Speaking Latin Brings an Unmediated Thrill to the Classics
14th September 2021
As a professor of Classics at the University of Oxford, I had quite forgotten the thrill of understanding spoken Latin when, in 2016, a group of students from the Accademia Vivarium, an institution based in the beautiful Villa Falconieri just outside Rome, paid a visit to the UK with their professor Luigi Miraglia. Among them were students of Dutch, Hungarian, Finnish and South American origin; but one could hardly tell their nationalities apart because, in addition to using Latin names (Julianus, Edmundus), they spoke in fluent and elegant Latin and in one case, Attic Greek.
When I signed up for Greek my sophomore year at Yale, the professor went around the room (all eight of us) and asked us why we were in the class. Smart-ass that I was, I said ‘To be civilized.’ He looked at me for a second and responded, ‘No, you learn Latin to be civilized. You learn Greek to be educated.’