A popular Latin course used to teach generations of British schoolchildren has undergone its biggest overhaul in 50 years to include more prominent female characters and better reflect ethnic diversity in the Roman world.
A fifth edition of the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC), a mainstay of mainly private schools since the 1970s, is being published later this month, in response to concerns from teachers, academics and students about the representation of women, minorities and enslaved people in earlier versions.
Girls studying the course, which is story-based, complained there were not enough female roles, and that those included were passive and undeveloped. There was also criticism that the Roman world was incorrectly depicted as predominantly white, and objections to the way in which slaves and slavery were represented.
The course, which has sold more than 4m copies and was last updated more than 20 years ago, has assumed cult-like status in the decades since it was introduced, even inspiring a cameo in Doctor Who. There has been a growing consensus that it needs updating for 21st-century students and modern sensibilities, though editors fear they will be accused of “cancelling” aspects of the original.
Book one, set in Pompeii in the first century AD, focuses on the family of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus, his wife, Metella, son Quintus, cook Grumio and faithful hound Cerberus. In the new version, a daughter called Lucia – who has been told by her father that he intends to marry her off to an older man – is introduced to allow greater exploration of young women’s experiences.
Another new female character, Clara, is hired by Caecilius to paint a fresco in his house in the new edition, while Barbillus, a successful Greco-Syrian merchant who appeared in book two of earlier editions, is given a more prominent role and is now clearly a person of colour. Previously, that was not clear from the line drawings.
Slavery, meanwhile, is depicted through the eyes of its victims, revealing the harsh reality of their lives in the Roman empire. One infamous episode from the original 1970s edition, in which a young female slave called Melissa is inspected lasciviously by the men of the household, prompting a jealous response from Metella, has been amended.
“Students today are much more aware of power dynamics and misogyny, not to mention issues of consent and sexual assault,” said Caroline Bristow, the director of the Cambridge Schools Classics Project, which runs the course at Cambridge University.
Editors have also removed the “loyal”, “happy”, “hard-working” and “lazy” slave tropes that existed in earlier editions. “The aim has always been to introduce students to the complexity of the Roman world and get them to think critically about it while learning Latin,” Bristow said. “That prepares them to engage more thoroughly with authentic classical sources. The feedback we got told is we weren’t doing enough in that regard.”
Bristow is bracing herself for accusations from traditionalists that she is trying to “cancel” Caecilius. “What seems to irritate our critics is that we don’t present Rome purely as a civilising culture. The reason is we’re teaching children to be classicists. We’re not teaching them to be Romans.”
There are even changes to the way in which gladiatorial combat is depicted, in line with recent scholarship, which has found it was not purely bloodthirsty, but reflected contemporary values such as martial prowess.
Steven Hunt, a Latin scholar at the University of Cambridge, who has been teaching Latin for 35 years and now trains teachers, supports the changes. “Every textbook needs a revamp every now and then. The CLC is remarkable among school textbooks as being something that’s been in existence since the 1970s.”
About 10,000 students sit GCSE Latin each year and most of them are in private schools despite government attempts to lift numbers in the state sector. According to a recent British Council survey, Latin is taught in less than 3% of state schools, compared with 49% of independent schools.
Jasmine Elmer, a classicist whose work focuses on trying to broaden access to the ancient world, said: “We’ve tended to take an all-white view of an empire that clearly wasn’t. If you’re a person of colour, it’s natural to wonder whether people like you were even there. It’s a catastrophic failure of our subject and needs to be rectified.
“The new course seems to be braver about those issues. It doesn’t run away from complicated subject matter; it turns it into teaching points.”
