Living with a Dead Language

by Ann Patty

  For example, freed slaves were always referred to by L (for libertus) and then their owner’s name, as in C L on my first stone above. If the owner was a woman, a backwards C was used to represent her. Bert’s explanation: Since Caius (Gaius) was the most common praenomen, all the epigraphers were good at C’s, so they figured they’d just write it backwards for a woman. My feminist ire boils again. This symbol disappeared during the second century A.D., by which time most women were given their own praenomina, rather than simply the feminine version of their father’s praenomen. The trend started only in the mid-first century, with the power of Livia Augustus. I think again of my mother with her many names and her rage when she shouted, “Just call me shit.” I had committed the sin of reminding her that she didn’t even have her own name.

  We also learned some tricks for dating. If an inscription contains the letters or we can date it to Claudius’ reign. Claudius felt it essential to create these new letters, the to represent the consonantal U (W and V hadn’t yet been invented) and the to represent the Greek Y, which hadn’t yet been absorbed into the Latin alphabet. (Y was the last letter to join the Latin alphabet, preceded by J and W and V.) Claudius also invented a third letter, but since no inscription bearing it has been found, we don’t know what it looked like. We know all this from mentions by Tacitus and from Suetonius, who tells us:

  Claudius invented three new letters which he added to the alphabet. These he believed were urgently needed. He published a book about them before becoming emperor, and afterward put them into general use. These characters may still be seen in books, in official registers, and in inscriptions on public buildings dating from that period.

  After Claudius’ death, the letters were never used again.

  The history class revealed yet another change the present has made on the past. In my day, eras were dated B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini, in the year of our lord). In the early years of the PC seventies, historians began using a new nomenclature that pushed Jesus out of the calendar in recognition of the non-Christian portion of the world. B.C. became B.C.E., before the Common Era, and A.D. became C.E., Common Era.

  The expression “Common Era” comes from the Latin vulgaris aera (vulgaris means “ordinary” or “common,” not the crass or crude display that “vulgar” has evolved into today). Since my days in college, which ended in 1974, C.E. and B.C.E. have taken over. The abbreviations can be used to mean whatever the writer wants, the C doing double duty as either Christian or Common. Nevertheless, because he was outraged that Wikipedia used only C.E. and B.C.E., the Christian fundamentalist Andrew Schlafly, son of Phyllis Schlafly (she who campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment and modern feminism), created Conservapedia, a wiki encyclopedia created to counter the “liberal bias” of Wikipedia. It, of course, uses only B.C. and A.D.

  I presented my second stone, which Bert had warned me was the most difficult of the fourteen to edit, with as many questions as assertions. Bert enthusiastically told us that he had figured out the stone, had even found it in CIL. Watching Bert talking about his solution was like watching a prospector report on his discovery of a valuable gold mine. The M stood for miles (soldier). The P was a symbol for the Praetorian Guards, and Cho the abbreviation for “Cohort,” two things I never could have figured out on my own.

  After the semester break each of us would be given an entire seventy-five-minute class to present the long inscription we had chosen out of a list Bert had given us. I chose my inscription last, feeling it was only right, since I wasn’t a paying customer, and got for my project the Laudatio Turiae (In praise of Turia), which I had wanted anyway. It was the only inscription among the ten that was for a woman. As the sign-up sheet for the date of our presentation made its way around, I was also last to choose. Predictably I would be the first to present after break, as the other students wanted the extra weeks to prepare.

  I spent hours in the library, researching, reading commentaries, delving more deeply into the world of Roman historians. My feminist outrage grew by the week. How lucky I was to be born at the time I was. What would have become of me if I’d been part of my mother’s generation? What might she have become if she’d had the choices I had? Wouldn’t she have loved to do what I was doing now? Wouldn’t this have provided her, as it was providing me, a pursuit more fulfilling than crossword puzzles? Might it even have kept her alive?

