Books about Latin: Perhaps There's Some Life in the Old Corpus Yet

[Harold F. Schiffman]

December 14, 2007
Books of The Times
Perhaps There's Some Life in the Old Corpus Yet
By WILLIAM GRIMES

AD INFINITUM

A Biography of Latin By Nicholas Ostler Illustrated. 382 pages. Walker &
Company. $27.95.

CARPE DIEM Put a Little Latin in Your Life By Harry Mount Illustrated. 259
pages. Hyperion. $19.95.

Latin might be dead, but it continues to twitch. Long after its
disappearance as the common tongue of Europe, it survives as a remarkably
successful brand, exuding dignity and permanence. Its numerals add
prestige to luxury cars, the dials of expensive watches and every new
edition of the Super Bowl. A Latin inscription, like nothing else,
indicates lofty purpose and high culture, even when it appears on
celebrity flesh. Quod me nutrit me destruit (What nourishes me destroys
me), proclaims the stomach of Angelina Jolie. Much more impressive than
the now effaced Billy Bob.

Yet Latin, in its infancy, showed few signs of emerging as a superstar,
Nicholas Ostler points out in Ad Infinitum, his lucid, erudite and elegant
history of the language he calls the soul of Europes civilization. Until
the third century B.C. it was simply one of several regional dialects
spoken in Italy, a pipsqueak compared with Etruscan.

So what happened? Three things, argues Mr. Ostler, the author of Empires
of the Word: A Language History of the World. First, when the Roman armies
conquered, they did not destroy. Instead they formed alliances and created
Roman settlements, with the choice tracts of land awarded to Romans.
Latin, the language of the new elite, immediately became a mark of
prestige.

Second, wherever they went, the Romans conscripted young men into their
army, where the commands were given in Latin, and retired soldiers often
settled on the territory of their final campaign, further extending the
community of Latin speakers. Wherever the Roman has conquered, he
inhabits, Seneca wrote.

Third, the Romans built roads, putting the capital and its language within
reach of the provinces. All roads led not just to Rome but to Latin, which
enjoyed distinct advantages over its major rivals, Oscan and Etruscan.
Unlike them, Mr. Ostler writes, it was a farmers language, a soldiers
language and a city language. Also, not incidentally, it was backed by a
mighty army and a strong government.

Latin nevertheless suffered from an inferiority complex in its adolescent
years. One of Mr. Ostlers most fascinating chapters deals with the
self-conscious program undertaken by Latin writers to replicate the
achievements of the Greek philosophers, playwrights and poets, a process
that lasted centuries and required trailblazers like Cicero to coin words
like qualitas (literally how-ness) to make Latin express abstractions.

Eventually Rome declared cultural independence from Greece, and Latin
emerged as the principal identifying feature of the far-flung Roman
empire, in the end proving more durable than the empire itself. Latin was
to become the distinguishing mark of a (western) Christian, and hence a
Roman, even after the collapse of the Empire and consequent disappearance
of any emperor, Mr. Ostler writes.

As the language of the Roman Catholic Church, Latin not only survived but
also thrived for another millennium, the universal language uniting all
educated inhabitants of a politically fractured Europe. The uneducated
communicated in rustica romana lingua, or hick Latin, better known today
as Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish and Romanian. These mob dialects
would eventually break Latins stranglehold, but not before the 16th and
17th centuries. Until then the force of the vernacular was only to
redefine, and nuance, the persistent role of Latin, Mr. Ostler writes.

Latin may seem as unchanging and eternal as the marble on which it is so
often inscribed, but Mr. Ostler traces the remarkable stylistic changes it
underwent over the centuries. Rough-hewn and direct in the writing of the
church fathers, it went on a borrowing spree from Greek and Arabic during
the Middle Ages, as scholastic philosophers generated a profusion of new
words. During the Renaissance the flash and splendor of classical learning
became a genteel accomplishment, and older models of elegance and
restraint returned to favor.

The rise of the bourgeoisie spelled the end of Latin. A property of the
elite, it toppled along with the rest of the worlds princes and kings.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, an almost immediate reform (in
1920) was to eliminate Latin in schools, Mr. Ostler writes. It lives on in
sciences like botany and astronomy, but as a medium of expression or
cultural glue, Latin now exists in the past tense.

Hope flickers. Harry Mount, formerly a Latin tutor and now a journalist,
wages a spirited rear-guard action in Carpe Diem, his plea to put aside
all fear and embrace the challenge of learning Latin.

Like a trainer who promises a washboard stomach in 60 days, Mr. Mount
throws out a short Latin inscription  the epitaph on the tomb of the great
Renaissance humanist Leonardo Bruni  and swears that anyone who makes it
through his little books will be able to translate it at the end.
Rock-hard ablatives in 259 pages.

This may be possible in theory, but most readers, despite the authors
noisy cheerleading, will pull up short when faced with Latins notorious
system of noun declensions. These can be mastered only through relentless
drilling reinforced, George Orwell said, by corporal punishment.

Mr. Mount recognizes the difficulties. The perfect tense has all sorts of
irregular endings, varies greatly across the conjugations, and is the
point where verbs have a sort of nervous breakdown and go into meltdown,
he writes. To boost morale he sprinkles his text with digressions on, for
example, the toga party in Animal House and introduces humorous examples
of Latin usage. Arnold Schwarzenegger should properly be known as the
gubernator, not the governator.

Carpe Diem is a trifle with an astonishing amount of filler for such a
short book. The passion is genuine, though, and Mr. Mount quite rightly
takes the high ground in making his appeal. The really useful thing about
Latin is not so much that it will help you understand English as that it
will help you understand Latin, in which some of the most stirring prose
and poetry ever was written, he writes.

Verb sap, as they say.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/books/14book.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print