Welcome to the Caeciliverse! In Praise of Reading: Celebrating 60 Years of the Cambridge Latin Course:

On Saturday, I attended the 60th anniversary celebration of the Cambridge Latin Course, held at the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. I had been invited to give a talk, and I chose to explore the relationship between cognitive science and the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC), particularly in the light of the renewed interest in cognitive science that has accompanied educational reforms since the 2010s.

I have long admired the Cambridge Latin Course and taught it for near twenty years to pupils of all abilities. When it was first devised in the 1960s, it was a highly progressive approach to teaching Latin, and it remains so today, despite its age. What I find particularly interesting is the way the course has evolved and developed over the decades while remaining true to its original principles.

Those principles are worth revisiting. The course is grounded in archaeological accuracy; it brings language and civilisation together; and it presents stories that are worth reading in their own right, offering students meaningful and engaging experiences. It makes them want to read more Latin - and the whole pint is that in order to get better at reading Latin, one should read as much as possible (telling people about Latin doesn't get them very far). It also provides teachers with the flexibility to make as much or as little use of its supporting material as they wish. I call it a 'generous' course; generous to the pupils, because it allows multiple interpretations, within guidance; and generous to the teacher, as it provides multiple routes into Latin and Roman civilisation and ideas.

In my talk, I argued that the Cambridge Latin Course works because it follows, quite naturally, the way human beings process and learn languages. Any approach to language teaching that ignores this seems to me to be making a fundamental mistake. Quite a few of them do.

Why reading matters

Consider courses that are not built around reading. Years of experience suggest that many students find such courses unappealing. Those who enjoy them may go on to become Latin teachers themselves, sometimes carrying their own experiences and assumptions into the classroom and imposing them on a new generation of students. They forget what it was like to be a pupil themselves, and almost certainly forget those pupils who were not like themselves.

There is plenty of evidence in discussions of Latin teaching, including articles in Teaching Classical Languages, Classics Teaching in the UK and other publications, that the traditional grammar-translation approach has significant limitations. And yet it continues to linger. I have never quite understood why.

Grammar, vocabulary, syntax and morphology all have their place. The question is whether they should be the starting point and organising principle of a course, or whether they should support the larger purpose of learning to read and understand a language.

Two experiences from my own life illustrate the problem.

Knowing Latin is not the same as reading Latin

Many years ago, I was helping an elderly gentleman with translations of Latin proverbs. I visited him at his home, and afterwards he accompanied me to the railway station. While we waited on the platform for the train, he began telling me about his Latin lessons.

He recalled the things he had memorised, and he seemed proud of his ability to remember them.

'hic haec hoc' he began; and then completed the paradigm - a prodigious feat for an elderly man: 'hunc, hanc, hoc; huius, huius, huius; huic, huic huic' and so on until the chart was ticked away, completed, over with. I can do that as well.

We looked at one another, and I was left wondering what all that memorisation had ultimately given him.

He could recall Latin, but what could he actually do with it? Could he sit down with a Latin text and read it with understanding? Or had his education left him with information about the language, without giving him the ability to use it?

For him - and at one point in my own life - that was what Latin 'was'.

However....learning facts about Latin or lists of Latin forms is not the same as learning to read Latin.

I was reminded of this again in the 1990s, when I attended an event organised by the Prince's Trust at my own college. Extraordinarily, I had not initially been invited: yet the meeting was to take place actually under my office. Neverheless, I managed to invite myself and found myself on a panel explaining why Classics mattered.

As part of the wider conference programme, I encountered another traditionalist. Neville Gwynne (the Prince's recommended tutor, we were told) gathered us around a large table in a single room and announced that he was going to teach us Latin the proper way.

We were intrigued. What, exactly, was this proper way?

It turned out to involve reciting long sequences of grammatical forms at high speed: 'bellum, bellum, bellum; belli, bello, bello; bella, bella, bella; bellorum, bellis, bellis'. We dutifully repeated the forms, there was much forced jollity, and our instructor declared that we now 'knew' Latin. He seemed unusually convinced of this. It was the 'traditional way', he declared (he was a traditional sort, maybe 80 years old), and this was the proper way to do it.

I found it difficult to imagine how this exercise would benefit anyone who wanted to read an actual Latin text. We had rehearsed forms, but we had not done anything particularly interesting with them. We had not encountered a story, followed a character, explored a Roman setting or made sense of a connected passage of Latin.

The problem with such approaches, which regrettably still exist, is that they can teach students about a language without teaching them how to engage with it as a whole. Language is not simply a collection of isolated forms to be memorised. It is something we use to make meaning. The time spent memorising forms, ad copying them down, and then rewriting the charts and tables could be spent doing some reading. But then, that might not be 'doing Latin'.

It seems that Gwynne's Latin is more of a pedagogy than an approach to learning a language - and a remarkably old-fashioned one. I should've given it a miss.

Cognitive science and the Cambridge Latin Course

This was the central point of my anniversary talk. Cognitive science provides a useful framework for thinking about why the Cambridge Latin Course works so well for modern learners. The important thing, however, is that these insights are not necessarily new to the course. The CLC has been putting many of these principles into practice for decades, long before cognitive science became such a prominent feature of educational debate.

