I am now preparing the lessons for the new IGCSE syllabus for exams in 2026-8. Those taking the exam in 2024 and 2025 should continue with the lessons (years two and three) that are currently on the website. Those taking the exam in 2026 can still use the first year's lessons on the website as these are unaffected by the syllabus changes. I hope, God willing, to have the new lessons up on the web so that those using the first year this year can proceed to the new second year in September 2024. Please pray that I will have clarity of thought, time and the necessary resources to hand to tackle the task. The new syllabus remains current until 2028.
The new syllabus has, as expected, a new selection of set texts. These are: Virgil's Aeneid Book 11, lines 532–596, lines 648–698 and lines 768–831. Sallust, Cateline 53, 6 and 54 Pliny, Convalescence of a Sick Slave. Tacitus, Annals XIV, 3–5. The last three are all contained in Two Centuries of Roman Prose, edited by. E C Kennedy and A R Davis (Bristol Classical Press or Bloomsbury Publishing). If you are doing this course you do not need to buy copies of the set text as I will be presenting the actual texts in the lessons and also uploading them with basic translation as sets of flashcards on Quizlet. (Relevant links will be provided in the lessons.) The Roman authors selected for set texts always provide plenty of opportunities for Christian reflection, through contrasting the behaviour of Roman deities with Biblical morality, by tracing the origins of wrong ideas in modern society and thought back to their roots in pagan philosophy or by considering the re-emergence of pagan practices in post Christian society. The new set texts present a wider opportunity for thinking about such things than any selection of texts that have been set since I began the website. I'm sure nothing was further from their minds than the teaching of Biblical morality but this year the exam board has excelled itself. The lines chosen from Virgil's Aeneid present the life and death of Camilla, an Amazon warrior and servant of Diana the huntress goddess. I'm pretty sure they have been deliberately chosen to allow even Latin lessons to be hijacked for the presentation, in schools across the world, of fashionable themes such as lesbianism and gender fluidity. I say this not because there is actually anything in what Virgil wrote here that concerns such topics but because, unlike most of the Aeneid, these lines can be manipulated – and have been manipulated – to do this. You only have to look at the abstract for this scholarly article, for instance, to see what I mean. My feeling is that if you are going to mess about with the Aeneid at this level you can make it support almost any crackpot idea. You will be pleased to know that it is perfectly possible to study these lines in depth without giving a thought to such perversions, as people have done for hundreds of years, and that is what we will be doing. However, as I said earlier it is too good an opportunity to miss. I will therefore prepare some additional notes for parents that can be used or adapted at their discretion. As a bonus the Pliny extract resonates well with Luke 7:1-10 and the Tacitus extract was set in 2005 so there is a past paper available that we can use to help prepare. God is Good!
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