Classics club
Isabel Raphael on 20 years of teaching classics to oldies
My class of Latin lovers
Latin for pleasure? It takes guts to advertise a course under that name. Yet now I am running two, both full to bursting, and one Greek for Pleasure course as well.
Twenty years ago this April, I launched an adult course for the Highgate Literary & Scientific Institution (HLSI), and called it, hopefully, Latin for Pleasure.
Frankly, I didn’t expect anyone to sign up. At 11 am on the last possible day, nobody had.
‘I told you so,’ I said to the office but, by 4 o’clock, there were five on the list.
They are the delight of my life, and have been a lockdown lifeline.
I’d never taught adults before, and it was a revelation. Two stalwarts have stayed the whole long course undaunted. Since September 2013, I’ve also worked with a second class in Hammersmith. There are twenty now in each group, and we meet for an hour and a half for ten weeks each term.
Almost all are retired, from a wide variety of professions, and range from mid-50s to over-90s. The class has included a judge, a science professor, a journalist cum philologist, a documentary filmmaker, a teacher, a churchwarden, and a gasmeter-reader.
They all have some Latin. Some took it to degree level, but most said goodbye to the language long ago. One has written disarmingly, ‘My grasp of Latin is tenuous, but I muddle along, hanging on to everyone else’s coat-tails and manage to enjoy it hugely.’
The great advantage for all is that they belong to a generation that had to learn by heart, and it’s amazing how much comes back. My job is to make accessible the glories of Latin literature.
How does it work? We have no textbooks. I type out and deliver online whatever we are studying. Currently one group is reading excerpts from Livy 1: the rise and fall of the Tarquins, full of political skullduggery and with two formidable women. The other is linking stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses with the grand Titian exhibition recently on at the National Gallery.
I vary verse and prose, usually with a different author each term, and am always open to suggestions. Together we have explored Quintilian’s literary criticism as well as the love songs of Catullus, eye-witness accounts of the Battle of Hastings and the letters of Abelard and Heloise. And Virgil, Horace and epitaphs from Westminster Abbey…
Last week, we had a go at translations of Ogden Nash’s poetry. Try this one: * sacchrum est gratum
sed liquor celerior We’ve even performed a medieval Latin Nativity play.
I do the donkey work, adding essential vocabulary to the typed texts and marking long syllables and words that agree but don’t look the same. Grammar and syntax are dealt with as we read - though I recently came up with a two-page ‘essay’ on my beloved Ablative Absolute. Anyone can chip in at any time and ask for further explanation.
I don’t teach: I translate, calling attention as we go along to the real excitement of subtly differing tenses, word order, scansion (they have to know all about that) and the differing styles of every writer. I see myself as a key-holder, opening doors for all to the classical world through literature, history, art, even music, and its legacy to us today.
There is no pressure – no dreaded moment when it is ‘your turn to translate’. The atmosphere is wonderfully relaxed. While everyone is serious about what we’re doing, the breadth of their backgrounds makes for wide-ranging discussion and we’re never short of expert opinions!
A recent ‘poll’ has been amazing. Memories of grim prep-school Latin have vanished to be replaced by ‘intensity, stimulus and huge enjoyment’. Rusty brains feel stretched and exercised.
One student writes of how fascinating it is that ‘one can hear something of the personality or creative fingerprint of the writers through their idiolect, much as one can identify the composer of a certain piece of music.’
A particular triumph was discovering that the dreaded Julius Caesar was in fact a supreme stylist and a first-class reporter whose despatches had us waiting intently for the next instalment from De Bello Gallico.
We used to meet in the HLSI or in a Hammersmith pub. The arrival of lockdown and Zoom seemed threatening at first, but this has even added to the warmth and cheerful atmosphere of our meetings.
One person wrote recently, ‘I have come to realise how much our Latin classes have meant over the past months; seeing all your faces on Zoom, with a glimpse of studies and sitting rooms, adds a new degree of intimacy. I feel privileged to be part of such an interesting group. Long may our gatherings continue.’
It really is Latin for pleasure.
* Candy is dandy, But liquor is quicker
Isabel Raphael was Headmistress of Channing School, 1984-1998