Tag: Latin language

Translating Long Sentences in Latin Prose: Some Tips

As pupils begin to develop their fluency in Latin reading and unseen translation, and begin to dig into the writing of some of the trickier Roman prose authors who form part of their Sixth Form syllabuses, they start to have to translate long sentences. Usually they find this difficult. No other Latin sentence is as lengthy as the 279 words of the longest sentence we have on record in Classical Latin (from Cicero’s De Oratore, 202-5), but many sentences in e.g. Livy do stretch on, covering several lines of a modern edition.

Short Latin sentences can often be read fluently and without much pause for thought. Long sentences, however, often require thorough and painstaking treatment. Breaking them down into their essential elements is wise, especially when you’re making your first attempts at dealing with them.

Here below I offer 5 (now 8 – after an edit) small suggestions on how to tackle the task of translating longer prose sentences when you’re first starting out. The suggestions are intended chiefly for my students – but maybe others will also find them useful. I would be very happy for others to add further suggestions in the comments!

  1. Use every clue the modern editor of your text offers you in the form of commas and inverted commas. Commas often separate off clauses from one another and this can enable you to break down a long sentence into smaller units of meaning which you can treat independently. Watch out, however: bad editing of a text may involve the insertion of commas in unhelpful locations (a rare, but not entirely unheard of, problem) and this can generate entirely avoidable confusion.
  2. Use conjunctions to your advantage. Conjunctions do important work in long sentences; they can help you break it down, especially if they separate off clauses from one another or indicate that a new main verb has taken over the action. It is often helpful, therefore, to underline conjunctions as you aim to think about the sort of work they’re doing where they appear in long sentences.
  3. Find all/any main verbs in a sentence, underline them, and work out whether they’re part of a subordinate clause (e.g. a relative clause), or part of the main clause.
  4. Locate any ablative absolutes and ensure you deal with them as discrete elements in your translation.
  5. Underline any vocabulary you’re unsure of or do not know. Build your translation up with a clear sense of what the ‘known unknowns’ (in the form of these words you do not know) look like. Having built up your picture of the rest of the sentence, try to parse/identify anything you can about words you don’t know, so that you can make a best possible educated guess at a successful translation when the time comes to do so.
  6. If there really is no way to make the sentence ‘work’ in English, try adding additional punctuation of your own – such as commas, or – if desperate, semi-colons or colons.
  7. Watch out for indirect statements which continue over several lines and/or beyond a colon. They can rely on just one opening verb, but be spun out across several infinitives which may appear on the far side of a colon! You will of course need to supply a ‘that’ when dealing with these.
  8. Once you’ve finished your translation, make sure that it makes sense in English. It is easy to lose sight of what a long sentence is saying when you’re working hard at translating it. If necessary, finesse phrasing in order to smooth any rough edges.

The Other Languages of Ancient Italy

Below is the text of an article I recently wrote for our school languages magazine. Much of the factual content of the article is based on reading I did in the OCD (Oxford Classical Dictionary), and it may be that certain sentences feature a misunderstanding or two, since I am no expert philologist. Nonetheless I thought readers of this blog might enjoy reading it.

Greek and Latin are today the best-known languages of ancient Europe – and there are good reasons for this. First, the speakers of these two languages produced literature and inscriptions which survive to us in large quantities far exceeding what we possess from most other ancient linguistic traditions; second, both languages were widely used, not just in a narrow geographical zone, but throughout the ancient Mediterranean, over many centuries; and third – both languages have enjoyed an amazing afterlife. They form a big part of the basis of the most commonly-spoken European languages today (English, French, Italian, Romanian, Spanish etc). And, equally crucially, the culture and literature of the original speakers of Latin and Greek have exercised a dramatic and influential impact on subsequent literary and cultural history.

The prominence of Latin and Greek is a reminder of how language connects with power. It was early Greek colonisation, and the later empire of Alexander the Great, which successfully spread the ancient Greek language across the ancient Mediterranean and beyond. And it was Roman military conquest which resulted in the spread of the Latin language – first, as Rome conquered Italy, throughout the Italian peninsula; later, as Rome expanded her borders, throughout the ancient Mediterranean, into France, Spain, North Africa, and beyond – even to that far corner of the empire, Britain. Latin and Greek, then, are languages of empire, not just literature and culture – and their ancient (and modern) prominence reflects this.

In spite of this background, I often pause to wonder, as a teacher of Classics, about the other languages of the ancient world – the ones we know less about; the ones we hardly know at all; the ones of which no trace whatsoever survives. In particular, since much of my day is consumed with the Romans and their Latin language, I find myself wondering about the other languages of ancient Italy.

