1841. And Latin. And New York City

The 1840 census recorded a population of over 317,000 for New York City, making it just three times the size of the second-largest US city, Baltimore.

At the time, New York City still consisted only of Manhattan; Brooklyn was a separate city, the 7th most-populous in the US with just over 36,000 inhabitants. The Brooklyn Bridge, and the joining of the other boroughs to Manhattan in the area we now know as New York City, were still nearly a half-century away.

The upper crust of New York society was large, growing, entrenched, and committed to at least an appearance of acquaintance with the finer things in life, among which were considered to be at least a fair command of Latin and at least a slight acquaintance with Greek. The two largest universities in the city were Columbia College and New York University, the upstart democratic institution founded in 1831 and at that time, somewhat the opposite of today, committed to educating promising students from all classes of society. Professor Charles Anthon of Columbia published A Classical Dictionary in 1841. The New York Review, in a tone somewhere between admiration and disparagement, described Professor Anthon's volume as an effort to establish American Classical scholarship at a level "as may not blench in presence of European rivalry."

Besides Columbia and NYU, Princeton was not far away across the Hudson River, and educated many of New York City's upper crust; others attended various other institutions of the Ivy League.

1841. And Latin. And Ohio.

The Ohio State University was not founded until 1870, and was originally conceived as an "A&M" school, concentrating on agricultural and mechanical studies. I have not been able to determine when courses in Classics were first offered at the university, nor when a Department of Classics was established. Ohio State's law school was founded in 1891, so by that time, at the latest, Ohio State legal students surely must either have been offered some instruction in Latin, or expected to have gained some proficiency in the language elsewhere, before receiving their law degrees. The university had a baseball team by 1881.

I have learned not to trust my memory: as time goes by, things I've seen grow larger or smaller or more impressive or less impressive, in my memory, than they really were when I saw them. Countless examples have taught me how my memory distorts things. 25 years ago my interest in and knowledge of Latin was much less than it is now. So the fact that around 1990 I was wandering through the stacks of the Main Ohio State library and came across what seemed to me to be an absolutely huge collection of volumes of ancient Greek and Latin, does not mean that the same collection would look huge to me today, because along with the passage of 25 years comes the fact that in 1990 I was much less able to make a coherent assessment of a collection of Classical texts: I had much less knowledge to apply to what I saw. However, there is no doubt whatsoever that the layer of dust I saw resting upon row after row of Loeb's Classical Library and the Oxford Classical Texts, was the thickest layer of dust I have ever seen, anywhere.

There simply could not have been a more eloquent single image of an academic discipline which was much less studied at a particular university than it had once been.

All the same, one should keep in mind that although by 1990 I had learned to spot a row of green or red Loeb's or black (under the dust covers) Oxford Classics at a glance, I was not yet familiar with the orange Greek and light-blue Latin volumes from Teubner. So that it is just possible that next to those rows of Loeb's and Oxford Classics which looked so mighty to me at the time, covered with that immense amount of dust which made me so very sad -- Ah say Ah say it is just possible that right next to those dust-covered volumes were immense amounts of Teubner volumes rubbed clean of dust from constatnt and eager use.

Just possible, but, it seems to me, not bloody likely. For one thing, although I cannot be at all certain, I believe that the volumes I saw were shelved by author, rather than Loeb being segregated from Oxford and both of them from whatever other publisher.

Another possibility occurs to me: that huge layer of dust may not have meant that a once-popular field of study had fallen from favor. It may have meant that those Loeb and Oxford (and other?) volumes had never been in great demand by the student body of Ohio State. Perhaps the bulk of those volumes had been the gift of some philanthropist who was smitten with the Classics and had no idea that he or she was about to cast pearls before swine.

Both Ohio University and Miami University, Ohio, are considerably older than Ohio State.

When Miami University opened in 1824, its curriculum consisted of Greek, Latin, algebra, geography, and Roman history; the only degree offered was a Bachelor of Arts.

Now THAT'S more LIKE it!

That, unfortunately, is also everything which I have been able to learn regarding the use and cultivation of the Latin language up until 1841, in the territory which in 1803 became Ohio, the 17th United State.

