http://books.guardian.co.uk/lrb/articles/0,6109,580910,00.html
Veni, vidi, vici: how Latin lives on
Latin has survived the fall of empire, the rise of the vernacular and
the incomprehension of generations of schoolchildren. In this exclusive
online essay from the London Review of Books, Anthony Grafton charts
the history of the language and its users from Descartes to Derek
Jarman, and finds that reports of its death are greatly exaggerated
Thursday October 25, 2001
Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: From the 16th to the 20th Centuries by
Fran�oise Waquet, translated by John Howe. Verso, 346 pp., �20, 19
July, 1 85984 615 7
Every spring at my university's convocation, an undergraduate addresses
the assembled students, parents and faculty in Latin. Parents receive a
plain copy of the text, which few of them can read. Most of the
students can't read it either. But they receive a different, annotated
version. Footnotes, always written in Latin - 'hic ridete'; 'hic
plaudite' - identify in-jokes and references to local and national
events. By clapping, catcalling and laughing, the graduating seniors
delude their parents - so local tradition has it - into believing that
that their children have not only studied engineering, English or
chemistry, but also learned Latin.
No one takes the ritual entirely seriously. This year's speaker doffed
his academic gown and mortarboard to reveal that he was wearing a toga
and a laurel wreath. A previous one interrupted his speech to hold up a
sign, in English, asking a female classmate to marry him. (She agreed.)
But the Latin oration still matters. Like the Princeton campus's
splendid trees and hideous buildings, like This Side of Paradise and
The Duke of Deception, it forms part of the hazy, glowing nimbus of
traditions and practices that renders four years in central New Jersey
worth the formidable current price of some $140,000.
In the 16th century, mastery of formal Latin was the price of entrance
to schools and universities. Learned Europeans gloried in the wealth of
Latin's vocabulary - which Erasmus demonstrated, in his most popular
textbook, by compiling a list of more than a hundred elegant ways to
say "thank you for your letter". They savoured the variety and
distinctiveness of Latin styles, ancient and modern. Joseph Scaliger
noted with amusement that his favourite pupil at the University of
Leiden, Daniel Heinsius, would turn up "on some days drunk on Lipsius,
on others drunk on Muret, and on others drunk on Erasmus, and would
insist that all the rest are asses".
They composed Senecan tragedies and Catullan love poems, Tacitean
histories and Ciceronian dialogues, Plinian (Jr) letters and Plinian
(Sr) treatises on every imaginable subject from astronomy to zoology.
They even cracked Latin jokes. When a pedant irritated the poet
Nicodemus Frischlin by addressing him with clumsy formality, "Tu,
Frischline, vates," he replied, without missing a Latin beat: "Tu mihi
lambe nates." The story delighted generations of schoolboys - who, in
those happy days, did not need to be told that the great scholar had
told his interlocutor to kiss his arse.
Latin, in short, played vital roles in the first modern age. From
Prague to Peru, it served as the arena of literary artistry, the
vehicle of scientific communication and the medium of common-room
gossip. Individuals across Europe and beyond knew Latin as intimately,
loved it as passionately and rolled it off the tongue as easily as they
did their native languages.
Then, apparently, something happened. By the beginning of the 20th
century, as AE Housman remarked more in anger than sorrow, even
professional Latinists revealed on every page of their work that they
lived "in an age which is out of touch with Latinity". What trajectory
did Latin follow between its heyday in the Renaissance and its slow
death by a hundred bad conjectural emendations and a thousand cuts in
curricula and budgets?
Traditional histories of modern Europe have treated Latin with some
ambivalence. The humanists made the ability to write obedient pastiches
of Cicero and Catullus the outward sign of inward cultural grace. They
wished to re-create something like ancient literary culture, not that
they would have put the task in those terms, and to revive a form of
education based on grammar, rhetoric and poetry, history and moral
philosophy, and designed to form an elite of generalists equipped to
lead an active life in State or Church.
Petrarch and his followers challenged the supremacy of scholastic
philosophy and theology. They forged a new Latinate public sphere in
which the questions that mattered most could be accessibly and
eloquently debated. Revolutionaries who looked backwards, they ended up
not only reviving lost skills, but creating a new world: one in which
the doctrines and teaching authority of the Church proved as vulnerable
to challenge as the methods of the late medieval university. To that
extent, the revival of classical Latin makes a logical beginning to the
story of the modern age.
