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The Case for Latin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William Riley Parker
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Extract

In the “good old days” in the United States, as in Europe, which supplied the model, anyone who went to a secondary school and college studied Latin as a matter of course. Even in the first years of this century, when a half million students were enrolled in all our public high schools, fully half of them were still studying Latin. Those days are gone, and will never return. To regret their passing is to regret both mass education and mankind's phenomenal increase in scientific knowledge. Moreover, our world has shrunk while America's role in it has grown, and lately our society has recognized the increasing relevance of studying modern foreign languages. What, then, is the future place of Latin in American education? As one who long ago was taught both Latin and Greek, I want to try to answer this question as candidly and as objectively as I can.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 4-Part2 , September 1964 , pp. 3 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © 1964 by The Modern Language Association of America

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Footnotes

*

Distinguished Service Professor of English at Indiana University, author of The National Interest and Foreign Languages (3rd, rev. ed., 1961), former executive secretary and past president of the Modern Language Association of America, and first chief of the Language Development Program in the U. S. Office of Education, Professor Parker has also written two books and about fifty articles on John Milton. His two-volume Milton: A Biography will be published by the Clarendon Press in 1965.

References

1 I resist all temptation to embellish my text with eloquent quotations favoring Latin study. It is easy to gather hundreds of these from well-known people, living or dead. The latest such collection that I have seen is Latin: The Basic Language (1964), edited by the students of Latin at Princeton (N. J.) High School.

2 I suspect, but cannot prove, that Latin teachers more often set and really achieve this objective than do teachers of other languages, yet I am sure that not all of them do so. How polished English is learned is a complicated matter. Aspiring stylists frequently absorb the manners of good literary company.

3 I do not want to be impaled on this touchy point. Translations are indispensable, but literary masterpieces often defy adequate rendering into another language. Let doubters who know a foreign language read any favorite English work in that language. Poetry, by its very nature, is a special use of language that defies translation. Similar or roughly equivalent effects can, with luck or ingenuity, be achieved, but the peculiar “meaning” of poetry depends, not only on the denotations of words, but also on their connotations, sounds, relationships, and arrangement. There is therefore no way of expressing in English (or any other language) what Catullus, Horace, Lucretius, and Vergil really “say” poetically. This is true also of unusually eloquent (i.e., poetic) prose.

Translations can convey form, but they convey thoughts without conveying the way of thinking, express feeling without giving us the true “feel” of the original. It is like being kissed through a veil—exciting contact of a sort, no doubt, if one has never been kissed directly. Emerson used another metaphor to defend the use of translations: why, he asked dryly, should one swim across the Charles River when one wishes to go to Boston? His figure is more revealing than he intended. Swimming is an exercise pleasurable and profitable per se. Getting to the other shore is only part of the experience.

4 This problem, Meriwether Stuart reminds me, was old in Cicero's day: “Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. Quid enim est aetas hominis, nisi ea memoria rerum veterum cum superiorum aetate contexitur?” (Orator 120).

5 So also many Augustine and other Latin church fathers. I do not mean here to minimize our Christian heritage. The subject matter of Latin includes this too.

6 James B. Greenough and George Lyman Kittredge long ago asserted: “… our vocabulary has appropriated a full quarter of the Latin vocabulary, besides what it has gained by transferring Latin meanings to native words” (Words and Their Ways in English Speech, New York, 1901, p. 106). See also the excellent essay by Gerald F. Else, “Classical Languages, Especially Latin,” in The Case for Basic Education, ed. James D. Koerner (Boston, 1959), pp. 123–137.

In the above paragraphs I discuss what must be labelled a by-product of Latin study. It can be and has been said that “an English teacher should be able to teach the roots and the grammar as well in a small fraction of the time spent on Latin, and at least as effectively. Why should we go around Robin Hood's barn?” The question was asked by a classicist; as an English teacher let me reply, simply, that in twelve or more years of trying, we don't do the job. One reason is that familiarity with English breeds contempt for formal teaching of English. Another reason is the general confusion among English teachers about both ends and means. Only within the past 100 years or so have we thought that English can be taught exclusively by English teachers—a theory I often question.

7 The case for the study of Greek is in most respects identical with that for the study of Latin. If I may be permitted an irrelevancy, as a student I enjoyed Greek more than I did Latin, and still find Greek literature and civilization more appealing. Nevertheless, I do not attempt here to plead both cases, partly because there are some differences (e.g., in alphabet and in structure), but chiefly because Greek is taught today in but a handful of public or private high schools and studied by only a small number of persons in college. I should like to see a revival of Greek, but in the present state of things Latin offers the only feasible opportunity for an early introduction to our Graeco-Roman heritage—despite the powerful and persistent influence of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greeks on modern thought. Ironically, the mansion of American education has numerous rooms, but the storehouse of many of its basic concepts and categories is the Attic.