1841. And Latin. And Photography

Photography existed in 1841 -- but how long it had existed by then, is debated. Since the 1820's, or longer. As far as the use of the Latin language by photographers in the early 19th century, one might think that the term camera, from camera obscura, Latin for dark chamber, indicates a familiarity with Latin among early photographers, but no: knowledge of the camera obscura, which is not exactly the same thing as what we call a camera, is attested as early as the 5th century BC, in the works of the Chinese philosopher Mozi. Aristotle, Euclid, Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci all were familiar with the camera obscura, and Kepler gave it its Latin name. When devices for making photographs were first named cameras in the 19th century, they were merely adopting Kepler's 17th-century term. The term photography -- from Greek, not Latin -- was used by John Herschel in 1839, and possibly by others before that. It is in the nature of Western learning that those familiar with Greek tend to be very familiar with Latin, and I think we may safely assume some knowledge of Latin on the part of Herschel, who attended Eton and Cambridge and translated the Iliad into English and was a founding member of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1820. But Herschel's Classical education does not necessarily say anything about the linguistic knowledge of other early photographers.

I have not been able to find any published works in Latin by John Herschel. And that seems strange for a man of his time, education and achievements. Of course, my not finding Latin works by Herschel should not be assumed to indicate that he published no such works. Perhaps he did not, or perhaps my trouble in finding such has more to do with lack of linguistic interests of those writing about Herschel today. Much the same can be said about my finding no Latin works by the early, traditionally-educated photographers Nicéphore Niépce and François Arago. William Henry Fox Talbot, another early-19th century photographer, went to Cambridge and won a prize in Classics there for crying out loud, and still, all actual Latin works by him have been cleverly, thoroughly hidden from me.

Louis Daguerre and Thomas Wedgwood came from less upper-crusty backgrounds and more therefore have had less occasion to learn Latin, although those backgrounds certainly don't make a knowledge of Latin on their part impossible.

The earliest confirmed date of a photograph of the Khyber Pass I could find: this one from 1878.

Of the Ottoman Empire, from 1864:

Baseball, 1862:

I'm flummuxed by my inability to find Latin works by such people as Herschel, Niépce, Arago and Talbot. Is this an indication of the beginnings of that notorious split and antagonism in Western culture between science and the humanities? It was as natural as could be that Kepler both experimented with optics and wrote in Latin. There was no reason why the one would have made the other less likely. And it would have been very strange indeed for Roger Bacon, probably the leading expert of his time on the subject of optics, to compose entire works in any other language than Latin, even though he was fluent in several other languages and was a pioneer and what we would recognize today as linguistics.

It's absurd and a disaster that today, tinkering with gadgets often makes a knowledge of Latin less likely, and vice versa.

1841. And Latin. And Slavery

In 1841, Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria signed a treaty agreeing to suppress slave trade. Opposition to slave trade was not always the same thing as abolishing slavery in one's own dominions: Britain, France, Prussia and Austria had already abolished slavery in their home states, although not in all of their colonies, while Russia would not free its serfs until 1861. The Ottoman Empire abolished slave trade from Africa in 1847, although it was not until 1882 that it abolished slavery throughout its territories, it having been already abolished in Egypt in 1877.

In the US South, railroad companies routinely owned slaves. Most of the Southern railways prior to the Civil War were built with slave labor. Much historical research remains to be done concerning the details of the relationship between slavery and railroads in the South.

South Carolina outlawed teaching slaves to read and write in 1740; Virginia did so in 1819. After the Civil War and emancipation, resistance to the education of blacks continued in the US and continues in some circles to this day, although today most no longer dare to express this opposition with complete frankness. If you doubt this, take a good look, in person, please, at a few inner-city public schools and public libraries in the US. While you're there, please take note of how much is being done with such appallingly meagre resources.

The earliest prominent African-American classical scholar of whom I know was William Sanders Scarborough (1852-1926), college president, author of a popular Greek grammar. Gradually, the Classics departments in the US have grown more diverse. Gradually. They cannot be said to have covered themselves with glory in this regard.

Although writing in the Latin language existed as early as the 7th century BC, the earliest writers of Latin to achieve enduring fame were Livius Andronicus (c284-c204 BC), Plautus (c251-c184), Ennius (239-169) and Terence (195-159), and both Livius Andronicus and Terence were born slaves and set free in recognition of their talents. There is some disagreement about who was the very greatest writer of Latin; some say Vergil, some say Cicero, some say Ovid, some say Sallust. Some say Horace, who like the other 4 lived and worked in the 1st century BC. Horace's father was born a slave. In ancient Rome, there most definitely were some major class barriers, and yes indeed, slavery was very widespread; but when it came to literature, the writing of slaves and former slaves and the sons of slaves was mentioned in the same breath as the writing of Emperors and Senators, and, with the exception of some Emperors known to be dangerous because of their vanity and need for flattery, was praised or criticized on its literary merit with no regard to its author's social position.

