Articles From The Classical Teacher

The Greatest Single Defect of My Own Latin Education
by Dorothy Sayers

Part V: Summary
     At twenty years of age, the old-fashioned schooling turned me out helpless, ignorant and dissatisfied.  Forty years later I encounter the product of the new schooling-still more helpless, still more ignorant, and possibly not even dissatisfied.

     But ignorance has seldom prevented anybody from laying down the law about how other people ought to run their jobs, and proposing impracticable solutions.  So I will proceed to offer a few "constructive suggestions", as they say, for getting boys and girls reasonably well Latinized with the least possible waste of time and energy.

     1. Catch 'em young and get the Accidence into them along with the multiplication table (if they still learn that). Eleven years old is too late-they are beginning to think.

     2. Throw that dreary man Cicero out of the window, and request the divine Virgil (with the utmost love and respect) to take a seat along with his fellow Augustans and the First Consul, until your pupils are ready to be ushered into the [sic] presence. 

     3. Choose a pronunciation and stick to it.

     4. Start your youngsters off upon the mediaeval syntax and the easiest and simplest mediaeval texts. (Books? No, I know there are no books. I will come to that later.)  Let the readings go as fast as possible, getting on to long, sustained extracts as soon as may be, and using a crib if necessary (except, of course, for Unseens).

     5. If possible, let them speak Latin in class.  Let them write simple proses-not about Caesar's Gallic Wars, but about their cats and dogs and what they do at home.  Don't bother too much about style, so long as they get something down; and if they ask what is the Latin for "Skye Terrier" or "motor-scooter", bear in mind that a trifle of that kind would not have flummoxed Abelard or Roger Bacon.  The singing of Latin hymns and carols would help too. And they might write and act their own Latin Nativity Play.

     6. Let them get up their classical myths and general background in English.  It would do no harm to introduce them to Ovid and Virgil in a good translation, if you can find one.  Caesar, if you like (though the girls won't care much about him).  How about the letters of the Younger Pliny, which cover the link-up with Christianity?  The most important thing is to display the people who spoke Latin as real people, living right on from Caesar's time into the Middle Ages.

     7. When the time comes-that is, when they can read with ease and have a decent vocabulary-let them go on to the Augustans in the original, pointing out that these are works of literature and intended to be enjoyed as such.  Pick the really exciting, moving and memorable bits, and let them express themselves freely about the sportsmanship displayed at the Funeral Games in honour of Anchises!  This is your moment for wrestling with the quantitative metres, and with the difference between Mediaeval and Classical syntax.  It should at worst offer little more difficulty than the difference between modern English and the English of Chaucer.

     Now as to books. The trouble is, as you rightly say, that even if you could bear to teach the Mediaeval Latin, there are no annotated texts.  Mr. Nunn's book, which I have mentioned, contains a useful guide to syntax, and a number of short extracts from Christian authors covering the period I have in mind, i.e. from the Vulgate to the Renaissance. (Post-Renaissance texts should be avoided at first, being quite as hard as the Classical and more derivative.  And, indeed, all the writers who at any period were being consciously Augustan should be avoided in the early stages.)  Being primarily intended for the use of theological students, Mr. Nunn's extracts are rather too exclusively ecclesiastical for our purpose, and need supplementing by some secular texts.

     Being myself very ignorant, I asked C. S. Lewis about this, and here are his suggestions: For an intelligible narrative poem, what about a chunk out of Waltharius, by Ekehard, of St. Gall (tenth century).  See a delightful account of it in W. P. Ker's Dark Ages.  For Prose: Saxo Grammaticus (give them the Hamlet story); Jordanes (vel Jornandes) De Rebus Geticis (lots about Attila); Gregorius Turonensis Historia Francorum; the anonymous Gesta Francorum (on the First Crusade); Geoffrey of Monmouth (some Arthurian bit); and-if you want to include something of the Renaissance-Kepler's Somnium, which is the first real instance of "scientifiction".

     To this list one could add immediately a number of the Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, of which Helen Waddell has given us a selection (though her translations are rather loose and over-romanticized), and one or two odd things which have an interest of their own, such as Dante's "Letter to a Friend in Florence"; and there should be some fun in the mediaeval Bestiaries.  Other things should turn up-few people have explored mediaeval texts with this purpose in mind. But keep things simple-don't wrestle with the complications of the cursus!  If you can get your colleagues in the History and English schools to lend a hand with the game by linking these various authors up with their background, so much the better.

     What you would need, in addition to Mr. Nunn's book is: (a) A book of exercises, to go with the grammar.  (b) A more extended selection of "Late and Medieval Latin Unseens for the use of Middle and Upper Forms", with vocabulary and annotations.  (c) A series of annotated texts, for reading in extenso.  These things do not exist; but they could be written.  Nobody, by the way, need be afraid of setting pupils passages from the Vulgate, on the grounds that it would be over-familiar.  In my experience, the Bible is unknown country to most young people nowadays.

     Let me end with the famous heart-cry from Augustine-him who wept for Dido: Cur ergo Graecam etiam grammaticam oderam talia cantantem? Nam et Homerus peritus texere tales fabulas, et dulcissime vanus est, et mihi tamen amarus erat puero. Credo etiam Graecis pueris Virgilius ita sit, cum eum sic discere coguntur, ut ego illum. Videlicet difficultas, difficultas omnio ediscendae peregrinae linguae, quasi felle aspergebat omnes suavitates Graecas fabulosarum narrationum. Nulla enim verba illa noveram, et saevis terroribus ac poenis ut nossem instabatur mihi vehementer.  (We have abolished the cruel threats and punishments, but boredom is quite as frustrating.) Nam et Latina aliquando infans nulla noveram; et tamen advertendo didici sine ulla metu et cruciatu, inter etiam blandimenta nutricum et joca arridentium et laetitias alludentium. Didici vero illa sine poenali onere urgentium cum me urgeret cor meum ad parienda concepta sua, quae non possem, nisi aliqua verba didicissem, non a docentibus sed a loquentibus, in quorum et ego auribus parturiebam quidquid sentiebam. Hinc satis elucet majorem habere vim ad discenda ista liberam curiositatem, quam meticulosam necessitatem.