Latin

How the Aeneid was nearly destroyed

According to legend, Vergil declared of himself ‘Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope: cecini pascua, rura, duces.’ (‘Mantua bore me, Calabria took me; now Naples holds me: I sang of pastures, fields, and leaders.’) In her rigorously researched biography, the American classicist Sarah Ruden shows that this is largely true – even if the author of the Aeneid was in fact born 30 miles from Mantua, in a little village called Andes, in 70 BC.  Ruden must necessarily rely on Vergil’s most influential biography, written by Suetonius more a century after his death. And there’s no reason to doubt the skeleton of Suetonius’s life: that Vergil was unmarried,

A translator’s responsibilities are as formidable as a transplant surgeon’s

When asked what it is we do, translators often resort to metaphors. We liken the act of translation to performing a piece of music, taking on a role in a play, kissing a bride through a veil or building bridges between cultures. But as the peerless Norwegian translator Damion Searls has said, when we sit down to work ‘there’s no metaphor at all really. The metaphors are just for interviews, or for talking with people about what translators do’. In this series of passionate, thoughtful essays, Jhumpa Lahiri uses metaphors, and more especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to explore the nebulous, almost ineffable nature of living between languages. The book is also

The power of prayerful washing-up

My days pass largely in a state of inanition. The fit and able-bodied express their sympathy, claiming it’s much the same for them. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m sleeping all the time.’ ‘Oh, but so are we in this terrible heat!’ Meanwhile the young get browner and more beautiful every day while going on with their energetic lives as if affected by the heat scarcely at all. For instance, I look at the cheerful lads digging up our road, putting in fibre broadband in 40 degrees of heat. I want to run up to them and implore them, with the fervour of a dying man preaching to dying men, to enjoy

The timeless appeal of Latin

The government’s promise to fund a pilot scheme promoting the teaching of Latin in secondary schools is music to the ears of the charity Classics for All, which has introduced classical subjects into more than 1,000 state schools. Latin has been taken up with especial enthusiasm in primary schools, where word derivations have proved very popular. The ancients loved them too. The Roman Varro (116-27 bc) wrote a 25-volume de lingua Latina (‘On the Latin Language’). Six survive, three discussing etymology, all full of interest because Varro, ignorant of scientific etymology (it developed only from the 17th century onwards), produced total nonsense. For example, he thought canis ‘dog’ was related

Letters: The uncivil service

Uncivil service Sir: The elephant in the room in the handling of the pandemic (‘A tragedy of errors’, 29 May) is the civil service, which has become the problem in government rather than the solution. Repeated disasters of problem management — from the blood transfusion scandal to Hillsborough to the failures illuminated by Dominic Cummings — reveal an inability to make precise decisions, accept errors and move on. This is especially illustrated by the Home Office which is no longer fit for any purpose. The difficulties encountered by the Windrush people are a case in point. The incompetence and sheer nastiness is breathtaking. It is apparent that we are governed

What would it mean to ‘decolonise’ the Classics?

We classicists peering into the past can sometimes be blindsided by the present. 2020 brings the charge that our discipline promotes racism. Last month, America’s Society for Classical Studies announced ‘the complicity of Classics as a field in constructing and participating in racist and anti-black educational structures and attitudes’. A pre-doctoral fellow at Princeton has enjoined ‘white classicists’ to ‘unlearn white supremacy in themselves’. And, closer to home, Oxford’s Faculty of Classics is being petitioned by many of its students to ‘acknowledge explicitly its own role in the proliferation of racist, colonialist, and white supremacist attitudes’. Have I really chosen the career of racism-pedlar? Are classicists really promoting ‘white people’

What’s the difference between ‘scaffold’ and ‘scaffolding’?

