For Whom Homer Tolls

 "Ask not for whom the bell tolls," advised John Donne, quickly adding, "it tolls for thee."  Yet we may well ask for whom Homer tolls, or more accurately, for whom his song still sings today.  Are his writings texts to be translated, merely "a bit of Greek construe" as a student once argued with Michael Redgrave in the classic film The Browning Version?  Are they works to be mined to support this or that idea or cause du jour?  And what has all this to do with the reigning question across social media at the moment, "How often do you think of the Roman Empire?

Rome On My Mind

It would seem, if we are to believe the polls being conducted by women with the men they know, that Ray Charles may have had the land of Augustus in his thoughts when he famously covered Hoagy Carmichael's 1930 song "Georgia On My Mind."

For reasons passing understanding, "How often do you think about the Roman Empire" is the fun question going around the land, and one particular response to it caught my attention.

First, this man's comparison of the ancient world with the modern is sound.  Second, he has remembered what he has learned well enough to be largely correct and able to speak meaningfully.  Yet how many would write him off because he is shirtless on his porch and speaking with a southern accent?  This man is precisely the person for whom Homer still sings, and I'll tell you why.

A Glorious Birthright

As the video shows, this man can speak about the issues of his day with reference to the past in order to better understand and respond to his world.  Would that our many preening intellectuals and elected officials could do the same.  Nearly twenty-five years ago, Victor Davis Hanson wrote Who Killed Homer?, a book that takes no prisoners in calling out the elitism of contemporary classical studies.

My copy is highlighted on almost every page, with margin notes that frequently include exclamation marks, so I will give you just a brief taste of what Hanson has observed.

All that is left to the career Classicist is to play the theoretical game, to reinvent the Greeks and Roman each year, to dress up Homer as a transvestite this fall, a syllable-toting accountant next spring.  To do something else, something actually important, to put stone and text together, to combine papyrus and coin, to make sense of some noble, big idea for the carpenter, teacher, and dentist, would require an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century scholar like Gibbon, Mommsen, or Grote.  They would be persons of action, of wide reading, of passion and prejudice -- "assumers" and "generalizers," in other words, who, like Homer, rarely nod, have a life outside the campus, and are not ground out of modern American doctoral programs.

Here, interestingly enough, is what most closely binds the High Classicists:  they disdain the average student -- and the entire American middle class for that matter.  Yet those burger-flipping students constitute the vast majority of students in our colleges and universities....  (pp. 149-150)

Why are Homer and the rest of the classical Greco-Roman authors important for carpenters, teachers, and dentists, for burger-flipping students, and for people like the man in the video above?  It is because the works of these ancient writers, beautiful and dangerous and enlightening and disturbing as they may be, have become world heritage works, the birthright of all who claim to be human.  They must not be hidden behind lenses of ideology nor made inaccessible through a thick blanket of obscurantist jargon.  Hanson again, "We read Virgil in Latin to learn, word by powerful word, of man's heroic struggle with a nature that in the long run will always win, of humanity's destined confrontation with its own limitations" (p. 187).

The Roman Empire For All

Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Spring, 1992 - Fall, 1993, Third Series, Vol. 2, No. 2/3, printed an article that had originally been published in Harper's Magazine in March of 1966.  It was written by the eminent classicist and translator William Arrowsmith.  A professor at Boston University, Princeton University, MIT, Yale, Johns Hopkins, NYU, and Emory, he also served as the chair of the Classics Department at The University of Texas, where I years later completed my M.A.  He was admirably qualified to write a piece called "The Shame of the Graduate Schools:  A Plea for a New American Scholar."  His words written more than fifty years ago echo in those of Hanson.

An alarmingly high proportion of what is published in classics -- and in other fields -- is simply rubbish or trivia. An alarming percentage of the subsidized books published by university presses have no business being published. An alarming number of the humanistic projects which yearly receive grants, fellowships, stipends, and support are not worth supporting. They represent the commitment of a given institution or university to support the humanities, in spite of the fact that the project is palpably unsound, or doubtful, or dull.  

