Author Archives: Chris Francese

Digital Commentaries and Generative AI

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A fascinating recent paper by Sarah Abowitz, Alison Babeu, and Gregory Crane, all of Tufts University, asks whether “general advances in machine learning could power alternative digital aids” to reading foreign-language sources more easily, “requiring less labor” than the immense effort required to create traditional print commentaries. In other words, how can we best use technology to transcend the limits of print in helping readers of classical works in the digital age? It’s a question at the heart of DCC, and of the other digital commentary projects they mention, the Ajax Multi-commentary Project and New Alexandria. After surveying classical commentary traditions past and present, print and digital (with some very kind words about DCC) they discuss a study conducted on sample commentaries aimed at different audiences on sections from Thucydides’ History and from the Iliad—Book 6 of both works. The authors do not consider the rich tradition of Hebrew and Christian exegesis, but their comments on the classical tradition could perhaps be extended to other traditions as well.

Unknown artist/maker, illuminator, Elijah ben Meshallum, scribe, Elijah ben Jehiel, scribe, et al. Decorated Text Page from the Rothchild Pentateuch, 1296. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

For the study, two coders tagged the comments and categorized them by function into six varieties: syntactic aid, translation, semantic aid, inconsistency alerts (which informed the reader of changes the editor made to the original text), stylistic claims (which assert that a certain linguistic feature occurs in a certain way in the text, for example, “this is one of Nicias’ favorite adjectives”), and finally reference pointers, which refer to any specific reference work, primary source, or scholarly paper.

The authors acknowledge that these categories are not watertight, and that quite a few comments straddled more than one of the categories. Unsurprisingly, commentaries that are oriented towards scholars have a higher percentage of reference pointers and less the way of translation and syntactic aids. Those aimed at students have more in the way of syntactic aids and translation. The high number of bare reference pointers that are characteristic of scholarly commentaries (I call them “cf.” notes and attempt to rigorously exclude them from DCC) are often dead ends in an open digital medium, since the material referred to is copyrighted and behind paywalls.

The authors point out that there is very little research about user experience of commentaries, of the kind that would be standard procedure in creating any self-respecting digital interface. What do we really know about how students use commentaries on average, and which types of notes are most helpful? We all have opinions on this topic, but apparently little or nothing has been done formally to investigate the question.

DCC’s practice is now to road-test commentaries with students before publication. In some cases, students are involved in choosing notes from existing public domain commentaries for variorum editions. A new cohort of DCC high school interns is on the way for summer 2025. We’re not gathering any data about student preferences from this process, but we could.

Another interesting point the authors make, coming from a computer science perspective, is that the stylistic claims in commentaries are often based on data (for example the number of occurrences of a given word or phrase), yet classical commenters almost never provide the data to back these assertions up (Some notes in the Cambridge Green & Yellow series do, and Ronald Syme’s Tacitus is a notable pre-digital exception). In a digital medium, it would be quite possible to provide the data, for example using treebank data.

The goals of this kind of discussion, it seems to me, are two: first to serve readers better, and second to use computational means to create more content with less labor. To what extent can artificial intelligence and generative AI aid in this enterprise? This paper suggested to me an interesting approach to testing and moving forward. The creating of a typology of comments is an important advance. This could be refined by analyzing a larger sample of older commentaries, akin to the corpus collected for the Ajax project on Sophocles’ Ajax, though these are all very scholarly, and not very useful for most readers, in my opinion. It would be better to work with school commentaries where multiple parallel school commentaries exist, say Caesar, Cicero, or Vergil, Xenophon, Homer, or Lysias.

Once a refined and well-understood typology of notes is ready, the types can be evaluated in terms of their relative utility for different audiences, and serve as a basis for creating prompts for generative AI. A specific, well-designed prompt might elicit from AI a certain type of comment, and a combination of those could be used to create a draft commentary on new texts, to be evaluated and edited by humans.  

Another key piece of the puzzle is something that Gregory Crane mentioned at the recent SCS panel, the fact that Hathi trust now has marvelously good multilingual OCR in its back end. In theory it will be possible to do a much larger harvesting of existing public domain commentaries, tag and use that data to create a more extensive collection of note types and do a kind of sifting operation in which the users select the notes that they find particularly helpful. The knowledge thus gained could be used on creative AI prompts. Obviously, anything produced by generative AI would have to be extensively edited by humans. But getting us part way would be extremely helpful. My own experiments on generating vocabulary lists with ChatGPT seem promising.

SCS 2025 Panel on Using AI in Classical Philology

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Every year the Digital Classics Association (DCA) sponsors a panel at the meetings of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS), and this year, appropriately, it was all about the potential of LLMs and AI in classical philology. Organized by Neil Coffee, the driving force behind DCA, it was a star-studded panel. Here is (was) the program:

Opening Up Classics with AI (organized by the Digital Classics Association)
Neil Coffee, University at Buffalo, SUNY, Organizer

  1. Neil Coffee, University at Buffalo, SUNY
    Introduction
  2. Samuel Huskey, University of Oklahoma
    Opening Up Bottlenecks in Digital Classics Workflows with Human-in-the-Loop AI
  3. Patrick Burns, New York University
    Prompt Engineering for Latin Teachers
  4. Edward Ross, University of Reading, and Jackie Baines, University of Reading
    Generative Image AI and Teaching Classics: A Case of Exaggeration
  5. Gregory Crane, Tufts University
    AI, Machine Actionable Publication and Assigning Credit
  6. Joseph Dexter, Harvard University, and Pramit Chaudhuri, University of Texas at Austin
    Benchmarking Generative AI Models for Classical Literary Criticism
Slide listing Gregory Crane's goals for his talk at the SCS

Gregory Crane, Tufts University
AI, Machine Actionable Publication and Assigning Credit

The abstracts of the talks are posted here, so I won’t try summarize them. My favorite quote came from the ever-polemical Gregory Crane, who referred to the monographs being sold nearby in the SCS book publishers’ display as “a dark archive,” and said “publications/datasets matter insofar as they fire the human mind.” That is a scholarly goal I can get behind, firing the human mind.

Huskey is working on the gathering comprehensive metadata for the Digital Latin Library, sucking in library records from all over the world and trying to disambiguate author names and work titles, many of which have multiple variants, confusing overlaps, and vagueness in the existing records (opera omnia? opera selecta? Bucolica? Eclogae?)

Burns is working on trying to create extensive reading material for Latin learners, as we go from the extreme scarcity of comprehensible texts for beginners to a world where we can have essentially infinite amounts of Latin pitched at any level. Charmingly, he had an LLM create a story about Odysseus and the Cyclops from the perspective of the sheep. From this talk I learned that prompts can be very large. A human will be confused by a question that is 300 pages long; AIs can easily take it in and synthesize. His main message is you can get a basic understanding of how this things work without being a computer scientist, and it is helpful to have such an understanding. 

Ross and Baines are keeping track of AI-generated images that have something to do with the ancient world, and ferreting out distorted history, incorrect information, and modern biases. They showed an amusing image of “Nike the Greek Goddess” flying around wearing a pair of Nike sneakers. Images of Hades draw extensively from Disney’s Hercules. They believe scholars have a duty to keep track of the craziness that is out there, if only to help the image tools get gradually more historically accurate.

Dexter and Chaudhri just finished teaching a seminar on Latin literary history using only fragmentary authors, and are trying to use AI to craft a new narrative about Latin literary history based on this material.

Crane wants to leverage AI to give people without extensive knowledge of historical languages better access to the classics of the world, the whole world, through enhanced translations and reference tools, and to serve audiences in their own languages (e.g. Persian), not just English. I was particularly taken with his effort to us machine translation to translate the examples in Kuhner-Gerth’s Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache into English, thus unlocking this fundamental reference work for a broader audience. He’s training AI to figure out which of the 26 uses of ὡς is active in a particular passage of Greek. He also pointed out the the multilingual OCR at Hathi Trust is off-the-chain good at this point.

What struck me was the way that using AI tools requires scholars to be explicit about their goals, what they really want to do, in a way that writing a journal article does not.  These papers used AI tools for different, all legitimate, philological and scholarly goals. Do you want to

  • critique historical bias and inaccuracy on the web? (Ross & Baines)
  • tell a story about literary history? (Dexter and Chaudhuri)
  • help people learn Latin? (Burns)
  • catalogue published texts? (Huskey)
  • attribute passages correctly? (Dexter and Chaudhuri)
  • fire the human mind? (Crane)

AI can help. Notably, none of these goals is rewarded by the academic world as currently constituted. Which is one more reason I respect these scholars for doing interesting work despite the professional incentives to churn out another article or book for the dark archive.

