The redisplayed London Mithraeum beneath the Bloomberg building in the City of London, and the material recovered from excavation of the site, now on display in the Museum of London, provide a valuable resource for exploring aspects of religion in Roman London. And they are well worth the visit, not least because they are free to the public. Inevitably the information provided with the artifacts and the site itself emphasise what we know about them. But there are puzzling features of this material, and there is a lot that we do not know. I want to discuss some of these puzzles, not with the aim of providing answers, but to remind us that there is still plenty to be discovered about ancient religion, and also that our perspective on the ancient world is always affected by accidents of survival.

My interest in undertaking a study relating to Classics and issues of diversity in the classroom is the result of several personal and circumstantial approaches to the subject, which have become more pronounced in my mind since the start of my Postgraduate Certificate of Education at the University of Cambridge.

This therefore suggests that the Year 11 class will not concur with studies to suggest that choice provides students with the motivation to achieve, rather that the boys are more likely to obstruct their learning by choosing the easier choice of task. The second class is a Year 9 Latin class, and there is a lower percentage of mixed-ability students in this class. Owing to this, the class will, I hope, further demonstrate whether choice in the classroom is linked to motivation and high performance. The reason why I have chosen two different classes and subjects is because, generally, the atmosphere in the classes and the preparation of lessons in each are very different from each other. It will therefore be worthwhile to determine how choice theory works in both instances.

There appears to be no ‘tail end’ in sight for academic enquiry into the worship of Mithras in the Roman Empire. Interest in this ancient religion, and its popularity and longevity as a topic of study, has no doubt been secured by its status as an elective cult and by its rich, and at times controversial, surviving evidence, which is predominantly archaeological in nature and packed with astrological symbolism. No written documentation representing a theological canon, which might outline its origins, traditions and customs, has ever been discovered. Furthermore, the few surviving literary accounts present snapshots of the cult and are written by ‘outsiders’. Though strongly associated with Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion widely worshipped across Asia Minor and Persia, the exact origins of Mithras, his identity as a god, and the development of his worship remain unclear. With the reopening of the London Mithraeum last year the spotlight has once again been cast on the spread and impact of the cult in Roman Britain. This article accompanies pieces in this volume of JCT and the next which focus on this sacred and once exclusive space. Organised in two sections, part one will begin with a brief introduction to the history of scholarship, focusing mostly on some methodological and theoretical developments in recent studies. Following this, attention will be paid to the nature of the evidence for the mysteries of Mithras and popular interpretations drawn from it. Part two will discuss methods for bringing this rich material to life in the classroom and reflect on pedagogical issues relating to teaching Mithraism as part of the Latin GCSE syllabus. The tried and tested exercises presented in this part of the article and are applicable to a variety of classroom settings, sizes and age groups.

The year before I had become obsessed with the grave of a 14-year-old Roman girl found in Lant Street, South London. Her bones and grave goods tell us that although she was blue-eyed with North European ancestry, she grew up in the Southern Mediterranean, (maybe even North Africa). When she was about nine or ten she made the long trip to London. She died five years later, aged about 14, and was buried with several interesting objects, including an exotic folding knife with an ivory handle in the shape of a leopard.

For countless students of Latin (myself included), prevailing memories of Latin instruction involve being taught to unpick Latin sentences by racing towards the verb and securing the meaning of the main clause before piecing together the rest. However, this ‘hunt the verb’ approach, where one's eyes are jumping back and forth in search of the resolution of ambiguity, is not necessarily conducive to fluent reading of Latin (Hoyos, 1993). If, as so many textbooks and teachers vouch, we are aiming to unlock Roman authors for all students to read, then we need to furnish them with the skills to be able to read Latin fluently, automatically and with enjoyment, not engender in them a process more akin to puzzle-breaking. I chose to experiment with teaching students to read Latin in order, firstly because, as Markus and Ross (2004) point out, the Romans themselves must necessarily have been able to understand Latin in the order in which it was composed as so much of their sharing of literature happened orally. Indeed, as Kuhner (2016) and others who promote the continuation of spoken Latin have argued, this is still a very real possibility today. And secondly, because it is a skill which I, and others, believe to be teachable (Hansen, 1999; Markus & Ross, 2004; Hoyos, 2006; McCaffrey, 2009). Not only that, but whatever our starting point, Wegenhart (2015) believes that by encouraging these reading skills early, we can encourage our students to be ‘expert’ readers who will be able to enjoy reading Latin long after they have been through their exams.