There is no more sickening spectacle in the modern university than that of the men whose very natures have been violated in order to suit the requirements of a system.  But the damage to scholarship is nothing in comparison to the human waste involved.  Three out of four men in academic life are the victims of this wasteful and terrible system.... Three out of four men you meet in academic life are quite simply unfulfilled.  (pp. 165, 166)

Whether it is high school, undergraduate, or graduate education, the discoveries and products of mankind are the birthright of all people to explore, to be inspired by, and to build upon.  Human beings should not be, must not be, victims of a "wasteful and terrible system."  Any education that equips a person like the man in the video above is worthy of the name.  Any that does not should stop its masquerade as education and go out of business.

How, then, do we present, as Poe once wrote, "the glories that were Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," along with all the other thoughts and discoveries and achievements in the arts and sciences produced by the human race, to our children, both young and old?  Theologian, scholar, and translator Benjamin Jowett had an idea, which he shared in the preface to his 1881 translation of Thucydides.

The voluminous learning of past ages [has] to be recast in easier and more manageable forms, and if Greek literature is not to pass away, it seems to be necessary that in every age some one who has drunk deeply from the original fountain should renew the love of it in the world, and once more present that old life, with its great ideas and great actions, its creations in politics and in art, like the distant remembrances of youth, before the delighted eyes of mankind.

I stopped my graduate work in classics when I realized that my field and I were asking different questions.  Most in my field were exploring minutiae of philology, tracking the literary influence of one author on another, when I was asking whether what a given author said were true.  It proved to be a good choice, for it led me back to the secondary classroom, with occasional, subsequent stints at the undergraduate level.  For more than three decades I have been blessed with the opportunity to journey with students to the lands of the true, the good, and the beautiful aboard

Those Nicéan barks of yore,

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

    The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

    To his own native shore,

for truly the land of Homer and Vergil is the native land of all.

Hidden Treasure

 

I recently thought I had fallen into a real life version of a Dan Brown novel or the Nicholas Cage move National Treasure.  As I scrolled through some of my picture uploads on Facebook, I found one of the title page of a book I had forgotten I owned.  I knew instantly where the book was, and given what it was, I could hardly wait to pull it from its shelf.  When I did, I discovered something even more amazing.  

My Currently Favorite Collection

I am not a huge collector of things, but I have enjoyed collecting fountain pens, miniature Mustang cars, and the complete discography of certain rock and metal artists.  My favorite collection at the moment, however, is of English translations of Vergil's Aeneid.  In the fall of 2021, I launched a website listing every English translation of the epic poem in chronological order from the first in 1513 to the most recent.  I wrote about that website in a post called "Mr. Holland's Aeneid," which explains that the new website Aeneid Translator would include a color-coded system to indicate the translations that I actually own.  Until recently, my collection totaled thirty-seven translations, including every one from 1937 through 2021.  Just the other day, that total climbed to thirty-eight.

As I was scrolling through some old pictures on Facebook, I ran across one from the title page to a translation of the works of Vergil.  Since the picture was in my photos, I realized that I must own the book and immediately remembered

not only that I did own it, but where it was in my bookcases.  I ran to that particular bookcase, pulled off the volume, and began to explore what I had.

The Excitement of Discovery

The oldest translation of Vergil's Aeneid in my possession is the 1685 translation by John Dryden, but it is a 20th century edition.  Prior to my recent discovery, I had thought the oldest volume in our personal library was the 1794 edition of Cicero's De Oratore that I had purchased at an antiquarian bookshop in Florence, Italy.  This forgotten edition of Vergil published in 1770 bested that by twenty-four years.

It is the dream of book lovers to discover a long lost work.  Indeed, this idea forms the core of one of the best-selling books of all time, Umberto Eco's The Name of The Rose, but let us be clear.  I did not unearth on a bookshelf in my Indiana home the lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics.  Still, just as children enjoy dressing up and playing as their favorite literary or movie characters, so I enjoyed the thrill of discovery when I realized just how old this volume was and what it contained.