I went into this panel rather repelled by AI, more aware of it as a tool for cheating on college writing assignments, and a potential menace to humanity, than as a potential aid in my beloved philology. I came out intrigued with the possibilities and wanting to try to apply it to the workflows of DCC (see this post on my first attempts to create DCC style vocabulary lists with ChatGPT and Claude).

Yuval Noah Harari’s fascinating 2024 book Nexus convinced me that there is no pre-determined end to the AI story, and that we need to be actively engaged in thinking about it and guiding its trajectory for human goals. Harari, a historian, talks about the ways that every new information technology brought good things and bad things. Printing enabled both the scientific revolution and witch hunts. What matters is how we use it and shape it. These papers all showed scholarly uses of AI that seem to me both interesting and productive.

AI on the Bravery of Women

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Fresh off the stimulating Digital Classics Association panel at the 2025 SCS on uses of AI in classical scholarship, I decided to give ChatGPT 4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet a crack at one of the central tasks of DCC: creating accurate vocabulary lists. 

Consider a work in our pipeline, Plutarch’s On the Bravery of Women, which begins as follows:

περὶ ἀρετῆς, ὦ Κλέα, γυναικῶν οὐ τὴν αὐτὴν τῷ Θουκυδίδῃ γνώμην ἔχομεν. ὁ μὲν γάρ, ἧς ἂν ἐλάχιστος ᾖ παρὰ τοῖς ἐκτὸς ψόγου πέρι ἢ ἐπαίνου λόγος, ἀρίστην ἀποφαίνεται, καθάπερ τὸ σῶμα καὶ τοὔνομα τῆς ἀγαθῆς γυναικὸς οἰόμενος δεῖν κατάκλειστον εἶναι καὶ ἀνέξοδον. ἡμῖν δὲ κομψότερος μὲν ὁ Γοργίας φαίνεται, κελεύων μὴ τὸ εἶδος ἀλλὰ τὴν δόξαν εἶναι πολλοῖς γνώριμον τῆς γυναικός: ἄριστα δ᾽ ὁ Ῥωμαίων δοκεῖ νόμος ἔχειν, ὥσπερ ἀνδράσι καὶ γυναιξὶ δημοσίᾳ μετὰ τὴν τελευτὴν τοὺς προσήκοντας ἀποδιδοὺς ἐπαίνους. διὸ καὶ Λεοντίδος τῆς ἀρίστης ἀποθανούσης, εὐθύς τε μετὰ σοῦ τότε πολὺν λόγον εἴχομεν οὐκ ἀμοιροῦντα παραμυθίας φιλοσόφου, καὶ νῦν, ὡς ἐβουλήθης, τὰ ὑπόλοιπα τῶν λεγομένων εἰς ‘τὸ μίαν εἶναι καὶ τὴν αὐτὴν ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικὸς ἀρετὴν προσανέγραψά σοι, τὸ ἱστορικὸν ἀποδεικτικὸν ἔχοντα καὶ πρὸς ἡδονὴν μὲν ἀκοῆς οὐ συντεταγμένα εἰ δὲ τῷ πείθοντι καὶ τὸ τέρπον ἔνεστι φύσει τοῦ παραδείγματος, οὐ φεύγει χάριν ἀποδείξεως συνεργὸν ὁ λόγος οὐδ᾽ αἰσχύνεται
ταῖς Μούσαις
τὰς Χάριτας συγκαταμιγνὺς
καλλίσταν συζυγίαν,
ὡς Εὐριπίδης φησίν, ἐκ τοῦ φιλοκάλου μάλιστα τῆς ψυχῆς ἀναδούμενος τὴν πίστιν.
 
In the Loeb translation of Frank Cole Babbit

Regarding the virtues of women, Clea, I do not hold the same opinion as Thucydides. For he declares that the best woman is she about whom there is the least talk among persons outside regarding either censure or commendation, feeling that the name of the good woman, like her person, ought to be shut up indoors and never go out. But to my mind Gorgias appears to display better taste in advising that not the form but the fame of a woman should be known to many. Best of all seems the Roman custom, which publicly renders to women, as to men, a fitting commemoration after the end of their life. So when Leontis, that most excellent woman, died, I forthwith had then a long conversation with you, which was not without some share of consolation drawn from philosophy, and now, as you desired, I have also written out for you the remainder of what I would have said on the topic that man’s virtues and woman’s virtues are one and the same. This includes a good deal of historical exposition, and it is not composed to give pleasure in its perusal. Yet, if in a convincing argument delectation is to be found also by reason of the very nature of the illustration, then the discussion is not devoid of an agreeableness which helps in the exposition, nor does it hesitate
To join
The Graces with the Muses, A consorting most fair,
as Euripides says, and to pin its faith mostly to the love of beauty inherent to the soul.

I gave both AIs a lengthy prompt, similar to what I would say to a human if I were tasking her with creating a vocabulary list:

I am going to attach a .txt file with some Ancient Greek. I want you to create a vocabulary list for the text. Each entry in the list should contain the standard dictionary form of the token, followed by an English definition appropriate to the context. For example, given the token γυναικῶν, the entry in the list should read “γυνή γυναικός, ἡ: woman.” γυνή γυναικός, ἡ is the dictionary form. This token is a noun, so it includes the nominative singular, γυνή, followed by the genitive singular, γυναικός, followed by a comma, then the feminine form of the definite article (ἡ), indicating it is a feminine noun. After that comes a colon, which separates the dictionary form from the English definition. I used “woman” in this example rather than “wife,” which is another possible definition. In the context from which I took the example, the author is discussing women in general, not just wives. Here is a second example, this time for a verb. The token is ἔχομεν. The dictionary form is “ἔχω, ἕξω or σχήσω, 2 aor. ἔσχον, ἔσχηκα, impf. εἶχον” . I derived this dictionary form from the Dickinson College Commentaries site https://dcc.dickinson.edu/greek-core-list . Use that if you can, but that doesn’t have all words. For words not in that source, use the fuller list in the Grieks Nederlands dictionary available on the site Logeion https://logeion.uchicago.edu/ . If the dictionary form there is very long, try to simplify it based on the format of the Dickinson College Commentaries list and the following list of further examples, which includes some adjectives, adverbs, and verbs.
ὑπόληψις -εως, ἡ: opinion, assumption

ὁρμή -ῆς, ἡ: impulse

ὄρεξις -εως, ἡ: desire

ἔκκλισις -εως, ἡ: aversion, avoidance

κτῆσις -εως, ἡ: possession, property, property

δόξα -ης, ἡ: opinion; reputation

1.2

ἀκώλυτος -ον: unhindered

ἀπαραπόδιστος -ον: unimpeded, unobstructed

ἀσθενής -ές: weak, powerless

δοῦλος -η -ον: slavish, servile

κωλυτός -ή -όν: hindered

ἀλλότριος -α -ον: not one’s own, under the control of others

1.3

ἐμποδίζω -ποδιῶ -επόδισε: to hinder, frustrate

πενθέω -ήσω ἐπένθησα: to mourn, to suffer pain

ταράσσω ταράξω ἐτάραξα: to trouble, disturb

μέμφομαι μέμψομαι ἐμέμφθην: to blame

ἀναγκάζω -άσω: to force, constrain

οὐδέποτε: not ever, never

ἐγκαλέω ἐγκαλῶ ἐνεκάλεσα: to rebuke, reproach + dat.

ἄκων -ουσα -ον: involuntarily, against one’s will

βλάπτω βλάψω ἔβλαψα: to harm, hinder, disable

βλαβερός -ά -όν: harmful

1.4

τηλικοῦτος -αύτη -οῦτον: such great

ἐφίημι ἐφήσω ἐφῆκα: to aim at, to long for, desire + gen.

μετρίως (adv.): moderately

ἅπτω ἅψω ἥψα: to grasp, obtain, engage in, undertake (+ gen)

παντελῶς (adv.): absolutely, completely

ὑπερτίθημι ὑπερθήσω ὑπερέθηκα: to defer, put off

πλουτέω -ήσω ἐπλούτησα: to be rich or wealthy

ἀποτυγχάνω ἀποτεύξομαι ἀπέτυχον: to fail in attaining, miss

ἐλευθερία -ας, ἡ: freedom

εὐδαιμονία -ας, ἡ: prosperity; true, full happiness

περιγίγνομαι περιγενήσομαι περεγενόμην: to be a result or consequence, to arise

You will notice that adverbs sometimes have “(adv.)” at the end of the dictionary form. That is desirable. Note also that when more than one English definition is given, sometimes those English definitions are separated by commas, and sometimes by semi-colons. The commas separate English definitions that are near-synonyms. The near synonyms are grouped together and separated from substantially different possible English definitions with a semi-colon. Notice also that there are milestones separating groups of entries that derive from a single paragraph or sentence, such as “1.1,” “1.2.” If the text I input seems to have section headers, either numerical like that, or a title, please include those on a separate line above the list of words for that section. Section headers often include English words.

