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I keep clawing at the bars of the cage I built for myself. But first a digression. Walter W. Skeat wrote numerous notes on English etymology, some of which he eventually put together and published in book form. Much to my regret, not too many kl-words attracted his attention. But I was amused to discover that the verb clop means not only the sound made by shoes or hoofs but also “to cling, adhere to.”
One might think of classicists as the most tradition-bound of humanist scholars, but in fact they were the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of computing and digital technology in the humanities. Today even classicists who do not work on digital projects use digital projects as tools every day. One reason for this is the large, but defined corpus of classical texts at the field’s core.
English grammar has been closely bound up with that of Latin since the 16th century, when English first began to be taught in schools. Given that grammatical instruction prior to this had focused on Latin, it’s not surprising that teachers based their grammars of English on Latin. The title of John Hewes’ work of 1624 neatly encapsulates its desire to make English grammar conform to that of Latin.
Can solidarity exist? Or is it just a fantasy, a pious dream of the soft of heart and weak of brain? Gross inequality, greed and prejudice: these manifestations of selfishness which stalk our world may seem to invite our condemnation and to call for an alternative – but what if they are part of the natural order?
"If you have no better offer, do come," 11.52 helps put flesh on the bones of Martial’s Rome (‘you know Stephanus’ baths are right next door…’) and presents the city poet in a neighbourly light. It’s also a favourite of modern foodies in search of an unpretentious sample menu from ancient daily life.
Martial adores sexy boys. He craves their kisses, all the more so if they play hard to get, "� buffed amber, a fire yellow-green with Eastern incense… That, Diadumenus, is how your kisses smell, you cruel boy. What if you gave me all of them, without holding back?" (3.65) and "I only want struggling kisses – kisses I’ve seized; I get more of a kick out of your bad temper than your good looks…" (5.46).
His books are famous around the world, but their author struggles to get by – two themes that quickly become familiar to any reader. Martial has an eye for fabric. He habitually ranks himself and judges others by the price and quality of their clothing and accessories (e.g. 2.29, 2.57), a quick index in the face-to-face street life of the crammed metropolis.
An epigram is a short poem, most often of two or four lines. Its typical metre is the elegiac couplet, which is also the metre of Roman love poetry (elegy) and the hallmark of Ovid. In antiquity it was a distinctively Greek literary form: Roman writers were never comfortable in it as they were in other imported genres, such as epic and elegy. When they dabbled in epigram they often used Greek to do so. Martial’s decision to write books of Latin epigrams, and nothing else, is thus a very significant departure.
Who is ‘Martial’? "Up to this point, Madam, this little book has been written for you. You want to know for whom the bits further in are written? For me." (3.68) Marcus Valerius Martialis was born some time around AD 40 (we know his birthday, 1st March, but not the year) at Bilbilis in Hispania Tarraconensis, a province of oil- and wine-rich Roman Spain.
The poet we call Martial, Marcus Valerius Martialis, lived by his wits in first-century Rome. Pounding the mean streets of the Empire's capital, he takes apart the pretensions, addictions, and cruelties of its inhabitants with perfect comic timing and killer punchlines.
Only Oscar Wilde could be quite so frivolous when describing a matter as grave as the punctuation of poetry, something that causes particular grief in our attempts to understand ancient texts. Their writers were not so obliging as to provide their poems with punctuation marks, nor to distinguish between capitals and small letters.
It’s fairly common knowledge that languages, like people, have families. English, for instance, is a member of the Germanic family, with sister languages including Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages. Germanic, in turn, is a branch of a larger family, Indo-European, whose other members include the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, and more), Russian, Greek, and Persian.
Being part of a family of course means that you share a common ancestor. For the Romance languages, that mother language is Latin; with the spread and then fall of the Roman empire, Latin split into a number of distinct daughter languages. But what did the Germanic mother language look like? Here there’s a problem, because, although we know that language must have existed, we don’t have any direct record of it.
The earliest Old English written texts date from the 7th century AD, and the earliest Germanic text of any length is a 4th-century translation of the Bible into Gothic, a now-extinct Germanic language. Though impressively old, this text still dates from long after the breakup of the Germanic mother language into its daughters.
How does one go about recovering the features of a language that is dead and gone, and which has left no records of itself in spoken or written form? This is the subject matter of linguistic necromancy – or linguistic reconstruction, as it is more conventionally known.
The enterprise, dubbed “darkest of the dark arts” and “the only means to conjure up the ghosts of vanished centuries” in the epigraph to a chapter of Campbell’s historical linguistics textbook, really got off the ground in the 1900s due to a development of a toolkit of techniques known as the comparative method.