As you can see from the title page in the picture above, this book contains the prose translation of Vergil's works.  It is, in fact, the first of two volumes (someday, perhaps, I will procure the second), that cover all of the Roman poet's works, the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid.  The prose rendering is that of Joseph Davidson, originally published in 1743.  As you can see from the opening page to the first book of the Aeneid, this is more than a simple translation.

Each page contains the Latin text, a section titled Ordo that puts the Latin into more traditionally English word order, Davidson's prose translation, and then copious notes.  After the double discovery of the oldest book in my library and a translation of Vergil I did not remember I had, a third thrill of excitement came when I noticed that in Davidson's comparison of the opening lines of the Aeneid with those of Homer's Odyssey, he cited Alexander Pope's translation after giving the Greek.  I have a good friend who is Beowulf fan, and he and I love to tease each other about who was the better poet, the Beowulf bard or Alexander Pope.  For my money, Pope will always win.  I have loved his heroic couplets since I was a senior in high school, and his translation of Homer, particularly the Iliad, is one of my favorite works of all time.

Holding a first edition of Pope's Iliad translation from 1715

These discoveries alone would have been enough to excite a bibliophile, but something even better was hiding in these three-hundred-year-old pages.

The Chief Design of Education

At the beginning of his book, Davidson includes an essay "To Those Gentlemen Who have the immediate Care of Education," and in it he lays out an understanding of education that has been held in various degrees by most people in most cultures, is espoused and practiced by some of us today, but has for too many others become a lost treasure.

Davidson refers to those of us who are teachers as "faithful guides, who, no doubt, will, in whatever author you teach, guard your pupils against the influence of any thing that has a tendency to corrupt their principles or morals" and then goes on to show why Vergil is such a suitable author for this purpose.  According to Davidson, "There is a peculiar tenderness and humanity diffused through all his writings, which never fails to make the heart better, and sends away every well disposed mind from the reading of him, equally pleased and improved.  He animates the soul to the love of virtue, by setting before us the most noble examples; corrects the passions, by showing their fatal effects, when indulged to excess, or when directed to improper objects; makes us feel the peace and serenity they bring, when conducted by reason, and regulated within the bounds of prudence and moderation.  From him we learn the force of piety, and what powerful incentives to fortitude, and every heroic virtue, arise from the belief of a deity, and a providence supremely wise and good.  In a word, every image, every description, every character he exhibits; his fables, his allegories, his episodes, all are calculated, not only to please the fancy, but to instruct the judgment, and form the heart."

If that sounds quaint, outdated, or even inappropriate for the modern classroom, we have sad proof of how far we have drifted from the true purpose of education.  It is about far more than teaching mere facts, the sufficient memorization of which can be determined by an exam, and Davidson states this pointedly.  "To teach boys to understand an author's language, is, you know, but the least part of your duty.  To acquaint them with his spirit and virtuous design, to form their taste aright, that they may be able to correct his faults and relish his beauties, feel the force of his pious or humane sentiments, and learn to copy out his heroic characters, and imitate his generous examples; in a word, to teach them to be sound critics on life and manners and to distinguish the true from the false, ... this is your honourable province, and the chief design of education."

Isn't that asking too much of our teachers?  It is if we insist on placing foolish burdens on them under the guise of professionalism.  Earlier in his essay Davidson had explained why he had produced this particular edition of Vergil's works.  "If it gives you some relief from the more disagreeable and burdensome part of your work, it is only to leave you freer and more disengaged in the execution of what is the principal business of education."  Davidson knew, as have most people in most societies through the ages, that education is a grander enterprise than the mechanical drudgery into which it can be corrupted.  He went on to say, "You, by your very profession, are solemnly engaged to teach and exemplify goodness to mankind, at a time of life when they are most capable of being taught, when their docile minds may easily be moulded to every shape of goodness, and are susceptible of the most durable impressions.  [T]he legislature may enact, and the magistrate may execute salutary law; but what will all avail, unless the foundations of national virtue be laid in the right forming of the heart at first?  If the fountains be foul and impure, all the art of man will not make the streams run pure and unpolluted.  The Scripture tells us, that the tree must first be made good, and then its fruits will be good also; but if the tree be corrupt, the fruit likewise will partake of the corruption.  Indeed experience shows us, that the best education is not of itself sufficient to establish the mind in an habitual, uniform course of integrity; yet the same experience evinces, that nothing is of so much importance towards effecting this great end, as to give the mind an early turn and bias to the right side; and that, without this, all other means, humanly speaking, will have but a weak and transient influence."

