Fun and games with a dead language
play. When someone asks me what my sign is, I say, “Cancer. One of the
top twelve.” Then I watch the wheels go round in his head until he says,
“Oh.” Sometimes the person I’m talking with catches on fast and says, “And
I’m Taurus, another of the top twelve.”
I mention this because I’m inventing a new game. One of the books I’m
currently reading is a fascinating work by Nicholas Ostler,
Ad Infinitum: a Biography of Latin and the World It Created.
This is a history of the language that (after classical Greek) was once
considered the most important language in the world. From its earliest
days until Vatican II, when the Roman Catholic Church permitted masses
in vernacular languages, Latin held the universality that English has held
for the last couple of centuries. So here’s my proposed new mind game:
“Back when I was studying Latin in high school and Julius Caesar was sending
daily dispatches of his Gallic wars straight to my Latin class….” Or, “A
couple thousand years ago, when I was reading Caesar’s reports hot off
the presses….” Then, as I watch the wheels go round again, I’ll get to
say, “Of course I’m not really two thousand-plus years old. And I bleach
my hair!”
Just so we all know, Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE) was a Roman
enfant terrible and an
homme even more
terrible, who had three of his own wives plus, it’s said, the wives
of all the Roman senators. One story about him is that when he was kidnapped
by pirates as a teenager (or at age 25), he outtalked them and ended up
becoming a sort of pirate king. (It’s kind of like O. Henry’s “Ransom of
Red Chief,” but without the humor.) Caesar spent nine years conquering
Gaul (modern France), and when he marched back to Rome and crossed the
Rubicon River in northeastern Italy, his action started the civil war that
led to his assassination, the end of the Roman Republic, and the foundation
of the Roman Empire. (Cleopatra was in Rome when Caesar was murdered; she
promptly went home to Egypt.) Caesar’s death was dramatized by Shakespeare.
I have a DVD of the 1953 movie starring Louis Calhern as Caesar, James
Mason as Brutus, John Gielgud as Cassius, and Marlon Brando as Antony.
Without even a tiny hint of Stanley Kowalski—Brando could really act.
Back when I was in high school in the 1950s, that famous Republican Golden
Age, Latin was one of the popular electives. “Take Latin,” they told us.
“It’ll teach you to think logically. You’ll learn how English grammar works.
You’ll learn a lot of history. It’ll make it easier if you decide to take
another language.” I bought it. I took two years of Latin.
What I remember best about Latin II is that we had a page or two of Caesar’s
Commentarii de Bello Gallico (
Commentaries on the Gallic War) to translate every night. Latin was
a complicated language. Ostler writes, “As every schoolboy [
sic.] once knew, Latin had four different classes of verbs…known
as conjugations.” (p. 24). Verbs were conjugated in six tenses (present,
imperfect, future, perfect, past perfect, future perfect), two voices (active
and passive), and three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative)…“altogether
a large set of combination.” These combinations has up to six forms to
express person and number (I, you, he/she/it, etc.) plus infinitives (to
do, to have done), participles (doing, done, about to do), a supine (in
order to do), and a gerundive (which is to be done) (p. 24, n). Nouns followed
five patterns called declensions, with different forms for the noun’s function
in a sentence: nominative (subject), accusative (object), genitive (“for
a noun dependent on another noun”), dative (for a recipient), ablative
(for a source), locative (for a place), and vocative (for an addressee)
p. 25)
Whew! Is it any wonder that when our Latin II class was voting to ask
Miss Doyle to teach a Latin III class, I voted no? I knew all that stuff
and wasn’t sure I wanted to know more. To this day, however, I wonder what
we might have read and translated in Latin III. Probably the great Roman
poets and historians from the Golden Age—Ovid, Livy, Cicero, Virgil, Lucretius,
Catullus, and that bunch. I didn’t read these authors until graduate school,
when I read them in English translation in my classes in 18th-century literature.
I’ve never been a Latin scholar. When a friend asked if I wanted to take
German I, I remembered that someone had said German nouns have a dative
case. That was enough to make me say no again. I took French instead. I’m
glad I took Latin, though, because I’ve always been fascinated by the lessons
of history. I bet I’m not alone in seeing parallels between ancient Rome
and the U.S.
I wish I had time to sit around and read all day, but I don’t, so I’m
still working my way through the book. I’m up to Chapter 11 now. I’ve read
about how, after the takeover of Latin by the Roman Catholic Church, the
collapse of the Roman Empire, and the migrations of the Germanic tribes
across Europe, the
grammatica of classical Latin was altered and Latin’s daughters,
the Romance languages, were born. I’m learning something on every page.
It seems that an early Christian bishop invented silent reading; before
that, people always read aloud.
Although Latin got changed a lot during the so-called Dark Ages, the lives
of ordinary people didn’t change much when Rome “fell.” They just went
on doing what they’d been doing. A good book about this is by Peter S.
Wells,
Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered, which I also
recommend. And while we’re on the subject of the fall of the Roman Empire,
see if you can find a 2007 movie called
The Last Legion, which stars Colin Firth as a legionary who takes
young Romulus Augustus, the last western emperor, to England and they somehow
wind up entangled in the Arthurian mythos. It’s so awful it’s funny. And
Ben Kingsley’s in it as Merlin. If you want accurate information on the
Roman emperors, there’s Michael Grant’s book,
The Roman Emperors: A Biographical Guide to the Rulers of Imperial
Rome 318 B.C.-A.D. 476
But enough recommendations. I’ll end with a paragraph from Ostler that
I stopped and read three times. “Languages create worlds to live in, not
just in the minds of their speakers, but in their lives, and their descendants’
lives, where those ideas become real. The world that Latin created is today
called Europe. And as Latin formed Europe, it also inspired the Americas.
Latin has in fact been the constant in the cultural history of the West,
extending over two millennia. In a way, it has been too central to be noticed:
like the air Europe breathed, it has pervaded everything:” (p. 20).
