Assassinating Cleopatra: Lessons from Role-Playing the End of the Roman Republic

Teaching a complex historical event like the end of the Roman republic, with its many conflicting forces and shifting alliances, is a considerable challenge. This paper describes how a structured long-term role-playing activity engages students with the history in powerful ways and gives them a framework within which to make sense of historical events and conflicts. The paper begins with a practical introduction to how the role-playing activity works and how it was developed over time in response to particular challenges and student responses. This is followed by a discussion of how the classroom experience is improved by approaching the history in this way: students are more engaged with readings and discussions, they take the initiative to do their own out-of-class research, and they show a fuller understanding of the complexities of the history than after a conventional classroom experience. Engaging with history in such a personal way gives students a feeling of investment in topics that can otherwise seem alien and obscure and allows them to assume agency in their learning.