The legislature may enact, and the magistrate may execute salutary law; but what will all avail, unless the foundations of national virtue be laid in the right forming of the heart at first?  What, indeed.

Mr. Holland's Aeneid

 

The 1995 film Mr. Holland's Opus tells the story of Glenn Holland, an aspiring musician and composer whose dream is to create one memorable work of music.  To pay his bills, however, he takes a job as a high school band teacher, never considering that to be his true vocation and spending his evenings laboring over his composition.  As Emilio Estevez says to his father, Martin Sheen, in The Way, you don't choose a life, you live one, and the one that Mr. Holland lives seems far from the one he would have chosen.  As the film develops, both he and the audience discover that his true composition, the opus for which he will be known, is the work he has accomplished with his students.

For many years I have wanted to publish a translation of Vergil's Aeneid.  I have played with a half dozen or more metrical schemes in which to do it and have considered prose as well.  Since 1533 and the Scots translation by Gavin Douglas, there has been a nearly unbroken succession of English renderings up to and including the one by Shadi Bartsch in 2021.  However the concept of need is defined, there can hardly be one for yet another English Aeneid.  Why, then, I have been lured by the Siren's call of this notoriously difficult task for so many years?

The opening of Aeneid, Book 1, by Gavin Douglas

When I was a boy, I played dentist when I came home from the dentist's office, barber after having my hair cut, and teacher following a day of Kindergarten.  The latter was enacted with my grandmother as my student and largely for the gleeful pleasure of putting a big, red F on her papers, regardless of her actual achievement.  The mimetic impulse is in all of us.  As children we role play and act out the lives of those around us in preparation for our adult callings, but even adults still feel the pull of mimesis as we wear jerseys bearing the names of a favorite athlete, display posters of a beloved band or album in the garage, or even try keeping up with the Joneses as we rush to purchase the latest technology.

For me, I want to go ever deeper into the amazing, beautiful, moving, haunting, inspiring, magnificent work that Vergil crafted two millennia ago.  So taken am I with it that at times I can only nod in mute agreement with Tennyson's eulogy for the nineteenth centenary of the Roman poet's death.

I salute thee, Mantovano,

I that loved thee since my day began,

Wielder of the stateliest measure

Ever moulded by the lips of man.

Statue of Vergil in the Piazza Virgiliana in Mantua

What that means, in practical terms, is that I have always wanted to translate this poem.  I want to get as deep into its words and artistry and story as I possibly can, and this means giving my own performance of it in translation.  This desire is not to satisfy any glaring need in the literary world, for there are many perfectly good translations, although none can, given the nature and limitations of language, completely capture all of Vergil, and that is one of the reasons why I think I have decided to abandon the project.  Every translation into any language of a work like this can only result in one seeing through a glass darkly, and in the particular case of the Aeneid, many of the translations are deeply tinted windows indeed.  The best one can hope for is to produce a lens with the faintest color possible through which to glimpse the original, but try as one may, there will always be that hint of hue to lend a perspective not present in the model.

There is another reason why I suspect I shall never complete a written translation, and it takes us back to the film Mr. Holland's Opus.  I have, in fact, translated the Aeneid countless times as a work of performance art in my high school advanced Latin classes.  There, my students and I have explored shades and nuances and subtleties.  We have played with synonyms in an attempt to capture the right essence of a word.  We have compared and contrasted bits of plot with storylines in other works and have explored artistic expressions in Vergil's poetry alongside not only other works of literature but other genres of art, including music, film, and painting.  Every year I read it with students, I read it anew and discover some wonderful gem that had escaped notice.  Seen this way, my translation of the Aeneid is not entirely my own, but is a crowdsourced work of living art, not to be read in the paper-and-board books that line a shelf, but to be expressed in the lives of Vergil's audience, those auditores who still hear his stately measures echoing across the millennia.