As the Romans spread from their home city of Rome to complete their conquest of Italy in the late centuries BC, they inevitably brought their own language (Latin) along with them into the areas they conquered. It is clear enough that Latin became quickly established throughout Italy as a language of politics, diplomacy and trade. But what happened then to the languages of the conquered peoples? One broadbrush comment we can make here is that these other languages continued to be used. They did not just vanish once Latin appeared on the scene. But what broad features of the languages and their use can we identify beyond this?

To start off with, we must register that we can say almost nothing at all about many of the languages in question. Of Paelignian, Marrucinian, Volscian, Marsian and Aequian, for example, all languages of ancient Italy, we know almost nothing beyond the fact that they existed and were spoken. About other languages we can say more than this. Take the closely related languages of Oscan and Umbrian, both of which were spoken in southern Italy.

Umbrian is known chiefly from a collection of bronze tablets which survive from the 2nd century BC and from a collection of short inscriptions from c. 400 BC. As with Umbrian, our best evidence for Oscan comes from an early period (pre-Roman conquest). Oscan was clearly widely spoken in South Italy. It was the language of the Samnites, the tribe who took over the region of Campania in the 5th century BC. The Romans called speakers of Oscan ‘Sabelli’. The Oscan alphabet is known to us: there are coin legends, building inscriptions, texts painted on walls at Pompeii, curses, funerary inscriptions and more. Users of Oscan were not afraid to use the language flexibly: we have evidence of its being transcribed into the Greek, and later the Latin, alphabets, for example. In terms of their linguistic relationship, Oscan and Umbrian have a close relationship to one another, moreover.

Another important language of ancient Italy was Greek. Greek colonies were established very early in ancient Italy and down into Sicily – and the Greek language found a home in these settlements. The geographical zone in which Greek was used has been known as ‘Magna Graecia’ (‘Great Greece’!). One impact of the use of Greek in this area is the drift of Greek loanwords into other Italian languages – including Latin. Greek continued to be an important language in Italy after the Romans conquered the peninsula. For example, when St Paul addressed a community of Christians in Rome itself in the first century AD in a text which came to form part of the New Testament, he wrote to them in Greek. And Greek remained an important language for Christianity at Rome.

Fleeting glimpses of other noteworthy ancient languages appear in our evidence. A form of the Celtic language known as Lepontic was also used in ancient Italy, for instance: inscriptions found in North West Italy give evidence of its presence. Meanwhile, down in Sicily, we have evidence of the use of the important North African language Punic.

The Etruscans, and their Etruscan language, represent a major topic in their own right. Our historical record is patchy but it seems the Etruscans flourished especially as a major power across Italy in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Inevitably their political strength is reflected in the spread of their language. The Etruscan language is interesting especially because it seems to have almost no obvious linguistic relationship to other languages we know about. This has made it particularly challenging for historians to decode the 9000 or so surviving Etruscan inscriptions, most of which are found in Etruria in central Italy.

There is something haunting about considering the use of these ancient languages. Once at the heartbeat of their respective towns, cities and societies, they are now known to us only dimly through small scattered evidence. Yet their traces remind us of the remorseless sweep of history, and of the fact that, in time, even the languages of great powers – such as Etruria, or Rome herself, or – dare we say it? – of the great powers of 21st century modernity – disappear or develop into something new.

Further Reading: The Oxford Classical Dictionary – articles on ‘Languages of Italy’, ‘Oscan’, ‘Sabellian’, ‘Etruscan Language’.

Caesar’s Prose

My recent bedtime reading has been Nicola Gardini’s fun little book ‘Long live Latin: the Pleasures of a Useless Language‘. The book is a nice combination of personal reflection and linguistic and literary discussion. Gardini focuses on a range of Latin texts he has encountered and on the nature of his personal responses to them over the course of his education and career.

The book has by turns intrigued and frustrated me.

One part of the book I didn’t much warm to was Gardini’s discussion of the prose of Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars (Caesar’s account of a major stage in the Roman conquest of Gaul). This is a text I haven’t read much myself since sixth form days, but my memory of its style is good enough: Caesar displays a special knack throughout the text for conveying the brutal suppression of his enemies and the trials faced by his armies with unnerving understatement and precision.

For Gardini, Caesar is, straightforwardly, the ‘matter of fact’ prose stylist par excellence: he is a rationalist, a pragmatist, someone who wants to ‘recreate the world mathematically and geometrically, as if the obscurity and vagueness of our deeper motives had no place here’ (p72-3).

Well, yes, as far as this goes. But what about the chilling nature of some of Caesar’s descriptions (chilling, that is, precisely because of their lack of graphic description or celebration where some such might have been expected)? There is a good deal more to say about his prose style, I felt, than Gardini does say.