That was the prompt. Claude made a nice summary of my prompt:

I understand you want me to create a vocabulary list from Ancient Greek text, following specific formatting rules. Each entry should have:

1. Dictionary form (using Dickinson College Commentaries when possible, otherwise simplified entries from Logeion)
2. English definition(s) appropriate to context
3. Special formatting for different parts of speech (e.g., adding “(adv.)” for adverbs)
4. Grouping similar English definitions with commas, different meanings with semicolons
5. Including section headers when present
6. For nouns: nominative + genitive + article
7. For adjectives: all gender endings
8. For verbs: principal parts in simplified format

I see you’ve provided helpful examples to guide the formatting. However, I don’t see the actual Greek text file you mentioned wanting to attach. Could you please share the text you’d like me to analyze? Once you do, I’ll create a vocabulary list following these specifications.

I will paste the raw results below. I also have the results in a Word file, edited with track changes to show all the improvements I would make. If anybody wants that I can supply it. Here is my summary analysis.

  1. Both AIs did a superb job of crafting dictionary forms to my specifications.
  2. There were occasional errors of lemmatization, e.g. ἐπαινέω for ἔπαινος, σύζυγος for συζυγία, φιλοκαλέω for φιλόκαλος, ἄμοιρος for ἀμοιρέω. Claude was somewhat better at lemmatization than GPT, but both were very good. GPT astutely picked up an instance of ὁ μὲν … ὁ δέ: “on the one hand … on the other hand (used to contrast ideas).”
  3. Both helpfully omitted very common words, though I had given no instructions in that regard.
  4. Both omitted a number of uncommon words, 9 in the case if GPT, 15 in the case of Claude. Claude missed all the proper names.
  5. The definitions were generally very good. Rare meanings like παράδειγμα = “illustration” and ἀπόδειξις = “exposition” were missed by both AIs
  6. GPT tried to give a case-specific definition for μετά twice, and was wrong both times. On μετὰ τὴν τελευτὴν it offered μετά + gen.: “with, among”; on μετὰ σοῦ it offered  μετά + acc.: “after.”

Very impressive, I would say, despite the errors. Just in terms of the formatting of dictionary lemmas, this will be a huge time saver. I don’t think we will abandon our usual workflow with the Bridge, but this is very much a viable option going forward.

The main thing I learned at the DCA panel is that you can put in huge prompts with elaborate instructions, no problem. Boy, do I feel slow now when I edit vocab lists, like a snail trying to keep up with a Lamborghini.

Ok, here are the raw results from GPT:

ἀρετή -ῆς, ἡ: virtue, excellence

γυνή γυναικός, ἡ: woman

Θουκυδίδης -ου, ὁ: Thucydides (name)

γνώμη -ης, ἡ: opinion, judgment, intelligence

ἔχω, ἕξω or σχήσω, 2 aor. ἔσχον, ἔσχηκα, impf. εἶχον: to have, hold, possess; to be able to

ὁ μὲν … ὁ δέ: on the one hand … on the other hand (used to contrast ideas)

ὀλίγος -η -ον: small, little, few

ψόγος -ου, ὁ: blame, criticism

ἔπαινος -ου, ὁ: praise, commendation

καθάπερ: just as, as if

σῶμα σώματος, τό: body

ὄνομα ὀνόματος, τό: name

ἀγαθός -ή -όν: good, noble, brave

οἴομαι, οἰήσομαι, ᾠήθην: to think, suppose, imagine

δεῖ: it is necessary, must

κατάκλειστος -ον: closed, shut in

ἀνέξοδος -ον: inaccessible, closed off

κομψός -ή -όν: refined, elegant, clever

Γοργίας -ου, ὁ: Gorgias (name)

κελεύω, κελεύσω, ἐκέλευσα: to order, command

εἶδος -ους, τό: form, shape, appearance

δόξα -ης, ἡ: opinion, glory, reputation

δημοσίᾳ (adv.): publicly, in public

μετά + gen.: with, among

τελευτή -ῆς, ἡ: end, death

ἀποδίδωμι, ἀποδώσω, ἀπέδωκα: to give back, return, pay

ἐπαινέω, ἐπαινέσω, ἐπῄνεσα: to praise, commend

Λεοντίς -ίδος, ἡ: Leontis (name)

ἀποθνῄσκω, ἀποθανοῦμαι, ἀπέθανον: to die

εὐθύς: immediately, at once

μετά + acc.: after

πολύς, πολλή, πολύ: much, many

λόγος -ου, ὁ: word, speech, discourse

παραμυθία -ας, ἡ: consolation, comfort

φιλόσοφος -ου, ὁ/ἡ: philosopher

βουλεύω, βουλεύσω, ἐβούλευσα: to deliberate, plan

ὑπόλοιπος -ον: remaining, left over

λέγω, λέξω or ἐρῶ, εἶπον: to say, speak, tell

μία -ας, ἡ: one, single

ἀνήρ ἀνδρός, ὁ: man, husband

καταγράφω, καταγράψω, κατέγραψα: to record, write down

ἱστορικός -ή -όν: historical

ἀποδεικτικός -ή -όν: demonstrative, explanatory

ἡδονή -ῆς, ἡ: pleasure, delight

ἀκοή -ῆς, ἡ: hearing, sense of hearing

συντάσσω, συντάξω, συνέταξα: to arrange, compose

φύσις -εως, ἡ: nature, character

παράδειγμα -ατος, τό: example, pattern

λόγος -ου, ὁ: reason, word, account

χαρίς -ίτος, ἡ: grace, favor, kindness

Μοῦσα -ης, ἡ: Muse (goddess of art and inspiration)

Χάρις -ιτος, ἡ: Grace (one of the Graces)

καλλίστος -η -ον: most beautiful

σύζυγος -ον: yoked together, paired

φιλοκαλέω: to love beauty, to be elegant

ἀναδέω, ἀναδήσω, ἀνέδησα: to bind up, to crown

And here are the raw results from Claude:

Let me create a vocabulary list for this text from Plutarch’s “On the Virtues of Women.”

Title: On the Virtues of Women (Introduction)

ἀρετή -ῆς, ἡ: excellence, virtue
γυνή γυναικός, ἡ: woman
γνώμη -ης, ἡ: opinion, judgment
ἔχω, ἕξω or σχήσω, 2 aor. ἔσχον: to have, hold
ἐλάχιστος -η -ον: least, smallest
ψόγος -ου, ὁ: blame, criticism
ἔπαινος -ου, ὁ: praise
λόγος -ου, ὁ: word, speech; account
ἄριστος -η -ον: best, excellent
ἀποφαίνω -φανῶ -έφηνα: to show, declare, present
σῶμα -ατος, τό: body
ὄνομα -ατος, τό: name
ἀγαθός -ή -όν: good, noble
κατάκλειστος -ον: shut up, confined
ἀνέξοδος -ον: not going out, staying at home
κομψός -ή -όν: refined, clever
φαίνω φανῶ ἔφηνα: to show, appear
κελεύω -σω ἐκέλευσα: to order, command
εἶδος -εος, τό: form, appearance
δόξα -ης, ἡ: reputation; opinion
γνώριμος -ον: well-known, familiar
Ῥωμαῖος -α -ον: Roman
νόμος -ου, ὁ: law, custom
δημόσιος -α -ον: public
τελευτή -ῆς, ἡ: end, death
προσήκω -ξω -ῆξα: to be fitting, proper
ἀποδίδωμι -δώσω -έδωκα: to give back, render
ἄμοιρος -ον: without share in (+ gen.)
παραμυθία -ας, ἡ: consolation, comfort
φιλόσοφος -ον: philosophical
ὑπόλοιπος -ον: remaining, rest
ἀποδεικτικός -ή -όν: demonstrative, proving
ἡδονή -ῆς, ἡ: pleasure
ἀκοή -ῆς, ἡ: hearing
συντάσσω -τάξω -έταξα: to arrange, compose
πείθω πείσω ἔπεισα: to persuade
τέρπω τέρψω ἔτερψα: to delight, please
παράδειγμα -ατος, τό: example, model
φεύγω φεύξομαι ἔφυγον: to flee, avoid
χάρις -ιτος, ἡ: grace, charm; gratitude
συνεργός -όν: helping, cooperating
αἰσχύνω -νῶ ᾔσχυνα: to shame
Μοῦσα -ης, ἡ: Muse
Χάρις -ιτος, ἡ: Grace (one of the Graces)
συγκαταμίγνυμι -μίξω -έμιξα: to mix together, blend
καλός -ή -όν: beautiful, noble
συζυγία -ας, ἡ: union, pairing
φιλόκαλος -ον: loving beauty
ψυχή -ῆς, ἡ: soul
ἀναδέω -δήσω -έδησα: to bind up, crown
πίστις -εως, ἡ: trust, faith; proof

2025 Dickinson College Commentaries High School Online Internship Program

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Dickinson College Commentaries (DCC) provides Latin and Greek texts for reading, with explanatory notes, essays, vocabulary, and graphic, video, and audio elements. The commentaries are peer reviewed and edited, and freely available at dcc.dickinson.edu.

