found improvements in classroom behaviour or reductions in distraction, even when academic outcomes may remain unchanged. These are valuable in their own right. A calmer, more focused classroom is a better environment for both teaching and learning, even if its impact on examination grades takes time to materialise. Education is not a simple input-output system: it is a complex, cumulative process.

Phone bans are not a silver bullet, they are one tool among many, to be used alongside education about digital literacy, parental guidance and broader societal conversations about technology use. Expecting them to single-handedly reverse trends in mental health or academic performance is not just unrealistic, it sets them up to fail. When the inevitable modest results appear, critics can then dismiss the entire approach, reinforcing a cycle of inaction. You throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Smartphones are deeply embedded in modern life. Schools cannot control what happens outside their gates, but they can shape the environment within them. By doing so, they send a signal about values: that attention matters, that conversation matters, that not every moment needs to be mediated via a screen. Ultimately, the debate about phones in schools is not just about education policy; it is about the kind of childhood and adolescence society wishes to cultivate. In that context, focusing solely on short-term academic metrics is a profound misreading of the issue. Schools cannot solve the problem alone, but they can play a crucial role in modelling a different way of living and learning: one that recognises both the power and the peril of the devices in our pockets.

Together Forever?

soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Suns can set and rise again:
but once the brief light has set for us
there is just one everlasting night for us to sleep through.

Catullus, Poem 5

It has surprised me how many students have found these lines difficult to comprehend, a reminder that metaphors are not always obvious to students. One student recently hazarded a guess that Catullus was talking about the idea that he and his lover will be together forever in death. This not really what Catullus is saying at all: the poem focuses on the brevity of life compared with the yawning enormity of death, and uses this as an exhortation to make the most of the short time that he and his lover will have together. Furthermore, my student’s assumption that Catullus is talking about himself and his lover being united forever in the afterlife is an inherently post-Christian sentiment.

My student’s misinterpretation of Catullus’s musings on life and death came not long after I had finished another novel by RF Kuang, an author whom I have blogged about before. Her novel Katabasis is both grim and entertaining, following the travails of two research students who make a trip down to hell in an attempt to retrieve the soul of their academic supervisor. In the same way that Kuang’s previous novel Yellowface was a side-swipe at the publishing industry, Katabasis takes a highly critical look at the competitive world of academia. It also takes a spectacular tour of the ancient underworld, as seen through a variety of cultural lenses.

The way a culture imagines the afterlife reveals much of what it believes about life itself. For the ancient Romans, death was not a doorway into a joyful reunion with loved ones, nor a promise of restored relationships and perfected bonds. Instead, it was a shadowy continuation of our current existence, stripped of vitality, and warmth. The afterlife, even at its best, was a lonely and inadequate shadow of life.. The later Christian vision of the afterlife, especially the idea that death reunites individuals with those they love, rests on a fundamentally different emotional and philosophical foundation. Where Christianity tends to offer hope, restoration and intimacy beyond death, Roman thought leans toward distance, melancholy and an almost unsettling persistence of separation.

To understand this difference, it helps to look at how Romans conceived of the underworld. Deeply influenced by earlier Greek traditions, the Roman afterlife was typically imagined as a vast, dim realm beneath the earth, populated by shades, which were faint, insubstantial echoes of their living predecessors. These shades were not vibrant souls enjoying a new form of life, but diminished versions of their former selves. They retained memory (forgetting comes before reincarnation and a return to the upper world), but not vitality. Existence in this realm was often described as monotonous and emotionally flat, a place where the dead lingered rather than lived.

In this context, the idea of joyful reunion with loved ones has no place. Even when the dead encounter one another, their interactions are rarely depicted as comforting or restorative. Instead, such meetings often emphasise loss and regret, or the impossibility of truly reconnecting. The emotional tone is strikingly different from the Christian expectation that relationships will be healed and perfected after death. For the Romans, death did not mend what was broken in life; if anything, it froze those fractures in place.

Stories set in the underworld illustrate this vividly. When heroes descend into the realm of the dead, they often seek out lost loved ones, but what they find is not solace. Encounters are fleeting, strained and painful. The dead may recognise the living, but there is an unbridgeable gap between them. Attempts at physical contact fail, as the shades cannot be grasped. Words may be exchanged, but they carry a weight of finality rather than hope. The living leave with a deeper sense of loss rather than reassurance.

