Latin is a treat for the mind. It’s beautiful, it’s interesting, and it allows a kind of time travel. This book explains how it works.
The book is distinctive in a few ways. It seeks to spell out the workings of Latin with an extra measure of clarity and patience. It illustrates every point, large and small, with short examples. The examples are mostly from ancient writings and they’re all explained on the spot. That’s the premise of the book: to let you learn Latin by reading and understanding lots of short specimens of the real thing.
This book, and the website that goes with it (along with a lot of practice), will enable you to master Latin if that’s your aim. It can also teach you to understand and appreciate Latin if you don’t have years to spend on it. Since all the illustrations are fully explained, you can (if you wish) wander at will among them and study the grammatical rules when and how you like. The format allows for free-range learning.
This book is especially written to help learners of Latin who like the ideas of the Stoics (another treat for the mind). Many of its examples are drawn from Seneca the Younger and from Cicero, the Roman writers who discussed those ideas the most. You’ll be able to learn Latin by studying samples that especially interest you. And cutting your teeth on authors you want to read later will make it easier when that time comes.
The book is big because it explains and illustrates everything you’re ever likely to want to know about Latin. But you don’t need to read the whole book to get the hang of the subject; it’ll be just as long as you wish. The book also has a companion website: www.latinlanguage.org. There you’ll find vocabulary, quizzes, longer passages to read, recordings of the illustrations, and much else. You can click on words or touch them on your phone to see what they mean.
Latin can relieve many modern ailments. When the slide of the culture into vapidity is too much to bear, for example, here is Latin: fixed and fascinating, a direct route to ancient Rome, and highly enjoyable if approached the right way. But what it’s like to learn depends on how you do it. This book seeks to make those features of the language more available to readers of a certain bent. It means to make Latin intelligible and fun.
The Attractions of the Subject.
The rest of this preface elaborates on the summary just given. To begin: This book is about the grammar of Latin and the pleasures of Latin. Squaring these claims requires a certain view of what makes Latin appealing.
First, Latin packs more meaning into a word than English does. The meaning of an English word usually depends on where it appears in a sentence. Compare the lion eats the gladiator and the gladiator eats the lion. All the words are the same but they mean different things—opposite things—just because of their order. And the meaning of an English word is often shaped by other words nearby. The word eat needs to appear in a phrase before you know what’s going on: they will eat or you did eat or let’s eat!
Latin compresses all those different meanings into single words. The word for gladiator has one form when the gladiator is doing something, such as eating. It has a different form when the lion eats the gladiator. The word for eat looks one way when it describes what you’re doing, and another way when it describes what they’ll be doing. So single words in Latin mean more than English words do. They can land with more power, and you don’t need as many of them to say the same thing. (Sometimes English words, too, change form to reflect their meanings—eat vs. ate, run vs. ran, etc. Latin words just do it much more often.)
Second, in order to give such exact meanings to words, Latin needs rules. How do you know whether the gladiator is eating or being eaten? There’s a rule about how the word looks each way. And the ending of one word often depends on the endings of others. When you understand a Latin sentence, you see all the endings of all the words following all the rules and producing an exact meaning. Everything snaps into place. That snapping sensation brings much satisfaction when you’re able to hear it. It’s like a sudoku that matters.
Third and above all, the writings that arise from these customs can be distinctly attractive. To the ear accustomed to English, there’s often a compact elegance to the way things can be said in Latin. It allows miracles of concision. And there’s a relationship between those properties and the rules behind them. To see large effects produced by little interlocking parts can be mesmerizing. It’s akin to studying clockwork or watching a ballet. A good Latin sentence is a study in beauty and order and how they find unity in words.
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Latin is pleasing in another way. Because Latin words have so much packed into them, they usually can be put into any order and still have the same meaning. This lets things be said in Latin in ways that surprise us. Cicero, for example, once talked about how our appetites shape the way we perceive food and all else. A standard English translation of what he wrote might go like this:
Who fails to see that appetite is the best sauce? When Darius, in his flight from the enemy, had drunk some water that was muddy and fouled by cadavers, he declared that he had never drunk anything more pleasant; the fact was, he had never drunk before when he was thirsty.
(Tusculan Disputations 5.97.) But if you translate the Latin more literally and keep the original word order, it runs more this way:
For who this not sees, by appetites all those things to be spiced? Darius in flight when water cloudy and by cadavers polluted had drunk, denied ever himself to have drunk more pleasantly. Never evidently thirsting had he drunk.
