Living Latin

This workshop allows Latin students to explore the uses and contexts of the language outside of traditional school books, and discover how rich and alive the Latin language truly is. With a total duration of 1.5 hours, this session is comprised of two mini-courses of 45 minutes each, with educators able to choose two out of the following three options at the time of booking:

• Gallery tour in spoken Latin.* Students use Latin to discover ancient Roman artefacts, myths, and history as they move through the museum's exhibitions. Not only is the tour mostly delivered in Latin, but students are encouraged to interact, using Latin themselves as an active language. This provides an immersive experience in Roman language, history, and culture.

• Music in ancient Rome. Students discover the culture and practices around music in ancient Rome, and learn about music's close relationship with poetic form. Together, participants analyse a piece of Roman poetry, and consider how music might have been used to emphasise or complement the literary techniques in a performance setting. Then, students handle reproductions of ancient Roman instruments, and create their own musical accompaniment to Latin text, bringing to life a vivid aural dimension of the Latin language and literature.

• Latin palaeography, from inscriptions to incunables. Students learn the essential skill of reading ancient and medieval primary sources without relying on edited transcriptions, and use this knowledge to create their own epitaphs. This course offers students knowledge about the transmission and material history of classical texts, and an increased self-sufficiency with Latin sources.

This workshop reinforces vital grammar, sentence structure and vocabulary, and exercises students' analytical skills through diverse contexts which reflect the richness of Latin-language culture, history and mythology.

*Please note, this mini-course is subject to the availability of Latin-speaking staff. If you wish to partake in this mini-course, education bookings staff will work with you to find an available date. In the event that an appropriate date is not available, groups can still partake in the other two mini-courses.