The Khyber Pass was an important part of the so-called "Silk Road," which was actually several land routes reaching from as far west as Europe to as far east as China, and the major land route between Asia and Europe for thousands of years. Columbus was looking for a passage to India -- and in 1492 until he died in 1506 he thought he had found it -- because in his time and until, well, until the rise of railroads, on long journeys sea travel was generally much quicker than land travel. Besides silk, popular items of trade on the Silk Road included gold, silver, ivory, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, jade, fur, lacquer, pomegranates, carrots, spices, porcelain, weapons, and, of course, human slaves.

1841. And Latin. And Migne

The name Migne has been very important to Medieval scholars since -- ta-daaaa! -- 1841.

This is Jacques Paul Migne, 1800-75,

a French priest and a publisher of a series of hundreds of volumes -- huge volumes. Huge inexpensive volumes -- of Latin Medieval writing, and another series containing hundreds more volumes, of Greek Medieval writing. The Latin series, the Patrologia Latina, was begun in 1841. Here's volume 41. Volumes 32-47 contain the complete works of Augustine. The series is numbered chronologically by the dates of the authors, from Tertullian in volumes 1 and 2 to Pope Innocent III in volumes 214-217. (Volumes 218-221 are indices.)

Medieval scholars today -- Migne called his series an ecclesiatical series rather than a Medieval one, but Medieval Latin almost always means Latin written by clergy, so, po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to, I say! -- are gradually replacing Migne's inexpensive volumes of Medieval source materials in Latin and Greek with extremely expensive ones. I mean, you wouldn't believe how much they charge for these newer editions. Anyway, it's all very splendid despite the amazing prices. (PS: Okay, actually, there are a few publishers offering brand-new editions of Medieval Latin texts at pretty reasonable prices. There are the Toronto Medieval Latin Texts, the Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies or MRTS, and the edition of Domesday Book published in many small paperback volumes by Phillimore and Co, Ltd. All of them actual bargains. And no doubt there are still other exceptions to the extremely-expensive rule, before we even get to the wide, wide topic of photographic reprints of pre-copyright items such as, for instance, Migne. Some of those reprints are quality products and some are crap. That topic deserves its own blog post.) (Some of these recent volumes smell like church pews. Or maybe it's the hymnals in those pews that give the pews that smell.)

1841. And Latin. And Germany

In 1841 there wasn't a single Germany as there is today. When someone said "Germany" back then, they may well have been referring to those people in central Europe who spoke German, who lived in a variety of different political entities.

Then again, it's not as if there is 1 political entity today in Central Europe where German-speakers live: besides Germany itself, German is the native language of Austria, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, about 2/3 of Switzerland; and about 1 million people in the French area of Alsace-Lorrain, which borders Germany and has passed back and forth between French and German control quite a few times; and about 1 million more in South Tyrol in northern Italy, bordering on Austria and Switzerland.

Also, there are millions of people who live in Germany whose 1st or 2nd language is Turkish. They've been there for decades, and gradually the German media and government have stopped ignoring their existence.

And of course today Germany is welcoming more refugees from Syria than any other country.

In 1841, the political make-up of Germany involved many different states. Here's a map of the German Bund, which existed from 1815 to 1866:

And it existed very uneasily, above all because of the rivalry between Prussia, the blue on this map in the north-east and again in the west, and Austria, the orange-brown... orange-tan... orange-yellow... I don't know how to describe the color of Austria on this map, but it's the large area predominating in the south-east on this map. In 1841 Prussia was busy annexing more and more of northern and western Germany, turning more and more of it blue on the map, while Austria was annexing more and more non-German territory east of the area which is colored and surrounded by the red line on this map: the German Bund. For example, the territory 3/5 of the way down the right-hand edge of this map, not colored in, labeled KGR UNGARN -- that's the so-called Kingdom of Hungary, which belonged just as entirely to Austria as the orange-brown-tan-yellow area. Hungary, despite its misleading name at this time, didn't have a monarch of its own: the King of Hungary was the Austrian Emperor. If you look close, you'll see that Prussia also has extensive territory east of the Bund. On this map it's colored very light blue.