Its emphasis on connected reading, meaningful stories and the relationship between language and context reflects an understanding of learning that modern cognitive science helps us explain. The course gives students a reason to read. They want to know what happens next. They become familiar with characters and settings, and they encounter Latin as part of an unfolding narrative rather than as a series of disconnected grammatical exercises. All the favourite buzzwords - retrieval practice, spaced retrieval, cognitive load theory, every EEF-favoured idea - they all come true in the CLC. And they have for 60 years.

The stories also introduce students to the material world of the Romans. Archaeology and civilisation are not merely supplementary topics bolted onto language teaching; they are part of the experience of encountering the ancient world. This combination is one of the course's great strengths. Students learn Latin while discovering something about the people who spoke it, the places in which they lived and the circumstances that shaped their lives.

For me, the anniversary was therefore an opportunity not simply to celebrate a successful textbook series, but to reflect on why its underlying approach remains relevant.

Following Quintus across Roman Britain

The day's programme offered plenty of opportunities to celebrate the course and share experiences with fellow enthusiasts.

One particularly enjoyable session was James Watson's gently-humorous account of his own car-journey following Quintus' journey from Fishbourne to Chester, inspired by the stories in Book II.

This was no ordinary trip. Through a mixture of reminiscence, archaeological exploration and travel along British motorways and country roads, we visited places including Bath (Aquae Sulis), Wroxeter and Chester, travelling via sites such as Avebury Hill and Gloucester.

At each stop, we considered the surviving remains and the possible locations of events described in the stories. We explored where characters might have experienced particular incidents, including where Togidubnus received — or nearly received — the infamous poisoned chalice, and where Rufus drew up his soldiers on Chester's parade ground.

It was a wonderful illustration of the way the Cambridge Latin Course encourages readers to connect its narratives with real places and material evidence. The fictional world becomes more vivid when it is placed alongside the archaeological record.

Dyslexia, Doctor Who and Mount Vesuvius

Other sessions demonstrated the course's continuing relevance in different ways.

We heard about dyslexia and the ways in which the Cambridge Latin Course can support learners who find reading challenging. This was an important reminder that the design of a language course matters enormously. The way material is presented can either create unnecessary obstacles or help learners gain confidence and make progress.

James Moran, the screenwriter behind Doctor Who's episode The Fires of Pompeii, spoke about the programme's origins. He explained how Russell T Davies, the writer and showrunner of the series, had encouraged the episode partly because of his own enjoyment of the Cambridge Latin Course.

This made for a particularly entertaining connection between a familiar television series and the Latin course that had helped inspire it.

The episode raises some wonderfully difficult questions. How could Caecilius escape the destruction of Pompeii? How could the Doctor prevent a catastrophe that he knew history required to happen? The answers lie, in part, in the dramatic possibilities of the ancient world — and in the appeal of the characters and situations that the Cambridge Latin Course brought to generations of readers.

Who deserves a place in the Tardis?

The entertainment continued with a balloon debate featuring characters from the Cambridge Latin Course. Each had to make a case for being saved, alongside such familiar figures as Caecilius and Clemens.

After a strong showing by Clemens, cat-lover, glass-maker, ex-slave and defeater of the hired thugs of Alexandria in the first round, he — and I — were knocked out. Julie Wilkinson, playing the part of Rufilla, eventually won the debate and secured her place in the Time Machine.

It was a light-hearted session, but it also demonstrated something important about the course: its characters have become memorable enough to inspire affection, discussion and imaginative play long after students first encounter them. That is no small achievement. A character who remains in the memory is more than a name attached to a grammatical exercise. They are part of a story that has made an impression.

New discoveries at Pompeii

In the afternoon, Dr. Sophie Hay, an archaeologist working in Pompeii, presented her recent excavations in different parts of the city. Her work revealed fascinating relationships between people living in the neighbourhood of the wine merchant Amarantus— the subject of CSCP's Amarantus and his neighbourhood project.

The archaeological discoveries offered another opportunity to consider how the course's stories relate to the evidence we have about Roman life. Pompeii continues to reveal new details about its inhabitants, their homes, their work and their relationships with their neighbours.

This is one of the lasting attractions of teaching the ancient world through a course that takes archaeology seriously. The evidence is not static, and our understanding of Roman society continues to develop. The stories provide an entry point, while archaeology allows us to deepen and sometimes revise our understanding of the world behind them.

Sixty years on: the continuing value of reading

Looking back on the anniversary, I was struck by how much the Cambridge Latin Course has achieved over six decades.

It has changed and developed, as any successful educational resource must. Yet it has retained its commitment to archaeological authenticity, meaningful stories and the integration of language and civilisation.

My argument about cognitive science was not that the course needed to reinvent itself to meet the latest educational fashion. Rather, it was that contemporary research helps us articulate why an approach based on reading and meaning still continues to make sense.

We should certainly teach students vocabulary, grammar, syntax and morphology. But we should teach these things in the service of reading, not allow them to become substitutes for it. A student who can recite a grammatical paradigm has acquired a piece of knowledge. A student who can read a Latin story, understand its meaning and follow its characters has acquired something more powerful: the beginnings of a genuine relationship with the language. That, ultimately, is the price of reading — not a price that students should have to pay through endless memorisation, but the value we gain when language teaching is organised around the act of reading itself.

After sixty years, the Cambridge Latin Course still reminds us that the best way to learn a language is not simply to learn about it. It is to encounter it, make sense of it and discover that it has something worth saying.