Amo, Amas, Amat … and all that. How to become a Latin lover, by Harry Mount, Short Books, 2006. The title is a nice nod to the brilliant 1066 and all that by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, the subtitle of which alone is worth the price of entry: A Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates.
I like the little laurel wreath around the second “A” in “Amat”on the cover. I have surprised myself by reading this book straight through in one sitting. It brought back a lot of memories, not all of them bad – I was one of those strange children at school who actually enjoyed Latin. Somehow I found it easy, it always seemed completely logical to me. This is a fairly light-hearted amble through the language, aimed at both those who have no Latin and those who learnt it at school. It’s amazing what the mind retains, but learning by rote will do that I guess. Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant is as fresh in my brain now as it ever was. Before I started reading, I remembered my father’s telling me of a practice which I thought was unique to his school – changing the name of the essential (sine qua non) Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer to Kennedy’s Shortbread Eating Primer but here there’s even an illustration of a copy so embellished.
The declensions for “war” and “table” came back just as readily: bellum, bellum, bellum, belli, bello, bello, bella, bella, bella, bellorum, bellis, bellis and mensa mensa, mensam, mensae, mensae, mensa … The first of those has a nice rhythm to it. That was the order of cases as we learnt them, nominative, vocative, accusative genitive, dative, ablative, and Mountford concurs, but internet sources mostly seem to differ. There’s also the rare locative case. I also remembered dominus, domine, dominum, domini, domino, domino… There are five declensions for the nouns and four conjugations for the verbs.
I certainly didn’t know about the division into three ages of great Latin literature: the golden Age of Lucretius, Catullus, Sallust, Cicero, and Caesar, the Augustan Age of Ovid, Horace, Virgil, and Livy, and from then to the end of the Silver Age giving us Martial, Juvenal, Lucan, Seneca, Pliny, and Tacitus. I did know that Catullus wrote some extremely ‘rude’ and witty poems, Carmen 16 being a notable example with the opening line Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō. The short lines above the letters are apparently macrons to indicate long vowels, not used by the Romans but useful for us now. Although surely the “o” in “ego” should then have one.
As in German, Latin nouns have one of three genders. Adjectives must always agree with their nouns – there was a lot to learn. Mount is keen to mock the pompous, those who use Latin unnecessarily only to impress. There’s a bookseller who was at a committee meeting who came out with consule Planco purely because he knew no one else would understand it. He looked at our perplexed faces and smugly translated it as “Plancus was consul then”. We were mostly none the wiser, but he meant that times had changed. Plancus is described on Wikipedia as “one of the classic historical examples of men who have managed to survive very dangerous circumstances by constantly shifting their allegiances.” That happens to be a perfect description of the Latin spouting bookseller too.
Predictably but engagingly enough Mount mentions Molesworth a couple of times, Nigel Molesworth being the hero of the series of books about St Custard’s school by Geoffrey Willans, illustrated by Ronald Searle, such as Down with Skool!, How to Be Topp and Back in the Jug Agane. Mount quotes an archetypal example of badly, too literally translated Latin: “The Gauls have attacked the camp with shouts they have frightened the citizens they have killed the enemy with darts and arrows and blamed the belgians. They have also continued to march into Italy. Would it not be more interesting if they did something new?” Something about Gaul being divided into three parts sticks in my mind.
There was quite a bit of Latin at my prep school even in everyday life. Three brothers would be known by their surnames with Latin add-ons: Robinson Maximus, Robinson Minor, Robinson Minimus. The house names came from the knights of the round table: Bevedere (more often spelt Bedivere), Geraint and Gawain. I am sure there was a fourth but I can’t think of the name. There were coloured shields on the wall for each. My brother has come to the rescue – it was Gareth.
Then there were the morning assemblies consisting of bible readings, hymns and a piece of classical music to finish off. At the end of each week though, results were read out. The three boys with the lowest marks would be singled out for ritual humiliation and sometimes beating with a slipper or cane. They would get no breaks but automatic double detentions until they “pulled their socks up”. At some point in this procedure the headmistress would say to her deputy (and Latin teacher), Mr Chiswell (I kid you not), “Satis specit Mr Chiswell”. I had no idea what it meant and still don’t. Online translation suggests “sufficiently observed” but I can’t see the relevance in the context. It was horrible. Humiliation, fear and pain were the three main tools in most teachers’ arsenals.
Mr Chiswell was one of those teachers who was all chalk dust, tweed jackets with leather elbow patches and predatory inclinations towards the younger boys. He was one of many paedophiles on the staff at both Keble Prep School and Highgate School where I went afterwards. The house names there were less imaginative: Northgate, Southgate, Westgate, Eastgate, Queensgate, Kingsgate, Midgate, Fargate, Heathgate, The Lodge, School House and Grindal. The last three were for the boarders who were blamed for us all having to endure six-day weeks. I hated Highgate and was thoroughly bullied and miserable most of the time.
