The first of twenty volumes on the language and culture of ancient Rome, edited by Elisabetta Cantone, will be on sale together with the newspaper from 22 September. An outing every Wednesday
Long live the deponent verbs, the five declensions, the active and passive periphrastic conjugation! Hurray for three-way adjectives, gender-neutral nouns, athematic verbs, la sequence of time!
The morphology and syntax of Latin inevitably accompany the daily existence of the ancient Romans and their culture, from religion and the structure of the army to the pleasures of the table and the theater of Plautus, Terentius and Seneca, from traditional family values to the territorial conquests of despotic commanders or bloodthirsty emperors, including Caesar, Silla, the Scipios, Augustus, Nero, Traiano, Costantino.
A triple journey between language, culture and life, which combines grammatical insights such as ablative absolute, gerundive and supine to the education of children, the role of women, the use of slaves and the literature of the main authors such as Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Livius, Cicero and Ovid. But why study Latin at the beginning of the third millennium? An insane vice of the past in the face of the uninterrupted succession of technological innovations?
It is an age-old question, that it is equally concerned with Greek. The questions of those who consider the study of a dead language useless and obsolete now follow one another in the same way as in the first post-war period and even more so in the 1970s. What is Latin for? Does knowing this make society more democratic? Wasn’t the Latin culture of reference of the Fascist period? Why learn a discipline status symbol, made to measure for an elite destined to continue their studies, while in the days of social networks English and Chinese are much more usable on the job market?
The answer is simply one: Latin teaches us to reason and no longer express such ridiculous questions that calling them irresponsible seems an excess of generosity. Illuminating the nonconformist Pasolini, who wrote about the imminent Latinicidal reform: «The poor Latin of the middle school is a first, minimum means of knowledge of that history of ours that the capitalist ferocity tries to mystify, making it his own. It is therefore a mistake to want to abolish the teaching of Latin: an error like any tactic. The chessboard of the struggle is immense and complex: Latin is only apparently a weapon of the enemy ».
Regarding the teaching used to educate young people towards democracy, Guido Baldi, professor of modern and contemporary Italian literature at the University of Turin, supports the need for the study of the Latin language in the essay The challenge of the School, edited by Pearson, to get to know Italian better: «Training in Latin syntax offers an irreplaceable help to build complex syntactic structures of the sentence without losing oneself and to master them by reading. Only those who know Latin can fully realize, thanks to the etymology, the semantic range of Italian words, and are able to use them with properties ».
Latin is also a mental gymnastics, which trains the soul to the indefatigable application then on any subject, without however reaching the extremes of Alfieri in being tied to a chair by his servant and of Leopardi with his «seven years of crazy study and very desperate ». Plus the Latin it is an integral part of the DNA of all Italians and Europeans. It works as an immune system against any viral attack of the dictatorship of ignorance. It is also a different way of thinking about law, the function of the state, the sense of collectivity.
It therefore seems more than appropriate to greet with jubilation the release of the new series on culture and the Latin language as roots of the West, edited by Elisabetta Cantone, on newsstands with the «Corriere della Sera». A very useful tool for readers of all ages to pick up a learned discipline, sometimes hated for the discriminatory way in which it was proposed by some professors, or to discover it ex new. A study without a teacher in attendance, but which includes a series of lessons (with the addition of games and crosswords), which can be approached with the spirit of self-taught.
From a glottological point of view Latin is the Indo-European language from which those “romances” (term that derives from the adjective “romanicus”) were born: Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, French. Consequently also the Italic dialects, including the Tuscan destined to become the language of literature and of our homeland.
It is not surprising that the demand for study Latin today in the USA and a renewed interest in Italian and European culture develops precisely in the rediscovery of the cultural foundations of American society. In this regard Pasolini would say it is necessary as soon as possible to introduce the study of dialects and Latin in Italy starting from elementary school.
The first release. Cicero’s eloquence, Caesar’s political work
The first volume of the series is out on newsstands with the Corriere della Sera on Wednesday 22 September Latin. Culture and language at the roots of the West at the price of 6.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. The first title, edited by Costanza Motta, is dedicated to Politics in ancient republican Rome. It also contains the first section of the language course, “Latin morphology, first declension, present indicative” and also an in-depth study on the figure of Titus Livius (59 BC – 17 AD), the author of the history of Rome City, that is, from the foundation of the city until the Augustan era. The series as a whole is edited by Elisabetta Cantone and includes twenty volumes (the first titles in the graph on the right), which will be released every Wednesday, always at the same price, until February 2, 2022. The aim of the initiative is to revisit an extraordinary heritage cultural heritage that is at the origins of our civilization and helps us understand where we come from. Just think of the world hegemony of the Latin alphabet, the prominence of the notions of Republic and Empire, and the fact that many upper chambers of democratic parliaments are still called the Senate. Not to mention the legacy of Roman law, which is still the basis of contemporary legal systems. The second volume, edited by Linda Pedraglio, will be War and will be released on September 29th: The following will follow: The society, edited by Elisabetta Cantone (6 October); Values and traditions, edited by Carmen Arcidiaco (October 13); Leisure, edited by Elisabetta Cantone (20 October); The philosophy, edited by Carmen Arcidiaco (October 27); The city, curated by Linda Pedraglio (November 3).
September 17, 2021 (change September 17, 2021 | 20:47)
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