REVIEW: Cambridge Latin Course Unit 1, by the Cambridge School Classics Project

Cambridge Latin Course: Unit 1, 4th Ed., The Cambridge School Classics Project (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

If you’re an English-speaker who studied Latin in school, you might remember Caecilius, who est in hortō. (Technically I suppose I should say you might remember Caecilium, but if we indulge that level of pedantry we’ll be here all day.)

Lucius Caecilius Iucundus is a real historical figure: he was a Pompeiian banker whose home, charred business records, and wax tablets were excavated in the 19th century. He’s most famous, however, as the main character of the first volume of the Cambridge Latin Course, where his household — wife, son, slaves — becomes the setting for a series of charming stories of lawsuits, dinner parties, accidental murder, and political intrigue. The exploits of the Caecilii familiarized generations of students with Latin grammar and vocabulary, with the details of Roman culture and everyday life from food to slavery to religion — and with the tragic finitude of all things. (The final chapter is called “Vesuvius” and, spoiler alert, Caecilius does not make it. The final line leaves his loyal dog, who opened the book by bothering the cook, guarding his dead master “in vain.”)

The Cambridge Latin Course is incredibly popular: since its original publication in 1970, it’s gone through six editions and is currently used in something like 40% of secondary school Latin classes worldwide. The stories are delightful, the conceit of hanging them on real archaeology whenever possible is inspired, and students love it. It’s just terrible at teaching Latin. And worse, it’s terrible on purpose.

It pains me to say this, but Caecilius and his garden — in fact, the entire Cambridge Latin Course — must be extirpated root and branch.

Ecce! Caecilius’s actual hortus. (The plants are not original.)

There are two basic schools of thought on how to learn Latin. Naturally, therefore, they resent each other passionately, compose vicious diatribes about each other’s failings, and issue dire warnings about the terrible fates that will befall students who suffer under the other method — and they’re both absolutely fine.

The traditional approach, sometimes called the “grammar-translation” method, focuses on drill and memorization to master the complexities of Latin grammar. This is a major undertaking, because — unlike modern English — Latin is a highly inflected language: where English mostly conveys grammatical information with word order and helper words, Latin instead changes the words themselves.¹ Yes, of course this is a thing English does occasionally, like when we make plurals or comparatives or change our pronouns (I mean “he” to “him,” not “he” to “she”), but Latin turns it up to eleven. The word abitūrīs, for instance, is built off of the basic verb meaning “to go,” with a prefix meaning “away from,” in a form that indicates it’s a future active participle, and with an ending that shows it’s the indirect object of its sentence. It means something like “for the people who are about to go away,” but all of that semantic information is packed into eight letters. And the whole language is like that! Latin texts are incredibly meaning-dense, so if you don’t recognize the forms you’ll end up with no idea what any of it means.

Learning Latin with the grammar-translation method means memorizing and reciting charts upon charts until they’re so deeply ingrained that grown men who last glanced at a textbook during the Truman administration still know them by heart. (Seriously, try this.) The prototypical scene from grammar school is a roomful of boys chanting the accidence: amō, amās, amat… And once they mastered that, they would go on to practice parsing the grammatical characteristics of a word, translating Latin texts into English, and tackling the dreaded English-to-Latin “prose comp.” The “Romans Go Home” scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a pitch-perfect example of how this works; the centurion is more or less my beloved middle school Latin teacher in a helmet.²

The opponents of the grammar-translation method advocate what’s usually known as the “natural” method. Forget memorizing charts, they say: Latin is a real language that was spoken by real people, and it should be learned the way you would learn any other language. If you decide to study French, do they immediately plop you down in front of a chart of the passé simple, or drill you on the genders of nouns? No! If you take French, you just start talking about the weather and what color shirt François is wearing and whether you like to have lait in your tasse de café. If you mix up le banc and la banque your teacher will laugh at correct you. You’ll pick up the grammar as you go, and if you start getting confused someone will explain it to you in French. So why not do that for Latin, too? See abitūrīs in context often enough, according to this theory, and you’ll just absorb its meaning without needing to memorize a chart.