The DCC High School Online Internship program is meant to give you a chance to contribute to the site, learn digital humanities skills, improve your Latin, and collaborate with others under the supervision of professional classicists. You will receive credit on the site for all contributions.

Statue of founder Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), in front of the East College building. East College is home to Dickinson’s Classical Studies Department and is the mother ship of DCC.

The projects are flexible enough to allow students of different levels of Latin, from intermediate to advanced, to meaningfully participate, and to give scope to those with special artistic, technical, linguistic, or research skills. The application process is simple and requires no essay or letters of recommendation.

Eligibility: Open to all rising High School Juniors and Seniors who have completed Latin 3. Graduating seniors may also apply.

Dates: June 23–Aug 1, 2025 (6 weeks)

Time commitment: 10–15 hours per week. The projects will involve a mix of independent work done on your schedule and mandatory Zoom meetings for approximately five hours per week.

Pay: this is an unpaid internship

Projects for 2025:

  • Select, edit, and enhance notes on Vergil’s Aeneid
  • Create images and other enhancements for the DCC Core Latin Vocabulary
  • Edit and enhance notes for Aesop’s Fables in the Latin version of Elegiac Romulus.

Application Deadline: Feb. 15, 2025.

Apply here: https://forms.office.com/r/sWvT11BXt7

Conventiculum Dickinsoniense 2025

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July 14-19, 2025

conventiculum candidThe Conventiculum Dickinsoniense is an immersion seminar designed for those who want to acquire some ability at ex-tempore expression in Latin. A wide range of people can benefit from the seminar: professors in universities, teachers in secondary schools, graduate students, undergraduates, and other lovers of Latin, provided that anyone who considers applying has a solid understanding of the grammatical essentials of the Latin language. (Participants must be at least 18 years of age, unless accompanied by an adult guardian).

A minimum requirement for participation is knowledge of Latin grammar and the ability to read a Latin text of average complexity – even if this reading ability depends on frequent use of a dictionary.  But no previous experience in speaking Latin is necessary. Sessions will be aimed at helping participants to increase their ability to use Latin effectively in spoken discourse and to understand others speaking in Latin. After the first evening reception (in which any language may be spoken), Latin will be the language used throughout the seminar. Participants will be involved in intensive activity each day from morning until early evening (with breaks for lunch and mid-afternoon pauses). They will experience Latin conversations on topics ranging from themes in literature and art all the way to the routines and activities of daily life, and will enjoy the benefits of reading and discussing texts in the target language. Activities will involve both written and spoken discourse, both of which engage the active faculties of expression, and each of which is complementary to the other. The seminar will not merely illustrate how active Latin can be a useful tool for teachers, it will show how developing an active facility in Latin can directly and personally benefit any cultivator of Latin who wishes to acquire a more instinctive command of the language and a more intimate relationship with Latin writings.

Moderators:

Prof. Milena Minkova, University of KentuckyMinkova and Tunberg

Prof. Terence Tunberg, University of Kentucky

camp fire at the farm, Conventiculum farm dinner

camp fire at the Dickinson farm, Conventiculum Dickinsoniense

We can accept a maximum number of 35 participants. Deadline for applications is June 1, 2025. The participation fee for each participant will $600. The fee includes lodging in campus housing (and please note that lodging will be in a student residence near the site of the sessions), two meals (breakfast and lunch) per day, as well as the opening dinner, and a cookout at the Dickinson farm. Included in this price is also the facilities fee, which allows access to the gym, fitness center, and the library, as well as internet access. The $600 fee does not include the cost of dinners (except for the opening dinner and farm cookout), and does not include the cost of travel to and from the seminar. Dinners can easily be had at restaurants within walking distance from campus.  Please keep in mind that the participation fee of $600, once it has been received by the seminar’s organizers, is not refundable.  This is an administrative necessity.

Registered participants should plan to arrive in Carlisle, PA on July 14, in time to attend the first event of the seminar. This first event is an opening dinner and welcoming reception for all participants, which will begin at about 6:00 p.m., in which all languages are acceptable. The actual workshop sessions (in which Latin will the exclusive language) will begin early the next morning on July 15.

For more information and application instructions write to: Professor Terence Tunberg:

terence.tunberg@gmail.com

The girl and her suitor (Erasmus, Colloquia Familiaria)

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This is a rather racy dialogue from Erasmus’ Colloquia Scholastica (1536). A discussion of the colloquia and link to the full text can be found here.

A Girl with a Birdcage and a SuitorAntoine Pesne (1683–1757) (after) National Trust, Wimpole Hall

Pesne, Antoine; A Girl with a Birdcage and a Suitor; National Trust, Wimpole Hall; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/a-girl-with-a-birdcage-and-a-suitor-171663

Proci et puellae

Personae

Pamphilus, Maria.

Pamphilus

Salve crudelis, salve ferrea, salve adamantina.

Maria

Salve tandem et tu Pamphile, quoties et quantum voles, et quocunque libet nomine. Sed interim mihi videris oblitus nominis mei; Maria vocor.

Pamphilus

At Martiam dici oportuit.

Maria

Quid ita, quaeso? Quid mihi cum Marte?

Pamphilus

Quia quemadmodum illi deo pro ludo est, homines interficere, ita et tibi: nisi quod tu Marte crudelior occidis etiam amantem.

Maria

Bona verba. Ubinam strages ista mortalium, quos ego occidi? Ubi sanguis interfectorum?

Pamphilus

Unum cadaver vides exanime, si modo me vides.

Maria

Quid ego audio? Mortuus loqueris, et obambulas? utinam mihi nunquam occurrant umbrae formidabiliores!

Pamphilus

Ludis tu quidem; tamen interim miserum exanimas, et crudelius occidis, quam si confoderes telo. Nunc longo cruciatu excarnificor miser.

Maria

Eho, dic, quot gravidae ad tuum occursum abortierunt?

Pamphilus

Atqui pallor arguit exsanguem magis, quam ulla sit umbra.

Maria

Atqui iste pallor tinctus est viola. Sic palles ut cerasus maturescens, aut uva purpurascens.

Pamphilus

Satis procaciter rides miserum.

Maria

Atqui si mihi non credis, admove speculum.

Pamphilus

Non optarim aliud speculum; nec arbitror esse clarius ullum, quam in quo me nunc contemplor.

Maria

Quod speculum mihi narras?

Pamphilus

Oculos tuos.

Maria

Argutator, ut semper, tui similis es! Sed unde doces esse exanimem te? An cibum capiunt umbrae?

Pamphilus

Capiunt, sed insipidum, qualem ego.

Maria

Quibus igitur vescuntur?

Pamphilus

Malvis, porris, et lupinis.

Maria

Atqui tu non abstines a capis et perdicibus.

Pamphilus

Verum; sed interim nihilo plus sapiunt palato meo, quam si malvis vescerer, aut betis absque pipere, vino et aceto.

Maria

O te miserum! et tamen interim obesulus es. An et loquuntur exanimes?

Pamphilus

Sic ut ego, voce perquam exili.

Maria

Atqui nuper quum audirem te conviciantem rivali tuo, vox non erat admodum exilis. Sed obsecro te, num etiam ambulant umbrae? num vestiuntur? num dormiunt?

Pamphilus

Etiam coeunt, sed suo more.

Maria

Nae tu suavis nugator es.

Pamphilus

Sed quid dices, si argumentis Achilleis evincam, et me esse mortuum et te esse homicidam?

Maria

Absit omen, Pamphile: sed aggredere sophisma.

Pamphilus

Primum illud mihi donabis, opinor, mortem nihil aliud esse, quam abductionem animae a corpore.

Maria

Largior.

Pamphilus

Sed ita, ut ne reposcas, quod dederis.

Maria

Non fiet.

