Latin and Greek, sixteen years of it, mostly to fifteen year olds in Thessaloniki. Close readings, bad translations of good poems, and the graffiti nobody puts on a mug.
You have arrived at the page of a woman who teaches Latin and ancient Greek to teenagers in Thessaloniki and has been doing it for sixteen years. Mostly the upper years, some younger. I have a cold office, a wall of dictionaries with cracked spines, and roughly a hundred and forty students a year who did not choose this.
What I put here: close readings. One poem, or one letter, or one wall, taken slowly. Real Latin with a plain gloss under it, and then an argument with my own gloss, because a gloss is always a decision, somebody made it, and it could have been made differently. Translation comparisons when I can get four or five real versions side by side. Footnotes, which is where I keep the things I know are too much.
What I will not put here: marble torsos captioned with advice about discipline. Anything beginning "the Romans knew". Stoicism repackaged as a productivity system. The fall of Rome as a warning aimed at whoever the author is annoyed with this month. Latin mottoes generated by a machine for tattoos, although if you have got one I will fix it, kindly, if you admit what happened.
Ancient Greek is compulsory in my school and Latin gets whichever hours nobody else wanted, so most of my students turn up already tired of both. That is the job and I am not complaining about it. Every so often one of them mistranslates a line into something better than the correct answer and I write it in a notebook. A boy called Stavros once rendered Dido's moriemur inultae at Aeneid 4.659 as "I will die and nobody will pay". That is not what the Latin says. It is exactly what it means. Another boy cried at the end of that book and told me it was the pollen.
Please argue with me about translations. Tell me a rendering is wrong and I will change my mind if you bring a reason, and I will tell you plainly if I think the reason is thin. A manuscript, a citation, or a good ear. Any one of the three is enough to start.