Ancient & Modern | 21 February 2009

Sandwell Council recently advertised for a ‘Thematic Liaison Manager (Performance)’ at £41,000 a year.

Sandwell Council recently advertised for a ‘Thematic Liaison Manager (Performance)’ at £41,000 a year. It would be instructive if any reader could tell from that description what the job entailed. I doubt anyone could, and thereby hangs a tale.

Latin was the language of learning in the West for more than 1,000 years after the fall of the western Roman empire in the 5th century ad. When it began to be replaced by vernaculars and translations, some other justification for it had to be found. One common one was that it gave you an entrée into the world of those who had done Latin at school, i.e. a highly restricted, socially dominant male hierarchy. It did not matter if your knowledge of the language was minimal or you never used it again. You had done it and were therefore a ‘gentleman’. That was enough to provide you with the passport. The result was that Latin became a sort of bourgeois certificate of authenticity, its very uselessness the mark of a truly liberal, superior education and, as a consequence, a language of power, bolstering the prestige of those who had learned it (however much they had forgotten or never known) and commanding the respect of those who did not, all the more effectively for being unintelligible.

That being the case, it was essential that Latin be kept from the masses. It might encourage them to rise above their station, abandon occupations like trade and manufacture for which they were ‘naturally’ qualified and strive for those for which they were not. Social mobility was not to be encouraged: a Frenchman argued, ‘For every few happy talents that such education drags usefully out of their primary state, how many mediocrities pick up tastes from it that are incompatible with the modest condition to which they will have to return.’