2008 October 3rd: WHERE THE ROMANS LANDED

From The Times October 3, 2008

Simon de Bruxelles

Archaeologists believe that they have found the spot where the Roman legions landed to begin the conquest of England in AD43.

A stretch of Roman shoreline has been uncovered during excavations at Richborough in Kent that is now two miles from the sea because of silting. Two thousand years ago it was the shore of a large lagoon where the Emperor Claudius's troops landed after the crossing from Boulogne.

The Roman landing place was discovered during excavations at Richborough Fort, a monument that still dominates the flat Kentish marshlands.It was probably from this port that the last of the legions departed in the 5th century.

The discovery was made at the bottom of a trench beneath a collapsed wall of the Roman fort.

Tony Wilmott, an archaeologist at English Heritage, said: “It is widely known that Richborough Roman Fort was the gateway to Roman Britain - but what is really exciting is that we have actually found the Roman foreshore while digging in a deep trench alongside the remains of a Roman wall.

“The bottom of the trench continually fills with water and by trowelling you can feel the hard surface, which was the Roman beach. We have long been curious about this fallen Roman fort wall and now we know there was a Roman harbour sitting out there.”

Fragments of Roman pottery and building materials, including wood and leather, were found in the ditch. During the month-long dig, which ends today, archaeologists also unearthed a medieval dock. It is believed to have been built with the same masonry technique as the mid-14th century town wall in Sandwich, which in the Middle Ages was a thriving port.

Archaeologists made a number of smaller finds, such as Roman coins and fragments of Italian marble, that are believed to be from a great triumphal arch built at Richborough in about AD80 to mark the conquest.

Today all that remains of the triumphal arch that greeted visitors to Roman Britain are its foundations.

Richborough, which was then known as Rutupiae, was a peaceful and prosperous port until the 3rd century, when it was hastily fortified to provide defences against Saxon raiders from across the North Sea.

The defences were rebuilt in the 4th century, when it became the largest of the fortifications known as the Saxon Shore.

Until the latest excavation, archaeologists could only speculate on the precise location of the Roman shoreline, buried as it was beneath centuries of silt. They now know that the fort would have stood directly above the sea.

Besides being one of the last places abandoned by the legions as they pulled back to defend the heart of the Roman Empire, in the 5th century the fort was also the site of one of the earliest Christian churches in Britain.

2008 September 28th: HOW THE EMPIRE STRUCK BACK

Tom Holland writes (from The Observer, September 28 2008)

Interviews with classics professors in newspapers went out of fashion roughly around the same time as liberty bodices and national service. Yet mirabile dictu, what should have been featured some weeks ago in the Review section of The Observer if not an interview with a classics professor? To be sure, Mary Beard has always made for good copy. In her ability to make a complex subject accessible to non-specialists, not to mention her occasional aptitude for controversy, she is the closest that her discipline has to a Richard Dawkins. Even so, she is only primus inter pares

This autumn, a whole legion of books by heavyweight classicists will be advancing on bookshops. In addition to Beard's study of Pompeii, enthusiasts for ancient history can enjoy biographies of Philip II of Macedonia, Julius Caesar and Attila. Most unexpected of all is a dense yet wholly gripping analysis by Robin Lane Fox of the Greek dark ages, a period that even specialists have always regarded as intimidatingly obscure. Something rather startling is evidently going on: publishers seem to believe that classical scholarship may actually sell.

For the practitioners of a discipline that has long been beleaguered by charges of irrelevance and snobbery, this is a heady thought. Even in the Fifties, when a knowledge of Latin and Greek was still held to be the defining mark of the nation's educational elite, the perceived pointlessness of studying dead languages was proving toxic. In How to be Topp, one of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle's tetralogy of satires about life in a Fifties prep school, the gloriously disaffected Molesworth advised that a Latin lesson could always be brought to a grinding halt by the simple expedient of asking: 'What is the use of Latin, sir?' He went on to describe the result. 'Master clutches the board ruber but he knos he is beaten this one always rouses the mob.'

