HUM / REL 293 - Beginning Latin
Course Notes - Week 1
Welcome to the Latin course at ENMU.
Because this course is online, more will depend on you - the individual student. You will have to set your own study periods, drill yourself, and set aside about an hour each day for your Latin studies.
There will be an assignment each week, which will be divided into sections, to be done Monday - Friday, then sent as an attachment to an email message to the instructor at the end of the week.
Download the assignment file at the beginning of the week. Read the assigned pages of the textbooks each day, type your answers into the file, save it, and send the completed file at the end of the week.
Many of the questions ask you to write out a Latin text, saying it aloud as you type it. Please do this. One of the main ways that children learn a language is by hearing it spoken. There are some audio files for the course, so that you can hear various ways of pronouncing Latin, but the best way for you to learn is to say the words aloud as you type them. When learning something, we need to open as many channels to the brain as possible - and hearing the spoken word is one of our main channels.
You may be wondering why there are two textbooks for the course.
The Cambridge Course will get you reading simple Latin sentences fluently, and you will start to read Latin and understand the English meaning almost instinctively. That will give you a jump-start, but it will not give you much help with more complex sentences.
The Wheelock book is the best College text for more advanced Latin. It was written specially for students at American Universities, and it includes many sentences and snippets from classical Latin authors. However, it has a heavy emphasis on grammar, and there is no ongoing story-line to hold our interest, and no setting in the life of a real Roman family.
So - the Cambridge course for speed of learning, fluency and comprehension, but Wheelock for in-depth learning, grammar, vocabulary, and a taste of classical authors.
The Cambridge Course was designed for High School students in England, and has been adapted for American schools. It gives many insights into life in the Roman Empire in the first century AD. The book we are using is the first of a four-volume series, based on archaeological discoveries. There really is a "House of Caecilius" in Pompeii, which was buried under ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.
There is no "happy ending" for Caecilius - he does die at the end of this book (stage 12), as did all those who remained in Pompeii.
Don't get too fond of Cerberus the dog - he stays faithfully beside his master's body while the volcano is erupting. So far as I know, no dog was found when Caecilius' house was excavated, but at another house a dog had been left chained to guard the house when its owner fled - it is illustrated on page 211.
According to the story written for the course, Caecilius' son Quintus does survive. Quintus and Clemens reappear in the second book of the series, in Roman Britain and in the city of Alexandria in Egypt. By the time you finish Book 1 you will probably be a fluent reader of Latin, although there will still be some grammar to conquer.
There is a students' workbook for the Cambridge course, which I have not asked you to buy, because it is intended for school children rather than college students. However, it does contain some drills with question words which are not covered in the textbook chapters.
I am going to incorporate these into the course notes each week, and part of the homework each week will include questions and answers.
This week's question words are "quis" - who? "quid" - what? ubi - where?
The name"Cerberus" was a good name for a Roman guard dog - it was the name of the mythological three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to Hades. According to Roman mythology, Hades was the place where the dead went (see pages 115-118). The story of Book 1 of the Cambridge course takes place in AD 79 - shortly after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Titus. Although the Jews lived in scattered communities, and Christianity was beginning to spread throughout the Roman Empire, I am not aware of any evidence that there were either Jews or Christians in Pompeii and Herculaneum at that time.
At that time, both Judaism and Christianity were regarded as a couple of strange sects on the fringes of society. Things which we now take for granted, such as human rights, fair play, morality, and social justice, were completely alien to the pre-Christian Greek and Roman world-views. Greek and Roman gods could be capricious, vindictive, totally unreliable, and the Roman people reflected those attitudes in their lives.
Roman Emperors ruled by might and the support of the army. If they did not like a man they could order him to kill himself - and he would do so in order that his family might be spared being killed also.
Nero ordered that his own mother be murdered - and she told the soldiers to stick a sword into her belly because that was where Nero had come from.
A Roman father, as head of the family, could have any of his children or slaves put to death. In fact, Roman society thought that the early Christians were rather weird because they "did not expose their children" - they let new-born children live, rather than put them out overnight to see if they were strong enough to survive.
There is a letter in existence, from a soldier away from home, who heard that his wife was expecting a baby. He wrote "If it is a boy - good. If it is a girl - kill it."
So we will meet slaves, a slave-trader, gladiators, and killing for entertainment as parts of Roman life at the time.
Before we get too judgmental about the pre-Christian world-view, we should maybe look at our own society, and ask, for example, what is our equivalent to the gladiator show? What do we like to watch on TV or film? Video games? "Stupid Videos"? Football? Professional Wrestling?
Pompeii had several brothels, one of which is shown in the photo on p. 43 (though not identified as such), and many of the houses were decorated with erotic frescos. Modern society still has prostitutes, and some students use their computers to go hunting porn on the Internet.
In many ways society has not changed very much in 2,000 years.
Roman society did not remain static - eventually Christianity became the leading religion of the Empire, and Latin was used for the worship services of the Church, and for the translation of the Scriptures into the common (vulgar) tongue. So I am going to incorporate some of the early Latin hymns and texts into the course.
After the break-up of the Roman Empire, and the development of European nations, Latin remained the main language for Law, Politics, Science, International relations and Theology in the West.
One of the primary texts for human rights, the Magna Carta (Great Charter, or Great Paper), was written in Latin in the thirteenth century. Several copies of the Magna Carta have survived to the present. By the end of this semester we should be able to read and understand most of it.
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