in Culture, Language, Pedagogy, Reception |

Lawrence of Arabia on Latin

In some ways I very much agree with the last part of this, even if I can’t make the same claim for my appreciation of Catullus or my command of Latin:

My Latin wasn’t ever much good, so that I have never enjoyed Catullus. I suppose that means that I have never justified the time I spent trying to learn the beastly language? There seem to be ten good Greek books to every Latin one.

–T.E. Lawrence, Letter 550 to C. Day Lewis, 20 December 1934

More can be learned about his background in Latin and his feelings regarding its value and teaching can be gleaned from a letter of 12 September 1912, no. 57, to a Mrs. Rieder on the education of a certain boy:

I was reading (chiefly police news) at four, and learning Latin at 5, and at 17 I was no more forward than the rest of the school, beginning Latin only at 8 1/2. And the most brillisiant people the early forms (except one) all dropped out of sight before they reached the Sixth: and then, after that in the University, it doesn’t make an atom of difference if one is 22 or 19; ….
. . .
And don’t bother about Latin. I take it Noel is more likely to be Modern than Classical in his tastes, and if one doesn’t want to write Latin verse, and knows French, one can read the Latin one needs in a six-month, and other than that he will only have to write Latin prose, which a mechanical stupidity, ground out of a Grammar and Dictionary, and to be handled at will. If he reaches 10 (an extreme age, probably) without Latin, he will merely be set to occupy his French hours in the older language. And a school is such a slow business that a little special training will overtake its standard in no time. Latin is a very important thing: but there are lots of Latin languages, and if he knows one it will make his way very easy for the rest, (e.g. I can read Italian prose, & even poetry not incorrectly: never having learnt them).

Again, I find myself agreeing with some of what he says, about the futility of much of Latin training, of the slowness of schools, etc. Any thoughts from readers on a more minute level? I do find it funny that 10 should seems an extreme age to begin Latin, when we typically begin today at 14-18.

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  1. I found his comments about Latin verse v. prose to be FASCINATING. Thank you for sharing this! This summer I’ve been collecting the elegiac verse fables of Aesop and I ended up with such a big pile of them that I’ve decided to do an anthology of them in book form. One of the books I found is a 19th-century collection of about 30 fables in verse done to inspire Latin students of the time in their own elegiac verse compositions. Well, finding that book of “schoolbook” fables in verse prompted me to take a look at the textbooks from the 19th and early 20th centuries to see how the task of Latin elegiac verse composition was presented to students. To my surprise, the verse composition textbooks were, by and large, REALLY nice. Unlike prose composition books, which always seem to me uniformly tedious (very much as L. says here, “a mechanical stupidity, ground out of a Grammar and Dictionary”), the verse composition books are a real joy, since they try to build up gradually, step by step, the forms and shapes of the verse line, together with the sense and meaning of the Latin constructions, so that students can confidently assemble correctly composed couplets – and not surprisingly, elegiac couplets are by far the preferred meter for beginner, since the structure of the pentameter line gives you so much insight as it were into the hexameter line. It’s inspired me to ponder doing an updated version of one of those textbooks, substituting the vocabulary and motifs of the exercises with animal fable materials rather than the mostly epic and lyric materials. I’m guessing that the demise of verse composition is now complete, with what little composition work there might be consisting of prose only… but maybe there are people out there teaching verse composition? Given the strong preference for Latin poetry in so much of the current Latin curriculum, you’d think there would be some interest in verse composition, but no course in verse composition was ever offered in any school I attended or have taught at. Hmmm…..

  2. I should be grateful for a way in to any of those verse composition textbooks, presumably now only found in libraries?

  5. Now we’re on the subject, I came across a copy of the (original) Completely Parsed Cicero (Cat.1)and the adverts at the back included a Completely Parsed Xenophon. No trace of it on English websites: did it ever come out in the States?

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