… I ought to be
glad
That I studied the classics at
Marlborough and Merton,
Not everyone here having had
The privilege of learning a
language
That is incontrovertibly dead
And of carting a toy-box of hall-marked
marmoreal phrases
Around in his head
Autumn
journal XIII
So Louis MacNeice, ironically.
The discarded
schoolbook of a boy uncle, the youngest of five and the only one of the family
in that generation to go to university, may have bequeathed to his nephew, the
present writer, such a toy-box treasure:
This pocket textbook, 4” X 6”, was apparently on the Leaving Certificate, or at least the Matriculation examination syllabus, in the Ireland of the early 1950s; it survived through casual neglect the seven decades since. The evident wear and tear is external: the interior is pristine and betrays no sign of assiduous study by its original owner, who was not seen in life again after his student years in UCC. Thereafter a year at the Sorbonne, where he met his French-Canadian wife and emigrated to Canada, dying there 60 or so years later in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, after a career as a much respected and well liked secondary school teacher.
The text was first published in 1879 and the school-text here is a 1949 reprint, by which time its eloquent and grammatically punctilious English must already have sounded arch and antiquated to the CBS schoolboy, and is today as incontrovertibly dead as MacNeice's Latin, all the more regrettably so.
Having set one's stubborn juvenile head stubbornly
against Latin, not tempted even by the remarkably modern parallels of Roman
history also bundled in the syllabus, the writer here must now content himself
with a copy of Jon R. Stone's Latin for
the Illiterati.
But all is not yet lost: if your Latin fails, the
notes of the learned T.E. Page are in themselves an education, even if
excruciatingly erudite in explaining the elegant stylistic inversions,
contractions and allusions in the poetry of Horace. The poet famously prized
the natural lifestyle on his Sabine farm over that of office and influence in
Rome. The pauperiem (Ode 1, line 18) of
his circumstances is not to be confused with its modern derivative, pauperism;
rather it was the status of a simple yeoman farmer. Carpe diem (live for now, but in a positive and not in a hedonistic
way) is echoed in similar maxims throughout Horace. Did you know that it was customary
to kick at, rather than to knock on doors (Ode IV, lines 13,14)? Now that's the
kind of vivid trivia that makes life in ancient Rome sound interesting!
Another thing the classical illiteratus such as the present writer might not know is that the
Peloponnese in the modern-day tourist Mecca of Greece is named from the house
of Pelops, whence many of the characters in the famed tragedies of Greek drama
(Ode VI, line 8). And, more trivia: what did the Romans wear under the toga? –
the tunica, a sort of T-shirt, whence tunic in English,
of course (VI, line 13). The chaps who invented the toga also realized that the
right tonsure was a fitting accompaniment, and barbers were introduced at Rome circa
300 BC (cf. Ode XII, line 41).
Aspiring potentates are liable to borrow greatness
from ancient Rome: Kaiser and Czar are merely transliterations of Caesar. And Duce, borrowed by Mussolini, meant not
emperor, but merely one of the generals leading the campaigns of Augustus (Ode
VII, line 27). At the ordinary, man-in-the-street level, Latin also had a words
to suit our moods: a morosus (Ode IX,
line 18), from which comes morose, meant one who consulted only his own
disposition, whereas a moriger was
one who consulted that of others. Such succinct terminology is not heard in
modern psychology.
There is wisdom to be mined in all the Odes. The
civilized horror with which 21st century sentiment reacts to
full-blown war in the Ukraine may already be read, refined in the affected
astonishment of Horace at the intention of Iccius to sell his carefully-formed
library in order to equip himself to take part in an imperial expedition of
plunder to Arabia Felix, south Arabia, the area corresponding to modern-day Yemen, war-torn even
today (Ode XXIX).
The Horace notes of T.E. Page are themselves clearly the work of a fine classical scholar and, lately discovered by your writer here, must come close to the satisfaction of reading and understanding the original Latin of the polished and witty poetic genius that was Horace.
Not tempted? Well, in that case the rhyming quatrains
of Colin Sydenham, secretary and subsequently chairman of the Horatian Society,
Horace, The Odes (2005), offer the
sheer pleasure of, as it were, easy listening.
