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The Learner and the Latin Period

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Eric Laughton
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Extract

The observations which follow will to some appear heretical and perhaps dangerous; but I believe that they are worth making, if only to draw attention to a tendency in the present teaching of Latin prose which seems more dangerous still. When the beginner, having covered the field of essential grammar and syntax, is first introduced to the writing of continuous prose, he is rightly reminded of the disjointed style which is often encountered in English. This, he is told, was foreign to the Roman, who preferred to express his ideas in the form of a ‘period’, that is to say, a complex, architectural sentence-structure in which several subordinate clauses are made to depend in various ways upon the main clause. This period, he learns, is central to Latin prose, and an example or two from Cicero and Livy will be given to illustrate its use; he is then advised to emulate these models. His first exercise may well be nine or ten lines of English, to be turned into a single Latin ‘period’. The result is rarely satisfactory. The unhappy learner, in his attempt to produce the required composite sentence, upsets the natural order of clauses, presses phrases into strained and alien constructions, and probably achieves confusion. Here, for instance, is one of the first exercises in Bradley's Aids to Latin Prose; the passage, it is stated, ‘should be fused into a single sentence by the aid of participles, relatives, and conjunctions’:

‘Both sides had exhausted their ammunition. The fight had raged at close quarters for three hours without any result. The carnage was horrible. The soldiers were suffocated with the heat and dust, and could scarcely keep their feet on the bloody and slippery soil; but no one could say that he had seen the back of a single foe, or heard a single voice asking for quarter. It seemed as though the gods of Mexico had inspired the nation with superhuman strength, and a courage proof against wounds or death.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 11 , Issue 32 , February 1942 , pp. 84 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1942

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References

page 84 note 1 See Williams, Nash, Introduction to Continuous Latin Prose, passim.Google Scholar

page 84 note 2 P. 176.

page 85 note 1 Most teachers of Latin will agree that this would be an exceptionally successful effort on the part of a beginner.

page 85 note 2 Aristotle, , Rhetoric, iii. 9Google Scholar: ‘a sentence which contains in itself a beginning and an end, and is of a size which can be easily grasped.’

page 86 note 1 See Cicero, , Orator, 204; Quintilian, ix. 4. 22.Google Scholar

page 86 note 2 Cicero, , Orator, 199.Google Scholar

page 86 note 3 See Cicero, , de Oratore, iii. 186Google Scholar, especially the words ‘membra illa modificata esse debebunt’.

page 86 note 4 Cic. Orator, 169.Google Scholar

page 86 note 5 Ibid. 221.

page 86 note 6 Quintil, ix. 4. 125.

page 86 note 7 See, for instance, the fragments of his speech Pro Rhodiensibus: Jordan, , Cato, p. 21Google Scholar; = Malcovati, Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta, vol. i, p. 191.Google Scholar

page 87 note 1 De Oratore, iii. 198. The dramatic date of the dialogue is 91 b.c.; Cato died in 149 b.c.

page 87 note 2 Livy, , xxi. 25. 11.Google Scholar

page 88 note 1 Cicero, , Cat. iii. 6.Google Scholar

page 88 note 2 Jordan, , Cato, p. 24Google Scholar, No. 5 = Malcovati, , vol. i, p. 195Google Scholar, No. 166; Jordan, , p. 44Google Scholar, xii = Malcovati, , vol. i, p. 171, No. 74.Google Scholar

page 89 note 1 ‘For, since God had willed that, so far as was possible, all things should be good, and nothing evil, having taken over everything that was visible while it was in a state, not of tranquillity, but of discordant and disordered motion, He brought it from disorder into order, considering the latter condition to be in every way the better.’

page 90 note 1 Orator, 200.

page 90 note 2 De Oratore, iii. 49Google Scholar: ‘non nimis longa continuatione verborum’. Cf. iii. 190 ‘ne excurrat longius (oratio)’.

page 90 note 3 Id. iii. 190. See also Orator, 226Google Scholar: ‘nec ullum est genus dicendi aut melius aut fortius quam binis aut ternis ferire verbis, non numquam singulis, paulo alias pluribus, inter quae variis clausulis interponit se raro numerosa comprehensio’.

page 90 note 4 Orator, 221.Google Scholar

page 90 note 5 Quintilian, ix. 4. 125.Google Scholar

page 90 note 6 Ibid. 128; cf. Orator, 210.Google Scholar