That this is indeed the case was nicely brought to light on (of all places) a Twitter thread recently. A number of classicists aired views on themes and stylistic elements in the Gallic Wars which confirmed (and indeed challenged) my own thinking. The thread, started by John Ma (link below), is worth viewing in full:

The notion (suggested by Llewelyn Morgan) that Caesar’s ‘pragmatic’ style in his writing reflects an attempt to ‘keep it that of a plain soldier’ struck me as a particularly interesting possibility.

My starting (and strong) assumption here is that the Gallic Wars was not a text intended for a readership of ordinary soldiers: why, in that case, write like one? Well, perhaps to identify oneself as a particular sort of character to one’s actual (well-heeled urban?) readers. A character, that is, who might come across as the very opposite of an effete aristocrat, and instead as a down to earth man of the rank and file military. (Quite a threatening posture to adopt in relation to these readers, in other words, and one that fits with the image of a Caesar who was interested in stirring things up in Rome itself).

Certainly I’m more interested now in a range of questions about the relationship between political and military authority and literate communication that I hadn’t considered all that clearly before. So thank you, classical Twitter, for the stimulus to reflection. Perhaps it’s time for me to revisit some Caesar this summer (Gardini, an unabashed enthusiast for this writer, would doubtless approve).

Consuetudo loquendi est in motu

‘Our manner of speech is in flux’: these are the words of Varro, the first century BC Roman encyclopaedist, as mediated through my slightly loose translation. Varro wasn’t thinking of individuals’ use of language when he wrote this – though, no doubt, his is a point that applies over the course of the life of an individual, just as it does over the course of a language’s life. Instead, he was participating in a highly self-aware Roman discussion about the developing use of the Latin language.

For many people who know some Latin today, it is easy enough to imagine the language as an impressively logical system – of clearly defined grammatical tables, of distinct word endings, and (more generally) of order and rational control. This image of the Latin language is in significant measure a product of the habits of teaching and learning favoured by 19th century educators: hefty Victorian grammatical textbooks are just one tangible artefact of their influence.

What I hadn’t really been aware of before this week was how the Romans themselves imposed considerable (conscious) control over the nature and structure of their language. This comes through in a range of first century BC discussions – in authors like Varro, Cicero and indeed Julius Caesar – of which I’m now aware. And it reflects an older Roman (and Greek) tradition of thinking about language use.

My education in this area has come about through reading Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s Rome’s Cultural Revolution, a text I’ve had on my shelf for several years but which I’ve only just found the time to get into.

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Romans of the first century BC were sometimes acutely conscious of linguistic differences in the way Latin was spoken (and written). Just as modern English speakers can effortlessly spot the differences between regional accents, national accents, formal and informal speech (etc), so too ancient Latin users would have spotted similar differences. But what were the boundaries of correct usage in amongst the (perfectly natural) linguistic variety that could be observed?

This is a question, Wallace-Hadrill suggests, that assumes an importance only with Rome’s – and Latin’s – imperial extension in the first century BC: ‘hand in hand with an insistence that others use one’s language is the establishment of authoritative standards by which to lay down what that language is’.

For Cicero, writing in his Brutus on the history of oratory, there was a pure use of Latin which all good orators – and indeed all good speakers of the language – should aim to practise. There was a time, Cicero thinks, when all Romans would speak this pure form of the language as a matter of custom. So what changed? A flood of people of diverse origins, he explains, has entered Rome. They have tainted the language, polluting its proper use!

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Cicero’s explanation is strikingly reductive (and prejudiced!) – but it is interesting that he seems to assume that ‘proper’ Latin was only ever spoken at Rome (and that non-Romans were never in command of pure Latinitas). Wallace-Hadrill makes short work of Cicero’s argument, pointing out the myth of ‘purism’ while noting also that ‘purism’ can only be imposed on a language by the imposition of an external authority (e.g. a grammarian!).

Varro, unlike Cicero, was a realist about linguistic change, just as he was about other changes of custom. Old practices can give way to new ones in clothing, building and furniture. Traditional usage in these and other areas has been replaced. The same is true for words. Consuetudo – custom, then (whether linguistic or otherwise), can itself be remade: it is not forever set in stone, as a Cicero might have preferred.

By the end of the first century BC, the power to define consuetudo, when it came to language, seems to have begun to move away from influential patrician figures like Cicero and Varro, who had previously been the key voices in its constitution. From this point, upper class influence on correct Latin usage was no longer to have quite the weight it once did: instead the foremost authorities when it came to defining what was ‘correct’ Latin would soon be professional grammarians. This is an area about which I have more reading to do.

