Dan Conway

Toni Morrison Olaf in Frozen II
🤝
“water has memory”

I helped edit this super cool story of a dude from India who wrote his name on Egyptian tombs 2,000 years ago! 🏺🧪

Lol a random app developer bot/spam account liked this

My kid as a toddler had a dog stuffy he called “Apper” because he goes “App app app!”

Im working on a student reader of short prose exempla about the Roman values highlighted in the AP syllabus. And even though I set the readings months ago, when I read the Laudatio Turiae I was like “I gotta use this for virtus now”

I will say one good thing about AP Latin: thanks to the Project Passages, I'm obsessed with the Laudatio Turiae now

Ooh gonna have to listen for that one

Or to use the proper endonym, Wisc[a]nsin

I have a sister-in-law from Wisconsin named Patti, so to me this is the P[ea̯]tti vowel lol

I have a very bright Latin 2 student who’s a zoology major and wants to do an independent study reading Pliny the Elder next semester. Are there any student editions of any part of the Natural History? I’m not getting paid extra so I’d rather not have to prepare my own notes for them.

I recall that the person who ran @shitplinysays on Twitter had stuff that they’d made. I might have saved it on my computer, I’ll have a look.

I have some materials of my own for a short passage about comets, which has a bonus excerpt from Augustus’s memoirs. I can pass that along if you want

What flavor of engineering is he going for?

a man in an astronaut 's helmet is standing next to a man in a mask ALT: a man in an astronaut 's helmet is standing next to a man in a mask

Congrats!!!

“2026 is the year of the horse”

The horse:

Gather round everyone, we're going to read the opening of Pliny Ep. 6.16 and psychoanalyze Pliny a little bit

magisterconway.blogspot.com/2026/02/fame...

I keep saying I need to have posters made of “Carthago delenda est” and “Morituri te salutant” and “Citius, altius, fortius” for all the times I use them as go-to grammar examples. “Vivamus…” would be a good one too

I wasn't such a fan of Sallust when I had to teach him for the old IB syllabus, but now I'd be lying if I say I didn't miss ol' Crispy.

B Transf.: praedatus, a, um, that has made booty; hence, well furnished with booty (Plautinian): bene ego ab hoc praedatus ibo, PLauT. Ps. 4, 7, 39 (1141); ID. Rud. 5, 2, 29 (1316); ID. Pers. 4, 4, 115 (673).—

Well this certainly changes my reading of "praedata puella est" in Amores 1.3

(This is from a handy appendix in "The Dissemination of Divination in Roman Republican Times: A Cognitive Approach," Ph.D. dissertation by Anders Lisdorf)

lamb with pig’s head (31.12)
pig with man’s head (31.12)
baby with elephant’s head (27.4)
mule gives birth (37.3)
four-legged snake (41.9)
wolf steals a sword (21.62)
two cows get on the roof (36.37)
child shouts “io triumphe!” from the womb (24.10)
consul’s ox says “Roma cave tibi” (35.21)

red sun (31.12)
larger sun (30.2)
smaller sun (22.1)
sun at night (29.14)
two suns (29.14)
three suns (41.21)
moon falls down (22.1)
two moons (22.1)
sun fighting the moon (22.1)
snake in sky (41.21)
ship in sky (21.62)
fleet of ships in sky (42.2)
sky on fire (22.1)
luminous crack in sky (22.1)

For no particular reason, here’s a list of weird omens in Livy

raining stones (frequently)
raining chalk (24.10)
raining blood (42.20)
raining milk (27.4)
raining soil (34.45)
fish come out of the ground (42.2)
black wool come out of the ground (42.2)
ravens eat the gold on the Capitol (30.2)

Thanks! Worked hard on this one

It’s not that person’s fault for not knowing this, of course, but when I was forced by IB to read difficult Latin, it broadened my conception of what Latin can do. But these people are stuck in their narrow ideas of Latin, and instead blame a NATIVE SPEAKER for his “weird Latin”

The sheer IGNORANCE of it all. And the more I read those complaints, the more things I found that were just inexperience/skill issues. One complained that he used “licet” to mean “although” when that’s, like, a thing

One guy said, "I wouldn't say he has any real style as a writer," and added that while it's possible to write a Caesar-style sentence, this is impossible with Pliny because his style has no distinctive features. Either he deleted that comment or blocked me after I tagged him in my first post, lol

Omg the AP Latin teachers Facebook group is full of Pliny haters. They drove me so nuts that I literally had to blog about it

I made another blog post for the Pliny haters. This one's about his omissions of esse, which are neither very unusual nor very challenging for students, but people need something to complain about I guess

magisterconway.blogspot.com/2026/02/comi...

CCCLX sine scopo

And then you read Catullus 64 and you’re like “This is too much heebie-jeebies, it’s exhausting” and you start to realize why Lesbia broke up with him