Even if you know what all the words mean, it’s a challenge to hear them comfortably in that order. This is part of why people say that Latin is hard: you have to understand the words and make sense out of them in a sequence we find strange at first. Yet there’s a delight to the order once you adjust to it. The twists and turns produce drama. Sometimes a word doesn’t make sense until you’ve read further; the verb in particular often comes last. So the meaning is a payoff you get at the end, not in drips as you go along. We want our sentences easy. Cicero wanted them eloquent. Latin gave him tools for the purpose that aren’t available to us. (Imagine being able to put the words of your sentences into nearly any order without losing clarity, and what possibilities this would create for invention.)
The surprising order of the words in Latin is a feature of the language, not a bug. We don’t just read words; we think in them. Their order sets out paths for the mind. The paths laid down by the Romans make Latin a different and thrilling landscape for the English-speaking mind to discover.
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Latin also has special value for speakers of English and of Romance languages. Most English sentences contain some words that came into the language from Latin (via French or more directly). That’s why so many Latin words will remind you of English words when you stop and think about them. The languages are similar and different, just as we and the people who spoke Latin are similar and different. Culturally speaking, reading Latin might mean hearing how your grandparents talked. Learning the grammar means knowing what they knew. Looking at English after you know Latin is like seeing the earth from the moon; and perhaps the same can be said for looking at ourselves.
The study of Latin grammar is more often urged (or, nowadays, defended) on grounds other than the ones we’ve just seen. It’s said to give you the habit of thinking more precisely, or to make other languages easier to learn, or (ye gods) to help you do better on standardized tests. But even if those results sound appealing, they can make learning Latin itself sound about as appealing as digging a ditch. It’s better if you think of the grammar as how the magician’s tricks are done. Then learning it stops being a labor done for the sake of other things. It’s captivating in its own right. That’s the start of a happy relationship with the subject.
The Role of the Illustrations.
I’ve sketched some rationales for learning Latin because the methods of this book go well with them. But you may find the methods helpful even if the reasons just given aren’t yours (or vice versa). The most important question about a way of learning is simply whether it fits the turn of your mind. Here’s a summary, then, of what follows and why.
Each section of the book explains one type of Latin word—verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, participles, and then some residual topics. Within those sections, each chapter talks about one family of endings that such a word can have. So there are chapters about each of the tenses in which a verb can appear. There’s a chapter about each kind of adjective, each kind of participle, and so on. The chapters start by explaining how the words work, then come illustrations. The illustrations are a central feature of the book and differ from those found elsewhere in a few respects.
First, the examples here are more numerous than is typical and also more systematic. They usually show every ending at issue in the chapter; collectively they illustrate every single way a Latin word can end, or nearly so.
Second, the illustrations are from ancient authors, verbatim and unabridged, with minor exceptions (there are a few legal maxims and other old expressions that aren’t from Rome, and some quotes have been excerpted from longer sentences in a way that simplifies the grammar a bit). This feature is meant to appeal to a specific sort of reader: the type for whom the appeal of Latin is bound up with reading the real (old) thing, even when it’s mundane. And reading ancient examples has another advantage. If you give up on learning Latin before you get as far as you wished, the time you spent won’t have been lost. You’ll have read some actual Latin the Romans wrote, which was probably your goal from the start. You won’t have spent hours preparing to do something you never did.
Third, the illustrations are translated on the spot. The first translation is typically from a published source—usually editions from the Loeb library or the University of Chicago Press. A more literal translation sometimes follows. The translations are there to clarify the Latin, of course; but once you’ve worked through a line yourself, you can also think about how the English version compares to it and what’s lost or gained between the literal meaning of a line and how it’s conventionally been rendered in English.
Then every word of the illustration is explained. In the beginning you won’t understand all the notes, but you’ll get the hang of them as you go. The summary in Chapter 2 will help in the meantime. Explaining all the words in every illustration, even in late chapters, might seem like overkill, but it’s a crucial feature of the book. It frees you to read chapters out of order or wander among illustrations found in any of them and still make sense out of what you see. You can get off the tour bus and explore the language on foot if that’s the way you like to learn.
Granted, there’s some risk in offering translations of every example on the spot. They can make it too easy to peek at the answer before working on it yourself. If you want to be able to read Latin without help, it’s best just to look at the notes as needed; their presence requires some self-discipline. The website makes it easy to hide or show them.
Fourth, the illustrations are all short. This book invites you to love short Latin sentences. Hear the words and read about them and savor the order of them. Be astonished (that’s how they said that?). Think about the translation, but also enjoy the Latin without translating it. That’s always the aim: to read the Latin as Latin. But be mindful that Latin sentences are usually longer than the ones you’ll see here, often much longer. The website has many longer passages to read.
Finally, the illustrations are from a wider range of sources than is usual. Some ideas of Stoic philosophers have found renewed interest of late, for example, and the largest set of writings to survive on that subject are from Seneca the Younger. His words don’t appear much in most books for learners of Latin, but they’ll be found a lot in this one. We’ll also see other authors from his era, such as Quintilian (a famous teacher of rhetoric), Seneca the Elder (Seneca the Younger’s father—another teacher of that subject), and Livy. And of course there are hundreds of examples from what’s called the Golden Age of Latin—Cicero, Virgil, Horace, et al.
