The book explores how Greek-speaking students in the Roman empire learned Latin, using the fragments of their Latin textbooks preserved on papyri from Egypt and in medieval manuscripts. In some ways these ancient Latin learners had an experience strikingly similar to that of modern students: they used grammars, dictionaries, and commentaries; they read Cicero’s Catilinarian orations and Virgil’s Aeneid; they memorized vocabulary; they looked up the hard words and wrote translations into their Latin texts.

Learning Latin the Ancient Way provides an introduction to learning Latin in antiquity through original sources. The texts are preceded by a helpful introductory chapter (pp. 1–9) addressing the questions of who learned Latin in antiquity and how they did so, how the textbooks survive, and what kinds of teaching materials they contained. The texts are categorised as follows: colloquia with dialogues whose subject matter derives mainly from the lives of younger students, didactic texts from ancient mythology, legal texts, examples of model letters, and didactically adapted original texts by Virgil and Sallust. Dickey also provides examples from Latin grammar books of late antiquity (Dositheus and Charisius), glossaries, alphabets, and transliterated texts, i.e., Latin texts in Greek script for Greek-speaking learners. A complete overview of the ancient papyri and medieval texts containing such didactic materials (ch. 10) proves especially useful. The book concludes with an up-to-date bibliography on language learning from antiquity to early modern times; the focus is on relevant editions and handbooks.