Crucial to the comparative method was a revolutionary empirical finding: the regularity of sound change. Though it has wide-reaching implications, the basic finding is simple to grasp. In a nutshell: it’s sounds that change, not words, and when they change, all words which include those sounds are affected.
Let’s take an example. Lots of English words beginning with a p sound have a German counterpart that begins with pf. Here are some of them:
English path: German Pfad
English pepper: German Pfeffer
English pipe: German Pfeife
English pan: German Pfanne
English post: German Pfoste
If the forms of words simply changed at random, these systematic correspondences would be a miraculous coincidence. However, in the light of the regularity of sound change they make perfect sense. Specifically, at some point in the early history of German, the language sounded a lot more like (Old) English. But then the sound p underwent a change to pf at the beginning of words, and all words starting with p were affected.
There’s much more to be said about the regularity of sound change, since it underlies pretty much everything we know about language family groupings. (If you’re interested in finding out more, Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language provides an accessible summary.) But for now let’s concentrate on its implications for necromantic purposes, which are immense.
If we want to invoke the words and sounds of a long-dead language like the mother language Proto-Germanic (the ‘proto-’ indicates that the language is reconstructed, rather than directly evidenced in texts), we just need to figure out what changes have happened to the sounds of the daughter languages, and to peel them back one by one like the layers of an onion. Eventually we’ll reach a point where all the daughter languages sound the same; and voilà, we’ve conjured up a proto-language.
There’s more to living languages than just sounds and words though. Living languages have syntax: a structure, a skeleton. By contrast, reconstructed protolanguages tend to look more like ghosts: hauntingly amorphous clouds of words and sounds. There are practical reasons why the reconstruction of proto-syntax has lagged behind. One is simply that our understanding of syntax, in general, has come a long way since the work of the reconstruction pioneers in the 19th century.
Another is that there is nothing quite like the regularity of syntactic change in syntax: how can we tell which syntactic structures correspond to each other across languages? These problems have led some to be sceptical about the possibility of syntactic reconstruction, or at any rate about its fruitfulness. Nevertheless, progress is being made. To take one example, English is a language that doesn’t like to leave out the subject of a sentence. We say “He speaks Swahili” or “It is raining”, not “Speaks Swahili” or “Is raining”. Though most of the modern Germanic languages behave the same, many other languages, like Italian and Japanese, have no such requirement; speakers can include or omit the subject of the sentence as the fancy takes them. Was Proto-Germanic like English, or like Italian or Japanese, in this respect? Doing a bit of necromancy based on the earliest Germanic written records suggests that Proto-Germanic was, like the latter, quite happy to omit the subject, at least under certain circumstances.Of course the issue is more complex than that – Italian and Japanese themselves differ with regard to the circumstances under which subjects can be omitted.
Slowly but surely, though, historical linguists are starting to add skeletons to the reanimated spectres of proto-languages.
The development of linguistics as a scientific discipline is one of the greatest achievements of contemporary thought, as it has led to the discovery of some fundamental principles about the functioning of language. However, most of its recent discoveries have not yet reached the general audience of educated people beyond the specialists. Scholars of classics, in particular, have found it difficult to become involved in the debate, since many recent studies in linguistics have been driven by the necessity to free themselves from the subordination to Latin grammar and have put into question the validity of certain aspects of traditional grammar.
As a consequence, progress made by contemporary linguistics has paradoxically had a negative rather than positive effect on the teaching of Latin. Although traditional grammars are now outdated, a suitable replacement has not yet been offered and a widespread scepticism has forced many to keep relying on old fashioned textbooks.
In order to overcome this undesirable state of affairs, it is desirable to bring Latin grammar back to its original high-level scientific conception, going beyond a prescriptive attitude and restoring the original theoretical tension. Although many branches of contemporary linguistics are potentially suited to fulfil this objective, none of them have been fully exploited in teaching yet. Their advantage over traditional approaches lies in their ability to satisfy the same needs as traditional analytical and philosophical Latin grammar, exploiting – at the same time – new methods, which are suitable to formulate more accurate analyses and theoretical generalizations.
Latin grammar should be presented as an activity which raises the linguistic awareness of its readers, using the most recent tools of modern linguistics. This should not be limited to the traditional Indo-European historical perspective, but includes the comparison of different languages and the attempt to represent the way in which grammar rules are codified in the mind.
The hypothesis is that there exists a language faculty underlying all languages, known as Universal Grammar (UG), i.e. a system of variable and invariable factors internalized in the speaker’s mind, which constitutes the basis of the grammar of each language. Understanding the contents of UG amounts to understanding those linguistic phenomena that are common to all languages. In this perspective, it is possible to develop a new method of teaching Latin, which aims at strengthening the cognitive skills of the learner’s mind. This method consists in overcoming the rigidity of a purely normative conception of grammatical rules, in order to make them explicit in a synchronic formal way and thus formulate hypotheses about the mental mechanisms that generate them. This method is an updated enhancement of the old conception of grammatical studies known as progymnasmata, i.e. “gymnastics of the mind,” which introduces the reader to the world of classical scholarship.