Pamphilus

Tum haud inficiaberis, eum qui alteri adimit animam, homicidam esse.

Maria

Accedo.

Pamphilus

Concedes et illud, quod, a gravissimis auctoribus dictum, tot seculorum suffragiis comprobatum est, animam hominis non illic esse ubi animat, sed ubi amat.

Maria

Istuc explana crassius: non enim satis assequor, quid velis.

Pamphilus

Et hoc sum infelicior, quod istuc non aeque sentis atque ego.

Maria

Fac ut sentiam.

Pamphilus

Eadem opera fac ut sentiat adamas.

Maria

Equidem puella sum, non lapis.

Pamphilus

Verum: sed adamante durior.

Maria

Sed perge colligere.

Pamphilus

Qui corripiuntur afflatu divino, nec audiunt, nec vident, nec olfaciunt, nec sentiunt, etiamsi occidas.

Maria

Audivi sane.

Pamphilus

Quid coniectas esse in caussa?

Maria

Dic tu, philosophe.

Pamphilus

Nimirum quoniam animus est in coelis, ubi habet quod vehementer amat, et abest a corpore.

Maria

Quid tum postea?

Pamphilus

Quid tum, dura? Illud consequitur, et me esse mortuum, et te esse homicidam.

Maria

Ubi est igitur anima tua?

Pamphilus

Illic ubi amat.

Maria

Quis autem ademit tibi animam? quid suspiras? Dic libere, dices impune.

Pamphilus

Crudelissima quaedam puella, quam ego tamen ne mortuus quidem odisse possum.

Maria

Humanum ingenium. Sed cur illi vicissim non adimis suam animam, par pari, quod aiunt, referens?

Pamphilus

Nihil me felicius, si quidem liceat facere permutationem, sic ut illius animus vicissim demigret in pectus meum, quemadmodum meus animus totus demigravit in corpus illius.

Maria

At licetne mihi tecum vicissim sophistam agere?

Pamphilus

Sophistriam.

Maria

Num fieri potest, ut idem corpus sit animatum, et exanime?

Pamphilus

Non eodem quidem tempore.

Maria

Quum abest anima, tum mortuum est corpus?

Pamphilus

Est.

Maria

Nec animat, nisi quum adest?

Pamphilus

Esto sane.

Maria

Qui fit igitur, ut, quum ibi sit, ubi amat, animet tamen corpus, unde demigravit? Quod si animat, etiam quum amat alibi, quomodo vocatur exanime corpus, quod animatum est?

Pamphilus

Argutare tu quidem satis sophistice; sed me talibus pedicis non capies. Anima, quae moderatur utcunque corpus animantis, improprie dicitur anima, quum revera sint tenues quaedam animae reliquiae; non aliter quam odor rosarum manet in manu, etiam rosa submota.

Maria

Difficile est, ut video, vulpem capere laqueo. Sed illud responde: Nonne agit, qui occidit?

Pamphilus

Maxime.

Maria

Et patitur, qui occiditur?

Pamphilus

Scilicet.

Maria

Qui fit igitur, ut, quum qui amat, agat, quae amatur, patiatur, occidere dicatur, quae amatur, quum amans potius occidat seipsum?

Pamphilus

Imo contra; qui amat patitur: quae amatur, agit.

Maria

Istuc nunquam evinces apud Areopagitas Grammaticos.

Pamphilus

At evincam apud Amphictyones Dialecticos.

Maria

Verum ne graveris et illud respondere. Volens amas, an nolens?

Pamphilus

Volens.

Maria

Quum igitur liberum sit non amare, videtur homicida, quisquis amat; praeterque ius accusat puellam.

Pamphilus

Atqui puella non ideo occidit quod amatur, sed quod non amat mutuum. Occidit autem; quisquis servare potest, nec servat.

Maria

Quid si iuvenis amet inconcessa, hoc est, uxorem alienam, aut virginem Vestalem? num illa amabit mutuum, ut servet amantem?

Pamphilus

Sed hic iuvenis amat, quod amare fas piumque est, atque etiam aequum et bonum, et tamen occiditur. Quod si leve est homicidii crimen, et veneficii ream peragam.

Maria

Istuc prohibeant superi. An Circen quampiam ex me facies?

Pamphilus

Aliquid et ista crudelius. Nam porcus aut ursus esse malim, quam id quod nunc sum, exanimis.

Maria

Quo tandem veneficii genere perdo homines?

Pamphilus

Fascino.

Maria

An igitur vis, ut posthac abs te deflectam noxios oculos?

Pamphilus

Bona verba. Imo magis afflecte.

Maria

Si mihi sunt oculi fascinatores, qui fit, ut non contabescant et ceteri, quos obtueor? Itaque suspicor fascinum istud esse in tuis oculis, non in meis.

Pamphilus

Non sat tibi erat iugulare Pamphilum, ni insultes insuper?

Maria

O lepidum mortuum! Sed quando parabuntur exsequiae?

Pamphilus

Opinione tua celerius, ni tu succurras.

Maria

Egon’ rem tantam possum?

Pamphilus

Potes vel mortuum ad vitam revocare, idque minimo negotio.

Maria

Si quis mihi porrigat panacen.

Pamphilus

Nihil opus herbis; tantum redama. Quid autem facilius, imo quid aequius? Non aliter absolveris ab homicidii crimine.

Maria

Apud quod tribunal peragar rea? Areopagitarum?

Pamphilus

Non; sed apud tribunal Veneris.

Maria

Aiunt deam esse placabilem.

Pamphilus

Imo nullius ira perinde formidabilis.

Maria

Habet fulmen?

Pamphilus

Non.

Maria

Habet tridentem?

Pamphilus

Nequaquam.

Maria

Habet hastam?

Pamphilus

Minime, sed est dea maris.

Maria

Non navigo.

Pamphilus

Sed habet puerum.

Maria

Non est formidabilis aetas.

Pamphilus

Vindicem ac pervicacem.

Maria

Quid is mihi faciet?

Pamphilus

Quid faciet? Prohibeant omnes superi. Nolim enim illi malum ominari, cui bene volo.

Maria

Tamen effare; nulla mihi superstitio est.

Pamphilus

Dicam ergo. Si hunc spreveris amantem non omnino mutuo indignum amore, nisi fallor, ille fortasse iussu matris immittet tibi pessimo veneno tinctum iaculum, ut in sordidum aliquem depereas, qui te tamen non redamet.

Maria

Supplicium narras abominandum. Ego sane vel mori praeoptarim, quam perdite amare deformem, nec amore mutuo respondentem.

Pamphilus

Atqui nuper huius mali fuit exemplum insigniter editum in puellam quandam.

Maria

Ubi locorum?

Pamphilus

Aureliae.

Maria

Quot anni sunt?

Pamphilus

Quot anni? vix sunt menses decem.

Maria

Puellae quod erat nomen? Quid haeres?

Pamphilus

Nihil; novi tanquam te.

Maria

Quin igitur edis nomen?

Pamphilus

Quia non placet omen. Utinam alio quovis nomine dicta fuisset. Idem habebat nomen quod tu.

Maria

Pater quis erat?

Pamphilus

Vivit adhuc inter iureconsultos praecipui nominis, re splendida.

Maria

Adde nomen.

Pamphilus

Mauritius.

Maria

Cognomen.

Pamphilus

Aglaius.

Maria

Vivitne mater?

Pamphilus

Nuper reliquit superos.

Maria

Quo morbo periit?

Pamphilus

Quo morbo rogas? moerore. Et pater, tametsi vir cum primis fortis, periclitabatur.

Maria

Licetne scire matris quoque nomen?

Pamphilus

Maxime. Sophronam nemo non novit. Sed quid sibi vult ista percunctatio? An me putas apologum comminisci?

Maria

Egone de te suspicarer hoc? Haec suspicio pronior est in sexum nostrum. Sed narra, quid acciderit puellae.

Pamphilus

Puella erat honesto loco nata, ut dixi, re lauta, forma perquam eleganti: qui multis? digna principe marito. Huius nuptias ambiebat procus quidam illi non dissimilis.

Maria

Quo nomine?

Pamphilus

Hei mihi, offendor omine; Pamphilus et ille dictus est. Illa nihil non tentantem pertinacissime sprevit. Iuvenis dolore contabuit. Nec ita multo post illa deperire coepit in quendam, simium verius quam hominem.

Maria

Quid ais?

Pamphilus

Adeo perdite, ut satis dici non queat.

Maria

Tam elegans puella tam deformem?