There was a lot of discussion going on between 1815 and 1871 about whether Germany was going to adopt a "kleindeutsche Lösung" ("Lesser German solution") with Germany united without the Austrian lands, or a "grossdeutsche Lösung" ("Greater German solution"), including Austria-Hungary, and with the Prussian monarchy in Berlin sharing a lot of the power with the Habsburgs in Vienna. Sometimes such things were discussed with words and sometime they were discussed with guns.

"Lesser German solution" it was: in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War -- and 2 wars against Denmark, the First War of Schleswig (1848–51) and the Second War of Schleswig (1864), and the Austro-Prussian War (1866) -- the map of this region suddenly became much less colorful: all of Prussia plus everything inside the red line which wasn't Austrian was now one solid color, and was Germany, and most of it was now dominated to some degree or other by Prussia -- the Prussian King became the German Emperor in 1871 -- "Kaiser" is the German word for "Emperor" -- while Austria now called itself and all of its territories Austria-Hungary, and usually didn't bother to use more than one color on maps to indicate all of itself, which extended much farther to the east than does this map. For example, at this time there was no Poland on the map. All of Poland was divided between Prussia, Austria and Russia. All of south-east Europe belonged either to the Austrian (or Austro-Hungarian) Empire, or the Russian Empire, or the Ottoman Empire.

Hey, Steve, what you're saying, it's all -- yawn -- this is all really, really interesting and all -- yawn. stretch. blink -- but what does it have to do with Latin?

Lots and lots, actually. In 1841, in Prussia and in areas about to be swallowed up by Prussia, prestigious universities in Berlin and Heidelberg and Leipzig and Bonn and elsewhere were international centers of Classical scholarship; while in Austria, the Emperor and his family, the Habsburgs, were very, very Catholic, and Latin was going to remain the official language of the Catholic Church until 1962. By 1962 Austria had become much smaller than it was in 1841, having shrunk down to, oh, about 1/5 of the brown-orange-tan-yellow area on the map. Much of that shrinkage had to do with non-German people in the Austrian Empire wanting to rule themselves. Much of it also had to do with people in the Empire being Protestant or Orthodox or Muslim.

So how much of that tension between the German Catholic Habsburg dynasty and non-German and non-Catholic people also ended up in opposition to the Latin language? That's a very interesting question, and I don't know the answer. But in the rest of Germany, the part which was eventually more or less conquered and swallowed up by predominantly-Protestant Prussia, the Latin language had always had more academic and less religious and political associations, and so I'm guessing that it was much less affected by all of the political upheaval and change.

1841. And Latin. And Constantin von Tischendorf

Unlike railroads, the Khyber Pass, the Ottoman Empire and baseball, I've had no difficulty whatsoever in linking Constantin von Tischendorf to the Latin language in 1841. It was as easy as could be, of course.

To be precise, in 1841 he was still just Constantin -- or Konstantin, or Constantinus -- Tischendorf. The "von," or "of," or "de," was awarded to him in 1869 by the Russian Tsar. I don't know how the "of" of an aristocratic title is written in Russian. But most Russian aristocrats, and many German ones too, were perfectly comfortable with the French "de," which makes me a little less self-conscious about my ignorance of the Russian term. Today he's usually Constantin to those reading or writing in French, Konstantin in German and Constantinus in Latin; in his own time he was perfectly comfortable with all 3 spellings, one of many examples of why I oppose those who insist that there is such a thing as "correct" spelling.

But you're saying, "Yeah, yeah, Steve, whatevs, but who was this Tischendorf, and why was it 'of course' easy to link him to Latin?" And because you ask that, I can see that you're no New Testament scholar. He's the most prominent figure in the history of the field. He made the single most spectacular discovery, of all time so far, of 1 Biblical manuscript, the Codex Sinaiticus, which he found in several pieces and put back together during 3 visits to St Catherine's Monastery under Mt Sinai in 1844, 1853 and 1859.

(I think that Grenfell and Hunt's discovery of the manuscripts at Oxyrhynchus is more spectacular, but it's a discovery of many manuscripts, not just 1, and of many kinds, not just Biblical.)

Besides this world-famous discovery he also discovered several other manuscripts less well-known to the general public, but nearly comparable to Sinaiticus in the eyes of Biblical scholars.