  CHAPTER 11

  It is astonishing how much enjoyment one can get out of a language that one understands imperfectly.

  —Basil Gildersleeve

  During semester break, I visited an inspiring after-school program my friend Patrick introduced me to, at which local Hispanic kids, in the still-ungentrified regions of Bushwick, Brooklyn, studied Latin on Wednesday afternoons. The free program, Still Waters in a Storm, gives kids homework help five days a week, and after homework is done, at 5:00 P.M., violin, yoga, and Latin are offered on various days. On weekends well-known writers come to give the kids writing workshops. I contacted the director, Stephen Haff, and asked if he’d like another Latin tutor. He was most welcoming. The very next Wednesday I traveled to Bushwick, where I’d never been, to a storefront that housed Still Waters in a Storm.

  The classroom, a controlled chaos of opportunity, was unlike any other I’ve ever seen: There were long walls of bookshelves festooned with Tibetan prayer flags and colored Christmas lights. Above a white piano was a bright Picasso print of a blue and yellow cubist man, and a chalkboard on which was written Salve! as well as the conjugation of amo, amare. Books and pictures, notebooks and artwork were stacked in piles on the floor. A string of tables stood in the center of the room, where kids from six to twelve were working on various projects. Others leaned into one another over books on couches. At the back in a small alcove was a table where pizza (laganum, literally “a cake of flour and oil”) was served at 5:00.

  Stephen, with four or five kids hanging on him waiting for the turn of his attention, welcomed me warmly. He is a somewhat shaggy man in his early forties, his blond-grey hair tousled, a two-day stubble on his chin, his glasses askew. Like Mister Rogers, he wore a plaid shirt and a blue cardigan, and he exuded a similar aura of a gentle kindness. Suddenly there was commotion, running and shouting, and Stephen stood up, clapped his hands, and said, “It’s getting too loud and boisterous in here. Everyone is working on different things, and we have to respect our friends’ work and be quiet enough so everyone can concentrate.” On a dime, the running stopped, the shouting stopped, and everyone turned back to whatever task was at hand.

  Stephen refers to Still Waters as a sanctuary for children. His model for his one-room schoolhouse is Alcoholics Anonymous and Quaker meetings, and his guiding principles are listening, learning, and imagination, and, encompassing everything he does, is love. Not only does Stephen provide a safe place for the children to express their feelings by writing and responding to others, he also teaches them to listen with attention and empathy. It’s a two-way street: What a child has to express is as important as what an adult expresses. There are no cliques here, no insiders and outsiders, only a group of thirty kids who respect and help one another.

  Since most of the kids are Spanish speaking, Stephen realized in the third year of his program that he could put his proficiency in Latin to good use. “Our language is our identity,” he said, “and learning Latin gives our kids pride in their heritage. It’s much easier to learn Latin if you’re a native Spanish speaker, and the kids love it; it makes them feel special.”

  Stephen told me the Latinists were working on translating Olivia Porca (Olivia the Pig) and, without further instruction, led me to a round table in one corner and introduced me to two nine-year-olds, Kimberly and Maya, who had already translated some of the short picture book and were eager for more. Maya looked two years older than Kimberly, and as soon as I sat down, she put her copy of the book in Latin before me. She’d written her translation above the Latin words,
just as I do when I translate poetry. “See,” she said, “I’m ahead of all the others, I’m almost finished, and I really need to finish first so we have to do it today.” I asked her if it was really that important that she finish first, and told her I didn’t think it was. “Oh, it is,” she repeated. “Believe me, it is very important.”

  Another driven girl! I immediately loved her. “What sign are you?” I asked. And sure enough, she, too, is an Aries (and as Curtis was happy to tell me, Aries means not only “ram,” but also “battering ram”).

  We began looking up the words in the Latin-English dictionary, working our way through the last four pages of Olivia Porca. Kimberly, who is beautiful, with two long braids that end at her waist, and a sweet and serious manner, frequently interrupted me. She was not quite as far along as Maya. “I don’t want to look at her translation,” Kimberly told me, “because I want to figure out all the words for myself.” I loved her, too.

