Back in that Latin groove

Because I’m studying part-time, I do each academic year in two halves. In practice this means that last year was all Greek, while this year is all Latin. Last year was great – it was brilliant studying language, close-reading texts (in the original) and looking at broader themes of epic and tragedy (in translation) all at the same time, and there was a lot of cross-fertilisation between the different strands.

I’m definitely more of a fan of Greek than Latin, although I find it much harder and have less of a grasp of the language basics. This being so, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this Latinate year. However, now I’m getting stuck in, it’s surprisingly enjoyable. I’m studying the Pro Murena, and although Cicero is comically full of his own self-importance, you’ve got to love the pace and swing of his rhetoric. Also looking at some Livy and Seneca, and although they don’t rock my world in the same way, it’s quite encouraging that the vocab and grammar are coming back to me. I think the alphabet is still a surprisingly large obstacle in Greek – there seems to be an extra mental loop of transliterating the text before I can begin to get a handle on it.

That said, my main goal for this semester is to get to the end before pregnancy slows me to a full stop. And from the new year my life will be completely different; it’s hard to predict what it will be like, but not like this! I hope there’s still a little scope for classics in the new world.