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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

I undertook research into the use of conversational, spoken Latin in the UK classroom, due to my intention to answer three specific research questions. Firstly, I wanted to find out how easy it is for the contemporary Classics teacher to implement communicative approaches to the teaching of Latin. Secondly, I wished to discover what techniques the Classics teacher can adopt to implement communicative approaches to the teaching of Latin, within the framework of active, oral communication in Latin. Thirdly, I wanted to consider how positive is the attitude of students engaging with communicative approaches to the teaching of Latin. I was introduced to this area of research on my PGCE course of study at Cambridge University. Furthermore, I was especially inspired by the scholarship of Coffee (2012), King (2011), Lloyd (2016), Patrick (2015), Rasmussen (2015) and Tunberg (2011) who have written so positively about the unique ability of communicative approaches to unlock the joy of experiencing and employing the Latin language for individuals of all ages.

The unseen translation - translation of a passage of Latin that the student has not seen before, under constraints of time and with limited access to resources - is a persistent element of Latin courses, especially at school level. It is present in A Level courses in England (for example, OCR 2017), in the Scottish Highers (SQA, 2017), in the New Zealand curriculum (NZQA, 2017), and in Australia (VCAA, 2004; Board of Studies, 2009), to name but a few examples. In Victoria, courses have undergone various changes in the last 30 years, but the unseen has remained a constant: there seems to be a consensus among teachers and examiners that the ability to translate a passage of Latin on the spot is a rigorous and enduring test of at least one aspect of a student's skills in Latin.

Discovered 12 metres (40 feet) below the surface in the Santa Rosa Island region, this rare and unprecedented archaeological cache of pottery and sculpture has flummoxed the archaeological community. Some scientists debate the authenticity of this newly-discovered society because of the apparent gender equality. But former native-Californian artist M F Dondelinger says sometimes it's hard to get our minds around new concepts and images to understand their meanings. ‘What we need now is to be open to interpreting this unusual society. I think it requires a whole paradigm shift on how some early communities are interpreted.’

My introduction to Latin came at the hands of my prep school headmaster, now a little over 20 years ago. An unyielding authoritarian of the old school, he had by then owned and run his institution for 49 years as the unquestioned ruler of an educational empire. In spite of the Spartan conditions – ‘We've never gone in very much for “facilities” here,’ he once observed – and wildly eccentric characters, the school turned out scholars (and future classicists) at an impressive rate.

Prompted by reading about projects elsewhere in the country – Birmingham, Liverpool, London for instance – I am writing to share my experience of working with a project to offer Latin to pupils in an 11 – 16 Catholic Academy in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. It is an unusual arrangement, but one which offers some ideas about what might be achieved elsewhere.

The purpose of this article is to encourage classical colleagues to develop their own illustrated talks to deliver to school assemblies (both senior and junior). In my experience, an illustrated talk goes down well with any audience (whatever its age) and can have an immediate impact on their view of the classical world (especially its ‘relevance’). Assemblies can be delivered in many ways: a talk; interactive; class presentation etc. This article concentrates only on the preparation and delivery of an illustrated talk. I have divided the article into four sections: the value of classical assemblies; tips on preparing and delivering assemblies; resources and copyright; and an example of a classical assembly (The Adventures of Theseus).

First, where does the Renaissance fit in chronologically with other periods of the past? There is general agreement that the Renaissance should be dated from 1300 to 1650, though some believe that a more accurate and meaningful starting date would be 1400/1450. The Middle Ages is generally taken to be the period 500 to 1500 (a considerable overlap with the Renaissance then), though some would date the start to the Arab conquests beginning about 640. A period of the Middle Ages is traditionally known as the ‘Dark Age(s)’. Those who believe that the term is still appropriate (many reject it because of its negative connotations) date this from 500/600 to 800, though some extend it to 1000. (See later for the origins of the terms ‘Renaissance’, ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘Dark Age(s)’.)