Pamphilus

Vertice acuminato, raro capillitio, eoque lacero et impexo, furfure ac lendibus oppleto: pleramque cranii cutem nudaverat alopecia; oculis refugis, naribus simis ac sursum hiantibus, ore sparso, dentibus putridis, balbutiente lingua, mento scabioso; scapulas deformabat gibbus; venter prominulus, crura vara.

Maria

Thersiten quempiam mihi depingis.

Pamphilus

Imo aiunt, illi non fuisse nisi unam auriculam.

Maria

Altera perierat illi fortasse in bello.

Pamphilus

Imo in pace.

Maria

Quis hoc ausus est?

Pamphilus

Dionysius carnifex.

Maria

Fortasse formae infelicitatem pensabat res ampla domi?

Pamphilus

Imo decoxerat, ac plus quam animam debebat. Cum hoc marito tam insignis puella nunc degit aetatem, ac subinde vapulat.

Maria

Rem miseram narras.

Pamphilus

Sed veram. Sic visum est Nemesi iuvenis spreti contumeliam ulcisci.

Maria

Ego citius optarem exstingui fulmine, quam talem ferre maritum.

Pamphilus

Ergo ne provoca Nemesim, et amantem redama.

Maria

Si quidem istuc satis est, redamo.

Pamphilus

Sed optarim istum amorem esse perpetuum ac proprium: coniugem ambio, non amicam.

Maria

Neque me id fugit; sed diu deliberandum est in eo, quod semel coeptum rescindi non potest.

Pamphilus

Apud me quidem nimium diu deliberatum est.

Maria

Vide autem, ne tibi imponat amor, non optimus consultor. Nam caecum esse ferunt.

Pamphilus

Sed oculatus est, qui ex iudicio nascitur. Non ideo mihi talis videris, quod amem te; sed ideo te amo, quod talem te conspexerim.

Maria

At vide, ne non satis me perspectam habeas. Si calceum induisses, tum demum sentires, qua parte te urgeret.

Pamphilus

Iacienda est alea; quanquam ego multis auguriis colligo rem melius cessuram.

Maria

Etiam augur es?

Pamphilus

Sum.

Maria

Quibus igitur auguriis colligis? An volavit noctua?

Pamphilus

Illa volat stultis.

Maria

An a dextris advolavit iugum columbarum?

Pamphilus

Nihil istiusmodi. Sed mihi iam annis aliquot perspecta est probitas tuorum parentum: ea primum avis est non pessima, e bonis prognatam esse. Neque me clam est, quam salubribus monitis, quam sanctis exemplis apud hos sis instituta. Et plus est bene institui, quam bene nasci. Habes alterum augurium. Ad haec meis maioribus non omnino malis, ni fallor, iam olim cum tuis amicitia non vulgaris intercedit: quin et nos inter nos a teneris, quod aiunt, unguiculis noti sumus; nec male convenit geniis nostris. Iam aetas inter nos, res, dignitas, nobilitas, inter utriusque parentes paene paria sunt. Demum, quod est in amicitia praecipuum, tui mores mihi videntur non pessime quadrare ad meum ingenium. Potest enim per se praeclarum esse, quod tamen non sit aptum. Quam mei vicissim tuo congruant, nescio. Hae videlicet aves, mea lux, mihi promittunt fore inter nos felix, perpetuum ac laetum iucundumque connubium, modo ne tuus animus mali ominis cantionem nobis occinat.

Maria

Quam cantilenam optas?

Pamphilus

Ego praecinam: Sum tuus; tu succine: Sum tua.

Maria

Brevis quidem cantiuncula; sed longum habet epiphonema.

Pamphilus

Quid refert, quam longum, modo laetum?

Maria

Adeo mihi es invisus, ut nolim te committere, cuius in posterum poeniteat.

Pamphilus

Desine male ominari.

Maria

Fortassis alia tibi videbor, ubi morbus aut aetas hanc formam immutarit.

Pamphilus

Nec hoc corpus, o bona, semper erit aeque succulentum. Sed ego non contemplor tantum istud undique florens et elegans domicilium, hospitem magis adamo.

Maria

Quem hospitem?

Pamphilus

Animum istum tuum, cuius decor semper cum aetate crescet.

Maria

Nae tu plus quam Lynceus es, si istum perspicis per tot tectoria.

Pamphilus

Animum animo perspicio. Ad haec, in communibus liberis subinde repubescemus.

Maria

Sed interim perit virginitas.

Pamphilus

Verum. Sed eho, dic mihi, si tibi esset elegans pomarium, optares illic nihil unquam gigni praeter flores: an malles, delapsis floribus, videre arbores maturis pomis gravidas?

Maria

Ut argutatur!

Pamphilus

Saltem illud responde, utrum est elegantius spectaculum, vitis humi iacens et computrescens, an amplexa palum aut ulmum, eamque purpureis uvis degravans?

Maria

Responde tu mihi vicissim, utrum spectaculum amoenius, rosa nitens et lactea in suo frutice, an decerpta digitis ac paullatim marcescens?

Pamphilus

Ego rosam existimo feliciorem, quae marcescit in hominis manu, delectans interim et oculos et nares, quam quae senescit in frutice: nam et illic futurum erat, ut marcesceret; quemadmodum felicius est vinum, quod bibitur antequam acescat. Quanquam non statim marcescit flos puellae, si nupserit: imo video, multas, quae ante nuptias pallebant, languebant, ac velut extabescebant, ex congressu viri sic enituisse, ut tum demum florere coeperint.

Maria

Attamen favorabilis ac plausibilis apud omnes est virginitas.

Pamphilus

Elegans quidem res puella virgo: sed quid iuxta naturam prodigiosius anu virgine? Nisi matri tuae defluxisset flos ille, nos istum flosculum non haberemus. Quod si, ut spero, non sterile fuerit nostrum coniugium, pro una virgine multas dabimus.

Maria

Attamen aiunt, rem Deo gratissimam esse castitatem.

Pamphilus

Et ideo castam puellam mihi cupio nubere, ut cum illa caste vivam. Magis erit animorum quam corporum coniugium. Gignemus Reipublicae, gignemus Christo. Quantulum aberit hoc matrimonium a virginitate? Et fortasse olim sic convivemus, quemadmodum vixit cum Maria Ioseph. Sed interim discemus virginitatem. Non enim statim pervenitur ad summum.

Maria

Quid ego audio? Violanda virginitas, ut discatur?

Pamphilus

Quidni? Quemadmodum paulatim bibendo vinum parcius, discimus esse abstemii. Uter tibi videtur temperantior, qui in mediis deliciis accumbens abstinet, an qui semotus ab his, quae provocant intemperantiam?

Maria

Arbitror eum fortius temperantem, quem parata copia non potest corrumpere.

Pamphilus

Utri verius debetur laus castitatis, eine qui semet exsecat, an qui membris integris, tamen abstinet a Venere?

Maria

Equidem posteriori, meo calculo, tribuerim laudem castitatis, priori dementiam.

Pamphilus

An qui voto adstricti abiurant matrimonium, nonne quodam modo exsecant sese?

Maria

Videtur.

Pamphilus

Iam non est virtus non coire.

Maria

At non est?

Pamphilus

Sic accipe. Si per se virtus esset non coire, vitium esset coire. Nunc incidit, ut vitium sit non coire, coire virtus.

Maria

Quando hoc incidit?

Pamphilus

Quoties ab uxore ius suum petit maritus, praesertim si prolis amore quaerit complexum.

Maria

Quid si lasciviat? non est fas negari?

Pamphilus

Fas est monere, vel rogare potius blandius, ut temperet: pernegare instanti, fas non est. Quanquam hac quidem in parte raras audio querelas maritorum de suis uxoribus.

Maria

At dulcis est libertas.

Pamphilus

Imo gravis est sarcina virginitas. Ego tibi rex ero, tu mihi regina: imperabimus familiae nostro arbitratu: an tibi videtur ista esse servitus?

Maria

Vulgus coniugium capistrum vocat.

Pamphilus

Sed ipsi vero capistro digni sunt, qui sic vocant. Dic mihi, quaeso, an non animus tuus est alligatus corpori?

Maria

Videtur.

Pamphilus

Non aliter quam avicula caveae. Et tamen consule illum, an cupiat esse liber. Negabit, opinor. Quam ob rem? Quia libenter est alligatus.

Maria

Res est utrinque modica.

Pamphilus

Tanto tutior. Eam tu domi augebis parsimonia, quae non sine caussa dicta est magnum vectigal; ego foris industria.

Maria

Innumeras curas secum adferunt liberi.

Pamphilus

Sed iidem innumeras voluptates, ac saepenumero multo cum foenore reponunt parentibus officium.

Maria

Misera quaedam res est orbitas.