  Soon, in the midst of thirty other kids, the three of us are in our own little Latin world, noticing which words sound like English words, which like Spanish. When we came to the adverb cotidie (everyday), the two girls looked at each other, repeated the word again and again, emphasizing the “tittie” sound, and burst into peals of laughter. The only way I could get them to focus was to remind Maya that she really wanted to finish her translation that day. And she did, just before I had to leave to catch my train back upstate.

  At the end of our all-too-short hour and a half, I told the girls that they should memorize one word every time we meet, and since they like cotidie so much, I was going to ask them to write a sentence about it next week. Stephen overheard and interjected what I would learn is one of his mantras: “And be sure to write beautiful sentences.” Stephen worked hard to make everything that happens at this school embody beauty in one way or another.

  I walked back to the subway in a haze of joy. Quam mirus Still Waters! And quam mirus Stephen. In his earlier career, he taught Latin and theater in Brooklyn public schools, even created a successful kids’ theater group, until his beloved children turned on him, and he broke down. After retreating to his native Canada for a couple years to regroup, he decided to start his own neighborhood one-room schoolhouse. He was hoping to combat, at least for a few hours a day, the Common Core curriculum forced on the youngsters. “It’s soul destroying and deadening,” he believes. Although funding is always an issue, and Stephen and his family live on a shoestring, Still Waters has now been serving the community for five years and attracts first-rate poets, novelists, and nonfiction writers as volunteers.

  When I arrived the following week, Kimberly rushed up to me and presented me with a folded-up piece of paper. “You can’t look at it till I’m out the door,” she insisted, and as she made her way to the street, where the kids were running up and down, working out their ya-yas, she kept glancing back to make sure I was waiting. Finally, she disappeared from view and I opened the paper.

  Cotidie amo Anna, it said. It is the sweetest note I’ve ever received. (I did not have the heart to correct the nominative Anna to the accusative Annam; it seemed truly unimportant.) I loved the place, loved the kids, and loved that my Latin adventure now included helping others: true enjoyment along with benevolence. It was a very long commute, but I went every other week for the rest of the semester. As autumn turned to cold winter, the glorious warmth of learning at Still Waters in a Storm was tonic.

  After the break, everyone in the class, except for Bert and me, had a new haircut. Siddhi and Alissa went one better. Alissa had become a dark, bobbed brunette, and Siddhi’s hair was now short, spiky, and dyed platinum. The classroom, as usual, was overheated, and Siddhi took off his heavy, ratty sweater to reveal what looked like a brand-new tattoo on his upper arm: SPQR, the ubiquitous abbreviation for Senatus Populusque Romanus (the Senate and People of Rome), writ large in blue on his upper left forearm thus:

  S·P·Q·R

  I wondered if it was in homage to my new favorite iPhone app, SPQR, available for a mere $3.99, which features not only a Latin-to-English and English-to-Latin dictionary but also the complete works (in both Latin and English translation) of the most important Roman authors, grammar reviews, Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar, Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as well as entries on various aspects of Roman life. It immediately became the go-to app on my new iPhone. Whenever I was waiting and bored and hadn’t brought along a book, I could read Latin poetry and translate.

  It was my day to present the Laudatio Turiae. With over 180 lines of text engraved on two enormous marble slabs, it is the longest private inscription yet found and was likely part of Turia’s enormous tomb. Because it must have cost, in the coin of the day, several million—the price of two large marbles and the cost of engraving—the one thing we know about Turia and her husband is that they were very wealthy. Other than Turia’s name, their identities have been lost to time. We know they were married from references in the text, happily at least in the husband’s opinion, for forty-one years. We also know that the husband supported Pompey during the Civil War, was exiled by Augustus, but later granted return to Rome.

