by George Sharpley (Latin teacher and author)
People who join the Latin Qvarter
beginner courses are curious to discover how dead this language really is and
to explore what they can of Latin (and English) grammar. They rightly expect a
word feast, with lots of our own words with Latin roots pointing the way ...
and I do my best to please. I also want give people a feel for what is easily
lost in Latin’s centuries-old silent imprisonment in books and stone memorials:
the language’s voice.
In its day, classical Latin was a
language heard much more than read. Most people – even those taught to
read – will have experienced the works of Virgil and Ovid read aloud. And if T.P.Wiseman’s
excellent The Roman Audience (Oxford
2015) is anything to go by, this will not have been confined to private readings
in rich people’s houses, but in public theatres too. And read – or performed –
with facial expression, gesture and body movement.
Thus we need caution in our application
of the oral-literary divide. We think of the Iliad and Odyssey as
‘oral’ epics, because they very nearly are. They are the closest we get to oral
poems of that time; but they are in fact pioneering triumphs of a literate
society, if drawing on an oral tradition from the world around them. And
Virgil’s Aeneid, the fruit of a poetic
culture at ease with scrolls of papyrus and the study of letters, is a good
deal more aural/oral than we might think. In fact the idea among some scholars
today that Roman literature started from cold in the 3rd century BC
is a little misleading. It was already well warmed up by the previous and
concurrent oral tradition of dramatised storytelling.
Dio Chrysostom (c. ad 40–115) shows us a poet and a storyteller
at work. He describes a scene in the Hippodrome: “I remember seeing a number of
people in one place, each one doing something different: one was playing a
flute, another dancing, another juggling, another reading aloud a poem, another
singing, and another telling a story or myth; and not a single one of them
prevented any of the others carrying out his own business” (Discourses 20.10).
What makes a poet literary is not
so much that he is read whereas a storyteller is heard, but his performance is
recorded on papyrus, which is then used as a prompt for further recitals (as
well as a text for admirers and teachers). The oral storyteller on the other
hand is below radar; his work has not been preserved. Mind you, his popularity
was not limited to ordinary folk: Suetonius tells us that Augustus would summon
a story-teller at night if he could not sleep (Aug.78).
We think of the literati of Rome
absorbing Hellenistic culture, and with it and through it the earlier classical
Greek one. What we see much less in the surviving evidence is the influx of
Greek culture into Italy at a broader more popular level, not least through the
oral storytellers.
The tour of cathedrals in spring
2016, Latin in the Cloisters, was meant to evoke the part played by medieval
cathedrals and monasteries in the teaching of Latin and in copying and
preserving the great classical authors. And as it continues to roll forward
into new cathedrals, Roman sites and museums in 2017, Latin beginners can
expect more of the same, to learn the language through stories, historical and
fabled; and to hear verses you might have paused to listen to on your way
through the forum.
Latin for Beginners, a
one-day course in 2017 (remaining dates):
25th March PEMBROKESHIRE
(St Davids Cathedral)
22nd April
CHICHESTER (Fishbourne Roman Villa)
29th April
CARDIFF (Llandaff Cathedral)
18th October
EXETER (Royal Albert Memorial Museum)
Details of these and other
courses from The Latin Qvarter:
