Lector intende: laetaberis
AD INFINITUM:
A Biography of Latin
By Nicholas Ostler
382 pp. Walker & Company $27.85
Reviewed by Gary Presley
Members of Opus Dei (meaning “work of God”) won’t need Ad Infinitum.
Unlike those of us who follow the Roman rites of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church and worship in the vernacular, the people adhering to Father—now Saint—Josemaria Escriva’s contribution to that ol’ time religion no doubt have been enjoying the Tridentine Rite—worship accomplished in Latin ad infinitum—“forever,” so to speak. A spiritual irony, since that was the language of the soldiers who nailed the lowly carpenter to the cross.
I wasn’t a Catholic when the Latin Mass was de rigueur—that’s French by way of Latin—but I’m no stranger to the Mother Tongue of the western world. My father saw to it that I enrolled in a Latin class as a high school freshman. That’s before the Montessori social engineers decided there were better ways to mold precious young minds than having them read Julius Caesar’s war dispatches from Gaul. In fact, even though I received a “C” in first year Latin, my father decided repetitio est mater studiorum (“Repetition is the mother of studies”) and enrolled me in second-year Latin.
I received a “D.”
Why was I enrolled in Latin class at Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Washington, circa 1958 Anno Domini? Because, of course, by then Latin had been one pillar of western culture for 1,400 years.
Why? Cupido dominandi cunctis adfectibus flagrentior est, said Tacitus, a Roman historian who lived through the Empire’s better days. “The lust for power inflames the heart more than any other passion”—no doubt the motivation for the Roman Empire’s expansion throughout the Mediterranean basin and deep into present-day Europe.
And sometimes when the Empire’s old soldier retired, he chose to stay where he last served. Look at a map of the Empire. No surprise then that languages like French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and a good bit of English (if we stretch the idea), are rooted in the lingua franca of those old legionnaires. Maybe it was the lay of the land, or maybe it was the companionship of the locals. In any event, when the old soldier was ready to lay down his gladius (“short sword”), he didn’t give up his language. He taught it to the wife and kids.
Ostler takes his readers back to the beginning, and he’s as mystified as archaeologists and historians as to why the Mother Tongue of civilization isn’t Etruscan. Rome grew on the edge of that first great empire on the Italian peninsula. The city was nominally ruled by Etruria, but by 400 BC it grew wholly Roman—as in “empire”—and conquerer of all of surrounding Latium, the Aequi, the Volsci, and the remainder of the peninsula. All that was left to secure the Empire was to offer the Greeks a Pyrrhic victory in 272 BC.
Rome soldiered on, as Ostler notes, and the author, following the expansion of the Empire, explores three reasons why the Romans, and thus the language, conquered the world. First, Rome settled where it conquered. Instead of sack and pillage, the Empire demanded tracts of land and set up housekeeping. Exegi monumentum aere perennius. Or “I have erected a monument more lasting than bronze,” as said Horace.
Second, when writing treaties with the conquered, Rome demanded, and received, the right to levy troops among the locals. And the Roman legions were commanded and administered in the Latin language; whether those soldiers settled in other conquered lands or returned home, they carried the language with them.
Finally, Rome preferred to conquer by land rather than sea. That meant wherever the army went, roads were built— all roads lead, and all that, not particularly to Rome but from the great city to maintain the Empire by transacting its business in Latin.
The three together made for a cultural infusion—Roman culture, tied together by Latin, the language of Rome, and by roads, which provided the most efficient communication in history up to that time.
Ostler also discusses Latin’s “taking over the Church,” and from there other elements of western scientific, political, and cultural life. By the middle of the first millennium, all that we would be today in western world had been built on Latin—the ancient language in the vernacular—“always a unifier,” as the author notes.
Ad Infinitum contains three appendices, notes, bibliography, and an index. It’s both a practical guide and a scholarly work, and it sometimes pushes a reader to ask, “What does Ostler want to me to understand?” The author says it best:
By the end of the first millennium AD, this was the Latin education current across almost the whole of Europe. The culture that it propagated was a curious complex, in which Roman Christianity, an oriental religion rearticulated in a language not its own, was set alongside traditional knowledge from an ancient pagan empire, which had been developed in total ignorance of it. Both referred exclusively to a world order that had perished more than five hundred years before. Latin, or grammatica, the artificially preserved language in which all was taught, was the single unifying element, its literature defining the bounds of contemporary knowledge.
Beneath that erudition, beneath that intellectual passion, is a foundation of simple yet undeniable truth: read it to know who you are.
History, like youth, is often wasted on the young. Better it would have been for this book to be handed me as a first quarter assignment in one of my Latin classes. At that point, my knowledge of the language in history—no, in human culture—was encompassed by General “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell’s faux Latin motto— Illegitimi non carborundum—“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
In fact, in a perfect world, a curious but lazy teenager like the then-me would have done well to have Nicholas Ostler as instructor, and Ad Infinitum as a textbook. It is a compact compendium compared to any book delineating my ignorance of Latin. The man knows—loves! —the subject, and he apparently has prospered in that knowledge through the superb classical education available in England. Of course, were I to sit in class before Ostler, he would no doubt peer down and offer the wisdom of Cicero. Assiduus usus uni rei deditus et ingenium et artem saepe vincit—“Constant practice devoted to one subject often outdoes both intelligence and skill.”
I can tell you now that Ad Infinitium will not take practice. It is, however, a book for the intellectually curious rather than the casual reader. It needs careful reading, leisurely reading, reflective reading. Ostler writes with authority, with intellectual complexity, with historical depth, and with scholarship. It is a learned book to be read slowly and to be consulted frequently. Or, as Ostler quotes Apuleius, lector intende: laetaberis. “Reader, pay attention. You will enjoy yourself.”
The key to that admonition is the call to attention. Ad Infinitum is not a book for casual consumption, but it is a book to treasure.
Gary Presley is an associate editor of The Internet Review of Books. You can find out more about him and his writing here.
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