Beginners' Latin courses play a crucial role in opening up the study of the ancient world to university students with little or no previous exposure to the language. Yet many learners struggle: in 2018, for example, 23% of undergraduates in UK universities either failed or withdrew from their beginners' Latin module. The current article reports on a series of semi-structured interviews dedicated to exploring with Latin students and their instructors the factors they perceive as contributing to success and failure, the overarching aim of the project being to identify potential strategies to improve student success.

Numerous ancient sources attest that Artemisia of Halicarnassus, a fifth-century bce tyrant whose polis came under Persian rule in 524 bce, figures prominently in Xerxes' naval campaign against Greece. At least since Pompeius Trogus' first-century bce Philippic History, interpretations of Artemisia have juxtaposed her "virile courage" (uirilem audaciam) with Xerxes' "womanish fear" (muliebrem timorem) primarily as a means of belittling the effeminate non-Greeks. My paper argues that although Herodotus is aware of such interpretations of Artemisia, he depicts her primarily as an excellent counsel, a woman who is not only brave in battle, but who is a wonder primarily because of her intellectual excellences in deliberative rhetoric and "geo-political" strategy in the Greco-Persian world.

Contrary to the view that the Trojan Catalogue lacks artistry or sensitivity to the Iliad's larger drama, I argue that it interweaves motifs used of epic obituaries and raises the theme of the doomed Trojan leader to underscore Hector's fate at the end of the epic. Hector's doom is put into greater relief through the Trojan Catalogue's deliberate contrast to the preceding Catalogue of Ships, which alternatively presents the theme of the absent leader with a view towards Achilles' role. The juxtaposition of the two catalogues ultimately generates pathos for the tragic fates of the Trojans and their chief defender.

Tibullus 1.3 constructs a narrative that blends traditional and elegiac themes. This synthesis, instantiated in Delia's matronly virtue and the love poet's militaristic epitaph, constitutes the poem's narrative core, in which Tibullus establishes a traditional dimension for his amorous pursuits. Furthermore, by casting himself as a Roman Odysseus, the speaker asserts heroic status for himself, both as a litterateur and as an upright Roman male. 1.3, at the same time, highlights Tibullus' loyalty to his milieu, pledged on the poet's imaginary epitaph, thus embedding his erotic pursuits as a love poet within the traditional values (honos, pudicitia, pietas) of Rome's elite.

Students in large-enrollment humanities courses need each other and frequent instructor feedback to learn complex concepts. This article details active learning techniques and assessments that we used to increase student communication, engagement, and learning in a large-enrollment, university-level Greek mythology course. We first inventory these techniques, including polling, structured-analysis activities, and two-stage exams, before demonstrating them at work with a concept central to our course, the oral palimpsest. We then assess their effect on student learning and show how expanded opportunities for communication and practice increased student comprehension of a difficult mythological concept.

Publishers are invited to submit new books to be reviewed to Professor Lawrence Kowerski, Classics Program, Hunter College, 695 Park Ave., New York, NY 10065; email: [email protected].

Christian readers engaged for centuries with Lucretius' De Rerum Natura and often contrasted or harmonized its Epicurean ideas. By analyzing a series of loci similes, I suggest that the imitation of Lucretius in a Neo-Latin epic written in sixteenth century Italy, Girolamo Vida's Christiad, represents a polemical response to that ancient author. Learned readers experienced cognitive dissonance when they could recognize the Lucretian intertexts. However, a systematic and usually contrastive adaptation showed them how to refute the false doctrine advocated by that Epicurean poem in what amounts to an extremely crafted case of Neo-Latin intertextuality, a still understudied area.