On the basis of some recent discoveries made by the neurosciences, it is possible to formulate grammatical rules that represent a better approximation of the implicit and explicit mental operations carried out by the language learner. The desired effect is the activation of the appropriate areas of the brain, i.e. the ones which are naturally devoted to the processing of linguistic information, thus rendering the process of language acquisition faster and more natural. Indeed, a vast number of recent studies have shown that language learning strongly relies on a constant and unconscious comparison between the second language (L2) and the learner’s mother tongue. By comparing linguistic phenomena across distinct languages and by interpreting the results with updated theoretical tools, we intend to underlie the deep similarities among languages rather than their superficial differences. This new teaching perspective represents a fundamental advantage for learners, who can focus their attention on the limits of linguistic variation, making their acquisitional task more feasible. In particular, by overtly reflecting on language and comparing L2 grammars to the structures of the mother tongue, the study of Latin becomes more stimulating and active.
Moreover, as students become aware of the difference between a “mistake”, as banned from the standard language, and linguistic “agrammaticality” (i.e. an option which is disallowed by the deep structure of the language), they become more critical and aware of the level of their written and oral performance in their mother tongue. From this perspective, it is clear that the study of Latin contributes to the overall linguistic education of learners, and not only to the training of those interested in classical studies. Students should no longer learn by heart the obscure rules of school grammars, often rooted on misconceptions, but they should instead explore the discoveries of centuries of classical scholarship in order to actively work out how languages function and change. In particular, they should focus their attention on the aspects of the targeted language they already know, before exploring the points of divergence from their mother tongue. Thanks to this revised methodology, the study of Latin loses any passive connotation and becomes an activity which enhances linguistic awareness, meta-linguistic competence, as well as critical thought.
The National September 11 Memorial Museum will be opened in a few weeks. On the otherwise starkly bare wall at the entrance is a 60-foot-long inscription in 15-inch letters made from steel salvaged from the twin towers: NO DAY SHALL ERASE YOU FROM THE MEMORY OF TIME. This noble sentiment is a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid, one of mankind’s highest literary achievements, but its appropriateness has been questioned. In the context of the Aeneid, Virgil is commemorating a homosexual pair of warriors killed while making a bloody surprise attack on their sleeping enemies’ camp. Three years ago, an article in the New York Times suggested that “anyone troubling to take even a cursory glance at the quotation’s context will find the choice offers neither instruction nor solace.” But the museum was unmoved by such objections, and its director has recently defended the choice, asserting, perhaps rather cryptically, that the quotation characterizes the “museum’s overall commemorative context.”
It is unfortunate that this controversy has arisen, especially since so few people nowadays know about the context of the quote in the Aeneid. Those who lost family members or friends in the attacks should not have their thoughts and feelings distracted in this way. The sentiments expressed on national monuments aim to be strongly and unambiguously assertive of a view held by the whole community, but perhaps they are inherently vulnerable to controversial interpretations. Ideally, of course, such quotations should resonate more deeply than the meaning of the actual words, but would it not be best to accept the obviously sincere intentions of the museum’s committee and let the matter drop?
“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country” in classical Greek on a memorial honoring the dead in the First Balkan War. Credit: J.C. McKeown
Otherwise, where will it end? Should we hesitate about using dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”), a line by Horace, Virgil’s contemporary, found so often on war memorials? In the 1910s, it was inscribed at Arlington and at Sandhurst, the British military academy, and was even translated into classical Greek (mirabile dictu!) on a memorial honoring the dead in the First Balkan War.
Before the decade was out, however, in the most celebrated of all World War I poems, Wilfred Owen had described Horace’s line as “the old lie.” Horace’s own authority to voice such ideals may be questioned. He was writing a poem of national significance–it is one of his “Roman Odes”–but the very next line, “death pursues even the man who runs away,” might make us recall a different poem in which Horace rather flippantly admits that he had thrown away his shield and fled at the Battle of Philippi. These considerations may give us pause for thought, but the validity of dulce et decorum in a national context is not diminished.
Carpe diem is perhaps the most ubiquitous of all Latin tags, but few people are aware of its original use: Horace is trying to persuade a girl to sleep with him. In another quote from the same book of Odes, Horace assures us that a person who is integer vitae scelerisque purus (“He who lives an unblemished life and is not tainted with crime”) is under divine protection, but the poem is essentially trivial, for Horace’s guardian deity turns out to be Cupid, who keeps wolves at bay while he sings in the woods about his mistress; even so, the poem was sung for centuries at Swedish funerals.
