Eleanor Dickey, Professor of Classics at the University of Reading in the UK, has written this book for non-specialists, and we should be extremely grateful. Learning Latin the Ancient Way (2016) provides linguistic, cultural and pedagogical information of interest to any teacher of Latin. What is more, this information is presented in an accessible way and accompanied by a sensible and often entertaining commentary.
Most of the texts in Dickey’s book were composed in the first centuries of our era as a type of “teaching Loeb” for native Greek speakers who desired to know Latin. There is a column of Latin text and a column of Greek (for most excerpts Dickey has translated the Greek into English). The texts survive through standard means of transmission, but for some unusual reasons. Some (the oldest) are from Egyptian papyri, but most are European manuscripts. The manuscript preservers/copyists of course knew Latin, but were interested in learning Greek. In other words, we have most of these texts because Medieval readers flipped the target language and the primary language.
This suggests, of course, that there was widespread interest in learning Greek in medieval Europe, something I was taught was not the case. That Greek speakers during the Roman Empire needed to learn Latin also came as a surprise to me. Dickey argues that the audience for most of these texts were not school pupils, but young adults, businessmen or student lawyers, who realized that decent Latin gave them a leg up when negotiating with provincial administrations or officials from the army. And all wills needed to be drafted in Latin in order to be valid under Roman law. Once all adult free males in the Empire became Roman citizens in 212 CE, this was an enormous legal market.
The dates for initial publication of these texts, as one expects, is clearer for the papyri than for the texts preserved in European manuscripts. The oldest (3rd c. CE) is a papyrus of Latin homonyms arranged alphabetically (Dickey gives us T and V,  as they are most completely preserved). Modern students should take solace from the fact that their ancient Greek predecessors needed help to remember that ventum could be accusative of “wind”, or an impersonal form of veniō.
The heart of Dickey’s book is a series of so-called colloquia, which are encumbered by a remarkably polysyllabic name: the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana. While descriptive (“Translations Falsely Attributed to Dositheus”), this moniker is a little unfortunate, because it conceals texts that are of real interest in a number of ways. In fact, these colloquia are bilingual monologues and dialogues that focus on more or less useful scenes from daily life crafted to provide important vocabulary to the learner.
The standardized, Loeb-Classical-Library-like format for these colloquia in itself is interesting. Dickey makes a convincing case that words mostly were taught in a sentence context, and translations set for students with a paragraph context, for the reason that smaller sense units run afoul of the famously wide semantic fields of individual Latin words. While Dickey does include some vocab lists elsewhere in the book, they are mostly specialized vocabulary (e.g., sacrificing, public entertainments, foodstuffs and seasonings). It might be a mistake to generalize from the small amount of evidence we have, of course; but it is interesting that general vocab lists are rarer (Dickey gives one which contains the otherwise unattested words hibernatio and hittio hittīre–this last the baying bark of a dog when tracking). The evidence that survives suggests ancient teachers were big on learning vocab in sentence context, a view I certainly concur with.
These colloquia sometimes read like an old-style foreign language phrase book. In each, there is a narrative, often in first person. The vocabulary is practical, but the setting is far from natural–one boy puts on so many clothes that he must have looked like Jean Shepherd’s little brother in A Christmas Story. Topics include a set of school topics, legal topics, visiting a sick friend, and going to the bank. A particular personal favorite is one that Dickey entitles “Getting a Scolding” (2.1.22):
“Ita hoc decet sapientem patrem familias qui aliis consilia dat semet ipsum regere? Non potest turpius nec ignominiosius evenire quam heri gessisti.” ”Me certe valde pudet.” “Quid dicunt alii in absentia tua? Infamiam maximam tibi cumulasti… sed modo numquid vomere vis?”
“Is this a fitting way for a prudent master of a household who gives advice to others to conduct himself? It is not possible (for things) more shamefully or ignominiously to happen than your actions yesterday.” “I certainly am very much ashamed.” “What do others say in your absence? Great infamy have you accumulated for yourself…but now you don’t want to vomit, do you?”
The odd detail here, of course, is the fact that some paterfamilias is the one who made excessive whoopie. Perhaps the original students found this detail entertaining as a sort of role reversal from the standard parental lecture on bad behavior.  It’s also worth noting that this type of scene really lends itself to performance and role-playing (Dickey suggests this elsewhere).
And (as the above example suggests) the Latinity is far from Cicero’s. One finds “ad quem dicit?” for “cui dicit?”, infinitives for purpose after motion verbs, non-standard conditional clauses, ubi…? for quo…? in place to which questions. But these details are easily corrected by the purist, and are amply counterbalanced by the treasure-trove of usage in realistic contexts that these colloquia provide.
One last example of the sort of items of interest found here. I’ve long suspected that the so-called Greek accusative found commonly in Latin poetry (e.g. Aeneid 2.273 perque pedes traiectus lora tumentis) was in fact exactly that–a grammatical solecism that native Greeks naturally made in Latin, manufacturing Latin middle participles that did not in fact exist. And here Dickey (p 117) produces a 3rd/4th c. CE papyrus that must be a prose composition exercise: Babrius Fable 16 in Greek is followed by a Latin translation. The student translator writes luppus [sic] autem auditus, anucellam vere dictum putatus, mansit quasi parata cenaret to translate λύκος δ᾽ἀκούσας τήν τε γραῦν ἀληθύειν νομίσας ἔμεινεν, ὡς ἔτοιμα δειπνήσων (“And the wolf, hearing [this], and thinking that the old woman was telling the truth, waited, in order to dine on the ready meal.” [Dickey’s translation] This tyro translator has given us two “Greek middle” Latin participles in a single sentence! Roman ears must have been bombarded by stuff like this all the time; and it is probably a mistake to assume that all, or even many, so-called “poetic” constructions entered Latin as innovations of literary artists.
This book is a must-have for anyone interested in oral Latin in the classroom, in Latin stylistic registers, or in education in the ancient world. Professor Dickey is at work on a textbook using these materials, and I’m personally very curious to see how and how much she adapts them for use in modern classrooms. I suspect she will merely supply the sort of structure and supports we have come to expect. These colloquia are entertaining and illuminating as they are.

Professor Dickey publicizes a lecture at the University of Reading via Twitter.