Latin Lessons and Life Lessons

Courtesy amazon.com

At the tender age of eleven, I was locked up in boarding school and exposed, among other things, to an odd combination of Roman History, Latin and Divinity classes twice a week under the tutelage of a demanding Latin master.   In a perverse way, I enjoyed those classes because they contained many surprising life lessons.

Roman History was definitely a good introduction to life in general and its vicissitudes in particular.  We got to read about wars, slave revolts, murder, incest, religious intolerance, corruption, and other outrageous happenings which inflamed our young minds.  It also seemed that Christians should stay well away from lions. Admittedly, we did all yawn when we first started reading an early chapter about Augustus in De Vita Caesarum (better known as "The Twelve Caesars” by Suetonius) but thanks to Blakely, the class swat, we were soon informed that some of the later chapters were “really dirty”.

Ultimately, a dog-eared copy of said book (in translation, thank goodness) was passed around and read under the bed covers at night.  Suetonius was more or less our primer on sex, violence, various forms of perversion and other delights.  The weird antics of Nero, Caligula and Tiberius were hungrily devoured and discussed at great length by an excitable group of increasingly depraved eleven-year olds who had little knowledge of the real world.  Of course, we later learned that some of this stuff was still going on long after the Romans had left Britain.  Roman History was, therefore, a welcome distraction from the dull slog of 6 lessons a day, soccer and rugby (winter), cricket (summer) and endless hours of homework, not to mention “recreational” woodwork after Chapel on Sundays.