So, um... this is bad. Really bad. I looked at the letters that were translated by the AI, and the very first one I found was almost entirely hallucination. Thread:

Does anyone happen to have the 1985 reprint of the Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse handy? I just want to check one page in this edition

I'm turning this into a thread of Classicists whose names I never knew how to pronounce

I never know how to pronounce the names of famous classicists. How do you say Betty Radice's name? Because I'm always inclined to pronounce it as the ablative of "radix," but that's not it...

My 2-year-old has been saying “Buddy’s not here!” when looking into an empty room. Took me a while to figure out that he was trying to say “Nobody’s here” and rephrasing it as “Body’s not here”

This is basically Ovid’s version of it in Met. 15

NEROSPASIAN

As some of you know, I've made student readers for some of the IB Companion Texts. I have a new one out now: Pliny the Younger's daily routine and other musings about fame! Like all my readers, this is FREE TO USE as you wish! magisterconway.blogspot.com/2026/03/plin...

The more I think about the AP Latin Pliny backlash, the more I believe it stems from a core misconception that Latin prose is supposed to be easier than Latin poetry. Poetry isn't easier or harder than prose, it just takes a different set of skills

I did a comparison of the vocabulary load in Pliny vs. Caesar. Spoiler: it's a lot lower in Caesar. But I wasn't going to let the anti-Pliny brigade have this W, so this post turns into a harangue against De Bello Gallico midway through magisterconway.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-...

Toni Morrison Olaf in Frozen II 🤝 “water has memory”

I helped edit this super cool story of a dude from India who wrote his name on Egyptian tombs 2,000 years ago! 🏺🧪

I will say one good thing about AP Latin: thanks to the Project Passages, I'm obsessed with the Laudatio Turiae now

I have a very bright Latin 2 student who’s a zoology major and wants to do an independent study reading Pliny the Elder next semester. Are there any student editions of any part of the Natural History? I’m not getting paid extra so I’d rather not have to prepare my own notes for them.

“2026 is the year of the horse” The horse:

Gather round everyone, we're going to read the opening of Pliny Ep. 6.16 and psychoanalyze Pliny a little bit magisterconway.blogspot.com/2026/02/fame...

Well this certainly changes my reading of "praedata puella est" in Amores 1.3

For no particular reason, here’s a list of weird omens in Livy raining stones (frequently) raining chalk (24.10) raining blood (42.20) raining milk (27.4) raining soil (34.45) fish come out of the ground (42.2) black wool come out of the ground (42.2) ravens eat the gold on the Capitol (30.2)

I made another blog post for the Pliny haters. This one's about his omissions of esse, which are neither very unusual nor very challenging for students, but people need something to complain about I guess magisterconway.blogspot.com/2026/02/comi...

Just in case you're at a Super Bowl party and need an excuse to talk about Latin poetry, the coin used in the Super Bowl coin toss has a Horace quote on the reverse (Odes 3.4.20) Non sine diis animosus infans – "a courageous infant, not without the gods' help"

Latin question: how would you say "three more times"? Like, "Someone rang the doorbell, and then they rang it three more times"?

Katherine McDonald’s truly marvelous “Four footprints, two languages, one tile”deserves your time: “Two slaves, working in conditions that were no doubt very difficult, taking a little time to mess about as friends and enjoy each other’s company.” katherinemcdonald.net/2016/01/14/f...

I've got another Pliny appreciation post. This one's about antithesis. Say what you will about Pliny, but the man loves a good antithesis magisterconway.blogspot.com/2026/02/anti...

My kids have been into Wild Kratts lately, so I was pleased to find that a species of mantis was named after them, and even more pleased to see the proper Latinity of the scientific name!

I'll be offering a follow up online class on Pliny, specifically those Suggested Letters for AP Latin - 1.6, 2.6, 7.5, 7.24, 9.6, 10.33, 10.34, 10.38, 10.39, 10.40 and includes materials & strategies to ease your workload! #LatinTeach #ClassicsSky thepatrologist.com/product/lati...

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