Lampas - Volume 57, Issue 3, 2024

In the nineteenth century, plaster casts of antiquities became popular in exhibitions. Copies of Roman antiquities from Belgium and the Netherlands were used in the last century for two exhibitions with a political message in Rome, the Mostra Archeologica (1911) and the Mostra Augustea della Romanità (1937-1938). This article examines the selection process, the political messages that were supported by using these copies, and the changes in the ‘dialogue’ between Rome and the Low Countries about these exhibitions. While Belgians and the Dutch had little interest in the first exhibition, reactions to the second were more mixed due to criticism of its fascist themes. This article thus also reflects on the power (of expression) of copies of antiquities, which seems to depend on factors in the past, present and future.

The Dutch education system is currently facing an innovation of the high school subjects Greek and Latin. While (learning and interpreting) the languages (and, therefore, the literary sources) will still take center stage, there is also a call for new ways to integrate Greek and Roman culture in the classroom, be it via reception studies, intercultural reflections or/ and actualization. In this article, I examine how Latin inscriptions can be a means to this end. Although different kinds of strategies for using inscriptions in the classroom are discussed, this paper ends with a lesson plan on Roman memory practices in epigraphic sources. In the lay-out of their inscriptions, Romans were able to highlight certain epigraphic elements, such as names, to ascribe them with special meaning. If we understand what the Romans emphasized, we can understand how they wanted to be remembered. For this purpose, the ITHAKA-model, used in Classics education to examine literary sources, is adapted in this article to study the material aspects of texts as well.

The translation assignment of the final high school exam of Latin in the Netherlands has been a topic of debate in the last decades of Classics education, as it was blamed for poor exam results. Kroon and Sluiter (2010) argue that the translation assignment is an invalid testing method: it does not give insight into the thought process of the student. It can therefore not distinguish between translating and text comprehension. In this study, we investigate the validity of the Latin translation assignment by proposing a new test that combines grammar knowledge and text comprehension. In a repeated measures design, it was found that there is a positive correlation between the results of the translation assignment and the alternative test (r = 0.65 and r = 0.68). This test was also found to be internally consistent. This suggests that there is an alternative test that reliably and explicitly addresses skills that overlap with skills tested in the translation assignment. We have demonstrated this new test to colleagues in the field of Classics. Their enthusiasm and constructive criticism lead to a new idea for testing the ability for translation, which is to be investigated in the near future.