Molesworth was right. Over the past few decades, classicists have suffered a rout on the scale of the Roman defeat at Cannae. A discipline that once enjoyed an Olympian status in the curriculum has been struggling for survival. In the state system, where the carnage has been particularly severe, a bare 15 per cent of secondary schools offer Latin. No surprise, then, that it has ended up more thoroughly the preserve of the privately educated than it was even in Molesworth's time. Hardly the perfect background, you might think, for a sudden explosion of interest in the ancient world.

And yet that is exactly what it has provided. The virtual eradication of classical subjects from the state system has left whole swaths of the population educationally disenfranchised: cut off from a knowledge of civilisations that remain no less the bedrock of our own, no less peopled with remarkable figures and famous names, no less fascinating, terrifying and strange than they had ever been. People are not stupid - they know when they are missing out on something interesting and important. If the education system fails to give it to them, then it can hardly be held surprising that they will look for it elsewhere, in works of popular history, perhaps, and in other media as well.

It is surely no coincidence that Gladiator, the film that effectively served to fuel the recent obsession with the ancient world, should have been released in 2000, a generation after the final collapse of classical studies in most schools. Maximus's heroics gave people a taste of what had been lost. Nor did it take long for Gladiator to reveal a quality not normally associated with sword-and-sandal fests: prescience. Watch it again now and it seems to display something of the quality of the best science fiction, a portrait of a world that is as weirdly familiar as it is strange, as much about the future as the past. Citizens fed on dazzling entertainments; armies striking at an elusive foreign foe; the hi-tech delivery of weapons of fire. Here, as with Blade Runner, was a mirror being held up to the future.

One year on from Gladiator's release and the American response to 9/11 ensured that the comparison of the classical superpower to the modern was transformed into a cliche. The image of George Bush wearing an imperial laurel wreath became a staple of caricatures everywhere. The rise and fall of the Roman empire began to seem not just ancient history, but a theme of pressing immediacy. Even now, with American hegemony looking more frayed than it did at the time of the Iraq War, the world of the classical past continues to cast an eerie shadow. As the critical response to the current exhibition on Hadrian at the British Museum has served to suggest, we find it hard now to look at a Roman and not identify in him something of ourselves.

There is nothing new about this. In the Renaissance, when classics as an educational discipline had its birth, Machiavelli had no doubts as to the abiding relevance of the lessons of the Greek and Roman past. 'Prudent men are wont to say,' he wrote, 'and this not rashly or without good ground, that he who would foresee what has to be should reflect on what has been, for everything that happens in the world at any time has a genuine resemblance to what happened in ancient times.' Such a claim, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, might have appeared outlandish, but now, with the Cold War ended and long-suppressed identities and hatreds emerging from the melting permafrost, it appears a good deal less so.

Whether in the Balkans or Georgia, not to mention in the former Roman province of Judaea, the origins of modern conflicts often have very ancient roots indeed. Even in Britain, where the increasingly diverse nature of our society has prompted endless tortured musings on the nature of 'British values', the political and moral ambiguities of classical history suddenly seem possessed of a wholly new relevance. Issues of citizenship, after all - for good and bad - lay at the very heart of the Greek and Roman experience. As in the Renaissance, so now: classical scholarship is coming to seem bizarrely cutting edge.

All of which serves to raise a tantalising possibility: that the very devastation to which the discipline has been subjected might end up providing the necessary context for its revival. Perhaps, like any outmoded brand, classics needed to go through a decontamination process. Certainly, it seems now to have purged itself of many of its more rebarbative associations: the fust of chalkdust, the hint of canes and cold showers.

Molesworth, describing the desperate flannelling of a classics teacher put on the spot, imagined him protesting: 'Er latin gives you not only the history of Rome but er [hapy inspiration] its culture, it er tells you about interesting men like J Caesar, hannibal, livy, Romulus remus and er lars porsena of clusium.' To Molesworth's classmates, such names would have been a reminder of ink-spattered textbooks and lectures on the vital importance of a stiff upper lip; children today are likeliest to have heard of them from computer games or glossy TV dramas.

