#classics teaching

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✨How to do Xenia✨

A follow-up to my old Xenia comic: https://greekmythcomix.com/comic/xenia/

See this comic as a video here: Learn more about Xenia (hospitality) here  Image updated with clear text (hopefully legible by text reader)

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Catching up on yesterday’s The Great Pottery Throwdown and as the challenge the potters l had to throw a PSYKTER - an Ancient Greek wine-cooler!

It’s likely that snow-cooled water would have been put inside the psykter and it placed inside a krater of wine, to cool it. There’s not a lot that survive - they went out of fashion, not being that practical, apparently - but I love the idea of them bobbing on the liquid surface with decorations like these dolphin riders!

Pottery Throwdown is already a great programme, connecting many of us with pottery, an age-old practice almost ubiquitous with humanity, in a way that most people don’t get to any more, and I’m always reminding my Classics students to watch it to give them a better understanding of the vessels they’re studying!

✨Find this free poster of Ancient Greek pottery vessels on GreekMythComix.com✨

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Between 2018-2021 I worked with archaeologist Dr Sophie Hay, Ancient Historian Prof. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Director of the Cambridge Schools Classics Project (who make the CLC Latin course!) Caroline Bristow and her gorgeous team, and legendary historical children’s fiction author Caroline Lawrence, to illustrate a novel and ancient history course about the life of Pompeiian freedman Amarantus and his neighbours in Insula 1.9

The story is a year in the life of Amarantus, following the events he experiences, including the devastating earthquake of 63BCE and his manumission (by a certain local natural-history-loving magistrate), the traditions of a Roman life, and the likely inhabitants of the rest of his block, based on the buildings and finds in Insula 1.9.

It acts as an Ancient History/Classical Civilisation (non-language) prequel to the Latin Caecilius stories (CLC Book 1) and there are some Caecilius-themed visual easter eggs 😁

The course has been designed for even non-specialists to be able to pick up and teach, entirely for free, to help bring Ancient History/Classics into schools.

We made the images in grayscale so they could be cheaply printed and reproduced in PoD books/PDFs for schools, but made some images in full colour for the website and book cover to show the diversity of the Pompeiian world. They’re all based on archaeological evidence and research and each one took hours of discussion and argument (and occasional paper models) to get right. (And I’m proud to say my rebuilding of some ruined structures like the Herculaneum Gate has been approved by other Pompeii experts, like the Cooleys 😁)

The entire book and course is massively researched and based on archaeological findings, and is FREE on the CSCP website: https://CambridgeAmarantus.com/home

Or you can buy the book PoD via these links: https://www.cambridgescp.com/array/buy-book

Bonus Roman Chickens (the precursors to my Roman History Chickens series!): the cockfighters Odysseus and Polyphemus! (And yes cockfighting is terrible and I’m glad we don’t have it any more)

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✨Which is your favourite mythical creatures papercraft?✨

Chimera

Siren

Pegasus

Cerberus

Griffin

Gorgon

Voting ended onJun 4, 2024

All of these papercraft creatures are based on ancient art, can be made with paper or thin card, and printed out in b&w for you to colour, or print them pre-coloured like below.

You can find them here: https://greekmythcomixshop.wordpress.com/2024/06/02/new-build-your-own-papercraft-ancient-greek-mythical-creatures/

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A pair of new GCSE overview videos for The Twins:

Artemis 🏹🌖👧🐻🐺🦌🌲

and

Apollo 🏹☀️⚖️🎶✨🧍‍♂️