  Pieces of the stone have been found all over Rome: two of them had been repurposed as lids to loculi—burial urns—in the Christian catacombs and painstakingly pieced together by epigraphers. On the bottom of one fragment are the easily discerned remains of a gaming board used for XII scripta (a precursor of backgammon). I imagine slaves, guarding the catacombs, enjoying playing board games on the tomb lids.

  Laudations for women were unusual and always private (those for men were usually held in the Forum). They became more common during Augustan Rome, when all epigraphy flourished. The Laudatio Turiae is unique: In all but the last two paragraphs, in which the husband decries his misery at her loss, the text directly addresses Turia as “you” as it recounts her many deeds on behalf of her (his) family. Even though Turia’s parents were killed (probably during the Civil War), she managed not only to “punish the guilty” but also to maintain control of her inheritance for herself and her sister (who, because she was married, was ineligible to inherit). At that time there were two forms of marriage: cum manu and sine manu. In a cum manu marriage the wife was placed under the legal control of the husband. In a sine manu marriage the wife remained under the legal control of her father and ostensibly gained control of her property at the death of her father, though she was required to have a guardian, whether husband or male relative.

  During her husband’s exile, Turia also managed to send him slaves, money, and provisions. The two never had children, which the husband laments, even recounting that Turia was such a good wife she offered to divorce him so he could have children with another woman, adding that she would happily take on the role of “mother-in-law.” He was outraged at the idea, though I can’t help but wonder if she might have had reasons other than proving she was a good Augustan wife (Augustus held procreation to be a positive political act). Perhaps she had enjoyed her life as an independent woman while her husband was away and longed for some way to get it back.

  She had been bold and brave when she was forced into the public sphere by her husband’s proscription. She stood up to Lepidus, who was then consul in Rome, so vehemently that she was dragged away by the hair, like a sixties protester. I believe she must have missed her public life when her husband returned from exile and been bored when once again consigned to home life. Was she like the post–World War II women, whose taste of work and independence during the war was so brutally crushed once the men returned? I couldn’t help but give my presentation a feminist spin, see it through the lens of my mother’s life, this intelligent, competent woman, so limited by her husband and his family. When Bert asked why the husband went to such an expense to make the memorial, I was stumped. To prove he was the most loving husband ever? Kind of like the Donald Trump of tombstones?

  Bert had an entirely different interpretation:
The expense of the Laudatio Turiae was not undertaken by her husband to glorify his wife but to protect himself. He had been on the wrong side of the Civil War, and such a display would very publicly enshrine his current loyalty to Augustus. Since those in control still had the power of proscription, which allowed them to confiscate all of a disloyal family’s possessions and kill them to boot, this was the best, most public way for Turia’s husband to declare his fidelity to the emperor and keep his fortune, which evidence suggests came from her family.

  Contemplating all I’ve learned about the Laudatio Turiae, and Bert’s interpretation of how the seemingly selfless man, in extolling his wife’s virtues, was in fact setting himself up for the future, makes me wonder if she loved him the way he claimed to love her, or if she felt enslaved by him, doing everything for him and his family, having no enterprise of her own. Maybe she was tired and took herself out.

  My father had also created a dubious memorial for my mother, in the form of a red maple tree. The tree, like her name (Frances, Fritzie, Fran, et cetera), has had several incarnations. Dad had a twenty-five-foot “Red Sunset” planted on the ninth fairway of the Sequoia Country Club in Oakland, California. The kitchen window of my parents’ house overlooked that fairway across the street. My mother would sit for hours at her kitchen table, playing solitaire and watching the golfers tee off and make their way down the fairway until they were obscured by the acacia trees, which grew by the fence across the street. She herself had played that fairway hundreds of times. Golf had become my parents’ main activity in their later years, and my mother had been captain of the women’s golf league two years in a row. That was against the rules, but I believe the other women knew that her role at the club was one of the few remaining tethers holding her against the alcoholic tide that was more and more eroding her.