Sewers and Octopodes

In these difficult times, I’ve found there are worse ways to maintain spirits than trying to remember fun moments in the classroom over the past term. It’s disarming to think that teachers could by now have had their last lessons in person with the pupils they’ve taught during the current academic year. Well, below, I’ve tried to record a fun portion of one of my lessons, in which discussion ranged widely – across food and drink, sea creatures, grain supply and Roman sanitation.

My year 7 class and I had been talking briefly about Roman food and drink, and about the grain-heavy diets that many ordinary Romans had. The class had recently learned about garum – Roman fish sauce – and about the Roman fondness for wine, olive oil and various other foods and tipples. We’d had a little help along the way from an amusing episode of the series, ‘What the Romans did for us’, by Adam Hart-Davis.

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Images illustrating the preparation of garum (Roman fish sauce), which seems often to have been added to desserts!

‘But what about delicacies?’ someone asked. Good question – so we started a discussion about the sorts of meats and seafoods that ancient Romans might (more occasionally) have eaten.

‘Octopus?’ suggested one class member. Probably not for most people, most of the time, I answered! But I do have a question for you about the octopus. ‘What is its plural?’

‘Octopi!’ This was the answer most of the group felt pretty confident with – especially since they’ve done a good job of learning their 2nd declension Latin noun endings (which have a -us ending in the nominative singular and an -i ending in the nominative plural). But a small smattering of class members tentatively suggested ‘octopuses’: octopi wasn’t the only pick.

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An octopus – aka polypus – on a Roman mosaic

Well, I asked, what if neither of those options is strictly accurate? Accurate, that is, if we treat ‘octopus’ as an ancient word. Confused looks.

Good, I said: this can be a little topic for you to do some research on later. Is there an additional possible plural of ‘octopus’ – and what might it be, and why?

The answer, jubilantly reported by some of the pupils in their next lesson, is that because of the Greek (not Latin) roots of octopus, the plural might best be given as octopodes.

They’d done well. Octopus does indeed have Greek roots – but, so it appears, the word doesn’t actually have an ancient provenance. Greeks certainly knew about the cephalopod we call the octopus, but the name they used for this animal was polypous (i.e. many footed creature). It was this word that Romans borrowed to give the Latin word polypus…and this is the word they used to designate the creature we know as the octopus.

It was only much later – in the 16th century. according to our best information – that the word octopus itself starts to appear for the first time, and it appears then in the English language. A nice discussion of this development is available here.

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A depiction of a Roman grain transporter ship being loaded

From our rather inconclusive discussion of the octopus (how should you talk about more than one of them?) we turned to start talking about a separate topic relating to Roman diet: the Roman grain supply. This was crucial for Rome’s development and stature as a city during the high period of its empire. In order to feed the vast majority of the city’s inhabitants, emperors would import huge quantities of grain, all the way across the Mediterranean, from North Africa, for ordinary people to eat. It was given out as a hand-out.

Some of the class were shocked by this revelation. ‘Free food. Really?!’ Not exactly free, of course, but to the Roman plebs, it must have felt like it. This in turn set off a conversation about how modern governments don’t really do this sort of thing – and maybe it would be helpful if they did?

I asked the class to reflect on another key area of Roman urban life that they might find surprising: hygiene. Walking into the city of Rome in the 1st or 2nd century AD, I asked, what – perhaps more than anything else – might have imposed itself on your senses. One pupil saw immediately where I was going with this question: ‘the smell’, she said.

I remember reading a passage somewhere in one of Keith Hopkins’ books where he really insists on this point. The smell on the streets of the ancient city would have been ghastly, overpowering, horrific. City dwellers in the developed world today have no point of easy comparison.

But this, I told the class, brings us to another topic you may wish to do some research about: the Roman sanitation and sewage system (particularly the Cloaca Maxima). Despite the toxic stench of their city, the Romans possessed a remarkably advanced sanitation system, featuring underground tunnels and drainage. Without this, the city would surely have smelt a whole lot worse.

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A modern view of the interior of the ancient Roman sanitation system, the Cloaca Maxima

I’ve noticed over the course of my time as a teacher that pupils in the 21st century classroom tend to assume that the story of historical development has been a pretty linear one of relentless progress: a sort of whiggish optimism, in other words, is pretty widespread. The history of Roman sanitation, of aqueducts and the provision of running water to urban centres, and of the Roman genius for engineering more generally, is a nice counterpoint here.

In these areas, Romans produced technologies that were not (in Europe, at least) to be matched for many centuries (over a milennium, in fact). With the demise of the Roman empire, some of the technology went out of use altogether, without being replaced by anything superior. Far from it. I’m sure my pupils now have a sense of this, even if they’re not exactly clear (as I myself am not) which word to choose if they want to talk about more than one octopus. Sometimes not even teachers have all the answers.