Dico Vobis

"Latin is a language — as dead as dead can be.
It killed all the Romans,
and now it's killing me."

(anon)

Miss Carlin. We swore she had known Caesar. Less seriously we imagined her to be the last of the vestal virgins. She was one of those "typed" school mistresses. In her severe dress and her hair bobbed she was easily identified as a teacher. Her area of study was Latin and she exercised it in an unremitting way, hurling declension, and gerund and conjugation with equal intensity. She brought the dead language alive in that classroom that was decorated with pictures of imperial Rome. She carried a personal aire of the antiquities to the infection of her charges. That was her job — her vocation, her love. Salary for her labor was immaterial.

Latin I under Miss Carlin was the vestibule to later excursions where we would learn that all Gaul was divided into three parts. Survivors of the Gallic Wars would get to know Cicero (and everything else) in the classically flawed German rules of pronunciation: Kaiser, Kikero, names and words all lacking the mellifluent sweetness of the Italian school. Nevertheless, our Latin was a source of satisfaction amid the terror that all its students are heirs to.

Her approach to teaching made failure an insult. If the students failed, she failed. She was aggressively on top of each pupil's weakness, spurring them to strengthen their grade. (Mine was vocabulary, and that was corrected and later it was the translation of English into Latin. The other way <@145>round was easy).

In June, when our thoughts turned to summer, Miss Carlin would ask each of us how we would spend vacation time. It was as kids were expected to idle their time. She would smile. Then she advanced her own plans before we might ask.

To Rome. She would poke among the ruins. She would smell the air that Cato and Virgil and Ovid and Pliny and Seneca and Josephus sniffed. There was much to be learned, she said, and she would take the Via Appiana to get her inheritance.

Latin, we knew, enriched the school's curriculum and elevated its overall reputation. It's derided with sneers as a dead language and yet its residual influence and benefits have been greater than those falling upon students compelled to enroll in other language departments.

She died too late. Her Roman church had abandoned Latin usage including the requiem with its Dies irae and Miserere and the dead are left without their language.

Amica (cum omnibus spiritis) requiescat in pace.

memoriter: 1947