The most popular text for the natural method, Danish linguist Hans Ørberg’s Lingua Latin Per Se Illustrata, is (except for the author’s name on the title page) entirely in Latin.³ It introduces grammatical concepts gradually, in contexts that try to make it clear exactly what’s going on, with illustrations and marginal notes (in Latin!) to clarify. It’s incredibly popular among Latin autodidacts, and when I eventually devote some of my copious free time to getting my Latin really good again, it’s probably what I’ll use.

So which one is better?

Grammar school.

Well, better for what? Or, to put it another way: why would a person learn Latin? Ask any school that offers it as a subject and you’ll get a whole laundry list of justifications: all those roots will help the students’ English vocabulary, it’s a good structured introduction to how grammar works more broadly, it teaches patterns of critical thought, it sets you up for learning other languages, all the tweedy Oxford dons did it so we should too…⁴ And none of that is wrong, precisely — those are all pleasant ancillary benefits — but if they’re your actual goals there are better and faster ways of achieving all them. You might, for instance, drill SAT vocabulary, or teach grammar in English class, or dive right into whichever other language it is you actually want to study.

No, the real reason to learn Latin — the standard against which any program that purports to teach Latin should be measured — is to read Latin. Does this sound facepalmingly obvious? The reason to learn a thing is so you can do the thing, film at 11! But in fact no less a personage than Mary Beard, the most famous classicist in the world, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that she can’t just pick up a piece of Latin and read it. Really reading Latin the way you would read English (or French, or Chinese, or whatever) — you know, moving your eyes across the words on the page in the order they’re written and simply understanding what they mean — is not at all a universal skill, even among people who have dedicated their lives to studying the ancient world.⁵ But any approach to Latin that doesn’t set you up to actually read it is a waste of your time.

So far, so me-reciting-natural-method-talking-points. But the truth is, both ways are demonstrably capable of getting you there.⁶

Critics of the grammar-translation method like to describe it as an innovation of the 18th or 19th centuries, introduced only after Latin was so thoroughly dead that people could stick it to the page like a dead beetle. This is false! Many of the pedagogical techniques go all the way back to the ancient world! A wonderful overview of Latin textbooks for Greek-speakers in the Roman Empire finds side-by-side Greek and Latin texts and exercises in translation from one to the other. St. Jerome, who translated the Vulgate, learned Latin as a young man from Aelius Donatus and a formal grammar complete with charts. A thousand years later Latin was no one’s native language, but it was still the lingua franca of educated Europe…and all those men who wrote all those tremendous works in Latin, from Erasmus to Thomas More to Athanasius Kircher, started out as schoolboys reciting the accidence. Queen Elizabeth I learned Latin from the man who invented the pedagogical practice of “double translation” (translating Latin to English, then back again, to check how you did), and she wrote Latin poetry in her spare time.

But the thing is that all that dreary memorization was meant to be a stepping-stone. I can imagine few things more depressing than two or three years spent drilling grammar and translating mindless sentences back and forth before you’re allowed to see Caesar — that misses the point! You memorize what abitūrīs means so that when you see it in a sentence, you recognize it at once and move along. Parsing, translation, and the interminable labels (ablative of means! passive periphrastic! dative of breakfast foods!) are analytical tools that you can pull out of your back pocket when just reading fails you. Sometimes, however, teachers and students mistake them for the goal itself. The failure mode of the grammar-translation method is an eternal resort to the dictionary and the charts, the painstaking substitution of an English word for each Latin one, until you end up treating great works of literature like a giant Sudoku.

Or, as C.S. Lewis put it in Surprised by Joy (my review here):

The great gain [of reading] was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it; I was beginning to think in Greek.

