5 - The voices of Latin culture

Summary

Dead language, dead metaphor

The Latin language has developed not in a series of horizontal periods stacked like uniform blocks in a simple pattern of rise and fall, but in strands now running in parallel, now intertwined, some broken and some continuous, from antiquity down to today. It is a language like any other, historically unique but nevertheless subject to the same general laws that govern all languages. The metaphors that have been used to understand it – metaphors of “gold,” of “death,” metaphors involving tax-brackets, blocks of time, gender, and authority – have largely lost their exegetical power and by now do as much to obfuscate the social and cultural dimensions of latinity as ever they did to clarify and explain. Latin studies needs new metaphors and needs to employ them cautiously, more cautiously than it did the old. Some lie ready to hand, but little used. Others can be invented and then discarded as needed. The point will be not to establish a new standard, but to work with a sense that the new metaphor is never more than just a metaphor, and to prevent any merely metaphorical construct of literary history from assuming in one's mind the status of an independent reality.

While a certain set of metaphors has indeed come to dominate institutional thinking about latinity, how many latinists are really happy with them today?