Based on the author’s own experience

Why do they even teach a dead language? He took off his blazer, felt the gush of a sun-drenched breeze wash over his face. The heavy woolen garment was draped over a rickety seat. He took the hundredth glance down at his shirt: there was nothing left to smooth out or to tuck under or to fidget with, each individual button shone with an oily glint.

Exam season is horrible. But there is a special kind of horror when it comes to language assessments — hours of French oral practice, scrunched-up Chinese practice essays, that Spanish dictionary that seems to grow thicker every day you see it on the table. Look beyond the bustling library stalls where students are buried in LOTE, the Languages Other Than English revision room, and you might catch one or two Latinists — a rare and solitary group — utterly defeated by the wall of text in front of them . . .

He watched the other Latinists file in row by row like convicts (or at least he thought so). Memorial Hall, a stately, dignified place, was now full of the jests and erratic footsteps of rowdy schoolboys. Bum-ba-bum went the dusty shoes against polished floorboards. The tables screeched as the boys crammed themselves into the chairs, not even bothering to pull them back before they sat. And all along, this animated scene was glazed by a glaring Melbourne sun, so that the faces were hazier and the shirts were stuffier.

There’s something peculiar about a language like Latin. There is no oral component, nor are you expected to write about yourself and your experiences. You might be preparing a mock interview in French, a presentation in German or Italian, or maybe even a song in Japanese . But when you get to Latin, things get odd. We can’t search for videos of Julius Caesar delivering his speeches — so his words are the next best thing. Learning Latin is all about translation, especially from Latin into English. Exciting in the classroom. Frightening in the examination hall.

It was a rectangular sheet of doom, with black letters jutting out from a pristine expanse of untouched paper, judging his every movement. He dared not put his hand near it, save to touch it or flip it around. To him it was so otherworldly, so alien and harsh. Latin, latin, latin. He felt something looming over his head; he tasted iron in the air, heard the hollers of his imaginary crowd and the smirk of his executioner. The heat crept up his nostrils and lit his eyebrows. He was burning.

There is a task in Latin, called the “Unseen,” where you are given a passage that you have never come into contact with and expected to translate it under time pressure. Sounds bad enough. Even worse — Latin likes to shapeshift: something might look like a noun, but be an adjective; a verb might change forms between the lines, becoming something spelled entirely differently from what you might remember. There is a little voice in his mind which pipes up whenever he gets himself into a tangle — What’s the use in learning Latin anyways?

Inside, his mind furiously worked at the words: fumbling them about like a toddler and his building blocks. laboro, laborare, laboravi, laboratus. Yes, that’s how it goes. But which one meant “to work” and which one was “had worked”? He scratched at his head and forced his eyes shut. What was the infinitive of subtuli? What about the ablative of rex? Why did the verb sum conjugate in the way it did? When did Emperor Nero watch the burning of Rome?

If it’s so painful to prepare for, why bother with it at all? If you asked any Latinist, they would probably agree with you on the outset! But he imagines that, in the middle of all the chaotic and frantic revision, there is an odd attraction to this old fossil of a language. Latin is one of those things which pops into his daily life in really, really subtle ways. When he says et cetera in a conversation about his weekend — “and the others.” When geography hits him with per capita — “by (each) head.” Latin lives on in the everyday; and learning about it might, if mindrackingly confusing, be an angle to seeing how we use English, or French, or any other contemporary tongue.

As he slouched over the table, these thoughts rushed through him in a surge. He had found it in that moment — why he learned Latin! Because it was a language that looked into the past — on the tongues of marching soldiers, pious empresses, and scheming consuls. Because it was a language that lives in the present — given new life, it nestles into English sentences, French poetry, and Italian operas. Because Latin will look into the future — it will name unknown animals, unsolved theorems, and nascent stars. Latin no longer belonged to one country, or one people, or one moment in history — but like a magical staircase it plunges into the deepest depths of antiquity, and ascends to futures he could not yet imagine.

And now he felt confident. Now he was in control. He had seen those words before. He opened his eyes and the first bell rang — You may now begin writing.