Back with another instalment of Pliny genius, @gregorystringer.bsky.social teaching Pliny's Letters for #SeumasU thepatrologist.com/product/lati... starts Mon 23rd Feb

All the Pliny haters in the AP Latin teachers Facebook group got me so worked up that I started a multi-part blog entry series on the unique features of Pliny's style. Because someone needs to stick up for Pliny boi magisterconway.blogspot.com/2026/01/plin...

I'm certain that this is now lost media, but what I wouldn't give to play these games advertised in The Classical Outlook in 1990

The amount of Pliny hate in the AP Latin teachers Facebook group is frankly astonishing. "I wouldn't say he has any real style as a writer." WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN???

“Hoc maxime propositum est: pessimis displicere.”

I just read the Pliny letters on Harpocras (10.5–7) for the first time, and let me say that the teachers in the AP Facebook group complaining about how boring Pliny is have no idea what they're talking about. If you can't find anything interesting to talk about in those letters, that's a skill issue

One thing I don’t miss about Twitter is the dogmatic, combative CI reply guys. It used to be you’d post anything about language education and get a passive-aggressive rebuttal and a link to a blog post of theirs from 2006

Little peek at my latest Latin reader project 👀

Latin question that's baffling me. Seneca, De Clem. 1.18, on Vedius Pollio: "Ō hominem mīlle mortibus dignum, sīve dēvorandōs servōs obiciēbat mūraenīs, quās ēsūrus erat, sīve in **hoc** tantum illās alēbat, ut sīc aleret." Is it "hoc" (accusative) or "hōc" (ablative)?

Long shot: does anyone have a better photo of this inscription in the Vatican Museums (CIL 6.1272)? The best I can find is the second photo (from the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg) but it is cropped off at the edges

I'm obsessed with this story about Severus Alexander from the Historia Augusta (Sev. Alex. 48). It reads like a sitcom plot

This was my hometown paper. As a kid I remember picking it up from the curb, reading the comics. In high school I would read the front page and political cartoons over breakfast. The PG has been dead to me ever since they fired Rob Rogers in 2018, but it's sad for me to see it actually dead.

Any century, you say?

This term I'm teaching with "Classics and Race: A Historical Reader" (2025), edited by Sarah Derbew, Daniel Orrells, and Phiroze Vasunia. An incredible achievement: global sources from 14th-20th translated, and given commentaries by expert scholars. And OPEN ACCESS! uclpress.co.uk/book/classic...

The ghost of Pliny the Younger whenever anyone uses a tricolon with asyndeton

Heri cum labrum complerem ad liberos lavandos, unus ex illis aquam parum calidam querebatur. Equidem mihi aqua frigidior quam solita videbatur. Itaque ad calefactorem aquae, in spatio angusto sub domo sita, descendi vidique aquam e calefactore rupto abundantissime exundare atque in solo stagnare.

I can never get enough of this one

Has there ever been a published edition of the Latin text of Thomas Clarkson's anti-slavery essay, written for a composition contest at Cambridge in 1785? All I can find is the manuscript digitized here. Should be an interesting text to take a look at radar.auctr.edu/liceat-nolen...

Today I’m sorting through my Vatican pics and beginning a public appeal to help me identify some artefacts🏺 first up, any idea what’s happening here? Are these axes?

Ecce! In crustulo est puella, nomine Cornelia.

They found a sitella!!! A real sitella!!! Sorry but I spent days researching Roman sortition for my writing project and it seems no one really agrees on how exactly the Romans drew lots. Hopefully we get some sortition research on this little guy

A weird thing about where I live (in central PA) is that a local guy married a woman with a connection to Christopher Columbus, and long story short, now a museum here has 100k pages of 15th-c. documents, never published. (Apparently digitized in 2019, but not available online from what I can tell)

"I used AI to generate ideas" ys just like "Ich used pickpocketing to generate a litel pettye cash"

I can’t tell whether this Latin quote from a bread cookbook is a genius pun or a really baffling mistake

This is a great time to break out my only Corpus Tibullianum meme

The AP Latin essential knowledge lists some of Roman values: mercy, honesty, frugality, hard work, responsibility, courage, self-control, moral discernment, and ethical behavior. I've got a couple questions on "moral discernment": 1. How would you translate that into Latin? Is there a single word?

