Classics Oxford Trip

Lower Sixth Classicists enjoyed the privilege of a unique school trip, visiting Oxford’s Ashmolean museum and Bodleian library this term.

Latin and Greek students first visited the Bodleian for a tour of manuscripts (and one early printed book) of some of the texts they are reading. The Head of Early and Rare Collection showed them a papyrus scroll of Homer’s Iliad from under the head of a 1st century AD mummy; some fragments of Herodotus, of the same period, from the rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus; a 15th century, much-annotated Horace Satires, whose pages we turned, and a version of Tacitus’s Histories, full of copyist’s errors and corrections. The fragility of our connection to the literature of the remote past was palpable. The final exhibit, a very early printed Homer, was remarkable for the pains that had been taken to make it not appear printed at all.

We then passed to the Ashmolean, where we looked at the history of coinage from Lydian origins to early Roman examples from the most valuable university numismatic collection in the world. The Curator of Greek and Roman Regional coins had laid on a spectacular range of examples in electrum, gold and silver (and one or two in bronze) which we took in our hands and pored over under the magnifying glass. Again, the contact with the distant past was immediate.