That is the real Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom the Greek word lives only while they are hunting for it in the lexicon, and who then substitute the English word for it, are not reading Greek at all; they are only solving a puzzle. The very formula, “Naus means a ship,” is wrong. Naus and ship both mean a thing, they do not mean one another. Behind Naus, and behind navis or naca, we want to have a picture of a dark, slender mass with sail or oars, climbing the ridges, with no officious English word intruding.⁷

The natural method promises a shortcut straight to reading (and possibly also speaking and writing, if that’s your jam). And it, too, can work! I recently purchased

Colin Gorrie

’s splendid Osweald Bera, an Old English reader that employs the same inductive approach as Ørberg’s Latin text (but has a much more engaging storyline). Then I made the mistake of leaving it out on the kitchen counter, whereupon it vanished for several days until one of my children appeared, clutching my book and announcing, “Mom, I think I found the dative!”

But you can’t do that unless you already know about the dative — or at least what an indirect object is. And unfortunately, because most schools no longer teach English grammar in any sort of formal way, Latin is often a student’s first introduction to concepts like “tense” and “participles” (let alone the subjunctive mood). This makes the fully natural method hard, because a student who doesn’t have a solid framework for grammar will have no mental hooks on which to hang all these new features: he just won’t recognize what it is that’s happening. Of course it’s still possible to learn this way — we all learned to speak as babies without knowing anything about grammar in any a priori sense⁸ — but it takes an absolutely enormous amount of repetition to internalize something without the conceptual scaffolding to organize it. (Ironically, this probably means that students at classical schools, who are the only ones getting structured English grammar instruction nowadays, are probably better equipped to learn Latin with the natural method than anyone else. But that’s rarely how those schools do it.) The entirely natural method can be done quite successfully, but there’s a reason it’s especially popular with motivated adult learners who already have some linguistic background.

If the failure mode of the grammar-translation method is Latin-as-Sudoku, playing hunt-the-verb through an impenetrable thicket of subordinate clauses until you’ve finally beaten the sentence into submission, the failure mode of the natural method is simple confusion. The poor Latin student sometimes ends up like someone who took four years of high school French and still can’t understand the directions to the bathroom. Yeah, you maybe, kind of, get the gist of it? You recognize the basic vocabulary, at least. There’s definitely something about cohorts doing something, or maybe something is being done to the cohorts… I’d argue that’s even worse: at least treating Latin like a puzzle lets you figure out who’s doing the verb to whom, even if you eviscerate the text in the process and have to piece it back together like Frankenstein’s monster.

Of course, the real answer to this is just “don’t fail” — a successful student of either method can get to the point of just reading, so picking an approach becomes a question of maximizing the number of students who can succeed. And there’s an obvious solution: combine them! Give some big-picture grammatical instruction so the syntactically naive get the conceptual framework to understand what they’re seeing. Have some charts so that they can see where abitūrīs fits in to the whole system. And then give them lots and lots of engaging stories that use all this grammar in context, because the whole point of learning Latin is to read it and there’s no reason to wait until Caesar to have something to read. Let them go from parts to whole and whole to parts at the same time, and let it all sink in through practice and repetition.

And that’s exactly what the Cambridge Latin Course claims to do. Only it does it in the stupidest way possible.

The CLC grew out of a crisis in the postwar British academy.⁹ Up until the 1950s, a mastery of classical languages had been a clear class marker: it was heavily emphasized at the public schools, it was required for admission to Oxford and Cambridge regardless of the student’s intended studies, and it could win university scholarships and social mobility for the ablest boys of the lower and middle classes. Almost definitionally, the men who built and ruled the British Empire had learned their Latin grammar — because they couldn’t have gotten those building and ruling gigs without it. It wasn’t that Latin itself was a prerequisite (although there was certainly a great deal of identifying the two great historical empires, to the point that the various enemies of perfidious Albion toyed with the idea that they themselves were the descendants of Carthaginians); rather, the habits of mind produced by years of the grammar-translation approach were supposed to be the qualification. The classically educated man, John Sharwood Smith later wrote, was expected to be “able, by virtue of [that] training, to master any problem in any sphere of life as long as it was amenable to intellectual analysis.” (Alas, General Sir Charles James Napier did not actually announce his whirlwind 1842 conquest of the Indian province of Sindh with the one word telegram peccāvī, “I have sinned,” but it’s exactly the sort of clever, breezy, effortless display of superiority that was supposed to characterize the classically educated man. Which is why the apocryphal story has stuck around.) I made fun of the people who like Latin because they want to LARP as Inklings, but they’re not wrong — after tweed, there’s no better symbol of the pre-WWII British social order than having your children study Latin. Unless it’s having them study Greek.