And if that does inspire some students to contemplate the study of a dead language at school, then at least they will no longer find the educational establishment standing in their way. As Will Griffiths, the director of the Cambridge School Classics Project, puts it: 'When we talk to schools about the possibility of offering Latin, we encounter interest and excitement, not hostility.'

Perhaps, then, just perhaps, the rash of books on classical subjects currently appearing in the review pages is indeed the reflection of a broader trend. Certainly, the discipline does appear to have stopped flat-lining. In 2000, there were a mere 150 non-selective state schools in England offering Latin; now there are more than 500.

All of which may be so much whistling in the wind. Enthusiasts for classics, like supporters of the England football team, are forever hailing new dawns and invariably end up disappointed. Nevertheless, like a phalanx of scarred and combat-hardened hoplites, classicists remain, at the very least, on the field of battle. Later this year, for instance, an £8m appeal, 'Classics for All', will be launched, with the stated ambition of making classics 'available and sustainable in all state schools'. What prospect there is of raising such a sum in the teeth of a recession remains to be seen, but the organisers of the appeal are no more likely to be daunted by that reflection than the Athenians were by the sight of the enemy on the plain of Marathon. 'Ignis aurum probat': 'It is fire that truly puts gold to the test'.

2008 July 26th: HADRIAN THE TRAVELLING MAN

From The Spectator 'Hadrian' Supplement, July 26 2008

When Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed and the royal family failed to offer its immediate tribute of tear-soaked teddy-bears, the tabloids were outraged. ‘Where Is Our Queen?’ rapped the Sun. ‘Show Us You Care’ moaned the Express. The family jumped to attention and were soon publicly caring as they had never cared before.

There is a golden rule here. For power to be wielded effectively, there must be a quid pro quo between ruler and ruled, a return on the relationship for both sides. Romans with political ambitions well understood this. For example, they spent fortunes providing the public with the aristocrat pleasures to which the public felt entitled – chariot races, gladiatorial games, theatrical spectacles – and (whatever they actually thought of these shows) turned up personally to see and be seen, and demonstrate their enthusiasm for the public’s pleasures.

But what if you did not live in Rome? In the early 5thC AD Synesius from Cyrene in Libya wrote to a friend saying that it was only because of the annual tax demand that people knew the empire was still functioning and the emperor alive. He goes on: ‘But who the emperor may be is not at all clear. In fact, some of us think Agamemnon is still on the throne’. In admitting to these feelings, Synesius was putting his finger on a serious problem. The emperor ruled territory from Britain to Syria, from the Rhine-Danube to North Africa and Egypt. The emperor’s face on a coin was probably the closest a provincial could ever get to him. What sense of mutual interest could possibly exist between such a distant figure and fifty million disparate subjects rattling round this vast area?

No Roman emperor understood the significance of this problem better than Hadrian (emperor AD 117-138). The use of force was taken for granted across the ancient world and, ultimately, Rome ruled the world only because it could enforce its decisions on it subjects. The army was its enforcer, none more effective (to the fury and grudging admiration of its enemies everywhere). But an army required to be paid, and it was only the taxes raised across the empire that paid for it. Let those taxes dry up, and the empire was at an end: no one need pay attention to orders from the centre any more. So the security of the empire outweighed every other issue with which the emperor had to grapple.

Hadrian was a pragmatist. If he felt, for whatever reason, that the empire was under threat and that the big stick needed to be wielded, he had absolutely no compunction about wielding it. At the same time, he saw more clearly than most that the empire was the sum of its parts, and that one effective way of helping to keep those parts together was to provide the political, social and communal glue of his own physical presence. Queen Elizabeth I was of the same persuasion: every spring and summer for 44 years she toured the realm, ensuring her subjects had the chance to see her in person.

