Cena Latina is Princeton’s Latin language table, sponsored by the classics department, and to the best of my knowledge it is one of only two weekly Latin tables in the Ivy League (the other being at Harvard). This has a lot to do with Leah Whittington — a classics grad student here and classics undergrad at Harvard — who organized both.
Latin, like Lazarus, refuses to stay dead. Every Thursday at 6:15 p.m. in the Rockefeller Private Dining Room, some five or six regulars and a few reinforcements resurrect the language and say, “Amabo te, mitte saltem,” for “Please pass the salt.” No English is spoken. If you don’t know what the word is, say, “Quomodo dicitur…”
This might seem a little necromantic to those who were told that Latin is safely defunct, but Latin shows a surprising will to life for a language with 30 endings to a regular adjective. Whenever the topic arises — and it does with surprising frequency — those to whom I mention the Latin table are always surprised that anybody speaks Latin, let alone that Princeton sponsors a table for it. Latin is supposed to be extinct. (Anybody who went through Wheelock’s textbook in high school may know the ditty, “Latin is a dead, dead language, as dead as it can be / it killed the ancient Romans and now it’s killing me.”)
When Christopher Wren was excavating London after the Great Fire, he found a tablet among the ruins, dating to the Roman period. “Resurgam,” it said. “I shall arise.”
Latin is dead only in the technical sense, that nobody speaks it from childhood. It is, however, spoken casually by at least a dozen people in this university. And it can be spoken. Somehow a myth arose that the Romans didn’t actually speak Latin or that nobody could learn to speak the language unless raised with it from birth. This is certainly not the case — though cases are indeed a problem.
Anybody who had some Latin in high school might remember that the language has no word order. Verbs tend to migrate to the back of the sentence, and the subject is often up front, but “E Pluribus Unum” means “Pluribus e Unum” which is the same as saying “Unum e Pluribus.” It’s all in the endings: Every word comes with about 10 endings to signal if it’s singular or plural, the direct object, modified by a preposition, the subject or indirect object etc. Because of these endings, there’s no need to always put the object after the verb or follow any set paradigm. So if one is used to modern European languages like English or Italian, Latin is very chaotic. Adjectives can be separated from their nouns by an entire relative clause, and it’s considered good style to interlock different nouns with different adjectives to weave the subject and object together. Prepositions follow or precede their objects. By French and Spanish standards, the subjunctive is used with wild abandon. And the verb can go wherever you like.
Cena Latina has its regulars, but we are also joined by the odd freshman or sophomore who’s thinking about classics, upperclassmen who drift in and out and some graduate students who attend when they can. The core group spans from sophomores to fellows. When I joined the Cena, I could barely follow the discussion, let alone speak good, colloquial Latin myself. Like any other language, learning to speak Latin requires practice in a Latin-speaking environment, and the Cena Latina welcomes beginners.
If you got hosed from your eating club, got rejected by the co-ops and can’t make Spelman, try coming to the Cena Latina on Thursdays. We can’t bicker because we can’t decide how to translate the concept. (Is it a simple disputatio, or a certamen? Quid est verbum desideratum? Ego nescio.) Anyway, Bicker seems too much like bellum civile, civil war. As Caesar would know, it’s much tidier just to massacre Gauls. Note to President Tilghman: Rebuild endowment by conquest of France. Cena Latina can provide detailed notes, written by a very experienced general. We have a proven investment strategy, which is more than I can say for Citigroup.
Cena Latina is quirky. We Latinators are the storm troopers of the rebellion, a Praetorian Guard for the passive periphrastic, the last legion of the forgotten locative. Temporal exiles, we wander through this world with our eyes fixed on Rome, plotting the return of the ablative, tending our sequence of tenses. If the physicists ever make a time machine, we will be ready.
Brendan Carroll is a sophomore from New York. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.
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