This research will investigate whether the teaching of prose composition to a group of students with no or very limited experience helps improve their linguistic knowledge and performance. The investigation covers two different strategies: a step method and an annotation method, The new WJEC Eduqas GCSE Latin paper was first examined in 2018 and contains an optional prose composition section. This comprises three sentences to be translated from English into Latin.

In our present times Languages and Humanities seem to be neglected in lieu of Science and Technology courses, and both teachers and parents redirect students towards courses that are said to make them more employable. This utilitarian view of education does not always provide the expected results and, in the short to medium term, ends up having nefarious consequences in the way humanity sees itself and how it supports humanist values. Whenever we ignore our past and look at it as if it were something useless and without relevance, we end up being, in a sense, overwhelmed with an admirable but ephemeral new world, where everything is illusory and without support. It is in this respect that the teaching of Latin in Portugal, as has been the case in other European countries, has been relegated to the old and the outdated, supposedly without any practical usefulness.

This research project seeks to examine, using approaches drawn from a case study, how oral storytelling within the classroom can influence various aspects of narrative writing. Therefore, certain teaching strategies and oral activities were implemented in a sequence of lessons which aimed to develop the style and content base of students’ narrative writing.

This research explores the utility of Latin as an aid to the acquisition of modern Italian. Latin is the root of the Romance languages, and consequently many words in Italian derive directly from Latin or are cognate with Latin words. Lexical connections between the languages could therefore prove useful for students learning Italian. The motivations for researching this particular area stem from the current trend of valuing subject areas in terms of their ‘utility’ to learners. Through this research I hope to show that Latin should be valued not only intrinsically, but also that it has extrinsic value as an aid to learning modern languages.

My experiences both as a learner and as a teacher of Latin have led me to the conviction that speaking Latin advances a more nuanced understanding of the language, and leads to an enhanced level of reading fluency and greater ease in engaging closely with the text. Even after having studied the language to any degree of competence in a passive capacity, bringing it into active use does not come without some investment of time and effort. With the intention of facilitating access to the benefits of speaking Latin fluently, I have set out some recommendations for those who would like to explore this approach, and put together an overview of its recent spread in formal teaching, and in research, around the UK and Europe. It is my hope that in drawing attention to the rapidly increasing number of initiatives, this article will promote cross-fertilisation of ideas between the disparate influencers in the field of Latin pedagogy.

Is it possible to teach philosophy to first-year philosophy students in a way similar to the one Socrates used to teach his interlocutors in the early dialogues? Socrates conducted challenging discussions in the agora of Athens; he began with examining everyday routine concepts, subjected his interlocutors to scrutiny—ἒλεγχος— showed the contradictions in their thinking, and often finally arrived at both his and their ignorance. The starting point of this paper is whether is it possible to teach Socratic philosophy following the Socratic Method. Here, we defend this possibility based on our practical experience of teaching Plato's Euthyphro to first-year students. In particular, the first author taught three groups of first-year philosophy students, for three semesters—Autumn 2016, Spring and Autumn 2017—in the Department of Philosophy at ATU (Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran).

‘Anyone can teach Latin, while teaching Greek is hard’. ‘Introductory language courses are easier to teach than intermediate/text-based courses’. These are views that the author of this article has heard voiced in Classics departments on both sides of the Atlantic. They reflect underlying assumptions about language teaching that often have very practical effects on who is assigned what kinds of teaching, and how those instructors approach their task.