The result was that Hadrian spent more than half of his 22 years as emperor on the road. His agenda was a wide one. One of his purposes in visiting far-flung places was military. He came to Britain because it had always been trouble, and trouble on the edges of empire was not to be taken lightly. The purpose of his famous Wall was to do in the West what he had earlier done in the East – redefine the limits of empire by cutting away areas where the cost-benefit ratio of remaining was unfavourable (‘they must have their freedom, because they cannot be protected’ was Hadrian’s delicious comment). Coinage of the time typically shows Hadrian in full military uniform on horseback, addressing the exercitus Britannicus. Farewell, then, Scotland.

Another purpose was judicial. The emperor was the source of all law, and thousands of petitions a year from all over the empire reached him in Rome, asking him to give judgement on issues great and small. Here is the personal reply from Marcus Aurelius to a woman who innocently married her uncle forty years ago and wanted the children legitimised:

‘We are moved by the length of time during which, in ignorance of the law, you have been married to your uncle, and the fact that you were placed in matrimony by your grandmother, and by the number of your children. So, as all these considerations come together, we confirm that the status of your children who result from this marriage shall be as if they were conceived legitimately.’

As Hadrian toured the provinces, part of his duties was to sit, day after day, at the local assizes and show what Roman justice was like in cases like these – trivial to him, maybe, but far from trivial to those bringing them. On one such occasion, we are told, Hadrian was stopped by a woman demanding to be heard. Hadrian said he was too busy to listen. ‘Then don’t be emperor’, said the woman. He stopped and listened. Caveat emperor.

Nevertheless, the specific military and legal agenda was not the main feature of his travels. The Restitutor (‘Restorer’) series of coins summarises perfectly what Hadrian was for the most part about. In these he is dressed not as a soldier but in civilian toga, extending a friendly hand to the personification of a grateful, kneeling Province, often with a cornucopia or ears of grain or some other indication of prosperity close at hand – Hadrian as great benefactor, dispensing revitalizing largesse wherever he went, showing the provincials what it really meant to be part of the mighty Roman empire.

And did he dispense them. In Athens, for example, he sponsored the construction of a complete new quarter; a magnificent library, filled with paintings and rare statues, featuring gilt ceilings and a quadrangle surrounded by a huge colonnaded portico (precious marble from Asia Minor); and the completion and inauguration of the temple to Olympian Zeus, started 600 years earlier. An arch commemorating his generosity was built. On one side, there was the inscription ‘This is Athens, the former city of Theseus’, on the other ‘This is the city of Hadrian, not Theseus’. So, though Hadrian was a passionate Hellenophile, this was not benefaction merely for the love of it: it was politics too, ensuring the loyalty of vital Greek East, while appropriating its history for Roman purposes and making it quite clear who was actually in charge.

In all, no fewer than 122 cities acquired new, splendid public buildings, while others were granted regular sponsored games, guaranteeing huge crowds, and therefore revenue, for years to come. As a result of this incessant networking, a contemporary wrote that ‘one could see memorials of Hadrian’s journeys in most cities of Europe and Asia’.

Hadrian showcased his rule in his villa at Tivoli, where he spent the last years of his life, naming its rooms after countries and sights of the empire. There was even a Hades, of which Hadrian may well have been thinking when, on his death-bed, he composed this touchingly appropriate poem:

/animula vagula blandula, / hospes comesque corporis, / quo nunc abibis? in loca / pallidula rigida nubila, / nec ut soles dabis iocos./

‘Little soul, little wanderer, little charmer, / body’s guest and companion, / where will you be off to now?’ ‘To places / dim, frozen and shadowy - / nor will you make your usual jokes.’

The great traveller, ‘guest and companion’ of so many, was about to make a journey to yet another distant outpost, but one in which no mutual interests were at stake and from which there was no ‘return’ – in any sense.

2008 May 24th: VOTE FOR CEASAR

The Spectator May 24 2008

Peter Jones on the simplicity of the Graeco-Roman world and the contract between past and present

In South Shields there is a Roman funerary monument dedicated to thirty-year old Rêgîna (‘Queenie’). It is dated around AD 200, at the height of the Roman occupation of Britain. It tells us that she was originally a slave from St Albans, freed by and married to one Barates - from Palmyra in Syria. What on earth was Barates doing in South Shields, for pity’s sake, over four thousand miles from home, in the frozen north of England? Why, doing business with the Roman army, of course, in the global world of the Roman empire.