The fundamental democratic principles of equality and unity encapsulated so precisely in e pluribus unum are surely not diminished by the possibility that it was inspired by a phrase from an inconsequential poem attributed to Virgil: color est e pluribus unus (“from being several, the color is one”), in a description of an old peasant grinding the various ingredients together to make a vegetable pâté for his breakfast.
We have difficulties enough with the nuances of our own language. How many of those who wear T-shirts emblazoned with The Road Not Taken regard Frost’s best known poem not so much as a declaration of their free spirit, but rather as “that cunning nugget of nihilism disguised as an anthem for nonconformity” (New Yorker, 10 February 2014)?
Even Virgil himself has been charged with quoting inappropriately. When Aeneas stammers to Dido’s ghost in the Underworld, invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi (“unwillingly, O queen, I left your shore”), it is an undoubted echo of Catullus’s translation of an elegant Hellenistic court poem, in which a lock of Queen Berenice’s hair laments that it is now a constellation, no longer with the queen: invita, o regina, tuo de vertice cessi (“unwillingly, O queen, I left your head”). To quote the standard commentary on Virgil’s line: “modern susceptibilities are pained by Virgil’s presumed indifference to the incongruity so produced.”
Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the Trojan city. Oil on canvas, 1815. Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, The Louvre. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
There is classical precedent for changing a memorial inscription. After the Greek victory over the Persians at Plataea in 479 BC, the Greek commander set up an inscription at Delphi: “Pausanias, leader of the Greeks, when he destroyed the army of the Persians, dedicated this memorial to Apollo.” He was ordered to remove it, and told he could put it up again when he had defeated the Persians single-handedly. Might that be the best solution to all this controversy? The task of re-writing the inscription might be given to Billy Collins, who was Poet Laureate at the time of the attacks. He would be sure to resist those who want to:
“tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.”
Torquato Tasso, who died in Rome on 25 April 1595, desperately wanted to write a classic. The son of a successful court poet who had been brought up on the Latin classics, he had a lifelong ambition to write the epic poem which would do for counter-reformation Italy what Virgil’sAeneid had done for imperial Rome. From his teenage years on, he worked on drafts of a poem on the first crusade which had ‘liberated’ Jerusalem from its Muslim rulers in 1099, a subject which he deemed appropriate for a Christian epic. His ambition reflected the climate in which he grew up: his formative years (he was born in 1544) saw a newly assertive orthodoxy both in literary theory (dominated by Aristotle’s Poetics, published in a Latin translation in 1536) and in religion (the Council of Trent, convened to meet the challenge of Luther’s revolt, was in session intermittently between 1545 and 1563). Those who saw Aristotle’s text as normative insisted that an epic must deal with a single historical theme in a uniformly elevated style, while the decrees emanating from Trent re-asserted the authority of the church and took an increasingly hard line against heresy. As he worked on his poem, Tasso was nervously anxious not to offend either of these constituencies.
The trouble was that his most immediate model – one whose influence he could not have ignored even if he had wanted to – was very far from conforming to the new orthodoxies. Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, a multilayered narrative loosely (very loosely) located in the historical setting of Charlemagne’s wars against the Moors in Spain, was published in 1532, and was written in more easy-going times. Ariosto could criticize the Italian rulers of his day, including the papacy, and introduce episodes into his poem which provocatively questioned conventional values, whether rational, social, or sexual, without worrying about the consequences. He could be equally casual about literary proprieties: his freewheeling poem indulged in constant romantic deviations from its main plot, such as it was, and its tone was teasingly elusive, always maintaining an ironic distance between the narrator and his subject-matter.
The Orlando furioso was hardly a model for the poem Tasso set out to write; and yet it was hugely popular, and Tasso clearly read and admired it as much as anyone. So Tasso’s poem, as he reluctantly agreed to publish it in 1581 after 20 years of writing and rewriting, embodies the tension between his declared aim and the poem his instincts impelled him to write. It would be hard to argue that the Gerusalemme liberata (The Liberation of Jerusalem) is an unqualified success as a celebration of counter-reformation Christianity; instead it is something much more interesting, an expression of the inner contradictions of late sixteenth-century culture as they were felt by a sensitive – sometimes hyper-sensitive – and gifted poet.
Some of Tasso’s drafts had leaked out during the poem’s long gestation and had been published without his consent, so the poem was eagerly awaited, and it immediately had its devotees. Not everyone, however, was impressed. Among those who were not was Galileo, who wrote a series of acerbic notes on the poem some time before 1609. His criticisms are mostly on details of language and style, but in one revealing comment he compares Tasso’s poetic conceits to ostentatiously difficult dance steps, which are pleasing only if they are ‘carried through with supreme accomplishment, so that their gracefulness overrides their affectation’. Grazia versus affettazione: the terms are taken from Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, that indispensable guide to Renaissance manners which decreed that the courtier’s accomplishments should be displayed with an appearance of effortless nonchalance. Tasso’s offence against courtly manners was that he tried too hard.
