Living with a Dead Language

by Ann Patty

  Last to arrive was Siddhi, a slightly Goth, gorgeous young man sporting long brown hair, lavender wifebeater T-shirt, low-slung black jeans complete with key chain leading from belt loop to back pocket, two leather necklaces, three bracelets, four rings—and radiating sex. Ecastor!!! Not your typical Latin scholar, to be sure.

  He sat next to Alissa, and the two immediately begin chatting. It turned out they were roommates. How was it this young woman was always with the cutest boy in the room? Was Siddhi straight or gay? I couldn’t tell, but he was captivating, very friendly, and very sweet. And what sort of name was Siddhi? And why did Xavier refer to him as Justin? Ralph and Peter, both of whom were clearly gay, entered the conversation from the other side of the room, and soon everyone in the class was chattering.

  Bert Lott, the leader of the pack, entered to enthusiastic Salves! Bert is an epigrapher first and foremost and contagiously in love with his subject. He was sometimes almost giddy with excitement as he introduced what he hoped to accomplish during the semester. The class was nothing like a regular Latin class, more like a treasure hunt, with Bert leading our very enthusiastic crew in ferreting out stories from stones.

  As Bert laid out the syllabus, Siddhi kept pumping his arm in the air saying, “Cool, cool.”

  “I don’t know how this is going to go,” Bert warned us, “I may have to throw this syllabus out altogether, it depends how much trouble we all have coming to terms with these inscriptions. The last time I did this, I took the class out to the Vassar cemetery so we could study modern inscriptions, but we were not too kindly asked to leave. I was told I was being disrespectful to the dead, though I don’t really think they minded at all. In fact, I believe they enjoyed our company and interest.”

  The Romans had what scholars call “the epigraphic habit,” especially during the reign of Augustus. “Augustus loved to see his name and accomplishments written in stone. He was the first of the Roman emperors, and he made sure no one forgot it,” Bert mused. There are over half a million Latin inscriptions, some on bronze, most on stone, that have survived the millennia. Back in the beginning of the twentieth century, Bert told us, Vassar had a first-rate classical archaeology department, as well as a classical museum, which was consolidated with the current Lehman Loeb Art Center in the seventies.

  Also around that time, fourteen inscribed marbles “somehow made their way back to Vassar”; it was more or less legal to bring home such souvenirs (viz., the Elgin Marbles and the current battles raging about important antiquities being returned to the countries from which they were plundered). No one knows who the collector was. The fourteen marbles were plastered into the walls of the Vassar Classical Museum until they were finally removed and stored in the basement of the Lehman Loeb Art Center, where, Bert told us, “they have been sitting uncatalogued, unresearched, untranslated, and unloved ever since.”

  It would be our task, at the beginning of the semester, to edit and catalogue these inscriptions so they could be added to the master list of Roman inscriptions: the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, commonly referred to as the CIL. Editing an inscription involves deciphering it in Latin, trying to date it, identifying those named on it, and guessing what purpose it served. Inscriptions so studied include laws, road signs, calendars, Senate decrees, and, most commonly, grave epitaphs and other forms of memorials. Each of us would be assigned two stones to edit, which left me, an auditor, without stones. Luckily, Alissa had a schedule change and had to drop the class, thus leaving her two stones to me.

  After class, I visited Curtis at his office, and we discussed the students in the class.

  “And there are two longhairs, Xavier and Siddhi,” I said. “They’re already my favorites.”

  He shook his head. “Of course,” he said. “Ever the Berkeley girl.”

  Xavier, he explained, was a Greek specialist, and flat-out brilliant. “Straight or gay?” I asked. No one knew. “And hottie Siddhi,” I said, “what about him?”

  “Ah, Justin,” Curtis said. “He’s the Latin intern this year.”

  “So what’s his name? Justin or Siddhi?”