In the long term, however, the preservation of classical Latinity
proved incompatible with the creation of a new intellectual world.
Writers such as Alberti and Montaigne, though steeped in the classics,
used French and Italian to discuss contemporary issues and reach a
large public. The 16th-century Reformers were also fine Latinists -
Luther gossiped with his pupils about his dream life and the
apparitions of the devil as easily in Latin as in German. But they
translated the Bible and the liturgy into German and French and
English, and they insisted that the medieval Church had used Latin to
keep the most precious religious truths inaccessible to ordinary lay
people. Natural philosophers such as Galileo and Boyle argued that one
could discuss the most recondite problems of astronomy and chemistry in
Italian or English.
French replaced Latin as the common language of the citizens of the
republic of letters. By the 18th century, even the greatest compendia
of knowledge - Diderot's Encyclop�die, for example - were usually
written in French or other modern languages. Latin had lost its
practical utility. Progress-minded Philosophes attacked its persistent
use in universities and other erudite circles as one more relic of the
Old Regime. No wonder, then, that active command of Latin declined so
radically, to become all but extinct in recent centuries. The language
that had served as the banner of modernity in the Renaissance had
turned into a symbol for traditionalism and intellectual sclerosis.
In Latin, or the Empire of a Sign, Fran�oise Waquet tells a much more
nuanced story. From the start, she emphasises that Latin was always as
much a matter of ritual as of substance. True, the school, from the
16th century on, was "Latin country". Boys were required to speak Latin
in Renaissance classrooms, where spies, known as "foxes", informed on
those who slipped into the vernacular. Masters lectured in Latin on
Latin texts, and the most successful pupils learned to produce Latin
prose and verse on demand. But many boys, perhaps a majority,
confronted with towering grammatical structures, typographical
monkey-puzzle trees which they often had to memorise before they really
understood that they were studying a foreign language, found their
entrance to this country blocked, not facilitated, by the traditions of
Latin pedagogy. When Winston Churchill began Latin, at the age of
seven, he opened his grammar and found himself staring, bug-eyed, at
the first declension, which his textbook exemplified but did not
explain:
Mensa - a table
Mensa - o table
Mensam - a table
Mensae - of a table
Mensae - to or for a table
Mensa - by, with or from a table
"What on earth did it mean?" he asked readers many years later. "Where
was the sense in it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me." He had
managed to memorise "the acrostic-looking task", but enquired about the
paradox that mensa could mean both "a table" and "o table". The master
explained that one would use the vocative mensa when '"addressing a
table, in invoking a table". And then seeing he was not carrying me
with him: "You would use it in speaking to a table." "But I never do,"
Churchill protested, even more baffled - only to be threatened with
severe punishment for his impertinence. This form of pedagogy - which
established itself in the Renaissance and survived until relatively
recent times - turned the Latin school into a labyrinth, whose centre
many never reached.
Even schoolboys who managed to master Latin grammar read a very limited
canon, which changed little over the centuries: Cicero, Terence, some
poets and historians, usually pulled from their contexts and presented
without any of the background information that could have made them
come alive. Miguel de Unamuno, for example, found himself tormented by
boredom as he and a friend translated their way, word by word, though
the "intolerably dry" works of Nepos, Sallust and Caesar. Eventually,
he became convinced that the Latin writers had first written down their
thoughts straightforwardly, like the moderns, and then amused
themselves by "dislocating the phrases, dissecting the sentences,
scattering the words here and there with capricious abandon, simply to
annoy us, the children of future generations".
Thomas Hughes vividly revealed in Tom Brown's Schooldays how Latin
verses were composed, as boys desperately sewed shreds and patches
drawn from the Gradus ad Parnassum into verses that could be scanned
and more or less made sense. Even some great writers of Latin, the
historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou for instance, could hardly speak the
language: "It is said that some Germans and some Englishmen, having
heard him speaking so badly at home, quaerebant Thuanum in Thuano"
("sought for de Thou in de Thou").