When that social order crumbled after the war — with the loss of the Empire, the weakening of the class system, and the sudden disreputability of the very idea of an “elite subject” — Latin came under threat. In 1960, Oxford and Cambridge both dropped it as an admissions requirement. In 1965, the Labour Government abolished the state-funded grammar schools that had offered Latin and Greek for the cleverest children in favor of a single comprehensive system for the whole country. A classical education was no longer an entrance ticket to the ruling elite (or at least a position as a colonial administrator) — in fact, it might no longer be available at all.

Britain’s classical scholars quickly realized that if their discipline was going to survive outside the confines of Eton and Harrow, it would have to be in the new, mixed- ability comprehensive schools, and it would have to be taught to children who might never reach the point of reading real Latin texts. Frankly, that was mostly already the case: for decades classicists had worried that most students dropped Latin as soon as they finished their O-Levels (about tenth grade) if not before, so that they met mostly their textbooks and rarely the Romans. (It’s bad enough to spend years doing nothing more than memorizing grammatical forms before you’re allowed to get your hands on Caesar; how much worse to do all that and never get Caesar at all!) Charles Brink had fretted that they got only “the preliminary to a classical education which never follows.” But now that there was no more elite academic track for the elite academic subject — now that the subject itself had been knocked off its pedestal — something had to be done.

That something was the Cambridge School Classics Project, which was founded in 1966 with the express purpose of “improv[ing] the teaching of Latin in the early stage.” To save Latin education, the scholars and teachers decided, it had to be fun and engaging from the start — and it had to be utterly unlike the Latin of the past, which had been an elitist training ground for snobs. This wasn’t just savvy marketing: the people behind the project had exactly the politics you would expect from 1960s British academics. They might love Latin, but they hated the intellectual and socioeconomic elitism it had come to symbolize. So when they published the first of their eponymous textbooks in 1970, they eschewed anything that reminded them of the bad old way of doing things.

The bad old way personified librified.

Unfortunately, the bad old way of doing things had a lot going for it, and the CLC suffered from their lack. To take a particularly egregious example: ever since the Romans started analyzing their own grammar, we’ve copied the names they coined for various forms. They don’t make as much intuitive sense to an English-speaker — the name of the ablative case, which is used (among other things) to express motion away, is obviously derived from the Latin word for “having been carried away” — but they’re still tremendously useful. The first edition of the CLC left them out entirely and instead labeled the forms A, B, C, etc.¹⁰

That’s more or less the problem in a nutshell: horrified by the aristocratic pedigree of Latin class as a roomful of boys chanting full charts of accidence, the authors present grammar not just inductively but piecemeal. The declensions are thrown at students all at once — but only in three cases, with the fifth and final one waiting until halfway through the second textbook in the series. New forms are presented for recognition but never formation, and certainly never systematic analysis, which is a disaster for a language full of things that look the same and are actually completely different. A word ending in -ī could be a plural subject or a singular possessive (or an indirect object or a first person past tense verb…), and a student who meets one version six months or a year after another (and never sees all the options side-by-side) will have great difficulty remembering the latecomers. This doesn’t matter so much for simple stories, since you can probably figure it out from context, but as the sentences grow in length and complexity and the dependent clauses swell like clusters of fruit, pausing to sort it out every time is like solving a polynomial when you can’t remember 7+3.