One of the most telling patterns in these stories is how often reunions are marked by emotional distance. A deceased loved one may turn away and refuse to engage or speak, displaying a kind of weary resignation that underscores the permanence of separation. Even when affection remains, it cannot be acted upon in any meaningful way. The relationship exists only as memory, not as a living bond. This is a far cry from the Christian idea that love transcends death and is fulfilled in eternity.

The Roman view is rooted in a different understanding of the self and its continuity. The soul, in Roman thought, does not necessarily retain the full personality or emotional richness of the living individual. It becomes something quieter, dimmer and more detached. Without the body, the soul’s capacity for connection is limited. Relationships, which in life depend on physical presence, shared experiences and emotional exchange, cannot fully survive in this diminished state. What remains is a kind of echo, not a continuation.

This helps explain why Roman literature often portrays the dead as solitary figures, even when surrounded by countless others. The underworld is crowded yet profoundly lonely. Each shade exists in its own muted sphere of awareness, unable to truly engage with others. Even when groups of the dead are described, they do not form communities in the way the living do. There is no sense of shared joy, no collective celebration, no renewal of bonds. The crowd does not alleviate loneliness; it deepens it.

The Christian concept of the afterlife places relationships at the centre of its promise. A stroll through my local graveyard reveals a multitude of 19th century graves that celebrate a family being reuited: their bodies are laid to rest together and the assumption is that their souls have reunited. Heaven is imagined not just as a place of individual salvation, but as a community of the redeemed, where love is perfected and reunion is assured. The idea that one will see loved ones again, recognise them and be reunited in a meaningful, joyful way is a powerful source of comfort to many (although as a child I often used to ponder how it would work for someone who remarried after their partner’s death: would they all hang out together in the afterlife?) Death, in the Christian framework, is not the end of a relationship but its transformation into something more complete.

Roman culture, for all its emphasis on family, duty and social bonds in life, did not project those values into the afterlife in the same way. Instead, the Romans believed that death severs the active dimension of those bonds. Memory may persist, but the relationship itself does not continue in a fulfilling sense. The finality of death is not softened by promises of reunion.

Even the rare exceptions in Roman thought, such as the idea that particularly virtuous individuals might enjoy a more pleasant afterlife, do not fundamentally alter the overall gloomy picture. These individuals may dwell in more favourable regions of the underworld, but the emphasis is still on individual reward rather than relational restoration. The joy, if it exists, is not primarily about being reunited with loved ones, but about relief from suffering or recognition of virtue. Relationships remain secondary, if they are present at all.

Another important aspect is how the Romans viewed grief. In a culture where the afterlife did not promise reunion, mourning had a different character. The dead were honoured, remembered and ritually maintained through practices that acknowledged their continued existence in some form. Yet these practices did not imply that the dead were waiting to embrace the living again in a future life. Instead, they reflected a desire to maintain a connection across a boundary that was understood to be fundamentally unbridgeable. This creates a poignant tension. On the one hand, Romans cared deeply about their loved ones and sought to preserve their memory. On the other hand, their worldview offered little hope that these relationships would be restored after death. The result is a kind of restrained sorrow, an acceptance that loss is permanent in a very real sense. The dead are not gone entirely, but neither are they truly present.

In stories of the underworld, this tension often reaches its most dramatic expression. A living visitor may be filled with longing, eager to see someone they have lost, only to discover that the person they remember is no longer fully there. The encounter becomes a confrontation with the limits of memory and the reality of change. The loved one is both present and absent, recognisable yet unreachable. The emotional impact is not comfort but a deepened awareness of loss. Death remains a boundary that cannot be undone. The afterlife is not a continuation of life’s relationships but a separate, diminished mode of existence. Encounters between the living and the dead, when they occur, serve to reinforce this boundary rather than dissolve it. They remind us that what has been lost cannot be recovered.

For the Romans, the afterlife was not a place where you would run into the arms of those you missed. It was a place where you might see them again, but only as shadows, only at a distance, and often only to feel more acutely the separation that death had created. Reunion, when it occurred, was not a resolution but a reminder of what once was. It attests to a fundamental difference in mindset and attitudes to death that I find endlessly fascinating.