Lampas is typical of hybrid publications. It is important for Dutch-language knowledge transfer in the broad subject area of Altertumswissenschaft. Its articles capture the state of play in the field and often consist of original essays by Dutch scholars. Lampas occasionally features English-language articles. To give an example: just after the discovery and initial text publication of ‘the New Sappho’ (2014), Lampas published the first scholarly article about this newly discovered poem in Dutch, with an abstract in English. The article has already earned numerous citations.
Lampas is a journal for all professional classicists, whether working at a university or in secondary education. It bridges the gap between the scholarly pursuit of Greek and Latin language and literature, philosophy, history, archaeology and reception history on the one hand and the practice of teaching Greek and Latin language and culture as secondary school subjects at pre-university schools on the other.
It was founded especially for this purpose after the introduction of the 1968 Dutch Secondary Education Act (Mammoetwet), which dramatically altered final examinations and reformulated the basis of cooperation between tertiary and secondary education. Today, the journal regularly publishes theme issues addressing the material covered in final secondary school examinations, which changes every year. Other issues devote separate articles to authors and subjects that teachers can use as background material and that keep classicists abreast of trends in other subdisciplines. Lampas also has a section devoted to teaching methodology that often presents texts annotated for use in lessons, as well as a ‘Sightings’ (Signalementen) section, which discusses new publications that provide an overview of a subject area.