So there is nothing new about a global world. We were living in one two thousand years ago. As Lionel Casson says:

‘The Roman man in the street ate bread baked with wheat grown in North Africa or Egypt, and fish that had been caught and dried near Gibraltar. He cooked with north African oil in pots and pans of copper mined in Spain, ate off dishes fired in French kilns, drank wine from Spain or France … The Roman of wealth dressed in garments of wool from Miletus or linen from Egypt; his wife wore silks from China, adorned herself with diamonds and pearls from India, and made up with cosmetics from South Arabia … He lived in a house whose walls were covered with coloured marble veneer quarried in Asia Minor; his furniture was of Indian ebony or teak inlaid with African ivory…’

Even more striking is how uncomplicated this global world was. Romans governed their provinces with a small bureaucracy co-operating with the local hierarchy to run the place as usual. Rome demanded its annual tax take, and the right to station legions there if needed, but apart from that they imposed no monetary system, no education system, no rules and regulations, and except in a limited number of cases, no laws either (so the Archbishop of Canterbury was right: legal systems can happily exist alongside each other). But their arrival opened up the massive economic network that was the Roman empire.

The contrast with our much-loved EU is stark, and one has to wonder why. There is a simple answer, relevant to all modern life: the ability, thanks to mathematics on the one hand (surely the central discipline of our age) and modern data-gathering, surveillance techniques, communications-systems and computers on the other, to be complex. The motives for complexity are laudable – vital, indeed, in scientific and medical research - but put those systems in the hands of policy wonks and just see what happens. /Sî monumentum requîris, circumspice/, starting with Brussels and the Treasury under Brown. In other words, because we have the /means/ to be complex, it does not follow that we should /be /complex. The Roman empire lasted 700 years without complexity.

At almost every point these ancient societies provide us with a parallel universe that can shine a stimulating light on the priorities and practices of our own. To stay with the issue of complexity, consider our legal system. The Romans were proud of their original legal code consisting of X tables, but even then they found they needed to boost them almost immediately by 20% to XII tables. The historian Livy comments that these were the tiny fountain-head of all public and private law /nunc quoque, in hôc immênsô aliârum super aliâs aceruâtârum lêgum cumulô /‘now as well, in this immeasurable of-others-upon-others-piled-up-laws accumulation’, the weight, length, word-order and alliteration of the phrase mirroring the tangled mountain of the law in Livy’s day. The later historian Tacitus traces the history of this monstrous growth (which Julius Caesar had tried to trim back), adding with his usual pithy brilliance /corruptissimâ rêpûblicâ, plûrimae lêgês/ ‘when the state was at its most corrupt, laws were most numerous’. Any comment, Mr Straw?

Greek philosophy is a splendid example of how not to do it, and a very instructive one too. Greek philosophers proceeded from hypotheses, which they never tested. But if the hypothesis is rubbish, rubbish will be the conclusions you draw from it, however logically deduced. For example, they opined that the basic constituents of the world were earth, air, fire and water (even the great Aristotle crazily opined it, so that closed the matter). Ancient natural scientists and doctors based their theories on that hypothesis for some two thousand years, with catastrophic results.

But are we any better? Modern schooling is based on the hypothesis that it is best controlled top-down by government, in schools, in every aspect from curriculum to examinations, for children between the ages of 5 and 18. Is it? The results strongly suggest it isn’t. I should guess that half of all school pupils would be better served by a different hypothesis.

And so one can go on. While our MPs struggle to prevent us from finding out what claims they make for ‘expenses’ and in whose interests, Athenian democracy two and half thousand years ago had a simple reporting system in place for allowing the people in Assembly (i.e. not political chums) to keep regular checks on all official expenditure. They once found the great Pericles annually claiming the gigantic sum of ten talents for ‘expenses’. They turned a blind eye because they believed him when he said he was using it to buy off their great rival Sparta. But the point is that the people /knew/. It was their decision to approve or not.