Some illustrations are drawn from the Vulgate Bible—the translation into Latin done by St. Jerome around 392. The Vulgate was the most influential book in the Western world for about a millennium after it was created, so it can be a subject of great cultural and literary interest whether or not it’s of religious interest. The notes will point out spots where the Latin of the Vulgate differs much from the classical kind. Many illustrations are also taken from the Adagia (Adages) of Erasmus (1466–1536), a Dutch Renaissance philosopher. Most of the entries we’ll see from that work aren’t adages in the modern English sense of that word. They’re expressions that Erasmus collected because they were prominent in classical writings.
The illustrations reinforce the lessons in the first part of each chapter, but they can also serve as the main event. You might like spending most of your time with the illustrations, and in that case should do it in fine conscience. You can pleasantly occupy yourself reading and thinking about short bits of Latin, perhaps memorizing some that really catch your fancy, and you’ll learn a lot in the process. Thoreau said it well: “It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations.” But all this raises the larger question of your aims, to which we now turn.
Ways to Use the Book.
Some people will tell you with surprising vehemence that there’s a single best way to approach Latin. (Survivorship bias runs riot in the study of classics; many oft-praised methods have left behind more forgotten casualties than the Battle of Ypres.) I view a book for the purpose more like a piece of exercise equipment: The best choice is whichever one you’ll enjoy enough to actually use. This book just means to add to the ways Latin can be studied and help more readers toward the kind of relationship they’d like to have with the language. With that in mind, then, here are some notes about how the book might help with your goals.
Suppose you want to be able to read an ancient Latin text without often consulting a translation or dictionary. An excellent aspiration! It will, however, take a long time to reach. Latin words have many different endings to keep straight. Those endings are a fit subject for affection rather than fear, but memorizing them undeniably takes patience and a longer attention span than is now common. It’s typically a matter of pounding away with flashcards. But this book takes some pressure off that process by illustrating every ending. You may find thinking about the examples to be a more agreeable way to learn some of those details.
This book doesn’t provide vocabulary lists. You’ll come to know the meanings of many words by seeing them used a lot and by digesting the notes slowly. (The definitions found there aren’t always complete or always the same; showing every meaning every time would be too much. The notes try to strike a useful balance.) When you do want to focus on vocabulary, the companion website (latinlanguage.org) provides extensive help in a similar style.
An important practical note: The organization of this book makes it easy to see the structure of Latin and to find whatever you want to know. But the chapters aren’t in a natural reading order. Indeed, working through them from front to back would (probably) be crazy: you’d encounter many arcane points about verbs before learning the first thing about nouns. The Appendix suggests a sequence in which to read the book if you’re using it by itself for any length of time, whether your purposes are the ambitious ones just discussed or the more modest ones considered next.
Your aspirations might reasonably be humbler than mastery. Suppose you just want to understand how Latin works and know some of its pleasures without devoting yourself to the subject as if you were climbing Everest. That’s a possibility this book means to bring within reach more easily than others do. It offers a path up a different face of the mountain, to a spot below the summit but still high enough to satisfy readers of a certain kind. It’s a path to the appreciation of Latin.
The path might work this way: you read about a rule, then look at a bit of ancient text and think about the explanation of it, then do the same with another bit. Or you mostly amuse yourself with the illustrations, systematically or not, and read explanations of whatever you don’t understand and wish you did. Either way you gradually absorb principles of the language and vocabulary by exposure. If you want to memorize the details, so much the better. But the illustrations will let you progress and root around without doing that. In most books you can’t; when presenting what comes next, they expect you to have memorized what came before.
So let’s say you do spend time reading this book but not memorizing much. What will you have to show for it? Happy familiarity with Latin. You’ll know how it works even if many of the details aren’t in your head. Such familiarity, even well short of mastery, is a great thing to have. It’s what many people end up with who do memorize the details of the language in their school days and then put it down for a few years. (Such lapsed Latinists are welcome here.)
Mere familiarity with Latin has many dividends. It shows you some rhetorical possibilities—remarkable ways of saying things—that can’t be experienced in English. It puts you into contact with the life and culture of Rome. It enables you to read ancient authors in English but with the Latin nearby and appreciate them differently. It lets you understand Latin phrases that are common but obscure if you’ve never studied the language. It allows you the edifying pastime of composing simple thoughts of your own into Latin (mottoes, adages …). Above all, though, familiarity with Latin is pleasurable in itself for the reasons we’ve seen. It gives your mind a taste of something interesting and delicious. These are improvements to the quality of life of any thinking person.