He was a thoroughly professional academic Biblical scholar, fluent in Greek and Hebrew. And it just so happens that in Western civilization, almost all scholars who are fluent in Greek are fluent in Latin as well. It's a matter of course that ancient Greek texts are published in the West with prefaces and footnotes in Latin. And generally expected that those prefaces and notes will be more easily-understood by most readers than those Greek texts. In Tischendorf's case, there's no need to wonder whether he might have been a rare exception to the rule of mastery of Latin, because, like a typical mid-19th-century scholar in many a field, he wrote and published a great deal in Latin, perhaps more, if you count it all up page-by-page, than in his native German. Tischendorf published quite a lot before he turned 26 in 1841. Here's his 1837 dissertation, Doctrina Pauli apostoli de vi mortis Christi satisfactoria.

(It's ironic that among the ancient people who wrote and spoke Greek, knowledge of Latin was NOT assumed. The Latin-speaking Romans had a great admiration for Greek literature. Young Roman gentlemen were often sent to Athens to complete their educations. But the Greeks tended to underestimate the literary achievements made in Latin, and often they looked down their noses at Latin and refused to learn any of it at all, even after the Romans conquered the Greek-speaking regions, giving great practical benefit to a knowledge of Latin.)

All of the territory Tischendorf covered in Egypt, where he made all of his great manuscript discoveries, was a part of the Ottoman Empire at the time. It seems quite possible that he may have ridden the Cairo-to-Alexandria railway line, which opened in 1856. Given his quite busy professional life after the first discovery of parts of the Codex Sinaiticus in 1844, it seems that he only would have avoided riding European trains at some time during his life (1815-1874) if he had deliberately gone quite far out of his way to do so. It seems a very safe assumption that Tischendorf rode the rails at some point. Perhaps if I could find his diaries, it could go from an assumption to a certainty.

It seems unlikely, however, even though he traveled a bit around Germany and Switzerland before 1841, that he rode a train as early as 1841, simply because there weren't very many railways in that region yet.

As far as Tischendorf ever having been in the Khyber Pass -- I do not yet know enough to rule it out, but I believe that his travels beyond Europe were mostly or entirely confined to Egypt.

I have not yet found any evidence that Tischendorf ever heard of baseball, nor that during his lifetime any baseball players ever heard of him. But you never know. (I'm picturing some various tenuous possibility such as Mark Twain meeting Tischendorf during his travels in Germany and mentioning baseball. That's a pretty tenuous possibility, I think.)

1841. And Latin. And Baseball

Baseball was around by 1841, and, as many of you undoubtedly already know, Abner Doubleday didn't invent it. You may not be aware, however, that Doubleday never claimed to have invented it. I was not aware that he had never made any such claim, and I was getting set to denounce him as a lying self-promoter, but when doing research for this post I discovered that Abner Doubleday, who lived from 1819 to 1893 and was a US Army man from the time he entered West Point in 1838 until he retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1873, never mentioned baseball once in his letters, diaries or his two books, Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie, published in 1876, and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, published in 1882. The only time Doubleday can be shown to have mentioned baseball at all was in 1871 when he filed a request for baseball equipment for the men under his command.

It seems that no claim that Doubleday invented baseball can be found until the 20th century, years after his death. There are some signs that Doubleday was a cantankerous braggart at times, but absolutely no proof that he bragged about inventing baseball. Whoever made that up, it seems very unlikely that it was he.

James Naismith (a Canadian btw) invented basketball in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891, but no one invented baseball. It evolved over the course of centuries. Baseball and softball have many undeniable similarities to rounders. The earliest reliable report of a baseball game being played comes (like Naismith) from Canada in 1838. Overzealous American patriotism and a feeling that baseball was "America's game" probably account for why some felt the need to make up the story of Doubleday inventing the game in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. I don't think baseball was invented in Canada in 1838, I think it was played in the US and Canada before 1838, and quite possibly in other countries as well.

I know: some of you are saying, "Hey, Steve, this is all really fascinating and so forth, but were there any poems written in Latin about baseball in or before 1841?"

