Mary Beard's blog here deals with the interesting fact that the Pompeii that we visit, and the images we see, have been reconstructed and repainted, sometimes so as to misrepresent the original desperately.

This, as Mary has commented, is not a sexy blog, so I have not used the title given in The Times: How weird was sex at Pompeii? But the point she makes has a wider application to what we learn and teach about the Greeks and Romans.

Mary's own book on the Roman triumph pulls the carpet out from under a number of 'facts' we have taught. When we teach about Athenian family life, don't we say that the birth of a boy or of a girl was announced by the householder tying appropriate symbols to the front door? (I forget now what they were.) When the one source for this was written about a much later period than the 5th century. As if future children were taught that all weddings in England took place at the door of a church - based on Chaucer's Wife of Bath, 'Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve.'

And what of the Latin language? We give our pupils the impression that the way 'the Romans' spoke and wrote was as Kennedy's Latin Primer tabulated it, or as our modern textbooks present it. What a shock my first reading of Plautus was to me! As for the Arval Brethren texts!! And is the Latin of the Vulgate any less valid than that of Cicero?

What attracted me at first to Latin was the fixed and logical nature of the language. Perhaps I was conned.