Few periods in the history of the discipline have witnessed such self-scrutiny as within Classics right now. Once defined through linguistic mastery and inherited cultural capital, the field now measures legitimacy through widening participation and demonstrable public value. Two major volumes, Holmes-Henderson and Hall’s Classical Civilisation and Ancient History in British Secondary Education (CCAH) and Gardner and Higgins’s Ancient Pasts for Modern Audiences (APMA), capture this disciplinary metamorphosis from distinct, yet complementary, perspectives. CCAH reconstructs how state-educated pupils enter the discipline; APMA shows how scholars and practitioners reimagine antiquity collaboratively and digitally.
Both volumes emerge from the valid assertion that scholarship must be more than self-serving. The ‘Advocating Classics Education’ (ACE) initiative underpinning CCAH and the Vancouver colloquium ‘Presenting the Past’ that generated APMA exemplify how collective labour drives innovation in the humanities. Earlier defences of Classics relied on timeless value; these books justify it through measurable impact, widening participation, diversifying voices and developing reciprocal exchange.
CCAH is a unique hybrid publication: half institutional history, half practical handbook. It reconstructs six decades of curriculum reform while advancing the case that Classical Civilisation and Ancient History represent the most intellectually inclusive avenues into antiquity. The tone is empirical yet underpinned by a sense of moral urgency: arguing that translation and contextual study are not dilutions of classical learning but the democratic fulfilment of its potential.
The opening essay, ‘The Classical World in Translation’, provides the historical and rhetorical foundation. Through a range of examples such as Camden’s Britannia (1610), Pope’s Homer, Bohn’s affordable editions and Rieu’s post-war Penguin Odyssey, the authors demonstrate that British engagement with antiquity has always flourished in vernacular form. Hall’s archival sketches of independent learners, women readers and colonial students reclaim translation as a tool of social mobility. Her approach is characteristically vivid; one cannot help but feel her delight in discovering that Rieu’s Odyssey sold more copies in its first decade than all Loebs combined. The chapter’s deeper argument – popular Classicism is the true mainstream of the discipline – frames the moral context for what follows.
The next section, ‘Reinvigorating Classical Civilisation Education in the Twentieth Century’, shifts from reception history to policy history. Drawing on education-department files and JACT (Joint Association of Classical Teachers) archives, the authors reconstruct the birth of the new school subjects amid the egalitarian optimism of the 1960s. The 1967 Beatrice Webb House conference, where teachers designed the first comprehensive-school syllabuses, emerges as a pivotal moment of grassroots curriculum-making. By aligning this narrative with broader legislative landmarks such as the 1944 Butler Act, the 1965 Circular 10/65, Holmes-Henderson deftly situates Classics within the democratic reforms of post-war Britain.
‘Ancient History Education: Past and Present’ chronicles the parallel evolution of the A-Level subject from its 1951 introduction to the Moses Finley inspired reforms of the late 1960s. Finley’s insistence on source criticism and social analysis rather than political chronology, the authors argue, re-cast Ancient History as training in historical and critical thinking rather than mere memorisation of the past. Their account of the 2007 OCR exam board crisis, when a planned discontinuation of the A-Level provoked a toga-clad protest in Parliament Square, captures both the precariousness and passion of the subject’s advocates. It reads almost as an illustrative story of twenty-first-century humanities activism and as a stark reminder that the dedication is there if a call to action is required.
‘Voices of Experience’ provides the qualitative core. Drawing on over 200 surveys and interviews, the authors weave together a selection of classroom practices. Teachers recount the astonishment of pupils encountering myth or tragedy for the first time; former students describe the subjects as gateways to critical thought and empathy. The material could have become sentimental, but the authors handle it analytically, identifying consistent themes: intellectual confidence, transferable skills and civic imagination. Individual case studies such as Emma Bridges’s trajectory from Durham comprehensive to Oxford; and Peter Wright’s expansion of Ancient History enrolments in Blackpool give narrative drive while substantiating claims for impact and subject value.
Later chapters shift from ‘what is’ to ‘what ought to be’. ‘Advocacy for State School Classics Education’ documents the ACE project’s outreach events, museum partnerships and teacher-training schemes between 2017 and 2024, demonstrating how scholarship can initialise policy. Whilst the catalogue of regional activities is extensive, its cumulative effect is invaluable: a record of an unprecedented, nationwide campaign for subject inclusion. Statistical tables and graphs reveal the scale of revival, with GCSE entries in Ancient History up 780 percent between 2011 and 2024, A-Level entries up 241 percent since 2004. The material is presented with well-founded caution, but leaves little doubt that ACE was transformative in its effects.
