Many of the high-school Latin classes I have taught in the past years have been based heavily on reading classical authors themselves, difficult and virile and authentic. This often leads to slow going, for many reasons — the Latin is hard, or gets more than usually tricky (not very much Classical Latin at all is as easy as an intermediate reader needs); the afternoon is balmy and quiet; I’m tired myself; the students are tired and I’m tired; nobody that day is interested because the gods have stolen their wits; check other and fill in below. These I imagine are universally familiar. Moreover, this fatigue can develop naturally from the day-in-day-out of a school year, and the day-in-day-out of attempting to get through a meaningful-sized chunk of an author — needful of course to get the hang of his style and voice, or engage at all with the larger force of the work. There are numerous ways to fence with monotony, but one I have found to my liking and suited to my style as a teacher is a regular “Culture Day”. Admittedly, it is an obvious or crude title, but virtuous at least in its clarity. Admitted, too, that this is not exactly a new or groundbreaking realization — many others I know have been doing this type of thing even for centuries, perhaps — only that it was for me, at the time, a new and refreshing idea, and a legitimate incentive to continue learning myself.

In the earlier years of our [Classical Liberal Arts] school before I first began teaching Latin, the curriculum had incorporated within it a day of history every week. In the three years of middle school, the (ambitious) idea was to make a survey of Greek, Roman, and Early Medieval history as a part of learning Latin. The result was typically rather disconnected lessons on peculiar or intriguing moments and customs, and the idea was ultimately jettisoned in favor of pushing to more extensive reading before the close of 8^th grade. Move beyond this provincial memoir, and I find my high-school students remember little of their 6^th grade history class on early Rome, and what’s more learned nothing about the (sometimes fanatic) Roman bathing customs, etc., etc.

I pulled a day as a breather in the middle of the week and an opportunity both to address questions on Roman culture and history which had come up in class and deserved a longer and more prepared answer than in passing, as well as to give the students a more mature sense of Roman history elsewhere neglected in the high-school curriculum. Often, they are simply readings for the students, from a page to twenty pages. Though my execution of these days has been up to this point by no means perfection, the idea is I think a ripe one that could go in multiple beneficial directions depending both on the teacher and the class. Below is a short list of example topics I have done, along with a few good books and online resources. Of course, you should also take a look at our RESOURCES page for a longer and richer list.

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Topics:

        – Roman Ships and the 1^st Punic War

        – Roman Wine and the Vintages

        – Cures, Quirinal, and the 7 Hills

        – The Oracles

        – Roman Roads

        – Political offices of the Republic

        – Triumphs

        – Sundial Inscriptions

        – The Calendar

        – Cleaning Roman coins 

        – Lives of Plutarch (Romulus, Sulla, Marius, Caesar, Cicero)

Books:

        – Plutarch’s Lives (Dryden trans.)

        – Daily Life in Ancient Rome, J. Carcopino

An erudite, well-written and engaging work of fascinating interest. I do not know how many of his theories have been exploded.

        – As the Romans Did, Jo-Ann Shelton

More recent, a sourcebook of short texts on a multiplicity of subjects with helpful introductions.

Websites:

        – Encyclopaedia Romana

Courtesy of the University of Chicago it seems. A very deep well of a website that has the feel of the earlier 2000’s. For the nostalgic.

        – Bill Thayer’s Lacus Curtius

                         – Ambulator