8th Grade Students Build Rome in a Day
How Building Ancient Rome Helps Eighth Grade Students Understand Latin
This week, students in 8th grade Latin completed the “Rome in a Day” project, for which each student was tasked with researching and building a scale model of a significant structure from the city of Ancient Rome. Here, Upper School Latin Teacher and Dean of Students Cori Russo shares a bit more about the annual project.
What is the Rome in A Day Project?
The winter trimester in 8th grade Latin is focused on the city of Rome. Students learn the basic timeline of Roman history, the foundational myth of Romulus and Remus, and the basic topography and geography of the ancient city itself. Once they are able to identify the river Tiber and know the difference between basilicae (civic buildings used for law and business) and thermae (bath complexes where Romans went to exercise, bathe, and socialize), the Rome In A Day project begins.
Students are randomly assigned one moderately sized building (or a number of smaller structures) from the city of Rome as it was in the year 320 CE. The special option to build a larger structure is chosen only by the most willing participants. Since each building will eventually be built to the same scale, the largest buildings can be very large indeed. For example, the longest building in the ancient city, the Circus Maximus, was a stadium used for chariot racing and other public games. It measured over 600 meters in length, coming out around 6 feet long using the scale we use for the project - and yet every year that we have done the project, multiple students have volunteered to make it!
After students have been assigned (or chosen) their buildings, they research some basic facts such as the ancient and modern names of the structure, the type of building it was, where it was located in the city, when it was built, and if there are any remains of the building still in existence today. They then put together slideshow presentations with maps, a timeline, and plenty of pictures, that are presented to their classmates, offering a preview of their structure.
Next, using scale measurements and a choice of building materials, ranging from cardboard and cardstock to foamboard and balsa wood, they build their structures. Decorating their buildings with historically accurate details can be as simple as drawing columns and arches onto the side of a paper theatrum, or as elaborate as gluing dozens of tiny lollipop sticks to the outside of a tiny cardboard templum. Finally, they build Rome. With a map of the city, and only the river Tiber as a guide, students work together to place their buildings and assemble the city.
Why build Rome?
Building a structure with accurate detail to scale requires students to use problem-solving skills and creativity. This hands-on experience gives them an intimate familiarity with their chosen structures that goes well beyond what they could learn in a reference manual.
Collaborating with classmates to assemble the larger model of the entire city on the final day of the project gives students a sense of scale and scope that is impossible to recreate through two-dimensional representations. Some things about the city jump right out at you when you can see them in a model: where the forum was located in relation to the hills, the fact that the oldest buildings in the center of the city were generally smaller than the newer buildings on the outskirts, and just how long the Circus Maximus really was!
By moving beyond the traditional research phase and actually making something tangible, students often develop a sense of ownership and pride in their building. It’s also a lot of fun to see this ancient city brought to life for a brief period within the four walls of the school - like you’re stepping into a time machine and traveling to another time and place.
What does this have to do with learning Latin?
Even though Latin went on to become the most widely used second language in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period - and indeed, we have hundreds of times more surviving texts written during those time periods than we have from the time of Julius Caesar - it was, in origin, the language of the Romans.
And since languages are inextricably intertwined with the cultures that they grow out of and are used by, learning a language entails, almost by definition, learning something about culture and history. If you want to understand what the Latin word basilica means, you can look it up in a dictionary and find the definition “a public building in the forum with double colonnades, which was used both for judicial tribunals and as an exchange,” but that’s a little unwieldy. When you have seen a model of a basilica in the Roman forum, or maybe even built one yourself, you have a much better sense of what exactly the word refers to. Knowing more about the ancient Romans and about the city of Rome, in particular, helps students to better understand the context in which the language evolved and was first set down in writing.
Why is teaching Latin still relevant today?
After the disintegration of the Roman empire, Latin continued to be used for a thousand years or more in European schools and universities as a sort of international language. (It was also extremely important in European law, diplomacy, and religion.) It’s true that by then it was “dead” and that no one was learning it as their native language anymore, but to the people who were using it, that was the point. The fact that it was “dead” meant that it wasn’t changing, so something written in the Middle Ages could still be read by someone hundreds or even thousands of years later (whereas a modern English speaker will have a hard time indeed reading Chaucer without a lot of help). The fact that it was no one's native language meant that it didn’t ‘belong’ to any particular nation - anyone lucky enough to have time and resources could learn it.
One outcome of the continued use of Latin long after the end of the Roman empire is that it ended up exerting an enormous influence on many modern European languages, including (in particular) English. This is particularly true in domains like law, mathematics, science, and medicine: a great deal of modern terminology in those fields is derived from Latin as a result of that history.
Latin is relevant, then, because any time that we use the English language, we use some Latin. And if you follow the history of the Latin language far enough back, you end up in an ancient city situated on the banks of the Tiber river, or, if you’re at GUS on the right day, in the Urquhart Room.