The Gerusalemme liberata is indeed full of unresolved tensions – between historical chronicle and romantic fantasy, sensuality and solemnity, the broad sweep of history and the playing out of individual passions. They are what bring the poem to life today, long after the crusades have lost their appeal as a topic for celebration. Galileo rebukes one of Tasso’s heroes for being too easily deflected from his duty by love: ‘Tancredi, you coward, a fine hero you are! You were the first to be chosen to answer Argante’s challenge, and then when you come face to face with him, instead of confronting him you stop to gaze on your lady love’. Tancredi does admittedly cut a rather ludicrous figure when he is transfixed by catching sight of Clorinda just as he is about to accept the Saracen champion’s challenge, but what Galileo didn’t realise was that the very vehemence of his indignation was a testimony to the effectiveness of Tasso’s writing. Plenty of poets wrote about how love mocks the pretentions of would-be heroes, but few dramatised it so effectively – and only Tasso could have written the scene, memorably set to music by Monteverdi, where Tancredi meets Clorinda in single combat, her identity (and her gender) concealed under a suit of armour, and recognises her only when he has mortally wounded her and he baptises her before she dies in his arms.
Galileo was wrong about Tasso’s poem. The very qualities which he deplored make it a classic which inspired poets from Spenser and Milton to Goethe and Byron, composers from Monteverdi to Rossini, and painters from Poussin to Delacroix, and which is still a compelling read today.
Mark Davie taught Italian at the Universities of Liverpool and Exeter. His interests focus particularly on the relation between learned and popular culture, and between Latin and the vernacular, in Italy in the Renaissance. In Oxford World’s Classics he has written the introduction and notes to Max Wickert’s translation of The Liberation of Jerusalem, and has translated (with William R. Shea) the Selected Writings of Galileo.
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the OUPblog. Subscribe to only Oxford World’s Classics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
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Image credit: Statue of Torquato Tasso by Luigi Chiesa. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Adapted from the Latin by M. D. Usher
Illustrations by T. Motley
David R. Godine 2011
Ah, the good old days of Ancient Rome, where a a reckless traveler manages to turn himself into an ass – literally, a donkey – and survive to tell the unbelievable tale to his traveling companions.
First, for those who know the original tale and might have some concerns, Usher's adaptation is cleaned up
0 Comments on The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius as of 5/4/2012 9:12:00 AM
The study of ancient history often reveals some fascinating anecdotes, mysterious happenings, and colorful characters. Some of these are not generally known.
Amsco’s Lingua Latina, Books I and II, by Professor John Traupman of St. Joseph’s University, deal with the Latin language and Roman history and culture. In Book I, Dr. Traupman describes a Roman of dubious character who was murdered in 52 B.C. Publius Claudius Pulcher (the Handsome) belonged to one of the most aristocratic families of the Roman Republic, the Claudii. One of his ancestors had built Rome’s first highway, the Via Appia, in 312 B.C. Nevertheless, he changed his name to Clodius in order to get political support from the common people, or plebians.
Clodius became a notorious gang leader. He and his followers terrorized the streets of Rome. (The Roman world, at that time, was ruled by the First Triumvirate of Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Crassus. These three men brought stability and order to Rome and its provinces. However, they were intense rivals. Each sought an opportunity to eliminate the other two. The death of Crassus in battle against the Parthians ultimately led to civil war between Pompey and Caesar. Pompey lost his head and Caesar emerged as sole ruler of the Roman world.)
Clodius’ sister Clodia was called pulchra because of her great beauty. Like her brother, she lived a wild life, taking many lovers. Among them was the poet Catullus. Brother and sister were admired by some and feared by others. They were involved with the leading political figures of the late Republic.
Among Clodius’ many criminal activities was the affair of the mysteries of the Bona Dea in December 62 B.C. These mysteries were open only to women. Dressed as a woman, Clodius entered the house of Julius Caesar while the mysteries of the goddess were being celebrated. Upon discovery, a scandal erupted. Clodius was accused of attempting to carry on an affair with Pompeia, Casesar’s wife. Whether this was true or not, Caesar divorced Pompeia. Clodius was brought to trial, but avoided conviction by bribing the jury.
After the departure of Caesar for Gaul, Clodius and his gang became masters of Rome. Milo, a rival gang leader and politician, was a candidate for the consulship (Rome’s highest office) in 53 B.C. Clodius’ opposition led to street battles between armed bands of the two leaders. Milo’s gang was strong enough to hold Clodius in check.