The final two chapters ‘Getting Started’ and ‘Next Steps for Classics Education in Policy and Practice’, transform historical narrative into guidance. School leaders are offered practical models for timetabling, funding and cross-curricular integration; teachers are directed to training bursaries and professional networks such as Classics for All. Yet, the recommendations extend beyond mere logistics. The authors call for ‘parity of esteem’ (p. 174) between Classical Civilisation and Ancient History within the English Baccalaureate; for state-funded training routes not to require Greek or Latin; and for renewed research into Classics education.
One of the book’s strengths is its narrative coherence. Although each chapter could stand alone, taken together, they map a persuasive progression from vernacular humanism to contemporary inclusivity, with Hall’s rhetorical flourish and Holmes-Henderson’s documentary precision (itself symbolising the alliance of advocacy and evidence), complemented with generous illustrations, photographs of classrooms and graphs of exam uptake. In its national frame the volume is commanding, a definitive resource for historians of education and a persuasive model for reformers elsewhere. It confirms that Classics, long imagined as the preserve of the lucky few, can thrive when treated as a common good accessible to the many.
If CCAH charts the accessibility of Classics through education, APMA shows how the discipline is being reinvented through public scholarship. Originating from the 2023 Vancouver colloquium ‘Presenting the Past’, this fifteen-chapter volume demonstrates how archaeologists, Classicists, museum professionals and creative practitioners make antiquity intelligible (and negotiable) to contemporary audiences. The editors’ introduction defines public scholarship as dialogic rather than pure dissemination, signalling a rejection of pre-existing one-way outreach in favour of collaboration and co-creation.
Section 1, ‘Museums’, places the classical past under the curatorial microscope. A. Malvoisin’s ‘Collection and Display Practices of Ancient and Medieval African Collections’ traces how ethnographic labels are still reproductions of colonial hierarchies, arguing for more effort to create joint authorship of catalogue texts with descendant communities. H. Abd el-Gawad’s essay on Egyptian ‘rematriation’ reframes restitution as a continuing relationship rather than an act of return; the inclusion of correspondence between Egyptian and British curators gives the piece documentary urgency. K. Lovely’s ‘Indigenising as Anti-Classical?’ asks whether the category ‘Classical’ is salvageable after decolonisation, concluding that ‘Classicisms’ rooted in local traditions are more productive than any singular canon. The essays are theoretically sophisticated yet practically engaged, offering a framework for reflexive museology that complements CCAH’s evidence-based pedagogy.
Section 2, ‘Teaching/Learning’, is the most methodical section, where APMA most clearly parallels CCAH’s concerns, while extending them internationally. C.L. Johnston et al. detail the creation of the ‘Peopling the Past Project’, sketching a full ecology of practice: podcasts built around short-form narrative, classroom-ready discussion prompts and a workflow that treats editing and peer feedback as public-facing forms of scholarly review, showing how serial audio can function as a suitable alternative offering. The chapter is instructive for teachers considering adopting audio without treating it as a novelty, offering a unique approach with its methodological claim: frequent storytelling is not merely a form of delivery, but an interesting tool for presenting and sequencing concepts across weeks and cohorts – an argument that ties in neatly with CCAH’s emphasis on the need for a curricular spiral and threshold concepts in school syllabi. The analysis of audience metrics and scaffold activities makes a quantitative case for podcasts as pedagogical tools. N. Hill’s ‘Back to Basics’ blends memoir and critique: as a Black Classicist teaching in the US South, she demonstrates how confronting racial assumptions of the curriculum turns discomfort into meaningful dialogue, drawing readers into the classroom’s emotional dynamics. She offers viable strategies that teachers might consider adopting, such as assessment by reflective journal and local heritage partnerships. Hill’s account of navigating student discomfort, revising reading lists and diversifying assessment is framed less as virtue than as what should be considered normalised craft, with design choices that could be lifted directly into a state-school context. Here the volume sits perfectly with CCAH’s ‘Voices of Experience’, where inclusive practice relies on teachers’ strategies, not just changing canon.
