Living with a Dead Language

by Ann Patty

  The future is present all over Book VI of The Aeneid: Aeneas lands at Cumae to seek out the Sybil who will lead him to the underworld, but the city of Cumae, just west of modern Naples, was not founded until the seventh century B.C., long after Aeneas. In the underworld, Aeneas’ father, Anchises, shows him the future heroes of a Rome that does not yet exist.

  Virgil writes most of his epic in the historical present tense, which not only lends it immediacy but also melds past and present throughout the narrative; the past is sitting shotgun with the present as they move in tandem into the future. As Fagles writes in his afterword, “In the light of the historical present, hindsight may make a bit more sense as foresight than we thought.”

  As we progressed through Book VI, the mastery of Virgil’s poetry was unmistakable. This passage describes his and the Sibyl’s entry into the underworld:

  Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram

  perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna.

  Dark, they went through the shade under the lonely night

  and through the vacant houses and empty kingdom of Dis.

  No English translation can capture the ghostly mood of sola sub nocte per umbram, nor Virgil’s brilliant use of hypallage, one of the hallmarks of his style: One would expect obscurus (dark) to modify nox (night), and solus (lonely) to modify the subjects (they), but Virgil switches the relations for poetic effect.

  And here again, in the second line is Lucretius’ inania, the void. But Virgil’s underworld is not void for long: As he and the Sibyl approach the gorge of hell, they meet bad conscience, disease, bleak old age, dread, hunger, poverty, and war in the vestibule. There, too, is the huge, ancient tree where false dreams cling to each leaf. Dis’s realm hosts every monster known to man, as well as the shades of children, suicides, condemned men, and those who perished of love, eternally wandering the Fields of Mourning. Stranded on Lethe’s banks for one hundred years are shades of the unburied.

  In Latin, Dis is synonymous with Pluto, god of the underworld, but the word dis is also a form of the adjective dives, meaning “wealth.” What might that mean to a Roman? Perhaps it’s the wealth of the Elysian Fields, the lovely part of the underworld, where Aeneas meets his father Anchises and learns his fate. I enjoy anew the irony of that name, which graced the street where I grew up.

  Over the course of our translating, I even managed to shoehorn two Buddhist concepts into Virgil’s depiction of hell, the two Lucretius left out of his own philosophy: Life is suffering (as we see Aeneas, suffering the weight of his own future) and souls are reincarnated. At one point in the journey, Anchises explains that the spirits gathered at the River Lethe are those who, after being punished for their earthly sins, now drink the water of forgetfulness before they return for another life on Earth. Virgil is alone among the classic Roman writers in positing rebirth, or reincarnation (though he never calls it that—the word comes from the Latin for flesh [caro, carnis] and literally means “to become flesh again”).

  In May, along with Aeneas and the Sibyl, we left the underworld:

  Sunt geminae Somni portae, quarum altera fertur

  cornea, qua veris facilis datur exitus umbris;

  altera candenti perfecta nitens elephanto

  sed falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia manes.

  His ubi tum natum Anchises unaque Sibyllam

  prosequitur dictis portaque emittit eburna

  There are twin doors of sleep, one which is said to be made of horn,

  which gives easy exit to true shades

  the other shining with brilliant ivory,

  but through it the shades send false dreams to the sky.

  Having said these words, Anchises escorts his son and the Sibyl

  and sends them both out through the ivory door.

  And here again is my old friend insomnia: sed falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia manes (but through it the shades send false dreams to the sky). The word clearly means “dreams,” not sleeplessness, though scholars have been perplexed for centuries about why Aeneas left the underworld through the Gate of Ivory, the gate of false dreams, since everything Anchises told him came true, at least for a few centuries. Could Virgil have suspected, even then, that the empire would finally collapse and disappear?

  Some commentators posit that because Aeneas and the Sibyl weren’t dead, they could not exit through the Gate of Horn, the gate of true dreams. Some believe it presages the fact that Aeneas does not remember his experiences in the underworld just as he does not recognize the future emblazoned on the shield Venus has forged for him in Book XI. Others would eliminate the line altogether.

  Virgil frequently uses the word somnia for dreams. As in English, in Latin in as a prefix can mean “not” but also “inside or into,” so insomnia can be translated literally as “not sleeping” and insomnium as “inside sleeping” or what we experience in sleep. The word “insomnia” brings not only dreams but also nightmares and wakefulness. I am not alone in being flummoxed by this word, and it’s that versatile in’s fault.

  Robert A. Kaster in Guardians of Language calls the word, and the ambiguity between the feminine singular insomnia (sleeplessness) and the neuter plural insomnia (dreams or nightmares, Latin makes no distinction between them), “a minor bog of Latin lexicography.”

  Such bogs (paludes) abound when a language contains so much ambiguity, all the true authorities are dead, and the copied versions that have come down to us frequently differ. This fact gives rise to the oft-repeated Latinist phrase lectio difficilior potior (the more difficult reading is better), which means that when different manuscripts contain different words, the one whose meaning is less obvious is preferred.