Post Scriptum

After writing this post more than a month ago, I delayed publishing it until I had finished another project that it had inspired.  I could find nowhere on the Internet a complete listing of all the English translations of the Aeneid, much less direct links to them, and so I decided to fill that need.  As nearly as I can tell, there have been ninety-seven translations into English of Vergil's poem from 1513 to 2021.  I created the website Aeneid Translator to list every English translation in chronological order.  Where online or print texts are available, I have provided links.  Please be sure to check out the About page on the site where I talk about a former teacher of mine who was in no small measure the muse for this project.

Finally, I have two requests.  PLEASE contact me if you know of other translations that I have missed, online or print editions that I am unaware of, corrections to any dates that are wrong, or if you have a print translation that I do not own (see the color-coded legend on the website).  I may be interested in purchasing it from you.  I would also ask that you share the website with teachers, scholars, students, and friends who have any interest.  I want this to be a helpful resource.  It is not fancy, but I hope it will fill a need.

Sharing a Classroom

My classroom is small, measuring about 23' x 13'.  For this reason, most of my Latin classes meet in other classrooms.  As I have written elsewhere, and borrowing Hamlet's expression, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space, and because this is true, I do not mind at all sharing my small classroom with many, many other teachers.  Both in this classroom, which is really more of an office, and in any place where I teach, I do not teach alone but am engaged in a most collaborative enterprise, for I have the pleasure of working alongside some of the greatest teachers the world has ever known.

There are Socrates and Plato and Alexander Pope, to say nothing of Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and Vergil.  The history teachers have their say thanks to Livy and Tacitus, and of course Homer holds a mighty sway.

Texts and commentaries

Oxford and Loeb texts

Penguin translations

Sometimes they speak their native Greek or Latin, and sometimes they speak in English, but always they are there, guiding the conversations I have with my students.  Even when their voices cannot be heard directly, they are teaching nonetheless, for they are like the waters described by William Butler Yeats in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Although the majority of my fellow teachers speak their wisdom from across the centuries, there are more modern educators as well, speaking to matters of linguistics and philosophy and the natural sciences.

A few of my colleagues who teach philosophy and science

Surely, you say, these do not all make their way into the daily curriculum of a high school Latin class.  Surely it would not be appropriate for them to do so.  Isn't a secondary language class about nouns and verbs and learning the basics?  No, they do not all make their way into our daily lessons, at least not explicitly so, but I disagree with the notion that any of these teachers should not be allowed through the door.  In 1970, G. P. Goold, who over his illustrious career served as the chair of Classics departments at Harvard, University College London, and Yale, as well as serving as the chief editor of the Loeb Classical Library for twenty-five years, wrote a most unfortunate statement with which I took issue in an article I wrote a few years ago about a textual difficulty in Vergil's Aeneid.  Goold wrote, "An elementary teacher, to reach in due season the end of his curriculum, must every hour turn a Nelson eye to serious problems and refrain from pursuing truth beyond the charted boundaries of the textbook."  I wrote in response, "I would argue that the true magister can never be so bound, but must, along with the students, pursue the truth, no matter how anfractuous the path."

And if truth, rather than the important but necessarily lesser goals of skills proficiency and career readiness, is the foundation and raison d'etre of education, then surely there must be another teacher in every classroom, even the one who claimed to be truth itself, Jesus Christ.