Whenever I turned on the news last weekend, my husband took to humming the March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie fantastique. He was expecting a political decapitation. Political metaphors tend to the violent: toast, under a bus, the high jump. Berlioz didn’t use échafaud, ‘scaffold’, in the title of his movement, but supplice, ‘torment’. But J.M. Neale, the author of ‘Good King Wenceslas’, wrote a less successful ballad on the martyrdom of Archbishop Laud that included these lines: ‘So steadfastly the scaffold-steps/ That good Archbishop trod/ As one that journeyed to his Home/ And hasten’d to his God.’ Scaffold has a different connotation from scaffolding, with its loud voices,

Not dead – yet

It was a dark afternoon in November, and the wind was rattling the casements of the bare schoolroom. My small but enthusiastic class of Greek students nibbled chocolate biscuits and listened politely as I ploughed through yet another list of irregular verbs. Suddenly, standing by the electronic whiteboard, I had a sort of minor epiphany (Epiphany: from the Greek term for a god’s manifestation to undeserving mortals). Why, I asked myself, were these bright teenagers devoting so much time to studying a difficult language which they would never be able to use to communicate, whose native speakers died two millennia ago, and in which it would take years to reach

Latin texts are full of violence, racism and class – that doesn’t mean they need a trigger warning

Last week, Brendan O’Neill described in this magazine how students regulate ‘unacceptable’ political views with ‘no platform’ policies, safe spaces and trigger warnings. Two weeks ago a student Latin course (Reading Latin, P. Jones and K. Sidwell) was ‘outed’ by an American PhD student, because the text featured three goddesses, each confidently stripping off, determined to win the golden apple from Paris, and two rapes. Such ‘offensive’ choices, she said, did not help the cause of Latin, ‘or make the historically racist and classist discipline of classics any more accessible’. Both rapes featured in a foundation myth of early Roman history. The most important was that of Lucretia by Sextus, son

The curious incident of Cambridge’s Latin graffiti

A weird one, this. Yesterday, a short walk away from me in Chesterton, Cambridge, an enigmatic threat appeared in three-foot-high letters on a new row of upmarket houses flanking the banks of the Cam. But these weren’t the usual slapdash daubings. No, the letters were lavishly painted across four houses by a ladder-wielding vigilante ten feet above the ground. The stunt has made national headlines, not so much for the content of the protest as for its medium – Latin. Well, it is and it isn’t Latin. It proclaims, Locus in domos loci populum! Purists will object that the Romans had to muddle through without the indulgent hyperbole of exclamation

Ash

Home is where the heart is, but some poor languages have no word for ‘home’. For them, home is where the hearth is. The Spaniards have a proverb (of course) on the matter: El sol es hogar de los pobres, ‘The sun is hearth and home for the poor’, since they can afford no other fire than the winter sun. My columnar neighbour, Peter Jones, touches on this hearth in his wonderfully entertaining new book, Quid Pro Quo, What the Romans Really Gave the English Language. I found it fun to turn from one entry to a connecting entry and read it like a game of hare and hounds. For

Diary – 11 August 2016

Walking along the Brighton seafront, I was struck by posters advertising endless tribute acts; among them Suspiciously Elvis, the Small Fakers and The Kinx. The Edinburgh Fringe is much the same. Shows this summer include Dirty Harry: The Ultimate Tribute to Blondie and Billie Holliday: Tribute to the Iconic Lady Day. Or how about Gary Bland’s Mr Romantic: A Tribute to Johnny Mathis — ‘an insight into Mathis’s career, and how Mathis’s music has been a big part of Gary’s life through love, heartache and laughter’. The theatre at Edinburgh, too, is full of remakes. Fancy Dan Choo-Park’s The Song of Beast (after Hamlet), where the Prince of Denmark is teleported to

Honorificabilitudinity

My husband told me with glee that Nicholas Byfield had a great big stone ‘like flint’ in his bladder, weighing 33 ounces, which ‘exceedingly afflicted’ him for 15 years, until it killed him in 1622, aged 44. It did not stop him writing about the Epistle to the Colossians and remarking that Christ’s divine nature is ‘incircumscriptible in respect of place’. This is doubtless true, but most interest has focused on the length of the word. In 1900 James Murray, the great editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (to the new history of which by Peter Gilliver I keenly look forward), completed the section I–Infer. ‘Those who are interested in