On
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“Take a look through these,” Grant said, handing me a pair of binoculars. We were kneeling in the high grass of a hill in Northumberland, England’s northernmost county. My companion was an assistant archeologist employed by the county council. I carefully focused the lens of the binoculars, expecting to see the remains of a 3rd-century A.D. Roman fort. Instead, I saw very modern barbed wire fencing penetrated by an access road along which olive drab jeeps and trucks rolled up to a guard post manned by red caps (British military police). Beyond them were barracks and squaddies drilling on open training grounds. With a shock, I realized that I was staring at Otterburn army base, Britain’s large training and testing facility for heavy artillery and long-range weapons systems. Several possibilities flashed through my mind, including arrest and incarceration for espionage or annihilation by a stray artillery shell. Angrily, I turned to Grant whose grin told me that, once again, he had indulged his passion for practical jokes by guiding me to the wrong location—a very wrong location.
“Don’t get your knickers twisted,” the archeologist said. “I thought you would enjoy a look at today’s British military.” As I had seen my share of army bases during my service in the U.S. Army, I was not impressed and told him so. I suggested we get on with our assignment, which was to survey the remains of Roman outpost forts upon which no excavation work or investigation had been done for years. An hour or so later, after making our way across the high moor, we came to another hill. On its summit were the remains of a low wall overgrown with grass and weeds. A dead tree leaned over the open gateway, giving the isolated spot a haunted look—barren and deserted. We were looking at Bremenium, an outpost fort that was part of the marvel of Roman military engineering that comprised the Hadrian’s Wall complex. Bremenium was located north of the wall, its primary function to gather intelligence about the activities of the unconquered British tribes that periodically threatened the peace of the towns and villas of the more civilized province to the south. It was built in the first century and not, therefore, originally a Hadriannic fort. A variety of units had served at Bremenium. In the third century, the fort was manned by the Germans of the First Cohort of Loyal Vardullians. They were Roman citizens, a privileged status not shared by the numerus (irregular troops) of exploratores (frontier scouts) also posted there. Of the vicus, or civil settlement which often grew outside the walls of Roman forts, there was no sign at Bremenium. We concluded that the surrounding countryside was just too rough and dangerous for the usual purveyors of “service industries” to risk settling there. However, the outpost could not have been entirely self sufficient. Periodic supply trains must have been dispatched to the fort.
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“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.” So wrote Salman Rushdie and he should know. Certainly free speech is routinely held up, often unreflectively, as an unambiguous, uncontroversial good – one of Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms, the right for which Voltaire would famously die, even if he disapproved of what was being said. In the age of WikiLeaks, the freedom to disseminate information and its corollary, the freedom to know what those in power have said or done in secret, have found ever more vigorous proponents, but also those who ask whether it has its limits.
It has always been problematic whether freedom of speech should be extended to those whose speech is considered abhorrent and who might even argue against others’ freedom of speech. Voltaire may offer to lay down his life and Chomsky may assert that “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all”, but the very power of speech which makes its freedom so desirable can also render it an instrument of discrimination, violence, and oppression. It is no coincidence that it is often groups such as the BNP or Qur’an-burning pastors who hold up free speech as a banner under which they can use that freedom to demand the curtailment of others’ freedoms. Even more directly, the dangers of verbal incitement to hatred – be it on racial, sexual, or other grounds – are increasingly recognized in both the statute books and the public consciousness.
WikiLeaks has highlighted the other potential danger of free speech, that, in the famous words of the World War II poster, “careless talk costs lives”. Many have used the rhetoric of being willing to die for the right to free speech, but the issue becomes more problematic when it is soldiers who are dying in Afghanistan because of outrage at revelations of undiplomatic diplomatic cables. Once again, there is no coincidence that it is in times of war and unrest that the issue of free speech becomes particularly fraught. It is then that its negative ramifications can be most keenly felt, but it is also then that it is most under threat from the pressures of power and expediency, then that it most needs defending.
So what does all this have to do with the Roman poet Horace? Horace too was writing in a time of war and political upheaval. As he composed his Satires in the 30s BC, Rome had suffered almost a century of civil unrest exploding into outright civil war at regular intervals, and the final bout between Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) and Mark Antony was just around the corner. Horace himself had fought on “the wrong side” at the battle of Philippi in 42 BC, in the army of Julius Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius, against the ultimate victors, Octavian and Antony. Taken into the circle of Octavian’s ally and unofficial minister of culture, Maecenas, Horace had his status and his finances restored. It was at this point that Horace wrote book one of the Satires. These poems are full of profound human insights and uproarious, often filthy, humour, as can be experienced in John Davie’s lively new translation, but there is one large oddity about them. Horace chose to write satire, the genre of the 2nd century BC poet Lucilius, famed above all for his fearless freedom of speech, and he chose to write it in the period of probably the greatest military and political upheaval Rome ever underwent, but he “doesn’t mention the war”.