  This principle was stated first by Erasmus in the fifteenth century, when he discovered that copyists tended to simplify difficult texts. Since nearly all Latin literature comes to us in copies, made mostly by monks or professional copyists who were not as dexterous with the subtleties of language as the original authors, many commentators follow the dictum. So if two manuscripts render the same section differently, and both variants are grammatically plausible and make logical story sense, the more difficult variant is deemed better. It is this principle that sometimes sends our class down the back alleys and obscure byways of the ablative and dative cases.

  It also turns on its head the scientific principle known as Occam’s razor, or lex parsimoniae (the law of parsimony) in its original Latin. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it thus: “A rule in science and philosophy . . . interpreted to mean that the simplest of two or three competing theories is preferable.”

  The principle was devised two centuries before Erasmus by William of Ockham, an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, and theologian. Here philosophy and philology part ways. And which is more complicated? Philology, of course, at least when it comes to Latin study. Ohe! (Enough!)

  I found myself stepping into many bogs while marveling at the visual immediacy and imaginative beauty of Virgil’s underworld that semester. It was beginning to feel like the more I knew, the less I knew. It was yet another sticky relationship among past, present, and future.

  Perhaps the great Virgil is correct, and the seeds of our future are contained in the distant past. The future waits for the unknowing past and present to catch up to it. My own future took twenty years to catch up to me. Among the furniture and books I had taken from my grandparents’ house were two prints I had found in the music room. The two pictures had remained rolled up in a cardboard tube for twenty years. I framed and hung them only after I’d finished rebuilding my house. One was a portrait of a curly-haired blonde girl playing with her cat. The girl looked a lot like Sophie, who loves cats. Though I was allergic, she had two at her father’s house, and they were her best playmates.

  The other print was a kitschy primitive-realistic painting of a house surrounded by flowers, a man leaning on a shovel, smilin
g at a woman tending her roses, while another woman hangs a birdcage from the wisteria-garlanded front porch. The house pictured was almost identical to mine: An eyebrow colonial with the same three eyebrow windows on the second floor, the same four larger-paned windows on the first. Even the flowers were the same as those that had been planted before I’d moved in: two cultivars of old-fashioned peonies, bright pink and pale pink and white, yellow-brown irises, and a small tree in the same position on the lawn. Pliny, I learned, wrote that peonies were protected by woodpeckers and might be used for prophetic dreams, though he doesn’t say how. Could it be that the peonies in that picture, and in my garden, and the woodpeckers that visit us were avatars from the future, long waiting for me?

  Was there something I recognized in this house the first time I saw it that rang an unconscious bell with that picture? I once had a session with my friend Susan, a “seer” who channels the African spirit Garuda. Garuda claimed that I was being watched over by a tall, thin, white-haired man. “Did I recognize him?” she asked. “Of course,” I said, “it must be my grandfather, the only other literary person in our very small clan.”

  When my English friend Caroline saw the newly framed print, she said, “I always thought when you were with the man in that picture, you’d finally be happy.” On her next visit, two years later, she added, “And now you are. Doesn’t he look like George?”

  The man in the picture has the same sort of sharp nose and tanned face, hair the same color as George’s, and he wears similar layers: work shirt over long-sleeved undershirt, pants too big for him, Amish-style hat. Though he isn’t as skinny as George, he has the same sweet, loving expression as he looks at his wife that I enjoy when George looks at me.

  Had my grandfather, like Anchises, seen my future?

  CHAPTER 15

  Salva res est, saltat senex.

  The thing is saved, the old guy is still dancing.

  —Unknown (preserved by Servius)

  At semester’s end, I had the equivalent of an undergraduate Latin major. I was given an unexpected graduation present. Jason Pedicone invited me to join Paideia’s “Living Latin in Rome” program for a couple of weeks if I wanted. And how I wanted to study and speak Latin in its home! With Jason’s help, and the first two chapters of this book, I applied for an apartment at the American Academy of Rome, and I was accepted as a visiting scholar. Six weeks later, I found myself in the multilayered glory that is Rome, where the past is ever present.

  I was fortunate enough to be assigned a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of the Greenhouse at the Villa Aurelia, a short hop above the Academy, on the crest of the Janiculum, the highest hill in Rome. Luigi, a friendly Italian, led me up the cobblestone drive, bordered by tufa walls, down which abundant blue and white flowers cascaded. I’d entered another world, of grace, gardens, and wealth. In the distance I spotted the magnificent beaux arts Villa Aurelia, glowing gold in the midmorning July sun. We turned right before the villa and headed up the narrow stone staircase, awash with flowers, to the Greenhouse, a stone structure with a tiled patio. As Luigi showed me around the charming, light-filled apartment that would be mine for two weeks, exhilaration quickly overcame jet lag. I decided to go to that afternoon’s class, which was a long, lovely walk along the Tiber to St. John’s University Rome Campus in the Prati neighborhood, where Paideia held its classes.

  This was the fifth year of Paideia Institute’s Living Latin in Rome program. The program was heir to a legendary Latin summer class given in Rome by a wildly eccentric Carmelite monk named Reginald Foster (Reginaldus to his students). A native of working-class Milwaukee, Father Foster had served as secretary to three different popes and as senior Latinist to John Paul II. In addition to translating the Vatican’s public proclamations into Latin, Father Foster was a one-man Latinist band. One of his official duties was to teach Latin at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and he allowed anyone interested to join his class free of charge. He quickly became something of a cult figure, and his classes grew and grew, to the chagrin of the Vatican.