Mr. Rogers: "You know, your own imagination is far more wonderful than any computer could ever be. You know why? You're a living human being, and a computer is just a machine. Human beings are far more wonderful than machines."

As a POOL–PULL merger guy, I found the fact that WOOL rhymes with PULL and not POOL to be a whole other layer of bizarre

All this Dido content on the AP syllabus but no wounded deer simile??? Unconscionable

Omg this contest gets more bananas the more you learn about it It’s for writing commentaries Of obscure Victorian prizewinning compositions By obscure rich 20-year-old men For a prize of TEN THOUSAND POUNDS With a minimum length of TWENTY FIVE THOUSAND WORDS Due in EIGHT MONTHS

Hairy cats are the likely derivation of the English word 'caterpillar' – coming from Old Norman *catepelose, itself from Latin catta 'cat' and pilōsa 'hairy'. Meanwhile, it was little dogs that were the inspiration for the Modern French equivalent word for the bug (chenille).

If you're looking to NOT buy something today, might I recommend instead downloading free PDFs from Pixelia Publishing? Open-Access editions of several Latin (and English) texts. Most recent edition is the Latin poetry of Elizabeth Jane Weston: pixeliapublishing.org

When there's a chance of a snow delay or cancellation, I consult the Sortes Vergilianae with my students. This is a thread of the oracular predictions If you want to do your own, you can make a copy of this doc docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

I can’t let Mommsen’s birthday pass without sharing Mark Twain’s encounter with him

I'm not on here much, but I am so excited to share the cover of my forthcoming Catullus translation, featuring an amazing painting by Eduardo Mata Icasa (called "Nature of Emptiness"). As soon as I saw the painting, I knew no other work of art could more perfectly capture how I think about Catullus.

Yes! Like how in the Talmud Vespasian was only wearing one shoe when he was told he would be emperor, and when he tried to get the other on, he found his feet had swollen up. But then a rabbi quoted Proverbs at him and got his feet to shrink back down. More believable than some of Suetonius tbh

AP Latin people: "The Course and Exam Description is crystal clear: if something is not mentioned explicitly in there, it won't be on the test." Me: "OK, so these things aren't mentioned in the CED. I assume they won't be on the test then?" AP Latin people: "Oh no those could be on it"

Reading parts of Aeneid 7–12 for the first time. We'll see if nobody ever reads these books because the canon is a self-replicating cycle in which teachers, out of familiarity, teach the passages they learned themselves, or if nobody reads them because they're not very good

AP Latin non sponte sequor

Would you call something that occurs 40% of the time "fairly rare"? Asking for reasons that are totally not just more kvetching about AP Latin

AP Latin: "Our unseen passages are drawn from underrepresented and nonclassical authors! Isn't that cool?" Also AP Latin: *doesn't give the authors for the unseen passages, so all students see is just Latin words floating in the ether*

Laura Jenkinson-Brown’s "You are Odysseus"...sets out with a remarkable twist on how we engage with his story: what if we can intervene in some of his decisions? What if we can be author of a part of his tale? sententiaeantiquae.com/2025/11/09/m...

talis erat Dido, talem se laeta ferebat per medios, instans operi regnisque futuris. She is fast, thorough, and sharp as a tack She is touring the facility and picking up slack Same vibes

Omg this is great. The initial reading is so bananas www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/ifa...

The AP Latin teachers Facebook group is constantly complaining about how boring Pliny is. And I’m like, “You all read Caesar for years, and you’re calling PLINY boring???”

Mildly interesting: the French word “chalumeau” (blowtorch) isn’t related to “chaleur” or the other heat-related words, it comes from “calamus” (reed)

Yesterday I sat through some PD about using AI to simplify texts. I tried it out and the results were... not fantastic

Normally I'm not a guy who insists on pedantic plurals for loanwords, but basing the English plural of "axolotl" on its Nahuatl plural "axolomeh" is really cool and I'm going to start doing it. Especially because I'm seeing a lot of axolomeh in kids' stuff recently, I think it's a trend