Pamphilus

An nunc orba non es? Quid autem opus in re dubia male ominari? Dic mihi, utrum malles nunquam nasci, an nasci moritura?

Maria

Equidem malim nasci moritura.

Pamphilus

Sic miserior est orbitas, quae prolem nec habuit, nec habitura est quemadmodum feliciores sunt, qui vixerunt, quam qui nec nati sunt, nec nascentur unquam.

Maria

Qui sunt isti, qui non sunt, nec erunt?

Pamphilus

Quanquam qui recusat ferre casus humanos, quibus omnes ex aequo sumus obnoxii, sive plebeii sumus, sive reges, is e vita migret oportet; et tamen quidquid acciderit, tu non feres nisi dimidium, ego maiorem portionem in me transferam. Ita si quid acciderit laeti, gemina fiet voluptas, si quid mali, societas adimet dimidium aegritudinis. Mihi vero, si fata vocent, dulce fuerit vel immori tuis complexibus.

Maria

Facilius ferunt homines, quod iuxta communes naturae leges accidit; sed video, quanto plus molestiarum adferunt nonnullis parentibus liberorum mores, quam mortes.

Pamphilus

Istius rei ne quid accidat, maxima ex parte in nobis situm est.

Maria

Qui sic?

Pamphilus

Quoniam fere boni nascuntur ex bonis, quod ad indolem attinet. Neque enim e columbis nascuntur milvii. Dabimus igitur operam, ut ipsi boni simus. Deinde curabimus liberos nostros ab ipso statim lacte sanctis praeceptis et opinionibus imbuendos. Plurimum refert, quid infundas rudi testulae. Ad haec curabimus, ut domi habeant exemplum vitae, quod imitentur.

Maria

Difficile est quod narras.

Pamphilus

Nec mirum; quia pulchrum est: atque ob hoc ipsum tu quoque difficilis es. At tanto studiis acrioribus huc enitemur.

Maria

Habebis sequacem materiam; tu vide, ut me formes fingasque.

Pamphilus

Sed interim pronuntia tria verba.

Maria

Nihil facilius; sed verba simulatque semel evolarint, non revolant. Dabo consilium utrique commodius. Ages cum tuis ac meis parentibus, ut utrorumque voluntate res transigatur.

Pamphilus

Ambire me iubes: tu potes tribus verbis rem certam reddere.

Maria

An possim, nescio: mei iuris non sum. Nec sine maiorum auctoritate olim coibant coniugia. Verum, utcunque est, arbitror, auspicatius fore nostrum coniugium, si parentum auctoritate coëat. Et vestrum est ambire, nobis decorum non est. Gaudet enim rapi virginitas, etiamsi nonnunquam vehementius amemus.

Pamphilus

Non pigebit ambire, modo ne me frustretur tuum unius suffragium.

Maria

Non frustrabitur; bono animo esto, mi Pamphile.

Pamphilus

Tu mihi heic religiosior es, quam vellem.

Maria

Imo tu tuum ipsius suffragium apud te prius expende. Nec affectum istum tuum adhibe in consilium, sed rationem. Quod affectus decernit, temporarium est: quod autem dictat ratio, perpetuo solet placere.

Pamphilus

Nae tu pulchre philosopharis; itaque parere certum est tuis consiliis.

Maria

Non poenituerit obsequii. Sed heus tu, incidit interim scrupulus, qui meum animum male habet.

Pamphilus

Valeant scrupuli.

Maria

Vin’ me nubere mortuo?

Pamphilus

Nequaquam sed revixero.

Maria

Amovisti scrupulum. Bene vale, mi Pamphile.

Pamphilus

Istuc tu cura.

Maria

Precor tibi laetam noctem. Quid suspiras?

Pamphilus

Laetam noctem ais? Utinam largiare, quod precaris.

Maria

Ne quid praepropere; adhuc tua messis in herba est.

Pamphilus

Nihilne tui mecum auferam?

Maria

Hunc pastillum, qui tibi cor exhilaret.

Pamphilus

Adde saltem osculum.

Maria

Cupio tibi virginitatem integram et illibatam tradere.

Pamphilus

An osculum aliquid decerpit virginitati?

Maria

Vis igitur, ut aliis quoque largiar oscula?

Pamphilus

Nequaquam: mihi servari volo mea oscula.

Maria

Tibi servo. Quanquam est aliud, cur in praesentia nec ausim dare osculum.

Pamphilus

Quid istuc?

Maria

Ais, tuum animum paene totum demigrasse in corpus meum; in tuo quam minimum superesse: vereor itaque, ne in osculo hoc ipsum; quod in te superest, transiliat in me, tuque iam totus fias exanimis. Accipe igitur dextram, mutui amoris symbolum, ac bene vale. Tu gnaviter rem gere. Ego interim Christum comprecabor, ut, quod agitur, utrique nostrum velit esse felix ac faustum.

Colloquia Scholastica from Stoa.org

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In the years around 2007 a team of graduate students and faculty associated with the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Latin Studies under the direction of Ross Scaife did valiant digitization work on a set of Colloquia Scholastica (Neo-Latin Colloquia), mostly dating to the 16th century. Several of the digitized texts produced by the Institute’s group were encoded in TEI XML and hosted on an instance of the Perseus hopper at Stoa.org. Due to server changes in 2019 those digital files have since fallen off the face of the internet, and are only available via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Middle aged male scholar in a heavy robe

Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam by Hans Holbein the Younger German, ca. 1532. Oil on linden panel. New York, Metropolitan Museum 1975.1.138. Public Domain.

During the summer 2024 Conventiculum Dickinsoniense, Jackson Perry suggested that we at DCC might embark on a salvage project to scrape the files off the cumbersome and slow-loading home on the Wayback Machine and consolidate the pages. The amazing Megan Ayer completed that process recently, thanks to funding from the Roberts Fund for Classical Studies at the Dickinson Department of Classical Studies. The text are now in a publicly viewable Google Docs folder containing all twelve works from Stoa.org.

They represent approximately 457,650 words of digitized Latin not readily available elsewhere. They are free for copying and re-use.

What is the value of colloquia? They are precious guides to Latin as it was in its modern heyday as the main vehicle for the discourse of the scientific community, the scholarly world, and all the main academic disciplines. They deal with many topics and situations not encountered in surviving classical Latin, and so can serve as excellent guides to those who foster Latin as a spoken language today. (Ross Scaife is unfortunately no longer with us, but the University of Kentucky’s Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Cultures remains a thriving center for active Latin under the leadership of Professors Milena Minkova and Terence Tunberg. And work on the renewed study and enjoyment of neo-Latin colloquia scholastica continues there).

In addition to their obvious pedagogical value, the colloquia are also, as Terence Tunberg points out, precious historical sources:

Colloquia provide historians with a rich mine of information on daily life in the towns and cities of renaissance Europe, as well as academic life in schools and universities. In the Paedologia of Mosellanus, for example, … we learn the Latin authors studied in a given term could include works of contemporary humanists like Erasmus, as well as those of Roman authors like Cicero and Horace. We learn that it was still hard to find courses in Greek at most schools. We learn that better-off students might live off gifts from home, but many had to beg or do sordid jobs in the town to subsist. This was not just true of university students, but even of young boys in grammar schools. We see our student characters dress themselves for a festival, and learn that taking a bath was a special occasion, something one did only three or four times a year! In the colloquia not only of Mosellanus, but of many other authors too, we get a glimpse of the seedy characters, thieves and con-artists, pseudo-doctors who frequented the streets of late medieval towns.

(Terence Tunberg, “The Way Many Aspired to the Eloquence of the Few: The Neo-Latin Colloquium.” [2011]. In Mobs [Vol. 3]. Brill. p. 200)

Google Docs is obviously not a permanent hosting solution. My hope is that other fautores linguae latinae activae will pick them up and preserve them, maybe add macrons, pictures, audio, that sort of thing. If anybody wants to try editing some of this material in full DCC style, please let me know.

Ok, here is the list. Enjoy!