  Often unbathed and unkempt, clad always in a blue polyester jumpsuit bought annually from JC Penney, he was known as the best Latinist alive. Because he came of age pre-Vatican II, when Latin was still the language of the Church, he was as close as any modern could come to a native Latin speaker. He was also a showman, a formidable teacher, and a passionate taskmaster. When exasperated to the point of indignation at the failings of some student, he would let loose a lion’s roar of outrage. “If you don’t know why that’s subjunctive, why don’t you go ask the driver of the 64 bus!” he’d yell. “Every bum and prostitute in the city spoke Latin fluently, so you can, too.” He did not use textbooks but threw students from day one into Latin texts, and supplemented them with exercises he composed himself. On Sundays, Father Foster took his classes on optional excursions around Rome to read texts in the places they had been composed for: Cicero’s Catilinarian Orations in the Forum, Augustus’ Res Gestae at the Ara Pacis.

  Jason had taken Father Foster’s summer course in 2004 and liked it so much that he spent the entire next year taking every class Reginald offered and reading as many Latin texts as he could in the Biblioteca Nazionale in his spare time.

  “Reginald was a genius,” Jason told me. “He was a rock star, a charismatic. He could hold a room spellbound for six hours a day, six days a week. And he did that for more than twenty years!”

  In 2008, halfway into the summer program, Father Foster fell seriously ill, too ill to continue the course. Jason and his friend Leah Whittington stepped in: Both were attending the class, and working on PhDs at Princeton. The two of them took over and did their best to channel Father Foster’s energy and teaching methods.

  At the end of the summer, Jason returned to Princeton to work on his doctoral dissertation. “I was a miserable academic,” he said. “I was not well suited for long hours of study in libraries. I was an organizer, I wanted to be out and about making things happen. And I’d spent all this time getting my PhD. What was I to do with it?”

  Two years later, doctorate in hand and despair in heart, he fled to Paris to regroup. At the École Normale Supérieure, as a pensionnaire étranger, he organized an unofficial course called Vergilius Vivus, in which students read and discussed The Aeneid in Latin. Then he got a call from Eric Hewett, a talented linguist who was also an alumnus of Father Foster’s summer programs. Eric had been traveling around Europe for the past eight years, learning languages, taking on odd jobs here and there to supplement a small inheritance from his grandmother. He was living in a van at the Circus Maximus in Rome. “Hey Jason, we need to start a summer program, take over from Reggie before someone else does.” And thus began Paideia. The two called Father Foster, seeking his blessing, which they duly received.

  It turned out that Jason and Eric were born entrepreneurs; if Father Foster was a Latin missionary, Jason was a visionary and Eric a Latin CEO. After two years, they had attracted a solid complement of donors and students; after four, Paideia was well on its way to becoming the “go-to” organization for classical summer travel.

  In this fifth Paideia summer, there were forty students divided into three groups: juniores (beginners), peritiores (skilled), and seniores (advanced), each taught by a Reginaldian.

  Jason put me in the juniores group, the easiest. I tried not to feel bad about it. My classmates were in their early twenties, from Ivy League schools, save a few known as “the British invasion,” clearly upper-class kids, one of whom, I could tell by the tilt of his head, was already well on his way to becoming a dandy. The British girls seemed to be taking turns on his arm, day by day. To my delight, there was also a fellow senex, Daniel.

  The classes were much like those at Vassar and included reading, translation, and explication of the grammar of Latin texts Jason had gathered, which corresponded to the ancient sites we would be visiting.

  That first day, the subjun
ctive and the sequence of tenses, things I’d avoided pummeling into my brain, were explained, explained again, then practiced sub arboribus (under the trees), which took place after a gelato break. We gathered in the school’s graceful courtyard, complete, of course, with fountain, where we broke up into even smaller groups and did round-robin exercises in speaking Latin.

  I hadn’t improved a bit since February. Getting even a few words out of my mouth in the proper sequence with the right conjugations and tenses was nigh impossible. I blamed jet lag and the fact that the rest of the class had already been there practicing for three weeks, but I knew the real culprit: age. Daniel suffered as much as I, though he didn’t seem to mind being bettered by youths who had taken a mere year or two of Latin. Vae mihi! (Woe is me!)

  Daniel was staying near the Campo de’ Fiori, so we cabbed there and dined together. Daniel had been in class since the beginning of the program, and his feet had given out. He took cabs to and from class, and thrifty me was only too happy to hitch a ride with him, share dinner, then walk the steep mile uphill to my Janiculum home, thus working off the pasta and bread I could not resist gorging on.

  A working-class boy, Daniel had dropped out of school at age fourteen to work as a teller at a bank in an Italian neighborhood in Melbourne, Australia. There, one of his regular customers noticed his fluency in Italian, which Daniel had easily picked up on the job. The man convinced him to return to school and arranged a scholarship to university.