Boris Johnson makes a speech in Latin outside the Houses of Parliament. Credit: Bruno Vincent/Getty
Having been a dyslexic child with slap happy teachers, I learnt to despise Latin. I can still remember the lick of that long ruler far more clearly than I can the apparently sweet taste of Horace or Livy. Amo, Amas, Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Amant, ad nauseam. Love had nothing to do with it. Whack if you got it wrong. Whack if you weren’t concentrating. From the age of seven onwards, Latin was the reason my prep school marked us with red lines on the back of our legs — in order, socially, to mark us out as different from the plebs.
Now Boris – who was learning his Latin at a prep school just up the road from mine — has decided that everyone should know what the word pleb means. He has earmarked £4 million for Latin teaching in state schools. Levelling up, Boris calls it. Cynics, however, might question whether this is little more than some culture war distraction from a general asset stripping of the humanities, with university arts subjects, for instance, facing a devastating 50% cut in funding. A paltry £4 million hardly disguises the continual shift in education away from cultural subjects towards market-useful STEM subjects. Arachis hypogaea is the Latin for peanuts.
Now I really should be passionately against all this Latin revivalism, however modest. Not only was Latin the language of regular childhood thrashings, in adult life it has become for me a kind of shorthand for the crucifixion of Jesus. Christianity began life as a small offshoot of Judaism, persecuted by Roman imperialism. In first-century Palestine, Latin was the language of the oppressor. And it was the Romans that crucified Him. The whole logic of the Roman world order was to destroy everyone and everything that posed a threat to its totalising rule. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” is not some clever compromise division of all that there is into the earthly and the heavenly.
All things belong to God, without remainder. And crucifixion was the Roman’s signature punishment, designed to terrorise those who defied their hegemony. With crucifixion, “the symbol which had spoken of Caesar’s naked might now spoke of God’s naked love”, as NT Wright memorably put it. Amo, Amas, Amat meant something very different now.
Of course, all this came to be obscured when the Latin world hijacked His religion, making Rome itself the capital of Western Christianity. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin and so the language that may have been used by Roman soldiers as they poked him with their spears and taunted Him with insults — or, at least, the language they took their orders in — became the official language of the faith itself. The Roman Catholic church, otherwise known as the Latin church, buried all this. Originally, at least, Latin was the language of the enemy.
So, given that I harbour theological instincts that would make Ian Paisley blush, how come I think Boris is really onto something with this whole Latin experiment? Because, primarily, it represents a small move against the thoroughly depressing idea that education exists simply to serve the needs of employers. What I like about Latin is precisely its relative uselessness, the very thing that its opponents also point to as a reason not to like it. Shouldn’t we be learning Mandarin, or Spanish, they argue? Useful subjects, ones that will help us negotiate new trade deals and induct us into the up-and-coming language of global power.
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