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Led by The Roman Mind Simulacrum
One of the three Literature and Culture options of OCR GCSE Classical Civilisation (J199/22), taught by The Roman Mind — the city's own habits of thought, law and civic virtue. The Culture half covers Roman housing, education, the social system, and spectacle (amphitheatre, races, theatre, baths); the Literature half studies the satire of Horace and Juvenal, Petronius' Satyricon and the letters of Pliny.
Led by The Roman Mind Simulacrum
The question
A Roman told you who he was by where he lived. The Roman Mind takes the student inside the rooms: the great man's domus, opening each morning to a crowd of clients in its atrium, rainwater falling through the roof into the pool below, the household gods watching from their shrine — a private house built to do public business. Below it, the insulae, the tenement blocks where most of the city actually lived, stacked high and prone to fire and collapse. The student reads the housing of rich and poor as a map of the social order, using the evidence of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Ostia: here architecture is sociology.
Outcome
The student can describe the Roman domus and the insulae and the conditions of rich and poor, and use the housing contrast and material remains as evidence for the social order.
Sub-units
Led by The Roman Mind Simulacrum
The question
Rome made its citizens, it did not simply breed them. The student follows a boy of good family from the paedagogus (often a Greek slave) to the schoolroom for letters, then — with ambition — to the grammaticus for literature and the rhetor for public speaking, because in Rome a man rose by how he spoke. A girl's education usually ended sooner and pointed at marriage; beneath the freeborn child stood the slave child educated to serve. The Roman Mind shows that education in Rome was never neutral: it sorted the citizen from the slave, the man destined for the forum from the woman destined for the home.
Outcome
The student can describe the stages and content of Roman education, explain why rhetoric was central to an elite career, and explain how education differed by sex and status to reproduce the social order.
Sub-units
Led by The Roman Mind Simulacrum
The question
Rome ran on obligation. Every morning the client came to his patron's door for the salutatio, took his dole or dinner invitation, and gave back his vote and loyalty — a chain of dependence running from the poorest free man up to the emperor, patron of all. Beneath the free stood the slaves, everywhere, who might be brutalised or freed and even grow rich as freedmen, like the monstrous Trimalchio of Petronius. The Roman Mind teaches this deep structure — not equality, never that, but a vast machine of rank and mutual obligation — and shows how, once the student grasps it, the satires and letters suddenly make sense.
Outcome
The student can explain the patron–client relationship, Roman slavery and the position of freedmen, and Roman attitudes to wealthy freedmen, using the prescribed literature as evidence for social attitudes.
Sub-units
Led by The Roman Mind Simulacrum
The question
Bread and circuses, a satirist sneered. The student studies the great entertainments — the Colosseum, where gladiators bled for fifty thousand and an emperor bought their love; the Circus Maximus, where the chariot teams drove a city to riot; the theatre with its masks and mimes; the baths, where Rome washed and gossiped and did business — and the social and political work that spectacle did. Then the Literature half: Horace smiling at the city's follies, Juvenal raging at its filth and danger, Petronius' fiction, and Pliny composing the image of himself he wished to leave. The buildings tell what Rome did; the satirists tell what Rome thought of itself.
Outcome
The student can describe Roman entertainment and its buildings using material sources, explain the functions of spectacle, and analyse how Horace, Juvenal, Petronius and Pliny depict and judge city life.
Sub-units