I don't know. I thought for sure I'd be able to find a slew -- a veritable slew -- of translations of "Casey at the Bat" into Latin, but that poem wasn't even written in English until 1888, and to my great surprise, the only translations of it I've been able to find are one into French, "Casey au bâton" by Paul Laurendeau (anOTHer Canadian!) and 2 into Hebrew: "Hator Shel Casey Lachbot" by Menachem Less and "Casey BaMachbayt" by Jason H Elbaum. I have yet to find anything written about baseball in Latin, original or translated from another language, verse or prose. Total failure on that front.

I've also found nothing at all about baseball being played in the Ottoman Empire. Surely that's just personal failure on my part, not a lack of anything to be found.

As far as baseball somewhere near the Khyber Pass: surely it will come as no surprise that an Afghani national baseball team has been formed since the arrival of US military personnel in that country in 2002. In 2013 they lost a game to their neighbor across the Pass, Pakistan, by a score of 34-0, which shouldn't come as a total surprise when you consider that the skills required in baseball and in cricket are similar in many ways, and that Pakistan won the Cricket World Cup in 1992 and was a close runner-up to Australia in 1999, while Afghanistan has had had only 1 appearance each in a World Cup and a World Twenty20. In fact, although cricket has been played in Afghanistan since the 19th century, Afghanistan's national cricket team is only a few years older than its national baseball team.

As far as baseball and railroads are concerned, connections are many and should be fairly obvious. Union Pacific claims that "By 1876, game times were being scheduled to coincide with train schedules," and the claim doesn't seem farfetched. Finding a connection between baseball and railroads as early as 1841 is proving more difficult.

As to whether baseball came to Mexico as early as the Mexican American War of 1846 to 1848, let alone 1841, that is controversial, although a confluence of baseball and railroads in Mexico as early as that war can be ruled out. Plans for Mexican rail lines began in 1837; however, the first line, between Mexico City and Veracruz, did not open until 1873.

1841. And Latin. And The Ottoman Empire

I have not been able to find much information about the knowledge or use of the Latin language in the Ottoman Empire in 1841. This of course should by no means be understood as indicating that there is little or nothing to be found out. In the 1840's the Empire was in the midst of a massive program of reform, re-organization and modernization which involved some imitation of Western Europe in things such as legal codes, finance, modes of dress and also education. Whether the latter included the great emphasis on Classical scholarship to be found at the time in Western universities, I do not know.

Here is a report by an Englishman who inspected the Seraglio collection of Greek manuscripts in 1907; his report, disappointing, to say the least, to anyone who had imagined a vast store of such manuscripts, includes one 15th-century "Lexicon Latino-Graecum et Graeco-Latinum."

Every now and then a Westerner would publish an account in Latin of his sojourn to the exotic Ottoman east, from Pierre Gilles' De topographia Constantinopoleos: et de illivs antiqvitatibvs, published in 1561,



to Victor Guerin's thesis De Ora Palaestinae: A Promontorio Carmelo Usque Ad Urbem Joppen Pertinente, published in 1856, in which descriptions of what Guerin himself had experienced in Palastine in 1852 and 1854 only very seldom interrupt the flow of quotations from ancient Greeks and Romans, the Bible and Crusaders.



I have mentioned before on the blog how Lord Charlemont, on his visit to Constantinople in 1749, asked his guide, whom he described as a "sensible Turk," whether the Seraglio library had by any chance preserved the lost books of Livy. Such anecdotes make one very curious about what such "sensible Turks" might have had to say about the eccentric Westerners who occasionally popped up in their midst. Who knows how much more I could tell you about things like that if I were fluent in Turkish or Arabic.

There appear to have been no railroads anywhere within the Empire in 1841; the earliest I have been able to find is the Alexandria to Cairo line, in operation from 1856. It seems that large-scale building of railways in the Ottoman dominions did not get underway until the 1880's. The lines dynamited by Lawrence of Arabia and his followers during WWI would've been 30 years old or less at the time.

The borders of the Ottoman Empire never advanced further eastward than the western shores of the Euphrates river and the Caspian Sea, about 1000 miles away from the Khyber Pass in a straight line by air, somewhat more than that by train and/or car.

1841. And Latin. And The Khyber Pass.

By 1841 railroads were not yet anywhere near the Khyber Pass. The first railroad in India opened in 1853. I can find no information about commercially viable rail lines operating anywhere in Afghanistan earlier than the 20th century. The Khyber Pass railway was opened in 1925.

The Khyber Pass has been one of the world's most important routes for business and military exploits since before Alexander the Great.