When Plato argues that students wishing to enter higher education should be selected on one criterion, and one only - passion for the subject; when Cicero says that ‘our ancestors wrote laws whose sole aim was the stability and interests of the state…and all laws should be interpreted in the light of that aim…’ so that one is justified in passing over the /letter/ of the law if that aim is compromised; when Seneca says of dying ‘as it is with a play, so it is with life – what matters is not how long it lasts but how good the acting is…so make sure you round it off with a good ending’ - we can begin to get an inkling of what Edmund Burke was proposing when he said ‘Society is a contract … a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’ Our contract with the past is, surely, to use it.

Peter Jones’s Vote for Caesar, which considers Graeco-Roman solutions to modern problems, is published by Orion, £9.99.

2008 May 12th: VATICAN LATIN WEBSITE

The Roman Catholic Church, for centuries a bastion of Latin usage, has given the ancient tongue a 21st Century boost by launching a website in Latin.

The Vatican website now has a section - Sancta Sedes (Holy See) - with Latin papal texts and religious works.

Pope Benedict XVI is an advocate of Latin, allowing Mass in the language.

But when a papal decree was issued only in Latin by mistake last June, there was confusion until the Vatican press office put out an Italian version. "It caused a bit of panic for my colleagues who had no schooling in Latin," said the BBC's Rome correspondent David Willey, "until the official translation finally emerged."

The Vatican website already has sections in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

For centuries church documents were all written in Latin, the mass was said only in Latin. Without a knowledge of the language you would not go far if you were an ambitious priest. But Latin has fallen out of favour in recent years as the subject has been dropped from school curricula in many countries and normal Vatican business is conducted in Italian, or increasingly in English. But Pope Benedict wants the Catholic Church to keep its ancient traditions. After his election to the papacy three years ago, he addressed the Church's cardinals in Latin. He has encouraged the use of the language in seminaries where new priests are trained.

Last year he lifted restrictions on celebrating the Latin Tridentine Mass, The Latin Mass had been largely abandoned in the 1960s, as part of reforms to make Catholicism more relevant to its worldwide congregation. But Father Reginald Foster, an American priest who is the Pope's official Latinist, praises the virtues and the clarity of the Latin language. "You have to say something and move on," he says. "It's not like French and some of these philosophical languages where you can write a whole page and say nothing - in Latin you can't do that!''

Fr Foster has a weekly programme on Vatican Radio called The Latin Lover, in which he explains the historical and contemporary uses of the language.

2008 February 5th: A CLASSIC CASE OF UNDERSUPPLY

Latin and Greek are making a comeback - but can universities provide enough teachers?

Chris Arnot reports; Tuesday February 5, 2008; The Guardian

Back in 1965, Oxford and Cambridge decreed that applicants no longer required O-level Latin to gain admission to their hallowed halls and cloisters. The following year saw the founding of the Cambridge School Classics Project (CSCP) with the aim of keeping alive not only the flickering flame of classical culture, but also a language that even some academics regarded as past its sell-by date and the preserve of a snobbish elite.

More than four decades on, something strange is happening. The demand for Latin teachers in schools is going up, while the supply is going down. "Universities aren't producing enough, so we're all scrabbling around for the same people," says Andrew Hutchinson, headteacher at Parkside Community College in Cambridge - a comprehensive serving the centre of the city. "Quite a lot of academics live around here, which means the parent body can be quite demanding." Unusually for a state school, both he and his deputy are classicists.

Hutchinson has an MA in the subject from King's College, London, one of just two universities that are still training classics teachers. The other is Cambridge. Every year, its faculty of education gives PGCEs to 15 graduates qualified to teach classics, including Latin. King's College trains another 12. A total of 27, then. Meanwhile, around 72 Latin teachers are retiring or leaving annually, according to the CSCP.