Franciscus Cervantes de Salazar (1514?-1575), Ad Exercitia Linguae Latinae Dialogi

Sebastianus Castalio (1515-1563), Dialogorum Sacrorum Libri Quatuor

Maturinus Corderius (1479-1564), Colloquia scholastica

Laurentius Corvinus (ca. 1465-1527), Latinum Ydeoma

Martinus Duncanus (1505-1590), Praetextata Latine Loquendi Ratio

Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), Colloquia familiaria

Ioannes Fontanus (1545-1615), Hortulus puerorum pergratus ac perutilis Latine discentibus

Petrus Mosellanus (1493-1524), Paedologia

Beraldus Nicolaus (1473-1550), Dialogus quo rationes quaedam explicantur quibus dicendi ex tempore facultas parari possit

Jacobus Pontanus (1542-1626), Progymnasmatum Latinitatis, sive Dialogorum Volumen primum, cum annotationibus

Petrus Popo, Colloquia de Scholis Herbipolensibus

Johannes Ludovicus Vives (1492-1540), Exercitatio Linguae Latinae

 

Dickinson Latin Workshop 2025: Vergil, Georgics Book 4

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July 7–12, 2025

The Dickinson Workshops are mainly intended for teachers of Latin, to refresh the mind through study of an extended text, and to share experiences and ideas. Sometimes those who are not currently engaged in teaching have participated as well, including students, retirees, and those working towards teacher certification.

gold ring with bee design

A Greek gold ring, 3rd c. BC, in the collection of the Getty Museum.

The text for 2025 will be Vergil’s fourth Georgic, which poetically discusses the honeybee hive, its “customs, activities, peoples and wars” (mōrēs et studia et populōs et proelia). It also contains a memorable account of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The workshop will be conducted both in person and online. For those attending in person, there will be an optional field trip to an apiary and a walk to look for plants and trees mentioned in the text. If time permits, we will read sections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 10 about Orpheus and Eurydice.

Moderators:

Elizabeth Manwell, Professor of Classics, Kalamazoo College

Christopher Francese, Asbury J. Clarke Professor of Classical Studies, Dickinson College

Fees, Meals, Facilities, and Lodging

The fee for each participant is $600 for those attending in person, $400 for those attending online. The fee for in person attendees covers lodging, breakfast and lunch in the Dickinson cafeteria, the facilities fee, which allows access to the gym, fitness center, and the library, as well as wireless and wired internet access while on campus. The fee does not cover the costs of books or travel, or of dinners, which are typically eaten in the various restaurants in Carlisle. Please keep in mind that the participation fee, once it has been received by the seminar’s organizers, is not refundable. This is an administrative necessity.

Lodging: accommodations will be in a student residence hall near the site of the sessions.

Daily Routine

The first event for those attending in person is an introductory dinner at 6:00 p.m., July 7. Starting July 8, sessions will meet from 1:00p.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day, with mornings left free for preparation (or for field trips for those attending in person). The final session ends at 4:30 p.m. on July 12.

To Register

Please email Mrs. Stephanie Dyson, Classical Studies Academic Department Coordinator (dysonst@dickinson.edu). Include your email, physical address, phone number, and the name of the workshop you plan to attend. A non-refundable fee is due by June 1, 2025 in the form of a check made out to Dickinson College, mailed to Stephanie Dyson, Department of Classical Studies, Dickinson College, Carlisle PA 17013.

For more information, please contact Prof. Chris Francese (francese@dickinson.edu)

Aeneid Progress

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Thanks to a very talented group of students under the supervision of Dr. Lucy McInerney (B.A. Dickinson ’15, PhD Brown ’24), the DCC edition of Vergil’s Aeneid is now complete through Book 2. The initial release back in 2016 only covered the then AP selections. It was always my intent to expand the coverage, and the opportunity to complete Books 1 and 2 came this summer (2024) with the pilot Dickinson College Commentaries High School Online Internship Program. 

The inaugural 2024 program served a total of 24 students over the period June 24 through August 2. Five were rising juniors (class of ’26), 16 were rising seniors (’25), and three had just graduated. Ten were from public schools, 10 from private schools, and 4 from parochial schools. The states represented were PA (7), NY (5), MA (4), NC (3), CA (2), TN (2), and VA (1).

Two  groups (of four total) worked with Lucy on gathering notes for the Aeneid. They drew on a variety of published and public domain commentaries. They met on Zoom five days per week for 50 minutes and read Latin and chose and edited notes on their own, before and after the daily sessions. They completed the so-far uncommented selections of Books 1 (177 lines) and 2 (330 lines). The group from Book 1 finished early and was able to do some final proofreading on the work done by the Book 2 group. Lucy cleaned up the results, and I did a final editing pass, adding some hyperlinks, fixing formatting, and adding a few notes of my own where I thought they were needed.

Huge thanks are due to the students and their teachers:

The Book 1 group was Felix Chen (The Harker Upper School, San Jose, CA, teacher Scott Paterson), Victoria Greco and Madeline LaJoy (Shenendehowa High School, Clifton Park, NY, teacher Keziah Armstrong), and Bridget Bauman (East Chapel Hill High School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, teacher Jenni Hoffman).

Zoom group of 8 or so people

The Book 2 group was Maeve Cannon and Imaan Ansari (Trinity School in New York, NY, teachers Peter Aronoff and Eric Casey), Lily Moore (San Luis Obispo Classical Academy High School, teachers Sarah Weinschenk [Dickinson ’84] and Pamela Bleisch), Thea Blakley (Central Magnet School, Murfreesboro, TN, teacher Lindley Henson), and Xan Matuch (The Haverford School, Haverford, PA, teacher Andrew Fenton).

Kentucky Neo-Latin Symposium 2024

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I am excited to attend my first Kentucky Neo-Latin Conference this week, organized by the amazing Jennifer Tunberg and Laura Manning. The program does not seem to be freely available online, so I reproduce it here.

KLFC Neo-Latin Symposium program screenshot

Thursday, April 18, 2024 – 9:10 a.m. to 10:50 a.m. Via Zoom

Latin and Scientific Discovery in Australia and Peru; Learning Latin in Mexico

Organized by: Jennifer Tunberg, University of Kentucky. Chaired by: Terence Tunberg, University of Kentucky

9:10–9:20 Welcoming Remarks

9:20–9:40

“Flora in the Antipodes: Baron Ferdinand von Mueller’s Fragmenta Phytographiae Australiae.” Peter James Dennistoun Bryant. Independent scholar, Conventicula Lexintoniensia

9:40–10:00

“A Medical Thesis by a Peruvian Mulatto Towards the End of the Colonial Period.” Angela Helmer (University of South Dakota)

10:00–10:20

“What if the earliest students of Latin in the Americas were… Aztecs? Indigenous Latin in early colonial Mexico.” Ambra Marzocchi (Brown University; University of Kentucky alumna)

10:20–10:50 Discussion

10:50–1:00 Pause

Thursday, April 18, 2024 – 1:00 p.m. to 3:20 p.m. via Zoom

Translation, Style, Censorship: 4 Neo–Latin Texts, ss. 16–18

Organized by: Laura Manning and Jennifer Tunberg, University of Kentucky. Chaired by: Milena Minkova, University of Kentucky

1:00–1:20

“Moro, Maumethanus, or both? Descriptions of Islamic believers in Archangelus Madrignanus’s Itinerarium.” Shruti Rajgopal (University College Cork, Ireland)

1:20–1:40

“Cleansing the Channels of Expression? The Early Prose Style of Bonaventure Baron (1610–1696)” Jason Harris (University College Cork, Ireland)

1:40–2:00 Discussion

2:00–2:20 Pause

2:20–2:40

“Quanto Elegantius, Tanto Difficilius: on the Latin of Jacobus Trigland III’s Diatribe de Secta Karæorum” Justin Mansfield. Independent Scholar

2:40–3:00

“Timui ne a censoribus italicis prohiberetur: An analysis of pre–publication censorial interventions in Gian Vittorio Rossi’s Pinacotheca” Jennifer Nelson (The Robbins Collection, UC Berkeley School of Law

3:00–3:20 Discussion

Friday, April 19, 2024 – 10:00 a.m. to 12:40 p.m. via Zoom

Empire and Colony in Europe and the New World: Four Neo–Latin Perspectives, ss. 16–18

Organized by: Julia Hernández and Laura Manning. Chaired by: Leni Ribeiro Leite (University of Kentucky)

10:00–10:20

“Luisa Sigea’s Syntra (1553): Framing Feminine Space at the “Hesperian” Margin of Empire.” Julia Hernández (New York University)

10:20–10:40

“Epic emulation of Vergil’s Georgics in Basílio da Gama’s Brasilienses Aurifodinae.” Dreykon Fernandes Nascimento (University of Espírito Santo)

10:40–11:00 Discussion

11:00–11:20 Pause

11:20–11:40

“Translating Anti–Imperial Dissent in Neo–Latin: Antonio de Guevara’s Horologium Principum.”  Matthew Gorey (Wabash College)

11:40–12:00

“Traveling to Lisbon: Maffei’s Historiae Indicae (1588) and the Portuguese Empire.” Christopher Francese (Dickinson College)

12:00–12:20 Discussion

12:20–12:40 Closing Remarks