Dear Tanaquil,

Iwas very interested indeed to hear about your experience teaching and researching into the classics, and your particular interets in sermo plebeius (I cut my teeth on Plautine comedy some 50 years ago). PLease do keep in touch after my guest week; my email is a better bet than the web: fantham@princeton.edu. (I offer this to any of the half dozen correspondents who have shown a particularly active interest in our conversations.)

Meantime Tanaquil's letter reminds me of 2 BIG ISSUES I'd like us to chat about before my week is over on Saturday;

1)LANGUAGE how do we recover the way the real Latin speakers talked at home or in the Popina and how do we suggets this in the transaltions we write (and do the one's we read do the job well; Please talk about translations you particularly admired


2)LIFE and HABITS How do we compensate for the neglect by ancient texts and traditional academic scholarship
of ordinary folk, not only in Rome but in Italy and the western provinces during the 300 years of empire before it went East with Constantine? What would you most like to know about their lives? What kind of evidence would help us find out?