The Classics department at my school has 32 Apple iPads. This allows for extensive individualised use of ICT in Classics lessons. Having access to tablets opens up many possibilities, not least the fact that students can stay in their usual classroom and pick up their tablet periodically to aid their learning. This facility lends itself perfectly to the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) electronic resources. There are many online activities, games and exercises on the CLC website which were developed to support learning through supplementary activities based on the original print materials. However, it is only when students have frequent and individual access to these resources that they can reap the benefits. My school, equipped with iPads, has provided the perfect opportunity to conduct a case study on the experiences of students using a CLC online resource in Latin lessons. As a PGCE student who has recently completed an undergraduate degree in Classics, I have had a lot of experience using electronic tools to aid the translation of Latin texts, namely the programme ‘Diogenes’, and the website http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. For this reason I was particularly interested in the use of ICT as a tool to aid the reading of Latin and enhance language acquisition.

This case study will describe a project undertaken with 2nd year students on a three year BA QTS course to learn and then teach elementary Latin in Key Stage 2. There were 22 students, 11 of whom are studying modern foreign languages (MfL) as their specialism, and the other 11, English. The inspiration for this came from a Primary Latin Taster Day for Liverpool teachers run by the Classics for All-funded Liverpool Classics Hub in February 2017, and we would like to thank Alice Case and Sue Balmer amongst others for many of the ideas that we used.

Readers would do well to keep in mind at all times the following distinctions when reading this article: standard/classical and non-standard; native and non-native speaker; literate and illiterate. I use ‘second’ and ‘foreign’ interchangeably of a language, as any distinction that may be made is not relevant in the context of a world in which there were no nation-states (or notions of political correctness). If I were to prefer one to the other it would be ‘foreign’: native speakers of Latin regarded everyone else but Greek-speakers as foreigners, or, as they called them, barbari. The foreigners came to have a higher regard for Latin than the native speakers of Latin had for their languages; but unlike the British in more recent times the latter never sought to impose their language on the former, nor even to encourage its adoption by them.

Despite the challenges which are involved, some secondary schools show determination to get Classics onto the timetable and into their curricular provision. The following three case studies draw on interviews with the people directly involved in doing so: the Principals and the teachers themselves. These experiences were captured at the time when they were getting Classics into their schools. The first is derived from an interview with a qualified specialist Classics teacher, ‘Rachel’, working in London. Latin already had a presence there from when the school had employed a part-time teacher; the remit was the development of a full Classics department. The second is based on interviews with the school head teacher and a non-specialist Modern Languages teacher ‘Yvonne’ who had been employed to start a Classics department from scratch in a school in the Midlands. The third is based on an interview with the Principal of an academy which had decided to introduce Latin not only into her own school with a new teacher ‘George’, but also into one that was not yet built. The respondents’ real names have, of course, been changed.

The Council of University Classics Departments surveys of 1995 (CUCD, 1995) and 2012 (CUCD, 2012) demonstrated a restricted set of approaches to Latin teaching in UK universities with little evidence of activity outside grammar-translation and graded reading. Despite this, in the 2012 survey, some United Kingdom university tutors made claims for the benefits of experiencing more varied pedagogy, including communicative Latin, in their own previous study and in Summer School Immersion events (Lloyd, 2016a). In schools, a number of challenges continue to provide motivation to move away from current norms of provision (Forrest, 1996; Lister, 2007; Hunt, 2016). Meanwhile, in America, changes in curriculum and methods are being proposed and implemented to meet the challenges of falling enrolment on Latin and other Classics courses.

I conducted a series of 20-minute activities during my research sequence where students solely read the Latin aloud to each other in pairs, emphasising verb terminations and noun/adjective agreement, and finished with the students using this technique during their normal written translation practice, with one student reading the Latin aloud and the other translating.