The Learner and the Latin Period

Extract

The observations which follow will to some appear heretical and perhaps dangerous; but I believe that they are worth making, if only to draw attention to a tendency in the present teaching of Latin prose which seems more dangerous still. When the beginner, having covered the field of essential grammar and syntax, is first introduced to the writing of continuous prose, he is rightly reminded of the disjointed style which is often encountered in English. This, he is told, was foreign to the Roman, who preferred to express his ideas in the form of a ‘period’, that is to say, a complex, architectural sentence-structure in which several subordinate clauses are made to depend in various ways upon the main clause. This period, he learns, is central to Latin prose, and an example or two from Cicero and Livy will be given to illustrate its use; he is then advised to emulate these models. His first exercise may well be nine or ten lines of English, to be turned into a single Latin ‘period’. The result is rarely satisfactory. The unhappy learner, in his attempt to produce the required composite sentence, upsets the natural order of clauses, presses phrases into strained and alien constructions, and probably achieves confusion. Here, for instance, is one of the first exercises in Bradley's Aids to Latin Prose; the passage, it is stated, ‘should be fused into a single sentence by the aid of participles, relatives, and conjunctions’:

‘Both sides had exhausted their ammunition. The fight had raged at close quarters for three hours without any result. The carnage was horrible. The soldiers were suffocated with the heat and dust, and could scarcely keep their feet on the bloody and slippery soil; but no one could say that he had seen the back of a single foe, or heard a single voice asking for quarter. It seemed as though the gods of Mexico had inspired the nation with superhuman strength, and a courage proof against wounds or death.’