Two chapters exemplify how object-based learning exist in public pedagogy. ‘The Lux Project’ (M. Funke, C. Van Gerwen, K. Lang, B. Karras) shows how a small-scale local collection of Roman-Egyptian artefacts can become the centre of an outreach programme whose outputs range from schools’ workshops to digital catalogues. Their description of volunteer mediation, by training undergraduates to translate scholarly catalogue speak into accessible labels, is an accessibility approach in need of much wider adoption across institutions. On a different scale, Johnston, A. Wheeler, A. Nunn and E. Escobar’s chapter on 3D-printed replicas is a model of restriction: they spell out where 3D helps (haptics, scale, wear patterns) and where it misleads (surface finish, colour). Every curatorial handbook ought to affirm that replicas serve to augment, not replace, interpretative context.
A salient connection to CCAH is ‘The Antioch Recovery Project’ (E. Gonzalez, D. Ortiz and J. Stager). Its contribution is not just ethical, but analytical, tracing the colonial dispersal of mosaics through American and European museums: by plotting the trajectories of specific panels, the project teaches students to read provenance as a narrative of power. The chapter’s main example of the separation and digital re-fitting of the Hall of Philia floor presents a seminar’s worth of historiographical questions: what is a ‘site’ when its parts are scattered? What counts as a ‘whole’ when we reassemble absent stones on a screen? The pairing of GIS mapping with before/after conservation sliders is exactly the kind of multimodal argument that APMA champions; it also models an effective research-creation workflow students can reproduce in smaller local archives.
The most openly global of the public-project chapters is ‘Wiki Education, the Ancient Mediterranean Classroom, and the Production of Global Knowledge’ (Gardner and V. Austen). The argument is empirical: enrol a class, scaffold sourcing, teach neutral-point-of-view, and the resulting edits will reach huge numbers of readers, significantly more than any traditional published routes. But the contribution is also conceptual as Wikipedia provokes a potential challenge to authority, resembling the teacher/student negotiation in CCAH. The editors show dashboards and training modules as assessment artefacts in their own right – measurable, improvable and accessible to non-specialist stakeholders (parents, funders, school governors). That is not a retreat from rigour but an intelligent re-staging of it in a public context.
Two further essays, by F. Ripanti, G. Papantoniou, A. Vionis and A. Lanitis on the Xeros River Valley (Cyprus) and G. Canlas, J. Weidemann, A. Danielson, I. Randall and M.W. Monroe on the Database of Religious History, push in opposite but complementary directions: the first hyper-local, the second macro-comparative. The Cypriot project documents how app-based routes and AR reconstructions can return a site to its local communities; the DRH chapter, by contrast, demonstrates how ‘big data’ in ancient religion is not just an abstract concept, but represents an interface that can be queried by school groups and casual users as easily as by scholars. Both chapters warrant close reading for their honesty about experience failures and their insistence that iterative design represents a hallmark of scholarly practice rather than a concession to technology, with reference to bugs in the app, taxonomic edge cases in the database.
Placed alongside CCAH, these case studies clarify where the books converge and contrastingly diverge. The convergence is clearest in their ethic of transparency. Holmes-Henderson and Hall publish their survey instrument and uptake graphs in appendices; Gardner and Higgins’s contributors expose their dashboards, analytics and codebooks. The divergence is mainly a matter of governance. CCAH operates inside the framework of a state-mandated curriculum, namely Ofqual specifications, EBacc incentives and exam-board consolidation in the British system, where wins and losses are publicly visible on national charts. APMA operates across multiple, varied audiences ranging from museum visitors, podcast subscribers and even local volunteers; as a result, its achievements are periodic, progressive and sometimes transient. The contrast is less disagreement, more a complement: one book secures the pass, the other leads the legions down it.
There is also an interesting disciplinary contrast worth highlighting. CCAH demonstrates that translation-based Classics sustains intellectual challenge while broadening access; APMA suggests public-facing Classics can shift the emphasis from text to experience, using object, site, performance and platform. The 3D-printing chapter and the Antioch case show how tactile or digital encounter can send readers back to the ancient texts with sharper questions; conversely, CCAH’s translation genealogy serves to legitimise the work of podcasters and community curators as heirs who carry forward an older, everyday tradition of humanism. The terminological pivot from ‘Classics’ to ‘classical studies’ throughout both volumes is also not merely cosmetic choice: it names a field that treats methodological pluralism as a core requirement, not an optional extra.