  Curtis gave his winning wry smile. “Actually it’s Siddhartha,” he said, “though he doesn’t always use that name. His parents are old hippies, probably like you, and it’s some kind of name he chose or something, I’m not sure.”

  Siddhartha! Could anyone be more appealing? I would later learn, from Siddhi himself, that his parents were members of the SYDA Foundation. Brahmins of Siddha Yoga had bestowed the name on him, the equivalent of a baptism. He preferred Siddhartha to Justin. Another boon of my age, I can fall in love with young people with no heat behind it, nothing but a pure enjoyment of their youth and a feeling of benevolence toward them. And isn’t that what I really want my life to be now, enjoyment and benevolence?

  As I would every Tuesday and Thursday, I passed the three and a half hours between classes eating lunch, studying in the library, sometimes taking a walk, and sometimes reading in the Victorian “Rose Room” above the student center. The Rose Room was the parlor of the original college building, a large, gracious room with mirrored columns and oversized windows, furnished with Victorian couches, lamps, and a grand piano. A marble staircase and mirrored hallway lead to it. Both were built extra wide to accommodate the hooped skirts women wore at the founding of the college in the 1860s. Now and again a few students would take their lunch there. Once a beautiful soprano accompanied herself on the piano for a song or two. Usually I was there alone.

  The Roman History class was altogether different. It was held in a large lecture hall in the modern, unattractive science building. Only three other Latinists, Sharon, Peter, and Naftali, were enrolled. Peter and I sat together, with both Sharon and Naftali flanking us—a nucleus with two electrons. Bert was a great lecturer, with his big personality and self-confessed love of his own cleverness, his wonderful way of making Roman motivations seem like a contemporary reality show. Bert’s seventy-five-minute classes were like professorial performance art: Irreverent, sardonic, he mixed ancient history with commentary in up-to-the-minute slang. We were constantly amused as he sped us through six hundred years of Roman history in twenty-six short lessons.

  “I love to hear myself talk,” he warned the class of twenty-eight students. “I expect you to come to class prepared so you don’t have to listen to me all the time. You cannot interrupt other students, but I’ll always be happy if you interrupt me.”

  Bert was never interrupted in Roman History class. He’d arrive every day and greet us enthusiastically, “Hi, how is everybody today?” and be met, every day, with a wall of silence. Whenever he asked a question in class, he usually answered it himself, having tired of waiting for a raised hand. The opposite was true of the epigraphy class, where each of the seven of us asked questions, ventured guesses, laughed at Bert’s jokes, and parried with our own.

  We met in the library for the second epigraphy class, and Bert took us on a tour of the research books we would be using. The Roman section was downstairs in the stacks. The CIL Romanum comprised six gigantic, much-repaired volumes that catalogue every known inscription found in Rome. It was the first time I had seen the historian’s arcana. It was awesome, which word I use in its proper sense to mean awe inspriring, not as it is now so commonly misused to mean good or simply okay.

  For the third class we met in a seminar room in the art museum. We were asked to leave all of our possessions in lockers before we entered the room where the fourteen stones were laid out on thick white paper atop a long table. We were each given a pair of spanking-clean white gloves, the sort used by film editors, to protect the stones from the depredations of human touch.

  What a thrill it was to be able to handle those ancient stones, to anticipate deciphering their language! By the end of the eighty minutes, we had each chosen two stones, carefully measured them in centimeters, written down the letters inscribed there, and catalogued any
decorative features. “These will become your stones for the semester,” Bert told us, “and you’ll get to know them intimately. After today they’ll be displayed in the front hallway here, so you can visit your stones and commune with them whenever you like. But you won’t be able to touch them ever again.”

  All were funerary stones.

  Though a study in contrasts, the two classes were perfect companions: Epigraphy was the raw material of history, an artifactual reminder that much of ancient history is “history from square brackets.” In epigraphy, as in literature, square brackets are used to indicate guesses the editor has made about letters, words, or entire phrases that are missing on a stone or in a manuscript—what has been worn away by time, weather, or erasure, or where a piece has been broken off and remains unfound. From their own deep knowledge and references from other sources, epigraphers make educated guesses to reconstruct history and add missing words, which are placed in [square brackets].

