The Roman Regal period: How much can we really know?

This lesson has been created with the OCR Ancient History GCSE 9-1 spec in mind, but provides suitable challenge for any A Level students needing to confront the reliability of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus as historical sources.

The lesson really tries to use scholarship in an accessible way. Summaries of journal articles are given to students initially in bite-sized formats. Students are questioned on these before completing some straightfoward comprehension questions to solidify their learning (on a sheet included as a slide within the .pptx file).

Students are then presented with summarised information sourced from another journal and academic book which looks at Dionysius’ and Livy’s motives for writing and key learning is then available for note-taking.

Students are then given a print out of an empty table where they fill in information about the two authors as the teacher goes through the information on the screen, with students having to guess whether the information belongs in their Livy table or their Dionysius table (teacher led - it’s made obvious on the screen at each point!). Students can then check their tables against a completed one on the screen at the end.

The plenary task asks students to come to a decision on who they believe is the most reliable author when it comes to learning about Rome’s earliest history, given all the limitations, biases and the political context constraining each author.