In 1841 as in 1925, the Khyber Pass, which today connects Afghanistan and Pakistan, was on the border between the area under British rule and Afghanistan. The British East India Company ruled in 1841, the British monarchy in 1925.

I have not been able to find any evidence that the East India Company ever supported Classical scholarship to a great degree in the area under its control. I assume that in 1841 the young Queen Victoria knew some Latin. Latin seems to have thrived longer and stronger among European royalty and high aristocracy than in many other places, and mid-19th-century Oxford and Cambridge are reputed to have been great centers of Classical scholarship, the scene of a Renaissance of Latin and Greek.

And they were not the only such centers. In 1841 the Bibliotheca Scriptorium Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana was still 8 years away: it began in 1849 in Leipzig. The Oxford Classical Texts series, obviously created in respectful imitation of the Teubner series, didn't begin until 1896. Teubner and OCT are huge figures in Classical publishing, but we must remember that they didn't suddenly appear from out of nowhere.

What I'm saying is that in 1841, many books were published in Latin, by a great variety of publishers in Europe and the United States, including many newly-written texts as well as texts written in antiquity and the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

1841. And Latin. And Trains.

In 1841 Søren Kierkegaard had to write to the King of Denmark for permission to present his dissertation, for a Master of Arts in Theology from the department of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, in Danish instead of Latin. I don't know how many dissertations presented there were written in Latin at the time, as opposed to Danish: whether they were almost all in Latin, and a request such as Kierkegaard's was unusual, or whether almost all were written in the vernacular, and the request was little more than a formality and a remnant of earlier times (the university was founded in 1479).

I would guess: neither. I would guess that a fair number of dissertations were written in each language at that time. In any case, Kierkegaard publicly (and successfully) defended the dissertation in Latin disputation on the 29th of September, 1841. Although the main text of the dissertation, Om Begrebet Ironi: Med Stadigt Hensyn Til Socrates, is in Danish, it begins with 12 theses written in Latin. And it contains many citations in Greek, Latin and German.

10 days before Kierkegaard publicly defended his dissertation, on the 19th of September, 1841, the world's first international railway line opened, between Strasbourg and Basel. Today most passenger trains take about 3 1/2 hours to get from Strasbourg to Basel. In 1841, presumably, it took a bit longer.

The first Danish railway would not open until 1844 if you consider Holstein to have been part of Denmark at the time, or 1847 if you do not. The Prussians considered Holstein to be part of Prussia, and after the Second Schleswig War in 1864, Denmark stopped contesting the matter.

In 1841 William Henry Harrison was inaugurated President of the United States on the 4th of March, and died of pneumonia on the 4th of April. Popular legend has it that Harrison contracted his fatal case on pneumonia while delivering an extraordinarily long Inaugural address on the 4th of March; actually, he did not fall ill until the 26th of March.

I do not know what state railroads were in in the USA in 1841. I cannot find any information of great events in the American railroad industry in that year. The first commercial American railroad opened in 1830, and between the 1830's and the 1860's American railways boomed, and replaced canals as the major method of transport. Plans for a great nationwide network of canals were abandoned.

I cannot tell what state the Latin language was in in the US in 1841, but I see signs to suspect that it was worse off there than in Europe. The Classics in America have had the bad luck that some very influential men have been anti-intellectual, and that some influential American intellectuals have been pretty stupid concerning the Classics they had been taught. As an example of the former, I have already in this blog pilloried Tom Paine: Part 1 Part 2

As an example of the latter, Benjamin H Latrobe, who was able to pass for a leading American intellectual at the time, writing in 1798 about the American curriculum, suggested that

"Terence, Phedrus, Ovid and other poets, from whom no one ever learned a single useful fact, should be rejected"

in favor of

"Justin's epitome of the history of Trogus Pompeius, as being an easy and entertaining writer,"

and also Nepos. After that shocking display, I think we can chalk up the fact that Latrobe also recommends some good writers, including Caesar, Livy, Tacitus, Horace and Vergil, to sheer dumb luck. Which Greek author does Latrobe praise above all others? Xenophon. What Greek work does he call the the worst of them all for schoolchildren, against which they must be protected at all costs? The Iliad.

And Paine and Latrobe, who may well have journeyed to America because they had to, because they were laughed out of the entire country of England for saying and writing such things, were and are counted among the best minds of the American Revolution and the early American republic.

That is how much of a chance Classical education had in the US.