  Because so much knowledge of history is gained from epigraphs, as well as from the historical texts that were copied over the years, epigraphy can and often has changed the past when and if those square brackets get filled in.

  Over the last two decades, many bronzes have been found in a region of southeastern Spain. With the advent of personal metal detectors in the 1990s, Spanish farmers began hunting for inscribed tablets in their fields, selling their finds to antiquities dealers who in turn sold them to museums or universities. Bronzes are particularly prized because so many of them had been melted down for other uses, bronze being as dear then as it is now. Six copies on bronze of a much-attested decree condemning Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso during the time of Tiberius were found in the same area of Spain. Historians knew of the decree because Tacitus wrote about it extensively. However, the actual decree inscribed on the newly discovered bronzes revealed that Tacitus had more than freely interpreted the event to serve his own historical bias. The discoveries changed the way historians read Tacitus. Kofi Busia’s mantra, “You can only change the past,” rings out again.

  Our history class was filled with references to epigraphy. The first recorded legal document we have from Rome is known as the Twelve Tables. They are believed to have been made around 449 B.C., were inscribed on both stone and bronze, and were posted publicly all over Rome so every Roman could read and know them. The Twelve Tables remained the basis of Roman law for centuries and heavily influenced our own constitution and jurisprudence. The Twelve Tables codified the legal and civil rights of patricians and plebeians, established procedures for courts and trials, and delineated both public and sacred law: the payments of debts, return of loaned property, rights of land and possession, remedies for bodily injury and defamation, inheritance laws, and guardianship.

  One entire section was devoted to the rights of fathers over the family, which included a father’s right to kill his son, as well as his obligation to kill a badly deformed child.

  Marriage between a patrician and a plebeian was forbidden.

  If a man and woman lived together for an entire year without an interruption of three or more nights, she “passed into his power” as his legal wife, which meant she was legally treated as the man’s daughter.

  If a husband desired to divorce his wife, he had only to give a reason for doing so.

  The laws also required women to refrain from tearing at their faces or scratching their cheeks with their nails during a funeral, or making loud cries of mourning for the dead.

  If any person publicly abused another in a loud voice, or wrote a poem that insulted or rendered him infamous, he was beaten with a rod until death.

  Unlike the powerless female “whom our ancestors believed, by reason of levity of disposition,” should remain in guardianship regardless of age, the poet (masculine first-declension noun) was taken seriously.

  Anyone who used incantations or magic to prevent crops from growing, or who used any magic arts to render another person ill, was punished with death.

  In the early days of Rome, writing and the alphabet were considered the ingredients of magic. Lott told us that curses on rivals, engraved on lead tablets and rolled and struck through with a blade, have been found at the bottom of ancient wells. In those days, writing had the power to make the ephemeral real: abracadabra, the magical incantation still used to pull rabbits out of hats, is all about the ABCs. In the Middle Ages, there was a German sect known as the Abecedarians who eschewed the written word entirely. All truths, they believed, came directly from god in visions or in ecstatic states, and human learning only got in the way of God’s truth. They believed that one must be ignorant of even the first letters of the alphabet if one were to be saved; hence the name, ABC-darians. They’re still alive and well, under other nomenclature: creationists, climate change deniers, Fox News watchers, much of the Republican Party.

  Peter emerged as the best student in the epigraphy class and was always asking the subtle question or raising an interesting possibility. And like me, he always arrived early. It must be a midwestern thing. Peter, like me, was born in Indiana and would be going to law school the following year. He had already taken six seminars in advanced Latin and worried he would miss it in law school. He often wore scarves, three different and fabulous scarves that a friend had knit or crocheted for him. I spent one class examining the pattern on his crocheted scarf, which turned out to be simple, worked it up, and we soon had twin scarves: mine blue, his green. I almost brought my crocheting to class but then thought better of it. I wonder if my retention of vocabulary would improve if I crocheted while listening. Would the kinesthetic motion help fix it in my brain, or would its distraction obviate the salubrious effects? The fates wove people’s story lines in Roman times; I was weaving mine with words, which are, in their own way, the garment I wear.