None of this troubled the authors of the CLC: they wanted to make a Latin for everyone, which meant that it had to be fun and engaging and accessible (which is to say, not too hard). The most talented students, who would presumably be the only ones to stick with the subject regardless of how it was taught, could muddle through, and everyone else would enjoy their little taste of Latin. And okay, fine: if you’re resigned to the idea that your textbook is the only exposure most of your readers will ever have to the material, it doesn’t much matter whether it teaches them enough grammar to prepare them for the real thing. If we’re comparing failure modes, the worst-case outcome of the Cambridge Latin Course is a vague fond familiarity with Roman culture and a soft spot for Caecilius and his family. Given what most people seem to recall from their secondary education, you could probably do worse! (No one seems to feel that way about, say, trigonometry.) But the problem is that the CLC is intentionally designed to create that failure mode. The ideological aversion to anything even resembling the traditional grammar-translation approach (even when it’s incredibly useful!) so hamstrings the instruction that even a gifted Latin student comes out of it ill-prepared to read real texts. John Wilkins, the linguistic consultant who guided the first edition, argued that “it is better to let students develop their own ‘personal grammar’ (or way to competence) rather than imposing a pre-analysed ‘pure grammar’ on them,” which is all well and good unless the personal grammar is, uh, wrong.

Luckily, the Cambridge School Classics Project is highly responsive to criticism and the recent new edition of their textbooks addresses a terrible problem that people have complained about for years: the egregious shortage of female representation.

The story of the Cambridge Latin Course is a terrible tragedy. Its reading-forward approach — carefully scaffolding the student’s exposure to increasingly complex grammar, presented in historical context and through honestly wonderful stories (I have cried) — is such a good idea…and the actual product is utterly poisoned by its roots in the ressentiment and massive social changes of the 1960s. It’s as though teaching kids to read using phonics had somehow gotten conceptually wrapped up with the Nixon Administration and was tossed out wholesale to prove the educators’ ideological bona fides. (Actually, that’s not a terrible description of something that actually happened: the push for the whole word method in American literacy instruction shares a number of features with the development of the CLC — and the faults are similar, too. There’s a tagline for you: “like Lucy Calkins, but for Latin.”)

Like Ridley Scott’s execrable Napoleon movie (or any number of novels I won’t name here), a good idea executed poorly is often worse than never doing it at all — because now no one else can do it. There is, demonstrably, a market for Latin textbooks that take a very different approach from the CLC. There is no market for “the same approach as that incredibly popular book, but structured more sensibly” — and there won’t be until my entirely reasonable plea is heeded. The Cambridge Latin Course is razed and the ground sown with salt. Perhaps then, heeding antique precedent, something better can rise.

1. Sometimes people will say that this means Latin word order doesn’t matter, which is a vicious lie; Latin word order absolutely matters, it just matters differently.

2. She would consider this a compliment.

3. The Amazon reviews are written in a delightful mishmash of languages, because native speakers of Chinese and German and Arabic can all use the same text.

4. Okay, they don’t actually say that part out loud, but LARPing as an Inkling is at least 15% of the point of the classical education movement. I say this with only love in my heart.

5. In fact, perhaps especially there, because there are so few texts and they’ve been so well picked over for two thousand years, that you can get away with it. If you want to tackle the much larger Latin corpus from the Medieval and Early Modern eras, though, you may well be the first person to look at a document in eight hundred years. There are no notes to help you. Good luck!

6. I once had a pair of teachers who, if they needed to discuss something private around students, would converse in Attic Greek in front of Latin classes and German in front of Greek classes. God only knows what they would have done if any of us had spoken German.

7. Seeing this passage quoted somewhere what what convinced me to read the book in the first place. I’m very glad I did, but this passage is not representative.

8. Incidentally, this is on my reading list.

9. The following history is drawn largely from this book chapter.

10. They’ve since walked this back.