A Little Latin, A Little History

Book Review:
Columbus' First Voyage
Latin Selections from Peter Martyr's De Orbe Novo
Constance Iacona and Edward George
Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers

Every junior Latinist knows that Gaul is divided in three parts. And every junior historian knows (we hope!) that "In 1492 / Columbus sailed the ocean blue." But there might be more to learn.

In the typical Latin class, one learns the Latin of the Golden Age - Ovid, Vergil, Cicero... What isn't so widely realized is that at different times, the language of that age was taken up again by men of learning and sophistication (or at least those who wanted to appear as such). This means that from time you'll find a writer from another era whose prose won't be that different from Caesar's. One such man is Peter Martyr, who just happened to be hanging around the Spanish court when Columbus went on his first expeditions. Martyr wrote back home to former senior associates and the letters were such a hit that they were distributed all over.

Were Martyr famous, it would be for the phrase "The New World." His "De Orbe Novo" is probably the first reference to the idea. But Martyr was not a starstruck fan of Columbus. He called 'em as he saw 'em, making for interesting reading as an intelligent observer gives one man's view of the living, breathing Cristopher Columbus, both from personal observation and based on chats with the Columbus' crew and numerous others.

In Columbus' First Voyage, the authors take a handful of excerpts from Martyr's writing, put in extensive glosses to help the beginning student along and include copious notes on what others were writing, as well as what the historical literature has turned up. What results is not quite a Latin primer and not quite histori(ographi)cal scholarship, but a mix of the two that should remind high school and college students - and other readers of Latin - that they have special tools for approaching and understanding the past that others might lack and that are worth developing.

Columbus' First Voyage is not a comprehensive look at Martyr, Columbus or the implications of the discovery of "A New World." But it is an excellent starting point for those seeking an often overlooked perspective about the explorer - that of the people of his own time. In Columbus' First Voyage, less advanced students have a relatively authentic bit of prose to work through with interesting subject matter. But more than that, general readers with some Latin have a nicely assembled source book dealing with a historical matter often debated in 20th/21st century terms but rarely considered from the vantage point of those who lived through the period.

A Horace Workbook

Book Review:
A Horace Workbook
David J. Murphy and Ronnie Ancona
Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers

After fading from the general consciousness and disappearing from the standard curriculum, Latin is starting to make a comeback. However, for Latin to catch up, it's not enough to brush off the old grammar-translation textbooks from the days of old. At the same time, T(otal) P(hysical) R(esponse) is probably not going to become the mainstay of Latin instruction either. What will?

For introductory prose, there is some fairly good stuff on the market, notably the Oxford and Cambridge series. And if you're just looking for fun with Latin, the adventures of Paulus and Lucia in Teach Yourself Beginner's Latin are a delight. But...

The place where Latin has always gotten difficult is the poetry. Horace, Ovid and Vergil thought with declensions and even they, we presume, sometimes must have wondered where the phrase they were working on was going to end and whether it would fit together. With its theoretically flexible word order, Latin allowed the Roman poet to do wondrous things to pair concepts and make it work with the meter. But for the non-Roman Latin student, this makes life very difficult. Until now.

A Horace Workbook is exactly the sort of book I wish I had had when I was first starting to decipher Latin poetry. And again, when I was reading Horace in graduate school seminars. In the middle? I found the whole thing rather difficult and stuck to Catullus and Ovid's Metamorphoses, which are at least a little more transparent to the modern American reader. A Horace Workbook, however, has just about the right touch: it uses grammar and other exercises to help you understand the poem, not to test your mastery of minutia.

In a typical A Horace Workbook presentation, you are given the poem, followed by leading questions that make it easier to see how it fits together, as well as prompting the occasional a-ha where you might have otherwise missed what was going on. The whole thing is very user-friendly, taking you by the hand and leading you through the things you ought to notice before you start getting quizzed on them.

After the first exercise for each poem, there are a few activities meant to dovetail with what students need to be able to do for the AP exam or, in real life, to more fully appreciate Latin poetry at a time when the knowledge is there but the feeling isn't.

Finally, there is a section on scansion (for each poem) where the student can work on developing a Latin ear to go with the Latin brain. This may seem tedious to some, but we could rearrange word order to the language of choice for reading these poems if we were indifferent to the sound, to the voice, that brought them alive for their first readers and hearers. Scanning the poems lays the groundwork for bringing them alive and for understanding just what it is that makes the intricate part come together in sound, however jumbled it may look when diagrammed or parsed.

There are, of course, great books for capturing all the subtleties, all the nuances, that went with the glory that was Roman poetry. But they're above most of our heads. Unless you spend a lot of time wondering if there weren't more exciting ways to employ the ablative absolute or deeper, darker unheard implications in the use of future passive participles. In A Horace Workbook, we have a Latin poetry reader for the rest of us, helping to bring the Latin alive in an understandable and meaningful form. Anyone struggling in AP Latin, and, indeed, anybody who has struggled through Latin verse and wished they'd gotten more out of it, should give this workbook a look.

GB