  My stones:

  C NONIUS.

  C L SALVIUS

  Gaius Nonius Salvius, Freedman of Gaius

  D M

  VALENTINO.FILI

  O. QUI VIXIT. ANV

  MES.V.AVR.ACH

  ILLES M. CHO.VIII P

  PATER FECIT DULC

  ISSIMO. B.M. FECIT

  To the Gods of the Shades

  For his sweetest son Valentinus

  who lived five years, five months,

  his father, Aurius Achilles,

  soldier of the eighth Praetorian Cohort made it.

  For his well deserving son he made it.

  As we were working on editing our stones, Bert assigned other inscriptions for study and translation: epitaphs, inscriptions on buildings, infrastructure (yes, even aqueducts and bridges were inscribed!), honorifics, and religious inscriptions. Rome allowed many gods—household gods neighborhood gods, and city gods—until near the end of the empire when Christianity overtook not only the gods but also the Roman Empire. The only religious practice ever outlawed in early Rome was the Bacchanalias, imported from the Dionysian Cult Mysteries of Greece. The ceremonies included liberal use of intoxicants and trance-inducing dance and music. Rumors of sexual orgies were rife. Most believe Bacchanalias were singled out because the cult was largely composed of women running wild, and one thing nearly every Roman senator believed was that it was essential to keep women in line.

  Spending so much time with Roman history made my feminist rage burgeon anew. I kept thinking about my mother, my powerless mother, and all those women who were so powerless for so many centuries, under the control of husbands. It was the gift of the feminist movement in my formative years that allowed me to focus on earning my own way and being independent. Unlike my mother, I did not choose men who might dominate me. I wanted to be in charge.

  For homework Bert assigned us his commentary on one of the inscriptions: a decree by the town council of Pisa outlining commemorative honors to be made to Lucius Caesar. “Some hack wrote this,” he said as he handed it out.

  And what should I find in h
is commentary on this inscription but the word “epexegetic,” which obscure favorite I had learned from Curtis the year before and imagined I would never see again. In Lott’s commentary it is not an infinitive that is epexegetic but a conjunction: que, which placed on the end of a word is to be read as “and” before that word:

  In the line inferiae mittantur bosque et ovis atri (sacrifices should be sent: a black cow and a black sheep) the que in bosque (bull) is epexegetic, in this case explaining just what specific infernal offerings were to be made, rather than copulative, which would be translated to mean that inferiae (sacrifices) as well as a bull and a black sheep (ovis atri) were offered. The epexegetic que tells us that the bull and sheep are the inferiae. Thus, “et” is used between them to denote a simpler “and.”

  So a conjunction can be exepegetic as well as copulative!

  Though Bert is a supremely supple Latinist, we didn’t do a lot of translating that semester. Most of my memorization was learning the many abbreviations used in inscriptions: the most common D M (Dis Manibus, to the sacred shades), L (libertus, freedman), F (filius, son), and the true kicker, Q D E R F P D E R I C (Quid de ea re fieri placeret de ea re ita censuerunt, it was decided what concerning this matter will be pleasing to be done about this matter). Latin, that most concise of languages, was redundant in legalese.

  As we spent three weeks going over our edited stones each day, the interest in our class turned almost to exhilaration. None of us had done a perfect job editing our stones, but Lott was happy to fill in the blanks, demonstrating the questions each letter might lead you to ask and what databases you might use to search for answers. He showed how one thing led to another. Just as I search out the meanings of words, he searches out the meanings of letters, enacting for us his historical method or, as he called it, “going hunting.”