Critics of classical education and classical scholars agreed on at
least one point: they deplored the low levels attained in most
classical schools. Educational reformers such as Jan Amos Comenius and
Enlightenment thinkers such as Helv�tius held that schools based on
drudgery and dead languages could have no other results. The
professionals, for their part, insisted - generation after generation -
that once upon a time, things had been better.
But this pan-European Golden Age was a myth - as Waquet shows by
tracing nostalgic evocations of it back through time and by offering
wonderful examples of classroom life. (The young Verlaine, trying to
conjugate lego, found himself stumped when asked for the perfect,
guessed legavi, and floundered - until a would-be helpful friend
whispered: "lexi". The master howled, and threw his keys and a Latin
dictionary. Fortunately he missed. All this not in the barbarous 21st
century but the disciplined and erudite 19th.)
Even periods of local brilliance in Latin writing did not always
reflect superb teaching in schools and universities. When James Boswell
showed Samuel Johnson his Latin thesis, the doctor shook his head at
the many solecisms and remarked: "Ruddiman is dead, sir, Ruddiman is
dead." He knew that the high quality of the Latin dissertations
previously submitted to the Society of Advocates in Edinburgh resulted
not from extra-good schooling but from the corrections provided by the
great Neo-Latin scholar and editor Thomas Ruddiman.
In Catholic countries, the Church provided the other forum where Latin
was in constant active use. The medieval Church staunchly resisted
efforts by Slavs, Waldensians, Lollards and others to translate the
liturgy into vernacular languages. Sixteenth-century Protestant and
Catholic reformers who demanded a vernacular Mass met with condemnation
at the Council of Trent.
A particular form of Latin thus came, over time, to symbolise and
embody the traditions and majesty of Catholicism - and was charged with
deep meaning by many prelates and intellectuals. At Vatican II, John
XXIII himself dwelt lovingly on the universality, antiquity and majesty
of the Latin language, which Providence - so he argued - had led the
Church to adopt. Catholics, then, were bombarded every Sunday with a
form of Latin that came to be, in some ways, consubstantial with their
religious beliefs, associated with them almost as tightly as Hebrew
with Judaism.
Even in the centuries when priests performed the Mass in Latin alone,
many of them had little or no idea what they were saying. Reformers
complained that ignorant priests rattled off the words of the liturgy
in absurdly corrupt forms. One friend of Erasmus, who notoriously
reproved a priest for saying "Mumpsimus", rather than "Sumpsimus",
received a revealingly dusty answer: the man had been doing it that way
for twenty years and saw no reason to change his habits.
Seminary administrators complained in later centuries that few priests
voluntarily studied a wide range of Latin authors, and fewer still
could express complex thoughts effectively in Latin. As to the
congregations, most of their members had only a general understanding
of what the priest said and the choir sang. When the 15th-century
humanist Leonardo Bruni wanted to demonstrate that ordinary Romans
could not have understood the oratory of Cicero and the plays of
Plautus and Terence in detail, he compared them to modern Italians at
the Mass: "Men of distinction could understand an orator speaking in
learned Latin very well, but bakers and trainers of gladiators and
riff-raff of that sort understood the orator's words as they now
understand the liturgy of the Mass" - that is, "they understand, but
they cannot speak that way themselves".
Yet Latin pervaded the early modern world, and even the modern one, in
multiple ways that Waquet carefully traces. Though vernacular books
became more numerous than Latin ones in Paris by the 1570s, and English
dominated the London booktrade, Latin retained pre-eminence in Italy
and the Holy Roman Empire until deep in the 17th century. In every
country, moreover, most scholars who wished to address a public not
limited to their own kingdom continued for centuries to write in Latin.
Some of the most radical prophets of modernity - Descartes, Grotius and
Newton - felt that they could address the deepest questions about
nature and nature's laws, Scripture and tradition, more proficiently in
Latin than in their native languages. Into the 18th century, diplomats
continued to study Latin, and often used it in negotiations (a number
of monarchs, like Elizabeth I and Philip II, also spoke it accurately
and well). For the old, teleological story, in which the vernaculars
marched forward to a natural triumph, Waquet substitutes something much
more complex: a dance, in which every forward movement was complemented
by a backwards one, and which, she argues, took centuries to degenerate
into a Totentanz.
