Why Latin?
Why learn to read Latin? I have many answers, given at many times in many places for many reasons. But one of them is that the Romans had a large segment of culture obsessively dedicated to debate and rhetoric, from which many persistent things have come. And some of them are timeless. Here is one such gem.
"On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains."
Cicero (45 BC), The Extremes of Good and Evil, 1.10.33; trans. H Rackham (1914)
"On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains."
Cicero (45 BC), The Extremes of Good and Evil, 1.10.33; trans. H Rackham (1914)
Labels: Latin
etched with acid at 4:01:00 am
4 Comments:
timeless yet so timely - an answer to your poetic prose?
Roman writers always seem to have such run-on sentence structure reminiscent of Dickens. Just how does anyone read a sentence that takes up an entire page? But then again I tend to write in a run-on manner too.
Latin's extensive inflection is crazy. On the other hand, the extensively analytic nature of Chinese is also crazy. English is such a nice moderate balance of being a moderately inflected analytic language.
The golden mean, as they say.
I think Latin is well-suited to technical or rhetorical discourse because it has built-in formal structures. It is possible to be totally colloquial in intent and still end up sounding like a textbook or a hymnal. For example, "Auspicium Melioris Aevi" means, "Looking for a good time."
Sometimes, however, the Dickensian feel comes from the Brit-tradition translators themselves.
Really? *eyes twinkle* So know I know, and I'm glad!
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