Not only does he not mention it, he goes out of his way not to mention it. Again and again there are opportunities to engage with the important political events in Rome and around her Mediterranean empire, but Horace repeatedly refuses. Satire 1.7 is all about Brutus’ time as governor of the provi
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Below you will find the various resources presented at OFLA 2011 by Dr. Franz Gruber and me in our session, Latin Projects Via Voicethread. Dr. Gruber and I completed two projects with Voicethread this year, an ancient architecture project with 8th grade Latin students, and an Ohio city project with 7th grade Latin students. Here you will find Dr. Gruber's slides, my slides, several student project examples, and a several other relevant links. If you have any questions regarding these or other Voicethread projects, please contect Dr. Gruber or me at:
Why has enrollment in middle-and-secondary school Latin increased over the last two decades? Why has the number of students taking the National Latin Exam and the Latin AP Exams increased as well? Maybe students have realized that learning Latin helps them improve their vocabulary, reading and writing skills, comparative-analysis skills, and SAT scores; or maybe the popularity of the Harry Potter novels and movies—chock-full of Latin and classical references—has sparked interest in the language, especially among young fans.
If you are considering learning Latin, or you’re a Latin teacher looking for a straightforward and affordable text, check out Amsco’s new second editions of Latin Is Fun, Book Iand Latin Is Fun, Book II. This series aims to provide students with a basal text that will help them learn basic communicative skills. Latin Is Fun presents a natural, personalized, and enjoyable program of language acquisition by teaching vocabulary through lively drawings and allowing students to discover grammatical rules deductively. Latin Is Fun also features short, fun narratives that illustrate new vocabulary and structures. The lessons are rounded out with illustrated conversations, personalized dialogue activities, and varied practice.
You can check out virtual samples of both books online by visiting www.amscopub.com, clicking “Virtual Sampling,” and scrolling to Latin Is Fun, Book I or II.
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For those of you not old enough to recall aspects of life on the home front during World War II, the families of GIs waited eagerly for the arrival of V-mail from their loved ones. These were letters, usually handwritten, from armed forces personnel overseas, which had been reviewed by military censors who often blacked out anything they thought might be of value to the enemy if intercepted. (No e-mail, texting, or Twitter in the 1940s, but plenty of signs with warnings such as LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS).
Katherine Hoare’s lovely little book, V-Mail: Letters from the Romans at Vindolanda Fort Near Hadrian’s Wall, was published in 2008 by the British Museum Press. It is a selection of documents written by Roman military personnel in the late first and early second centuries. Written in vegetable dye on thin pieces of wood, these writing tablets were preserved by the anaerobic soil of northern England. Commencing in the 1970s, more than two thousand of these writing tablets were discovered by archeologist Robin Birley and his staff in the course of the excavation of the Romano-British fort of Vindolanda.
Today, the writing tablets are on display in the British Museum. Vindolanda remains a permanent excavation and research center in northern England at which new discoveries about life on a Roman frontier continue to be made.
Let’s read what the soldiers and vicani (residents of the vicus, or village outside the walls of the fort) had to say:
First, the famous birthday invitation, the earliest known example of handwriting in Latin by a woman: Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, it will make the day more enjoyable for me if you are present. Give my greeting to your Cerialis. My Aelius and little son send him their greetings. I shall expect you.
Sulpicia Lepidina was the wife of Flavius Cerialis, commander of the gar
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My Review: I'd never really thought about Castro's 1961 takeover of Cuba and its effect on children. I'd never even heard of Operation Pedro Pan, which flew lots of Cuban refugees, in their teens and younger, into the US. The Red Umbrella gives a moving, personal glimpse into the life of Lucia, just 14 years old, who is sent with her little brother to live in Nebraska.
I adored this book. The possibility that Lucy and Frankie may never see their parents again kept bringing tears to my eyes. Lucy's just a regular girl, concerned with cute boys, the latest fashions, and going to the movies with her friends. Strange things begin to happen in their little town as a result of the Communist takeover, and it's interesting to see how she learns to deal with these changes. The lessons she learns about strength, family and friendship will stick with readers long after the symbolic red umbrella makes its final appearance.
I kept wondering, if I were in her shoes, would I have fallen for all the brainwashing, the Communists' calls to "honor" and "duty" that tore children from their families and sent them into dangerous places? Would I have thought that I was doing the right thing to turn in someone who was being disloyal to the government? It's easy now with hindsight, and because I am at least twice the character's age, but I still found her reactions unsettling and was very satisfied with the character development in this book.