Perfect command of the language of Catholic liturgy was reserved for
clerical elites and a few highly-educated laymen. But Church Latin
permeated local cultures and dialects. In the early 19th century,
Tuscan dialects swarmed with strange beings such as Santo Fic� (formed
from Latin sanctificetur). In Lucca, "Homo natus de muliere" ("man born
of woman"), the opening phrase from a reading from the book of Job,
became a proverb, "omo nato deve morire" ("man, who is born, must die").
Nineteenth-century congregants in Britanny eagerly assented to the dies
irae. Di�z means "difficult" in Breton, and they agreed: "all this is
far from easy, we have every reason to repeat the word". Creative
misunderstandings like these gave the Latin Mass a participatory
feeling, and helped ordinary Catholics make the set liturgy, in some
part, their own. The mysterious, half-understood and wholly familiar
Latin of the Church often had a charm, a magical quality, which
translation would destroy after Vatican II, and Waquet evokes this
brilliantly.
Latin, in other words, was not a single language, but a congeries of
dialects, each of which flourished in a particular locale and played a
particular role - a fact underlined by the unintentional comedies that
took place every time scholars from more than one country tried to
carry on a conversation in Latin. When the great Huguenot scholar
Samuel Bochart asked permission to attend a public ceremony in Oxford
in 1621, the MA to whom he addressed himself thought that he was
begging.
Yet Latin fulfilled certain purposes almost everywhere in Europe. First
and foremost, it made the gentleman (at least when it wasn't being used
to say "Will work for food"). In the Renaissance, to be sure, using too
much Latin identified one as no gentleman, but a player. Castiglione
and Montaigne distinguished sharply between the pedant, who clumsily
spouted Latin tags at every opportunity, and the adroit, supple
gentleman.
But over the next two hundred years, Latin inevitably lost its
practical function. Modern textbooks, histories and reference works
replaced ancient ones for most practical purposes, French became the
international language of gentlemen, and schools made less and less
effort to produce real fluency in their pupils. At exactly the same
time, Waquet shows, Latin became a necessary accomplishment for anyone
who aspired to gentility. Or at least the study of Latin became
necessary - though few were expected to retain it in adulthood. "Do you
think Sir John Crake, the master of the harriers, knows Latin?" - Tom
Tulliver asks Philip Wakem in The Mill on the Floss. "He learned it as
a boy, of course," replies his more sophisticated friend, "But I
daresay he's forgotten it."
In fact, the lack of practical utility made Latin all the more
attractive, as a pure mark of distinction. It became the "chapeau bras"
of high culture, as Benjamin Franklin astutely remarked - the hat that
a man of fashion carried under his arm even though his wig made it
superfluous. It survived the fall of the Ancien R�gime to become the
accomplishment of the 19th and early 20th-century bourgeoisie, who
enjoyed, in the words of Louis MacNeice, "the privilege. . . of
learning a language that is incontrovertibly dead" - as well as the
privilege of seeing others excluded from learning it.
For practitioners of the learned professions, Latin served another set
of purposes, some of them richly contradictory. It could mystify, and
create authority, as it did for doctors, from Moli�re's Sganarelle,
whose fake Latin amazes his bourgeois patients ("Aye," one remarks,
"it's all so proper, I can't understand a word of it"), to the real
ones who infested the Piazza Navona at Rome, hefting big books in Latin
and Greek which they quoted to justify the useless nostrums they
proposed. It did the same for civil lawyers - about whom Waquet could
have said more - as their clients and their critics regularly
protested. Yet Latin could also express what otherwise could not be
expressed. A learned man could properly discuss obscene and sexual
matters, so long as he did so in Latin.
Latin, in other words, had a double power: it could conceal or reveal.
It prevented the supposedly vulnerable young person from reading such
potentially corrupting texts as Isaac Vossius's pioneering study of
ancient brothels, or J.H. Meibom's essay of 1639 on sexual masochism,
or Gibbon's discussions of the sexual proclivities of the Empress
Theodora.
