Colloquium

Contemporary philology has had a growing interest in the period and in the epitomai again, which has been proved by several colloquiums, monographs on the subject.

Colloquia are books in Latin for teaching the Latin language as though it were alive and spoken. They are Latin books in the form of scripted conversations. This Latin and Greek textbook gives little daily conversations about familiar things, like waking up, dressing, going to school and so on. ... Scholars during the time of the great Latin revival deliberately set out to copy this methodology, and from the late 1400's, right through to the early 1900's, a large number of dialogues and student level readers were written.

These are the first colloquia for learners that I’m aware of. They aren’t the flowery dialogues of the later Renaissance authors like Pontanus, but they are the only colloquia we have by a native speaker of the Latin language and a great way to experience Roman Latin of a colloquial register. They are written for schoolchildren who were either Greek speakers learning Latin or Latin speakers learning Greek, and generally deal with activities in the ancient classroom the daily lives of young Romans.

Thus a modern student learning French might memorize a dialogue in which a character goes to a café in Paris and orders a sandwich, and the ancient student learning Latin would memorize one in which a character goes to the baths in Rome and gets someone to watch his clothes while he swims. Many bilingual texts were written specifically for language learners; these are known as "colloquia," because much of their content (though not all of it) is in dialogue form.