The CSCP also estimates that there has been a three-fold rise over the past seven years in Latin classes of one form or another. The subject is now taught in 1,042 schools, including 453 independents and 118 grammars. But the biggest increase has come in state comprehensives, with a total of 471. Before addressing how this has come about, perhaps King's should be asked why it is training only a dozen classics teachers annually.

"Good question," says Aisha Khan, subject director for PGCEs in Latin and classical civilisation. "Our head of department recently made a bid to increase the numbers to 16, but that was turned down. We've been told by the Training and Development Agency that the figure will stay at 12 until at least 2011."

Khan's counterpart at Cambridge, Bob Lister, points out that 20 years ago there were 15 higher education providers of classics teachers. "But then 20 years ago," he goes on, "universities were happy to have PGCE courses with four or five students. Financially, that won't work now."

Times change. The number of higher civil servants with Oxbridge classics degrees is in decline just as the number of employers demanding graduates with more practical skills is increasing. What can a profound knowledge of classical civilisations offer in this brave new world? "The same benefits as any humanities degree - the ability to develop and sustain argument with reference to evidence," Lister says. "What's more, a knowledge of classical heritage is invaluable to anyone trying to understand culture in the 21st century."

Roots of English

Or the new millennium, to put it another way. Millennium is a good Roman word, and one of many that lie at the roots of English and other European languages. Ironically, the revival of an ancient language in schools has come about through modern technology. DVDs and computer terminals bring the subject to life in a way that would seem unimaginable to older generations who were forced to conjugate verbs by rote. "In 2000, the government put out a tender for software to support the teaching of Latin," says Will Griffiths, director of the Cambridge project, based on the second floor of the university's faculty of music. "One aim was to improve standards in schools where the subject was being taught by trained teachers. The other was to allow the majority of schools to be able to offer the subject through English or modern language teachers."

For the most part, the subject is taught on an extra-curricular basis to children who tend to be academically bright. "You find them in state schools all over the country," Griffiths enthuses. "I remember a girl in Dagenham who did GCSE by following our distance-learning course. The girl was highly sought after by top clubs in the field of women's football, but she turned them down to concentrate on her studies and came out with an AS in Latin by video link."

In one of its offices, the CSCP harbours a bank of screens from which one teacher, Verity Walden, holds what might be termed a video conference in Latin with some 260 schools around the country. Meanwhile, the demand grows for specialist Latin teachers on site. "They're becoming like gold dust. I sometimes receive two inquiries a day from heads looking to hire one," says Griffiths, 37, a former classics teacher at a comprehensive. "The issue for higher education is how it can support this surge in interest from schools. The government will always prioritise subjects like English and maths, but there's no reason why it shouldn't support more training for teachers in classics."

And the children who are creating the demand for those teachers - how do they see a knowledge of Latin and classical civilisation helping in their future degree and career choices?

"I think there's still an idea that a knowledge of Latin is helpful for medicine and law," says Griffiths. "That may be a misconception. But there's little doubt that Latin helps with an understanding of the make-up of English and other modern European languages. As teachers it's our job to enthuse and make that understanding a lively process."

*Not an easy option*

On the other side of the River Cam, dusk is drawing in and children are streaming away from Parkside Community College as Latin teacher Nicky Parr is going to work. From key stage 3 onwards, between 25 and 40 pupils in each year group stay behind after normal classes, and the numbers taking the subject at GCSE level are approaching double figures. "It's not an easy option," says Parr, "Latin is marked particularly rigorously and children have to put in long hours. It demands commitment as well as academic ability."

At least one of her pupils, Molly Makinson, 13, is also studying ancient Greek. ("My grandad used to teach it," she says.) Another, David Mestel, 15, acquired an A* GCSE in Latin in year 9. Along with Luke Freeman-Mills, currently studying A-level Latin at sixth-form college, he's producing a booklet containing translations of Virgil, Horace, Ovid and others. So does he fancy studying the subject as part of a classics degree?

"No," he says. "I will probably do something scientific." For young Mestel, it would seem, translating Latin poetry is simply a bit of fun.