Yet it also made possible the production of the first modern literature
on sexuality, as Waquet shows in fascinating detail, enabling a male
cultural elite to say what "the prevailing norms would not allow to be
stated in everyday language". Indeed, Latin sometimes assumed an erotic
or sexual flavour - especially when futile and obvious efforts at
bowdlerism of school texts sent boys leaping into their paternal
libraries to read, and never to forget, the full story of Catullus'
love life and Horace's premature ejaculation.
This rich and cosmopolitan study of a universal language has its
limitations. It is, first of all, a little provincial - or at least
hexagonal. Waquet's account of noble education fits French
circumstances much better than English or German ones. In England and
Germany - especially the mid-19th-century England of reformed
universities and public schools - Greek played a greater role than
Latin in conferring social distinction, and many developed a strikingly
active command of it.
When one 19th century undergraduate read aloud his diary of a journey
to Italy and mentioned the cost of a "painted beauty", another stormed
out of the room, contemptuously remarking, in Greek: "We are lovers of
beauty without extravagance." The others knew that he was quoting
Pericles' funeral oration, from Thucydides. Greek, however, passive or
active, receives little attention here, since Waquet's standpoint is
that of the French schools, firmly embedded in a tradition of Latin
rhetoric that goes back to the 16th century municipal and Jesuit
colleges (which, incidentally, laid down the rule that no one could
master Latin without Greek).
Though Waquet looks back to the lost world of active Latin users less
in anger than in admiration, she seems oddly reluctant to evaluate - or
even to write about - the artistry exhibited in much Neo-Latin prose
and verse. The Latin writers of the 15th century and after composed
lullabies and love elegies, epithalamia and epics, hymns to the pagan
gods and the Christian God, ambitious histories of their times and
mordant satires on life at court and university.
Many of the most distinguished vernacular poets, from Petrarch to the
members of the Pl�iade to Milton, wrote Latin when young to obtain what
Leonard Forster called their "training in poetic diction" and continued
to do so as adults, producing what they and their readers saw as
independent works of art. Such extraordinary creations as Fracastoro's
Syphilis and More's Utopia match anything written in any European
language of their time for distinction of form as well as originality
of content.
The reader who hopes to explore this uncharted mare magnum of early
modern literature will have to look elsewhere for guidance - for
example, to the pioneering surveys by James Binns and the late Josef
Ijsewijn, and to the lively survey of the Latin prose of the 17th and
18th centuries, published - in Latin, of course - last year by the
Russian philologist Oleg Nikitinski.
Despite the wonderfully subversive materials Waquet compiles, moreover,
she falls prey at times to the very nostalgia that she elsewhere
deconstructs. Again and again, she mourns the death of Latin
everywhere, except among tiny groups of scholars.
When the British film director Derek Jarman was making his film
Sebastiane, whose script is in Latin - part of the decadent thematic
central to Jarman's oeuvre - he was forced by the incompetence of some
actors in Latin to abridge their lines. It really is all over, what the
Goncourts coarsely called "going to bed with Latin books", the fruitful
commerce that Western civilisation maintained with the classical tongue
for centuries. Latin no longer says anything, or hides anything.
This is plain wrong. "How did they read Livy," Zbigniew Herbert asked -
"my grandfather my great-grandfather" - and answered the question with
a poem that became a modern erotic classic and an anthem of the Polish
resistance to Soviet tyranny. Reading the stately prose of Roman
history assured him, and many others, that someday "the empire will
fall". If Latin could survive being a required subject, it can survive
anything. Epitaphs - even lapidary ones in capital letters - are
premature.
For the most part, though, this is a splendid book: original in method,
suggestive in argument, and a pleasure to read. Waquet has shown us how
an ancient language became a sign - if not the sign - of modern Europe.
She has proved that even in a period of relative quiescence, French
historiography can still tell new stories in new ways. And she has
shown my colleagues and me that the barrage of Latin to which we are
subjected once a year under the harsh New Jersey sun represents not the
travesty of something that was once great but one stage in a long,
complex tradition that continues to grow and change.
� Anthony Grafton's many books include Joseph Scaliger and The
Footnote. The latest is Leon Battista Alberti.
� To read more online essays from the current edition of the London
Review of Books visit the LRB. The extensive online archive of essays
from past includes John Lanchester on the rise of Microsoft, Alan
Bennett's Diary and much more.
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