Remember your Latin? Don’t all speak at once!
An optimist, listing for me the reasons that the deplorable state of the world is not quite as bad as we think, cited, as one of them, ‘the Latin revival’. Oh, is there one? I haven’t heard anyone saying anything in Latin recently, have you? When Fox was asked for advice about quoting in Parliament, he replied, ‘No modern languages except English. No English poet unless dead. Greek never. Latin as much as you like.’ But when did someone last use a Latin quotation in the Commons? I suspect it was Enoch Powell, or possibly Quintin Hogg. I have heard Latin quoted at lunch in the Beefsteak Club (probably by Harold Macmillan) but not for years. I understand it’s not much used in White’s or Brooks’s or even in the Athenaeum. Children used to hold up objects and say ‘Quis?’ Response: ‘Ego!’ Not any more.
Still, I hope the news is true. I hate having to explain to supposedly educated people what I mean when I say IJltima Thule (Virgil) or Laudator temporis acti (Horace) or even Rus in urbe (Martial). You might just get away with Nil desperandum (Horace again), but if you quote Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori you will get dinner-table snorts, not least because few now agree with the sentiment — and who, indeed, would die for Prince Charles’s multicultural multifaith Britain?
I began to pick up Latin words from my big sisters at four or five, and I then did ten years or more of it at school. Indeed in my time you still had to take a Latin exam at Oxford and we certainly used it a lot to study mediaeval historical documents. I probably now remember more mediaeval than classical Latin. I know most of the Ordinary of the Mass by heart, and often attend the 11 a.m. sung Latin Mass at the Carmelites in Kensington Church Street, for I enjoy roaring out the plainchant Gloria, Credo and Pater Noster.
In some ways mediaeval Latin texts are the best — if you are allowed to include in them St Jerome and, especially, St Augustine. Next to the Gospels, as translated by Jerome, the Confessions is the greatest work produced by Latin Christianity, as readable and relevant and deep now as when written in the early 5th century. What a strange fellow was this African sage! I have a love-hate for him. The only competitor is the Dies irae, the best of all Latin poems. I love it in the tremendous plain chant version, and one of the most thrilling moments in music is Verdi’s setting of
Tuba mirum spargens sonum Per sepulchra regionum, Coget omnes ante thronum.
We do not know for sure who wrote it. The theory is that it is by a late 12th-century Benedictine monk but sharpened by a Franciscan friar in the mid-13th century. In my youth it was the standard ‘sequence’ (the processional passage just before the Gospel) in the Mass for the dead. Today the trendier clerics frown on it — too ‘alarming’, i.e. truthful — and have virtually banned it. I have left instructions that I don’t want one of those bogus modern ‘services of thanksgiving’ for my misspent life. I certainly expect a proper requiem Mass, having great need of it, and it must include the Dies irae in Latin. I require an eschatological send-off.
This powerful and tragic poem belies the myth that mediaeval Latin is diffuse and lacks the ability of classical prose and poetry to put thoughts with lapidary succinctness. It’s true, however, that Latin in its golden age could be wonderfully snappy. I am thinking of Veni, vidi, vici (Caesar) or Cicero, in his speech against Cataline, Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit. (Bush might have used this against bin Laden.) But, even in the hands of Tacitus, it is not great literature in the way that classical Greek is. The Latins have no one like Homer or Thucydides or even Plutarch, let alone Plato and Aristotle. We all spent a long time over Virgil — did we not? — in those cold, mote-filled classrooms smelling of chalk and ink. I thought at the time the Aeneid was an irremediable bore, which never came to life, though there are one or two nuggets, like itur ad astra (the way to the stars) and experto credite, a good example of false wisdom. The Eclogues and Georgics are better, though not much. Non omnia possumus omnes sounds good but, on reflection, is a truism.
Ovid is overrated too. Horace is a better poet than either and was once widely enjoyed among the ruling classes of the Anglosphere. There is some subtlety in the man. And I like his contemptuous Hoc genus omne, which I render as ‘all that crew’, a useful phrase in politics. He survives chiefly in a few such phrases, as in his Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus, though the English version, ‘even Homer nods’, is much more of a snapperoo, as Mark Twain would say. I am surprised that Horace still rates 105 entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, the most of a classical writer I think. Virgil gets 82, more than he deserves. By contrast, Cicero has a mere 20, though some of his sayings are more quoted than anyone else’s. O tempora, O mores! has, I believe, been used more often in the Commons (and still more in the Lords) than any other Latin tag. There is also his pithy and useful phrase Cui bono?, though that may have been a quote from some other Roman, now forgotten. His boast Civis Romanus sum has the honour of being quoted by St Paul more than a century after he uttered it. As for his observation ‘There’s nothing so silly but some philosopher has said it’, it is one of the most timeless digs to come down from antiquity and apter today than at any time in the past. But I note that Cicero used 15 words for what we say more sharply in ten.
We sweated over Caesar’s Gallic War. Few, I think, have ever re-read the text since their schooldays, though it holds useful lessons for any public figure (and not just generals) who writes memoirs. Caesar was a sly man, perhaps a bad man, who still raises hackles. I heard of an elderly don, normally taciturn to a fault, who burst into the senior common room at breakfast and announced, ‘I am coming to the conclusion that that man Julius Caesar is an abominable scoundrel!’ as though he were Putin, Chirac or George W. Bush. It is good to know that a potentate who died two millennia ago can still rouse passion in an academic breast. Caesar, like Cicero with his O Tempora!, also coined an immortal and useful ejaculation, ‘Et tu, Brute?’ But the general feeling today is that, being an educated fellow, Caesar spoke his dying words in Greek — xat, ov, iexvov — ‘you too, kiddy?’ Not the same thing at all, and the tone might be ironic or even contemptuous. Which reminds me: I have just had my 78th birthday and I have not yet decided my famous last words. But that is a theme for another essay.
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