Recent and Contemporary Latin Prose

Over the course of the past 30-odd years, I have taught myself a small amount of Latin. In 1989 I received a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in German and English and a minor in French, and I studied more German in graduate school, without obtaining any graduate degree.

Otherwise, all of my language acquisition has occurred outside of classrooms. My method of learning Latin may be unusual -- I don't actually know whether it is -- and perhaps it is not to be recommended: I have read little bits of Latin textbooks, but really not very much at all. Almost all of my attempt to learn Latin has consisted of looking at Latin texts, in editions by Teubner and Oxford Classical Texts and the Rolls Series and MGH, and Loeb, and some editions from the 19th century and earlier from publishers like Weidmann -- just looking at the texts and trying to read them, and occasionally going to a dictionary or textbook for help. And then looking at the Latin texts again, over and over, until I begin to understand them somewhat better. And then looking at them some more.

In the case of recent editions from Teubner and Oxford Classical Texts, in which the editors' prefaces have been in Latin in every case I've seen except one -- in such cases, often I'm much more familiar with the modern prefaces than with the actual ancient texts, which are after all the ostensible point of such endeavors. The modern editors often write in a much more accessible style.

Let me assure my readers that I am in no way accusing these editors of writing Latin in an unsophisticated way. On the contrary, an accessible writing style can the sign of the very greatest skill: look at Bellow in English, for example, or late Sartre in French, transmitting great depths of thought with exceptional clarity. A complex writing style, one which is a little more difficult to read, can also convey deep thinking, but it does not always do so: right now I'm thinking of great 18th century writers in English who wrote grand, long, convoluted sentences -- often because they had read a lot of Classical Latin -- writers such as Berkeley, Hume and Gibbon, and also of other 18th century English writers who wrote long, convoluted sentences which are not grand at all, and who are far too numerous for it to be necessary for me to name any of them.

Right now I'm struggling, not for the first time, with de aquaeductu urbis Romae by Frontinus.

It's not the first time that I've turned the pages of this text, in the 1998 Teubner edition by Kunderewicz, and yet, I could tell you much more about Kunderewicz' preface than about Frontinus' text. At first I had thought to copy here the first sentence of Kunderewicz's preface and of Frontinus' text, but on the copyright page of this edition is an exceptionally long and emphatic warning against using any part of its contents -- and I could hardly claim to be ignorant of this warning's contents just because it's written in German -- and so I will just give you word counts: the first sentence of Frontinus is 75 words long, and then first sentence of Kunderewicz is 12 words long.

I coincidentally also happen to have a copy of the 1990 Teubner edition of stratrgrmata by Frontinus, edited, by R I Ireland. The first sentence of Ireland's preface is 104 words long. It's a wonderful sentence, and I have nothing to say against Ireland as a Latin prose stylist, but, as a whole, I think Kunderewicz's style is closer to the contemporary norm. And I think that is a good thing. I take it as a sign of an authentic and living contemporary Latin (at least as far as writing is concerned). Most of those writing today in Latin do not seem to be trying to imitate the ancient authors whom they edit. (There may be many others writing in Latin today who are doing things other than editing ancient Latin and Greek authors, but I am not aware of the existence of many.)

In the Italian Renaissance, very many of the most prominent Latin authors, who were writing all sorts of things besides prefaces to editions of ancient authors, strove quite consciously to imitate Cicero's writing style in prose and Vergil's in verse -- two very bad ideas, in my opinion, which inadvertently did more to kill the Latin language than to vivify it.

Contemporary Latinists, as far as I can tell, rather than imitating the ancients, seem to be closer to sharing the attitude of Angelo Poliziano, one of the the relatively few non-Ciceronians among the Italian Renaissance authors, who said:

"Non exprimis, aliquis inquit, Ciceronem. Quid tum? Non enim sum Cicero; me tamen, ut opinor, exprimo." ("Some say I don't write like Cicero. So what? I'm not Cicero. But, I believe, I do write like myself.")