The 3-D printed bust of Christ, courtesy of my son

You see, all of these great teachers have taught me.  I am the product of their wisdom, eloquence, and art, and in that way alone, they are teaching my students as surely as I am.  Because I have spent considerable time with many of them, their words and ideas are also at the ready when I attempt to do what all teachers do, make connections.  Education is essentially helping someone see that this is that.  In its simplest expression it may be an equation, for example one connecting the ideas of 2 + 2 and 4.  In more complex forms it can be seen in metaphors, allusions, and parables.  Indeed the metaphoric nature of all language points to the this-is-that nature of communication, of which formal education is but one particular instance.  For this reason, the assassination of President Kennedy can make its way into a reading of Caesar in Gaul.  The dual nature of light as wave and particle will enter into a discussion about the opening of Vergil's Aeneid.  Even Disney's The Lion King will help to illustrate the aspects of Catiline's conspiracy and the fertile ground for demagoguery among the poor and disenfranchised.

Just as these secular teachers weave their way seamlessly and effortlessly through our exploration of Latin, so does the greatest teacher of them all, but for a different reason and in different ways.  I am blessed now, somewhere past the midpoint of my career, to teach in a school where Christ is acknowledged as Lord.  We are, therefore, free to offer a complete approach to learning, one that does not exclude faith as a way of knowing.  My students and I can easily make references to Scripture just as we do to writings by Plato or Homer.  Yet, and far more significantly, Christ is present in our classes in a way the others cannot be, for He is still alive.  His Holy Spirit dwells within us, leading us, according to John 16:13, into all truth, which, as stated above, is the reason a school exists.  Although it is my name on the door, my small classroom is actually crowded with the greatest of all teachers, and I am more than grateful to share with them the delightful, exciting, and provocative calling of teaching.

The End of Education

 

Terminus, Roman god of boundaries

Terminus is the Latin word for boundaries as well as of the Roman god of them.  A terminus stone marked the end of one person's property and the beginning of another, and a related idea is that of imperium, which is the authority of someone over a particular sphere.  Violations of imperium were quite serious, especially in the realm of the Roman gods, where one deity frequently usurped the authority of another.  In Book 1 of Vergil's Aeneid, for example, Juno, the queen of the gods, wants to persuade the god of the winds, Aeolus, to do her bidding.  She begins by acknowledging that he has the power, given him by Jupiter, to stir up storms and then promises him a proper marriage to a beautiful nymph, something she is entitled to do as the goddess of marriage.  A few lines later, however, Neptune, the god of the sea, becomes enraged when his waters have been churned to a tumult.  Aeolus may indeed have authority over wind, but he does not, as the angered sea deity makes quite clear, possess it over the ocean.

On September 8, 2021, a senseless act of violence took place at the high school where I spent twenty-three years of my career.  North Central High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, is a large, public high school of nearly 3,800 students, all of whom were sent home early yesterday because one student stabbed another in a fight.  You can see news coverage of what happened here.

Let us return to the idea of boundaries.  In 1970, The Five Man Electrical Band released a B-side song that the following year became an A-side hit, "Signs."

It reflected the growing spirit of freedom in that era, one that pushed back against boundaries that restricted people from living to their full potential.  In a country built on the idea of vast freedom and freedoms, this was a good thing.  Yet with most good things, the eradication of all boundaries is a step too far.  We need certain boundaries in society.  They provide definition and clarity.  There was a time when we dressed and behaved a certain way at church and then differently when we returned home Sunday afternoon.  We knew that certain types of talk were appropriate in the business place and others at the football game.  There was a common understanding, reinforced by parents and educators alike, of what was acceptable at school and what was not, and although fighting among children and teenagers has never been approved by adults, there was at least the sense among young people that should it occur, it must not take place in a school, for there would be swift and serious consequences.  As Ecclesiastes 3:1 puts it, "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven."  It is why Jesus cast the moneychangers out of the temple, a reference I made in another post discussing the difference between the sacred and the profane and what difference that makes in education.

We may never know what led these young men to think that the appropriate next activity in their lives would be to fight inside North Central High School.  We may never know why one of them did not see it as inappropriate to stab his classmate in the halls of his school.  We must, however, work to reinforce with our children proper boundaries in their lives.  School is a place where people learn and grow.  It is place to try, to fail, and to try again.  It is a place to create and produce something new from what has been learned, and because this is true, there are certain behaviors and language that are appropriate within its walls.  Stabbing someone is not among them.