I also felt very connected to Lucia's culture--they use some of the same words we say in the Philippines, like "basta" and "sigue"! I love flan just as much as her little brother Frankie does (that reminds me, there's some in the fridge, BRB).
Who should read this book: Middle grade readers will have a fine time with this book. It would be interesting to know how non-Spanish speakers react to the interjected lines of Spanish. My grasp of Spanish is good enough to be able to read through and not get lost, and the glossary in the back of the book helps, too! There is a little hint of death and violence, but most of the action is happening at a remove, and is not quite so scary as it could be. I think everyone should read this book with a box of tissues. And I think Pedro Pan kids, and their kids/grandkids should read it together, and share those tissue boxes!
I've heard a lot of great things, especially after attending the signing. It piqued my interest, but I'm not sure if I will read it. The Red Umbrella doesn't fall under my favorite genres to read. I always enjoy paranormal/urban fantasy books, but it does sound like a good read and I may pick it up...someday.
I loved this book. The interjected phrases in Spanish didn't bother me but my limited Spanish was able to keep up. And yes, this is really something that I would consider multi-generational and not just a YA read. Nice review.
As follows from the title, my first unpleasant character is CULPRIT; naturally, I am interested in the origin of the word rather than in the culprit’s behavior. What the OED says on the subject may be final, but the story will allow me to make a point not directly connected with guilt and crime. At first glance, culprit, with its root culpa (Latin for “fault”), is the most transparent word one can imagine. But what about -prit? English abounds in so-called disguised compounds. For example, marshal goes back to mara- (or some similar form) “mare” and skalk “slave.” The original marshal looked after horses. Then the word passed into Old French and returned to English with its lofty Romance meaning. Another horsy noun is henchman: hench- continues heng(e)st- “stallion.” Taking care of a lord’s horses gave status to medieval attendants. Marshal is disguised so well that we no longer recognize its old structure. In henchman, the presence of -man reminds us of the word’s initial composition, but hench- makes no sense to a modern speaker. In culprit, -prit baffles languages historians. However, no one ever doubted that we are dealing with a (thinly) disguised compound or word group.
In some early dictionaries, culprit was spelled culprit (1715), cul prit (1718), and cul-prit (1719). The word was relatively new at that time. It first occurred in a legal formula (see it below), but later acquired the sense “the accused” and still later “felon.” In texts, no occurrence of culprit “felon” predates 1700. I often refer to Nathaniel Bailey’s 1721 dictionary. Here is a passage from it: “Culprit, a formal word, used by the Clerk of the Arraignments, in Tryals [sic], to a Person indicted for a Criminal Matter, when he has register’d the Prisoner’s Plea, Not Guilty, and proceeds to demand of him, (Culprit) How wilt thou be Tried? Culprit seems to be compounded of two Words, i.e., Cul and Prit, viz., Cul of Culpabilis, and is a Reply of a proper Officer, on behalf of the King, affirming the Party to be Guilty after he hath pleaded Not Guilty; the other word Prit is derived of the French Word Prest, i.e., Ready, and is as much as to say, that he is ready to prove the Party Guilty. Others again derive it from Culpa, a fault, and Prehensus, taken, L. i.e., a Criminal or Malefactor.” (Note the prepositions: derived of, derive it from.) Bailey borrowed his etymology from Thomas Blount’s Law Dictionary and expanded it, but his dictionary had a much broader readership than Blount’s. Except that the OED found actual examples of cul. prit. in legal documents, Blount and Bailey’s explanation still stands.
Strangely, Samuel Johnson derived culprit from French qu’il paroit “let it appear” and took no notice of Blount’s or Bailey’s comments. In the early decades of the 19th century, correspondents to The Gentleman’s Magazine debated the origin of culprit anew, again without reference to Blount or Bailey, and vacillated between qu’il paroit, culp-prist “taken (supposed, suspected) to be guilty,” and Latin culpaereus (or culpae reus) “arraigned for a crime.” Some of them misunderstood the combination culpabilis prest as allegedly meaning “already guilty,” though it meant “guilty and (we are) ready to prove the defendant’s guilt” (“What! are our laws so severe and their procedure so preposterous as to declare a pers
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The trouble was that his most immediate model – one whose influence he could not have ignored even if he had wanted to – was very far from conforming to the new orthodoxies. Ludovico Ariosto’s 
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I've heard a lot of great things, especially after attending the signing. It piqued my interest, but I'm not sure if I will read it. The Red Umbrella doesn't fall under my favorite genres to read. I always enjoy paranormal/urban fantasy books, but it does sound like a good read and I may pick it up...someday.
I loved this book. The interjected phrases in Spanish didn't bother me but my limited Spanish was able to keep up. And yes, this is really something that I would consider multi-generational and not just a YA read. Nice review.
I just got a copy of this, and your review has me really excited to read it!! :)