When I visited my relatives back home during Christmas break, my uncle asked me what I would study in college. I said nonchalantly, “Classics … so Latin and ancient Greek.” He was silent for a moment, but then he asked me this question:
“Why do you need to study dead languages to study classics?”
Notably, my uncle was not challenging the value of learning about classical antiquity, but the necessity of reading original Latin and Greek rather than translations. What is so compelling about the ancient languages themselves? This is the question I want to discuss today.
My first moment of epiphany came when reading Lucretius, an Epicurean poet. When introducing the central project of his work, he wrote, “nam tibi de summa Caeli ratione deumque / disserere incipiam et rerum primordia pandam,” which is translated as, “For I will begin to expound to you about the greatest nature of the sky and of the gods, and I will unfold the origins of things.” The translation tells us what the lines are saying. However, when I was working through the second line in Latin, I paid attention to the two consecutive elisions, that is, the omission of syllables to create a blending, elongated sound effect. While I found the first part of the line difficult to read aloud because of the elisions, I regained a limpid, fluid rhythm, a sense of stability, in the second half. The metrical pattern of the line, then, mimics the very idea Lucretius wanted to express—the power of philosophy to untangle and clarify confounding concepts. I would not have found the beauty of his poetry if I had resorted to reading the translation.
I found a similar nuance when reading Homer’s Iliad. When Priam, the great Trojan king, addressed Achilles, who killed and mutilated his son, he said:
τῶν μὲν πολλῶν θοῦρος Ἄρης ὑπὸγούνατ’ ἔλυσεν·
ὃς δέ μοι οἶος ἔην, εἴρυτο δὲ ἄστυκαὶ αὐτούς,
τὸν σὺ πρῴην κτεῖνας ἀμυνόμενονπερὶ πάτρης,
Ἕκτορα
Robert Fagles translated the lines as:
Many, most of [my sons] violent Ares cut the knees from under.
But one, one was left me, to guard my walls, my people—
the one you killed the other day, defending his fatherland,
my Hector!
When reading the original Greek. I was struck by the correlative words μὲν … δέ, translated into “on the one hand … on the other hand” in English. The correlatives juxtapose the deaths of Priam’s many children and the monumental fall of a single person, Hector, emphasizing just how much Hector’s singular death distresses his father. I also noticed that Priam waits until the end to mention Hector by name. He first talks about his son through a descriptive relative clause, then uses a deictic demonstrative pronoun, and finally utters his name. As he speaks, he seems to be reaching back to distant memories of his son before compelling himself to bitterly acknowledge his death. This is the grief of an aged father. Heartbreaking and painfully raw with genuine human emotion.
So, why learn two dead languages? I would say that it is an act of humility and empathy. When you struggle to piece together a sentence and do justice to all its components, you care less about what the sentence is saying than how it is saying it—the embedded emotion,the implications behind words. You start paying attention. Note how much empathy you have displayed. You are genuinely interested in these people—their lives, families, stories, thoughts, emotions, and humanity—even if these people are no longer with us. You know that you can only understand an author or a text to a certain degree, but you still try, with compassion, effort, and humility. By spending valuable hours of your time working through passages in the original language, you are honing a culture of care so invaluable to our world today. Among many answers, that is my answer for now to why a dead language is never dead.
Thank you.