A final aspect of note is that of sustainability, the potential problem in both volumes. CCAH’s graphs imply a fantastic success story, one that depends, however, on teacher supply, bursary alignment and timetable goodwill. APMA’s projects depend on short-cycle grants, volunteer energy and platform stability. Neither collection pretends otherwise, and both articulate an honest rhetoric of limitation: they document what worked, specify resources, publish the tools. Mutually the volumes proffer that making books, datasets and media openly accessible increases their downstream legitimacy. The publication choices of both presses (open access) further enhance this approach with a welcome consistency.
If we consider the volumes individually rather than read together, what we are presented with is a guide and toolkit. CCAH provides the policy landscape of inclusive classical education: its stakeholders, instruments and tensions. APMA supplies the toolkit, the required techniques and case studies by which inclusivity is performed in the gallery, the seminar and the feed. In a decade that has repeatedly forced the humanities to defend their value in reductive, metric-driven terms, these volumes counter with a substantial offer of accountability.
The final chapter of APMA celebrates creativity as method. F. Kirk and L. Albert explore podcasting and performance respectively with Albert’s discussion of Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby!, positioning humour as an entry point into nuanced questions of consent and power. The concluding roundtable between Albert, Kirk and M. Lewis emphasises the ethos of the whole collection: intellectual depth blended with openness; critique tempered by play. The section closes, fittingly, with a meditation on creative rigour, the claim that making art from antiquity can be a form of acceptable and accessible scholarship.
APMA succeeds by demonstrating multiplicity. Some essays are empirical reports, others reflective manifestos, yet all share a belief that knowledge must circulate. The editors adeptly avoid homogenising voices; the light editorial touch creates the chorus of perspectives the introduction sets up. The range of case studies and examples can sometimes dilute focus in the volume; a firmer conclusion tying the case studies together would have clarified the theoretical underpinning more. Yet, overall, the messages are clear, providing the most comprehensive demonstration to date of how Classics can function as public humanities.
The two volumes form a diptych on disciplinary reconstruction. Their shared premise is that scholarship attains legitimacy only when it is shared as widely as possible. CCAH is national, focused on British secondary education; APMA is international, spanning museums and classrooms from Vancouver to Cairo. Yet the scale of analysis is in reverse, the British case study yields statistical depth, the global panorama provides conceptual breadth. Together, these volumes demonstrate that reform must be both systemic and situational.
The politics of access: for Holmes-Henderson and Hall access is structural found in funding, training, curriculum. For Gardner and Higgins it is epistemic considering whose narratives and aesthetics define the ancient world. Both perspectives converge on decolonisation understood as redistribution: of opportunity in CCAH, of interpretative authority in APMA. Both volumes thus turn inclusion from moral slogan into operational strategy.
Historiographical lineage: each volume re-situates reception studies as praxis. CCAH extends the work of L. Hardwick and C. Martindale by treating reception as educational infrastructure; APMA extends it by treating reception as social process. Both inherit the public-humanities agenda presented by M. Beard, A. Wallace-Hadrill, J. Macaulay-Lewis and E. Edwards, but translate it into institutional form.
Comparative shortcomings: each book could learn from the other’s emphases. CCAH might have incorporated more case studies of museum-school collaboration; APMA might have engaged more systematically with educational policy. A future synthesis (perhaps a project on classical education and public humanities) could fuse their insights. Yet the contrast between the empirical and the experimental is itself productive: it models the range of tools now available to Classicists when considering presentation, education, curation and accessibility.
Global resonance: the synergy of these approaches locates both volumes within wider debates on humanities reform from the United States to Australasia. CCAH echoes American ‘Classics Outreach’ initiatives, while APMA resonates with the digital-heritage programmes of the European Research Council. Their publication under open-access licences signals that the ancient Mediterranean is a shared inheritance rather than merely a Western legacy.
Reading CCAH and APMA together is to witness the rewriting of a social contract in the discipline. One seeks to rescue Classics from curricular marginality, the other from being restrained by cultural insularity. Their shared optimism is methodological, each book treats collaboration as essential and accessibility as a measure to determine success. Both recover humanitas as education through empathy – how learning about others refines our capacity for justice. In that respect these volumes exemplify the humanities at their best: critical, reflexive, generous.
For scholars, teachers and policymakers alike, these books provide correlative instructions for navigating the next phase of classical studies. CCAH demonstrates how to build systems of inclusivity; APMA demonstrates how to engage modern audiences into heritage participation. Between them they leave little doubt that Classics, when reinvented, still matters profoundly. The ancient world endures because it continually reflects on itself to offer models of renewal.
