Bloomsbury (2024) p/b £16.99 121pp (ISBN 9781350377035)
Bloomsbury informs us that ‘This new series under the series heading Rubicon seeks to challenge and refresh the study of antiquity: to re-examine central texts and questions, to disrupt stale orthodoxies, to test and problematize the nature and limits of our disciplines, to champion new approaches, and to respond to the latest developments in research and in our contemporary world. Rubicon breaks through barriers—to open up the history, literature, and culture of the ancient world.’
K., who teaches Latin in Trinity College, Dublin, has interpreted this brief with a political agenda: words such as imperialism, fascism, colonialism, slavery, elites, private education and capitalism surface in all but the last chapter.
In the first chapter, K. examines those texts which introduce us, in as far as they can, to the language of the everyday Roman and some of the ways in which it began to change over the years. This productively covers the well-trodden ground of inscriptions, graffiti, the Vindolanda tablets, the curse tablets in Bath (where he misplaces the famous Regina funerary monument with its Palmyrene connection, which is in South Shields) and the travels of the highly educated Egeria in the 4th C AD across the Holy Lands. In these he finds many sentiments little different from our everyday language.
In this context, K. remarks on Saint Jerome’s translation of the Bible into Latin and suggests he might have translated it into Ciceronian Latin (he does not mention that Jerome dreamed of Christ saying to him ‘Ciceronianus es, non Christianus’) but resisted the temptation in order to make it ‘easier to understand’. Not quite: his orders from Pope Damasus were to correct the old Latin version (Vetus Latina) with reference to the best Greek manuscripts, but also to keep as close to the familiar old Latin as he could.
The second chapter is less successful. Entitled ‘Pop Classics’, it was not quite clear to the reviewer what K. meant by ‘pop’, since he starts by pointing out that Petronius’ Trimalchio is referenced in the famous (untranslated) preface to T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’—Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω—which K. does not translate. He is on more ‘pop’ ground when he turns to the riotous language of Roman comedies, featuring foolish old men, young men in love, randy soldiers, pimps and the tricky slave—the master of them all—and suggests that it was the upper classes that watched them. But they were put on at festival time: everybody watched them, as Plautus’ prologues make clear. His suggestion that somehow the comedies represented protests against slavery and oppression is to confuse modern concerns with the reality of the ancient world.
Virgil’s Aeneid is the next ‘pop’ classic, illustrating (from Book 9 onwards) ‘the violence of a group of settlers towards an indigenous people and their ecosystem’. But precisely what ‘ecosystem’? K.’s single example is the digging up of an ancient sacred olive tree (he calls it ‘bulldozing’: he is welcome to try) to clear the ground for battle. That suggests to K. ways in which various activists today attempt to draw attention to the destruction of the environment by dam-building as a kind of sacrilege. He then outlines Virgil’s influence on Dante, Hamlet and Cervantes, finds points of comparison with St Patrick and discusses how at one stage the classics were seen as ways for the Irish to combat English colonialism.
He ends the chapter with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a work of enormous influence which he suggests Ovid sees as a kind of weaver’s tapestry, celebrating magic and fantasy and strange transformations; and finds in both Ovid and Virgil a ‘democratic archive of human creativity’ which gives full humanity to slaves, recognises the ‘value of the natural world in the face of human greed and warfare’ and the importance of artisans and their products. All this, he suggests, shines a light on the natural world and its fragility as well as on colonial and sexual violence and can be interpreted as anti-capitalist. Up to a point, Lord Copper.
The final chapter does a fine job of tracing the transformation of Latin into romance languages and the continuing existence of Latin, or rather its vocabulary, in dialects of Latin like modern Spanish and French. In what precise sense those languages (let alone English) are therefore ‘Latin’, as K. suggests, is not something he discusses.
There is much that is worthwhile in this eclectic survey, but K.’s insistence that the study of the classics is an inspiration both for capitalists, colonialists, fascists and wealthy imperialistic elites on the one hand, but on the other a rallying cry for resistance to the above and everything they stand for, left this reviewer wondering: what has this got to do with studying Latin as a ‘living language’? Is that really all there is to say about it? There is, of course, nothing wrong with using the ancient world to critique the modern and the modern to critique the ancient, historical context permitting: but Romans were not fascists or imperialists or colonialists in the modern sense of those words, let alone capitalists. K.’s predilections do not help the important case for Latin that he clearly wishes to make. It adds up to an uneven start to the series.
Peter Jones