I wrote about some of this in Animal Trust:
Schoolday memories are conjured up too of hanging around uselessly on football and rugby pitches, with no interest in participating, often suffering the early stages of hypothermia, then being physically warmed by teachers with extremely dodgy intentions, wandering hands and a worrying glint in their eye. I was educated privately and this sort of thing was an accepted commonplace. I largely enjoyed prep school and stayed out of trouble, but the headmistress, Miss Swinburne, was a nasty old sadist and canings and other beatings and humiliations of young children were the norm. Those were certainly different times. I will never forget my not unkind parents’ saying that what most impressed them about the school, when they were first shown around it, was the way in which the boys raised their caps and flattened themselves against the wall in terror when she hove into view. I mostly hated secondary school, a grim, joyless Victorian monstrosity, and although I was not ‘interfered with’ myself, everyone knew it went on (one teacher I liked told us that he’d written to the headmaster about it all, both to report it and to cover himself, but the letter was suppressed). I remain mentally scarred by the bullying. Years after I left a scandal finally broke, there were some swift, hushed-up exits, and one teacher served jail time …
One of Harry Mount’s Latin teachers seems to have been similarly inclined, a Dr Rutherford, who we are told did not at all mind boys being half-dressed and later in the chapter on his teachers we read: “Dr Rutherford’s desires – for Latin, and for the boys who studied it – may have been strong but he generally did his best to conceal them beneath a cold, hard exterior.”
The school motto at Keble was, ironically in retrospect, “Puritas, Probitas, Veritas“. An oddity is that the school year between fifth and sixth was called “Shell”. This was an utterly spurious and pretentious appropriation from other, grander schools, originally Westminster where pupils were taught in a shell-shaped room.
Not all the memories are bad, in fact I was mostly very happy at Keble. I may as well just say that I happened to be very good at Latin to the extent that I was finishing off a lesson’s work in minutes. I translated the lovely story of Arion and the dolphin (The Myth of Arion and the Dolphin » Mythphile) so fast that the then headmaster, Mr Watkins, decided to give me private lessons in his study instead so that I would learn more. After a couple of these he asked me for the form of a verb to be used in a certain circumstance. “Superavissent” I said. He threw his hands in the air. “That’s incredible,” he said, “to be honest there is nothing more I can teach you.” It was way too late to tell him it had been a total guess.
There are some nice digressions in this book, on architecture for example: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite, in that order. Romans took pretty much everything from ancient Greece and we are told about entasis, a slight curve in a column without which it would not seem to be straight. Modern architectural historians still don’t know how the curved roof of the Parthenon was built. The French came up with pointed, Gothic arches in the twelfth century, hence Norman and Romanesque are used exchangeably in descriptions of styles in Britain. Quite nice too to be given the names of all seven of the hills of Rome: Aventine, Caelian, Capitoline, Esquiline, Paltaine, Quirinal and Viminal.
There are useful lists too of the Greek gods and their Roman counterparts and of literary devices. Jove is the ablative of Jupiter we are told, so that “By Jove” is tautological.
All of the following took me back in time: gerunds and gerundives, the subjunctive, the aorist or simple past tense, the perfect, imperfect and pluperfect tenses, the ablative absolute, the prepositions and conjunctions, the future passive and hic, haec, hoc, hunc, hac, hoc.
Mount finds the Roman numbering system unwieldy but I have to say I love its purity and logic. It’s French numbers that baffle me. It’s all fine up to 69 but then it goes a bit mad. Why is 70 sixty plus ten, and why on earth is 80 four times twenty? 90 is four times twenty plus ten. It’s crazy.
I had never come across the word “deponent” until this morning when it was part of a crossword clue. It can either mean someone giving testimony in court or a verb which is passive in form but active in meaning (I don’t really understand this). The clue was “Deponent wearing fluttering sari in catchment area”. It had to be “river basin” from the definition and crossers but I couldn’t parse it until this afternoon when the word came up in Amo, Amas, Amat … and I was able to see that it was an anagram of “sari in” around the word “verb”. Quite the coincidence.
The Latin ‘phrasebook’ is both fun and helpful for those legal terms and many others which we use all the time, like “e.g.”, “i.e.”, “viz”, “cf.”, “ibid.”, “etc.”, “et al.”, “pace” and “passim”. I love the last two, they are a really useful shorthand. Of the longer phrases I especially like mutatis mutandis, primus inter pares, mirabile dictu, cui bono and quis custodiet ipsos custodes which seems very relevant.
Mount even mentions Ecce Romani! which I had completely forgotten. He accurately describes it as a “second-rate and depressingly jocular exercise book.”
Finally my favourite bit of Latin of all time. I am the proud owner of a first edition of Winnie ille Pu, a Latin translation of Winnie the Pooh published in 1960, which brilliantly opens with this:
Ecce Eduardus Ursus scalis nunc tump-tump- tump occipite gradus pulsante post Christophorum Robinum descendens.
There’s genius in that.
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