That's the only way to write, as far as I'm concerned. Here's to the living Latin language.

Ciceronianism: The One Thing Upon Which CS Lewis And I Agree

Until 2 1/2 weeks ago I had been studying Latin all by myself. Which is a very strange and unnatural way to study a language. By their nature, of their essence, languages have to do with communication between people. A language lives through interaction between people.

Then all of a sudden I found something which I had only imagined until then: a group of people communicating with each other in Latin. An online community, writing back in forth in Latin. And also sometimes in English. I felt very nervous about exposing my own feeble attempts at Latin composition to this group, and it turns out I had some reason to be nervous. By simply reading Latin, which is what I had been doing on my own for years, I had had no practice in translation, or original Latin composition, and much less in speaking Latin.

And I had some unrealistic notions about the state of the Latin language. It's not quite as alive as I had thought. Specifically, spoken Latin is not nearly as alive as I had thought. 2 1/2 weeks ago I published this blog post, in which I commented upon Father Reginald Foster's estimate that the number of people in the world who speak Latin is around 100. I wrote that surely either his estimate was drastically low, or that he had been mis-quoted. I had just assumed that in the many places where Latin is studied, a great emphasis is put upon spoken Latin -- not just recitation, but conversing in Latin as people converse in vernaculars when taking courses in those vernaculars.

And I posted a link to that blog post in this group of people I had just found who wrote back and forth to each other in Latin. And the response from the group at first was very negative. They explained to me that Father Foster's estimate was in fact a reasonable one. I hadn't been wrong about the number of people who read Latin, but I had been very drastically wrong about the way that Latin is generally taught. Generally speaking, very little emphasis is placed upon spontaneous conversation in Latin. In fact, some instructors actually discourage efforts at such conversation, calling it a distraction from the study of ancient Latin texts.

That sounds like a dying language to me. Some of the members of this online group agree with me about that, and favor the few exceptions to the rule in academia where students are encouraged to converse spontaneously in Latin.

Oh, and after the original who-are-you-to-question-one-of the-world's-leading-Latinists negative response, after I made it clear that I had seen through my previous false assumptions about Latin being taught just the same as Spanish or French or English and that I appreciated the feedback and expertise and experience of the others, they quickly became very nice and welcoming. They're real menshes.

In that group I read the first thing written by CS Lewis which I either liked or agreed with, but it had nothing to do with religion. It was in one of his letters, quoted online in the group. He said he disliked the way many Italian Renaissance humanists insisted that the way to write good Latin was to imitate Cicero. Lewis said that they buried living Latin under the mausoleum of Ciceronianiasm. I are completely agree. I don't even like Cicero. It's not just that those Italian Renaissance writers were all imitating one ancient writer, which already was bizarre and unnatural enough -- they were all imitating a mediocre ancient writer. Sallust, Horace, Ovid and a lot of other ancient Latin authors are miles better than Cicero. Even Vergil, the 2nd most-overrated ancient Latin author.

Encouragingly, some major figures in Renaissance Italian literary life strongly opposed the slavish imitation of Cicero --



-- Poliziano, for example, when rebuked because he did not, in his writing, "express Cicero," replied, "So what? I'm not Cicero. But I do, in my opinion, express myself." ("Non exprimis, inquit aliquis, Ciceronem. Quid tum? Non enim sum Cicero; me tamen (ut opinor) exprimo.") -- while discouragingly, some people even today -- the editor of the I Tatti volume Ciceronian Controversies, for example -- think that the Ciceronians were really on to something and are misunderstood.

So I'll gladly take the support of Lewis on this issue.

Now, when it comes to my further opinion that Cicero was a perfectly ordinary mind, a common rabble- and jury rouser, there, as far as I know, I stand alone. I mean, surely, some other people somewhere at some time have also found Cicero mediocre and the fuss made about him perfectly appalling. But whether all of those people together plus me add up to 100, I don't know.