8 This statement is practically (or pedagogically) true for all except advanced students and scholars, but therefore in several technical senses needs qualification. For example, epigraphical and papyrological evidence continues to add to the specialist's knowledge of Latin and of Roman matters, and each new generation of critics reinterprets Latin literature. Latin as a language went through a number of fairly distinct phases of development, known to philologists as Old Latin, classical Latin, Late or Low Latin, Medieval or Middle Latin, and Modern or Neo-Latin (since about 1500). There is a scholarly newsletter for students of Neo-Latin. Vulgar Latin was the everyday speech of the Roman people, from which the Romance languages developed. Today, priests and scholars are constructing new forms of Modern Latin by coining words or phrases for contemporary things and activities. There is sometimes a playful spirit about this construction, as when Adlai Stevenson warns: Via ovicipitum dura est ‘the way of the egghead is hard.‘

9 This is not intended as a sentimental argument, although I realize that it can easily be parodied and ridiculed as such. I state what I believe to be both true and important. I am not, of course, arguing that Latin study is a substitute for psychiatry, or that this particular by-product is experienced by all students. I am arguing the almost unique status of Latin as the inexhaustible mother lode of Western civilization. All great literature of the past can give us faith, or renew our faith, in the ageless dignity of the human spirit—in an age when our own literature often challenges that faith. An irony in what I am here arguing is the fact that the stability of Latin can attract teachers who are intellectually timid or sluggish. It can also, alas, encourage a false notion about the nature of living languages, unless the teacher does his job properly.

10 We need, however, an objective and reliable answer to this problem: at what educational level should Latin be introduced in order that it may best provide the chief benefits inherent in study of it? Like the modern languages, it can be, and is, taught at all levels, from elementary to graduate school. But when does its study give optimum results? In the competition with modern languages, a convincing answer might well strengthen the status of Latin in the total curriculum. I do know this: some students (I wonder how many) react adversely to the tension of audio-lingual methods of language teaching, but enjoy the more familiar, bookish methods of most Latin teaching. The chairman of a Spanish department tells me that, as an administrator and teacher in two universities, he has observed “over and over again that a significant number of students who failed in modern languages had a successful academic experience in Latin or Greek.” This phenomenon, which other teachers have reported to me, should not be confused with a different, less important problem—the occasional relaxing of standards in Latin or Greek as a desperate bid for enrollment. Improve the status of the classics, and the football team will have to relax elsewhere.

11 I would make the same objection to hasty attempts to introduce our students to the non-Western cultures which we have so long and so foolishly ignored. They need this knowledge of civilizations in which they have no “roots,” but not before, and certainly not at the expense of, a significant knowledge of their own culture. It is my impression that too many students have feelings of insecurity or doubt resulting from the various assaults upon Western tradition emanating from the Communist bloc—and more recently from the non-Western nations. It can be argued that what these nations really seek is some ideological equivalence with what the West has created by relating its vital heritage and traditions to its contemporary discoveries in science and technology. An American student ignorant of Graeco-Roman culture is unlikely to understand such an aspiration, and very likely to misunderstand it.

12 This writer cannot pretend to any expert knowledge of the reforms in methodology and curricula currently advocated by classicists, but he applauds the critical, questioning spirit of many teachers in this tradition-taut field. Some are concerned to see what can be learned from the audio-lingual approach now widely employed by modern foreign language teachers; others are experimenting with applied linguistics, along lines set forth in Waldo E. Sweet's Latin: A Structural Approach (Ann Arbor, 1957). Professor Sweet has just completed the first year of a “programmed” course in Latin, for use with or without a language laboratory. The synthetic “made-Latin” that has crept into many textbooks is under vigorous attack, as are the trinity of Caesar, Cicero, and Vergil in their monopoly (since about 1894) of the second, third, and fourth years of secondary school instruction. The Gallic Wars may go, to give place to new, untraditional material (e.g., Erasmus) chosen for its permanent relevance. Prose composition may also go, or be minimized. Ovid may enjoy a revival—a development that would doubtless be cheered by English teachers, who have the cheerless task of explaining mythological allusions to students who should be happily recognizing them instead of merely understanding them.

In reporting these trends, I am neither predicting nor expressing any personal preferences—beyond the irresistible one above. Caesar, I should think, can be effectively taught today as a master of political self-justification, rather than as a dull reporter of strategy and tactics. Cicero can be taught as a voice of moderate conservatism. In any case, most Latin teachers are proud of the fact that their students quickly encounter real classics, and this is as it should be, for they can't have it both ways—offering to reveal the roots of Western culture while actually giving us diluted Latin and equally diluted ancient history. They have their clubs and contests and Roman banquets, but I have met no movement to substitute Winnie Ille Pu for Vergil.

13 A second draft of this essay was read and most helpfully criticized by 55 colleagues in 28 different schools, programs, or departments at Indiana University. A third draft was then seen and criticized—often at great length—by 115 persons throughout the United States and Canada. I regret the impracticality of thanking here individually so large a number of collaborators, to very many of whom I am deeply indebted—as they will realize upon reading my final version. I was greatly encouraged by the unanimous expression of genuine interest in my subject.

Some wondered why this piece should appear in PMLA. The Editor of PMLA invited me to write it, and reprints are available from the Modern Language Association (4 Washington Place, New York, N. Y. 10003) for all who wish to join me in getting it into the hands of those who most need to be informed and, perhaps, persuaded—guidance counsellors, school and college administrators, school boards, curriculum experts, and others. It is my earnest hope that, in this effort, teachers of English, linguistics, the modern foreign languages—indeed, all the humanities—will find common cause. My personal motive is to renew my allegiance to the humanistic tradition. The case for Latin seems to me a crux—in all senses of that word. My basic concern as an English teacher is the relation of language to wisdom. I like to believe that most members of the MLA share this concern. [Reprints of this article are available at the following rates from the address given above: single copy, 25 cents; 10 copies or more, 10 cents each.—ED.]