Journey to a classroom from 2,000 years ago

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In front of the door to the Greek Hall lies a dead giant, sword still in hand, muscles bulging, posing theatrically—a sculpture from ancient Rome, exhibited in the Museum of Casts of Classical Sculptures. Behind the door, 21 very lively students in tunics and leather shoes are bustling about. Normally, LMU students discuss monuments of Greek art history or learn about archaeological field research here. Today, however, the hall belongs to the fifth and sixth grades of Starnberg High School. Within two hours, they experience how school worked almost 2,000 years ago, how it smelled, what subjects were taught, how arithmetic was done, what was read: sayings by Diogenes, fables by Aesop, ancient ink, and old abacuses. “You really immerse yourself,” says Elisabeth Steutzger, a Latin and history teacher from Starnberg. She made a special trip to Munich with her students today. “We called it a journey through time,” says Steutzger.

The Ancient Schoolroom is the brainchild of Prof. Eleanor Dickey, visiting professor of ancient cultural history at LMU's Center for Ancient Worlds in Munich. The lessons are based on Dickey's research on the work “The Colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana”: handbooks designed to help the ancient Greeks and Romans thousands of years ago to find their way around each other's languages. The “Ancient Schoolroom” was already a huge success in Great Britain, and now Dickey has imported it from Reading to Munich for a week, bringing with her 85 hand-sewn tunics and 52 pairs of leather shoes. “Customs caused a few problems,” says Dickey with a grin as she enters a room separated by sheets within the Greek Hall. Only those wearing classic Roman everyday clothing are allowed in, because inside is the classroom of Greco-Roman Egypt from the fourth century AD.

Writing as in ancient Rome and Greece

Some schoolchildren sit cross-legged, others lounge on the floor or walk from station to station. The occasional pair of jeans peeks out from under loose-fitting cotton tunics, and the girls have tied ribbons around their waists or in their hair. “Very comfortable, except the shoes are a little tight,” says one student about his outfit. He is sitting with a classmate at the dictation station. “Are you ready?” he asks, then reads slowly: “Someone came to Diogenes with the news that so-and-so is talking badly about you.” His classmate has just neatly drawn lines on his black wax tablet, and now he is scratching the sentences with his wooden stylus. But it's not quite that simple, neither reading nor writing, because back then there were no hyphenations and only capital letters, so from the students' perspective, it looks like this: “SOMEONECAMETODIOGENESWITHTHEMESSAGETHATSOANDSOISTALKINGBADLYABOUTYOU.”

For most of human history, Dickey explains, this is how people actually read and wrote. For the students, it's a completely different way of thinking about words and language. The two boys have now finished the dictation task. “Then recite, oh noble slave,” one of them now says to the other.

Antike Texte lebendig erleben

Next door, a group of five students stare at three different sets of capital letters drawn in red on a sheet, closely spaced, again without word breaks. These are three fables by the Greek poet Aesop: “The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs”; “The Tortoise and the Hare”; “The Dog and the Piece of Meat.” The students can choose a fable and then write it on a roof tile using a reed pen (calamus) and ancient ink. Historically, clay shards (ostraka) would have been more accurate, explains Dickey, but a colleague had some tiles to give away. Dickey and her colleagues mixed the ancient ink themselves, using lampblack, gum arabic, and water, just like in ancient Egypt. “It smells a bit,” says one student as she corrects a spot with her thumb, which is already completely black. “The ink is cool,” says another. He also offers a tip: “Take the story with the turtle; the golden goose is so long.” When the students are finished, they take their bricks to LMU students, who check each task, encourage them, and help them.

“Did you understand the argument?” asks a history student to two schoolgirls standing in front of her with a papyrus scroll on which part of Homer's epic ‘Iliad’ is written. The text, explains the student, was already incredibly old even for schoolchildren in ancient Greece, “it is meant to convey an archaic feeling,” she says. In general, each station shows in great detail how schoolchildren were taught at that time, with only the ancient Greek, the native language at that time, being translated into modern English by Dickey. This includes a kind of ancient worksheet with bilingual dialogues, which schoolchildren then and now use to learn Latin. At the end, the students can perform a short play. “This is a completely different way of learning a dead language, especially since it was very much alive back then,” says Dickey.

Individualized learning then and now

Meanwhile, her wife is teaching the Roman numeral system in another corner of the room. Philomen Probert is a professor of classical philology and linguistics at Oxford University and has accompanied Dickey to Germany. In front of her is a bowl of coffee beans and boards divided by red lines, with Roman numerals on them. Probert shows the children how the system works and lets them lay out different numbers. Twelve, for example, means one bean on the digit X and two on the digit I. If you now add the number 17, you can forget about mental arithmetic, “it's better not to do it,” says Probert, adding the coffee beans is enough. One bean goes on the digit X, one on the digit V, two on the digit I. “Now you can count very easily,” says Probert. Just follow the beans.

Dickey observes the students from the sidelines, happy that school classes in Germany can now experience what she did during the project. “The lessons were very individualized back then,” she says. Consideration was given to the child's age, interests, talents, and experiences. Each child was allowed to learn and work at their own pace. Of course, that would be difficult to achieve today, says Dickey, but it would be nice if it could still happen from time to time. So that every child can get what they really need.