2008 January 11th: THE MIGHTY HADRIAN

Dalya Alberge Arts Correspondent, The Times, January 11 2007

Two thousand years after he built a wall across Britain to keep out the barbarians, Hadrian is returning to this part of his empire. More than 200 treasures relating to the Roman Emperor will go on display in a block-buster exhibition this summer, the British Museum announced yesterday.

Spectacular artefacts that have only just been found will be among loans from 31 countries - a reflection of the global scale of Hadrian’s empire. It extended from Scotland to the Sahara, and from the Nile to the Danube. Negotiations are now under way to bring to London a colossal marble statue of Hadrian that was found only a few months ago at Sagalassos, Turkey.

Archaeologists were excavating the site of a huge Roman bath complex, whose construction began under Hadrian, when they found the lower part of a leg and a foot with an exquisitely decorated sandal. The foot alone is about 0.8 metres (2.6ft) long. The complete statue, topped by an imposing head, was originally nearly five metres high. Traces of red paint have survived on both the hair and sandal.

The exhibition comes after the unprecedented success of the British Museum’s show on another great world leader, The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army, which has sold 600,000 tickets. The demand is such that opening hours have been extended to midnight four nights a week.

Hadrian: Empire and Conflict is likely to prove just as popular, particularly as Hadrian is part of the history of so many countries. The lenders include Italy, Georgia and Israel – as well as Newcastle upon Tyne.

This will be the first big show dedicated solely to the life and legacy of a military man who ruled the Roman Empire at its height between AD117138, combining ruthless suppression of dissent with cultural tolerance. The British Museum’s historic Round Reading Room is a particularly appropriate setting for this exhibition as its dome has been compared to that of Pantheon in Rome, one of Hadrian’s architectural masterpieces. The exhibits will include a sculpture of Hadrian’s wife, created with a beauty that, according to Thorsten Opper of the British Museum, “would have had Michelangelo in raptures, if he had seen it”.

There will also be exquisite bronzes, including an extraordinary statue found in Israel in the 1970s and a silver bowl bearing an intricate portrait of his young Greek lover, Antinous, who accompanied him on his travels around the empire. A papyrus fragment will give an insight into the man himself as the only surviving section of Hadrian’s autobiography. Its contents are particularly touching in that Hadrian described the loss of his father at the age of 9. The show also includes objects from the museum’s own collection such as the famous Vindolanda wooden tablets, the oldest surviving examples of handwriting in Britain, which were discovered near Hadrian’s Wall.

Before the exhibition, a bronze head of the emperor from the 2nd century AD will travel to both ends of the wall, which extends 80 miles from the Solway Firth to the Tyne at Wallsend. The head, one of the rare remaining bronzes from Roman times, has never left the museum since its discovery in the Thames in 1834. Most such bronzes were melted down. This one not only survived but, thanks to the underwater silts of the Thames, it is also particularly well preserved. The statue to which it belonged, which was one and a quarter life size, may have been erected in London in AD122 to commemorate Hadrian’s visit to Britain.

Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, said: “The exhibition will provide an opportunity to assess the important legacy of the emperor Hadrian, whose reign has telling relevance to our lives today.” The Face of an Emperor: Hadrian Inspects the Wall /will be at Tullie House, Carlisle (February 8 to April 13), and Segedunum Roman Fort and Museum, Wallsend (April 16 to June 8). Hadrian: Empire and Conflict (July 24 to October 26) is at the British Museum. Both are sponsored by BP. Tickets can be booked from February 6 on 020-7323 8181 or online at the British Museum.

Caesar Traianus Hadrianus Augustus was born in Rome but of Spanish descent He was adopted by the emperor Trajan, his father’s cousin, as his successor His family fortune was based on the production of olive oil His admiration for the Greek civilisation and the beard he wore – a Greek fashion – prompted some to refer to him scornfully as Graeculus (“the Greekling”) He travelled throughout the empire for nearly half his reign, building temples, baths and libraries wherever he went After his young companion Antinous drowned in the Nile, he grieved openly, erecting statues of the boy throughout the realm.