By Gary Topping–
So the story goes like this: an over-zealous student of Latin gets the idea that since Latin is the root of all the Romance languages, one ought to be able to go to one of the Romance language countries and make oneself understood with nothing but Latin. He goes to Rome, and he asks the first person he encounters, “Ubi est flumen”? (Where is the river?) The Roman blinks his eyes and says, “Wow, you’ve been away for a long time”!
Latin is a “dead” language, meaning that despite the fact that people do learn to converse in Latin, there are no native Latin speakers. So there’s no reason to study it, right? I think there are good reasons to study Latin, and its very “deadness” is one of them.
If you study a modern language, say, Spanish, you’re going to spend a lot of time learning to ask where the rest room is, or how to order a glass of wine. And that’s the way it should be. If you find yourself plunked down in Seville, for example, your cab driver might well be interested in engaging you in a dialogue about the nature of true friendship, but at the moment he has some more pressing matters he needs to resolve.
There are no such pressing matters in Latin. You’re never going to have to worry about where the rest room is or how to order a glass of wine in Latin. You can detour around all that stuff and get right down to heavy matters. “I sing of arms and a man,” Vergil proclaims at the outset of The Aeneid. You think, in the first place, “Wow! Where is he going to go with that”? (Answer: a very, very long way.) Then you also think, “How many Spanish lessons am I going to have to sit through before I encounter a sentence like that”?
That’s the kind of stuff Latin deals with. Wheelock’s Latin, edited by Richard LaFleur, is by far the most popular Latin textbook, both for the classroom and self-study. Almost every one of its over five hundred pages is crammed with opportunities to translate Latin passages that are funny, entertaining or inspiring.
Let’s see, let me grab my Wheelock and open it at random and see what I find. Okay, here it is: Chapter 29. After lessons in grammar and vocabulary, we come to the exercises. The first one is adapted from one of Catullus’s poems: “You are thinking, Lesbia, how many of your kisses would be enough for me,” the passage begins. (Don’t be sucked in, Catullus; she’s going to dump you. I read ahead!) Unlike what you might find in Chapter 29 of your Spanish textbook, this one is completely impractical; in fact, if you spring that line on the first good-looking woman you encounter in Rome, you’re on your own, dude!
At the bottom of the page, we have a completely unadapted epigram of Martial: “Callistratus praises everyone, not just those who are worthy. If no one is bad, who can be good”? Think about that one the next time you encounter some glad-hander who goes around praising everyone in order to ingratiate himself with them.
Studying Spanish is a very worthwhile endeavor. I wish I had done it. But so is studying Latin. Even if you never develop a real fluency (as I have not), you will reap rich rewards all along the line. Read Cicero and you will go around with your head full of phrases extolling the value of true friendship or the advantages of growing old. It’s an ennobling experience.