The government can’t ‘phase out’ Latin from the English language

In his essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell famously exhorted writers to be cautious of allowing ready words or prefabricated phrases to affect whatever it was he or she wished to articulate. ‘Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about,’ he wrote. Seventy years on, Whitehall Mandarins have spoken. ‘We promote the use of plain English on GOV.UK,’ writes one of their number from the Government Digital Service, announcing a new policy on which words cannot be used on government websites. ‘We advocate simple, clear language. Terms like eg, ie and etc, while common, make reading difficult for some.’ As a result, ostensibly to make

N.M. Gwynne’s diary: Old names worth dropping

As I get older (and my 74th birthday is now close), I get deeper and deeper into nostalgia. I do not fight this, because nostalgia seems to me to be rational as well as agreeable. Things really aren’t what they once were. ‘But people have always said that,’ is often the response. Yes, and for the most part, I maintain, people have always been right. So it is that, whenever I leave my present home in Ireland for a visit to England, what I most enjoy there is seeing the most elderly of my friends. Having been around for so long, they have so much to talk interestingly about. Indeed,

How the Romans taught Latin (N.M. Gwynne would not approve)

Barely a week passes without someone complaining about the teaching of English or foreign languages, usually because it involves too much, or too little, grammar. The ancients also had to face the problem. Clearly, non-Romans who wanted a career in Roman high society, the courts, civil administration or the army needed to learn Latin. So they did, and by the 2nd century AD, the Greek essayist Plutarch was able to say that almost all men used Latin. Certainly, as the Vindolanda tablets demonstrate, the Latin of the Germanic officer Cerealis was very respectable. But Romans also admired Greek culture enormously, and Latin literature drank deeply at its well (the statesman Cicero could

Spectator letters: Press regulation, heroic Bulgarians and the case for Scotch on the rocks

Beyond the law Sir: In your leading article of 28 June you make the point that the hacking trial demonstrates why political oversight of press regulation, not press regulation by politicians, would be an unnecessary ‘draconian step’ because ‘hacking is already against the law’. Later you compare the illegal but honourable behaviour of Andy Coulson with that of Damian McBride, who ‘broke no law but behaved criminally’. In doing so you weaken the earlier argument. Regulation of the press should not solely be focused on illegal activity; rather it is to ensure that the press does not behave in a way analogous to that you criticise McBride for. In the

My tax avoidance tip – win literary prizes!

David Cameron is said to want a woman to be chairman of the BBC Trust, now that Chris Patten has had to retire early because of ill health. Perhaps he has a bad conscience about what happened last time. By far the best candidate then was the runner-up, Patricia Hodgson, a distinguished BBC veteran who is committed to its virtues and has always understood its vices. She would have led a return to the BBC’s core strengths, and saved licence fee money in the process. But the government did not know what it wanted, so it chose the nearest chum, Lord Patten, who accepted in that casual and complacent spirit

Horace and Me, by Harry Eyres – review

After Zorba the Greek, here comes Horace the Roman. The peasant Zorba, you’ll remember from the film, releases uptight, genteel Alan Bates from his cage of repressed Englishness. Now it’s Horace, the Augustan lyric poet, releasing another repressed Englishman: Harry Eyres, Old Etonian scholar, Cambridge graduate, poet and author of the ‘Slow Lane’ column in the Financial Times. This charming, moving book calls itself ‘Life Lessons’, as if it were a general teaching guide for the reader. Really, though, it’s a personal guide for Eyres — who realises that the poet he first struggled to appreciate at school has valuable lessons to teach about love, wine and friendship. Now Eyres

It’s vital that children translate English to Latin at GCSE

One of the most rewarding exercises a Latinist can attempt is to turn a piece of English prose into Latin. The reason is quite simple: it means getting under the surface of the English meaning — to ‘get beyond the word to the thought behind it’ (Gilbert Murray) — and transferring it into a form most closely corresponding to a Roman way of thinking and writing. It takes one to the very heart of how Romans made sense of their world. Only someone with a supreme understanding of the Latin language and its culture can do that effectively. That master prose-composer Colin Leach was once asked in an exam to