Making a Teacher Cry

Any number of things can make me cry while teaching, although I try to hide it the best I can.  More often than not, it is the depth of insight from one of my students that so unsettles me.  It is rather like snapping one's head to look at brilliant work of art or to hear a bit of sublime music while walking through the humdrum of the day, lost in a sea of less important details.  This time it happened during the last period of the day.

It was my A.P. Latin class, and before you make assumptions about my students or our school, you should know that ours is a large, midwestern, public high school with an enrollment between three and four thousand students.  This particular class is evenly split between boys and girls and is ethnically diverse.  As you read the rest of this story, I don't want you to assume it is set in an ivory tower.

Class started with us talking about accents, what connotations are associated with them and whether those same connotations exist for all people.  Do the flowing vowel sounds of Italian or the sharp consonants of German produce the same effects in you as they do in me?  Do they conjure the same feelings in other non-Italian- or non-German-speaking people as they do in many English speakers?

We are still in all-virtual instruction, and one of the benefits of Zoom is the private chat function.  Not a day passes when at least one student in nearly every class messages me privately a question or comment that I can then address with the whole class without revealing that student's name.  It is a help like no other for quiet students and those who like to process more deeply before they speak.

In this particular A.P. Latin class during the last period of the day, one of my students texted the following in response to our discussion about accents.  "The best way to tell the beauty of an accent is if it enthralls you, even if you don't understand a word."  This time I did a horrible job of hiding my tears.  When I shared the comment aloud, others in class commented that we had a true wordsmith or even a Shakespeare among us.  

Just as I had no time to ponder the depth of that comment or the beauty of its expression in the moment, I will leave you no time to do so, but will move on to what happened next.  As you read, let these powerful moments build up and wash over you.  Quick warning, however.  This next part gets a bit deep, but hang in there.

From there, we dove into our text, starting at Aeneid I.561.  As we read the line "Tum breviter Dido vultum demissa profatur," I had to stop to share with them something that had occurred earlier in the day during Latin III.  That class had been reading Sallust's Bellum Catilinae and were at the part where Catiline, the infamous conspirator of the late first century B.C., prepared to address the senate demisso voltu.  Even people without Latin can pick out the two similar phrases, vultum demissa in Vergil and demisso voltu in Sallust.  I pointed that both expressions contain the same words and mean the same thing, "with a downcast expression," but that they used different grammatical structures.  Vergil opted for a purely adjectival function of the participle demissa and an accusative form of vultum expressing respect.  She was literally downcast with respect to her face.  Sallust, on the other hand, had put both words in the ablative case, using an incredibly common construction known as the ablative absolute.

One of my students asked what, if anything, was being conveyed by Vergil's grammatical choice, and I pointed out that it was in clear imitation of Greek, for Greek likes to use the accusative of respect.  My student pressed on to ask why he would do that, and this led us to a brief discussion of the King James translation of the Bible.  One of the notable features of that translation, itself drawing heavily on previous English versions, was its casting into English certain Hebraisms.  For example, where English might more readily say, "God's son," the King James translators used "son of God," for the pattern "X of Y" is common in Hebrew.  In a similar way, I explained, Vergil clearly imitated Homer without slavishly aping him, and this connected his new epic with the Homeric works from a millennium prior.

Still without time to pause, I had to end that session with my Latin IV students and switch over to a breakout room in Zoom where my Latin V students deciding what they wanted to study next.  Latin V at our school provides a rare opportunity for students to explore topics of interest, and as we were starting a new quarter, it was time to see where they wanted to go.  One student began by saying she had been reading recently about rhetorical and logical fallacies.  I nearly stumbled going to the board to write her ideas and asked if she were reading such things for a class.  She said she was not, but had been inspired by other classes to look into the topics.  She thought she might want to pursue something with logic, rhetoric, or philosophy in her next Latin V project.  Another said she wanted to revisit some medieval studies we had pursued in Latin III, and another talked of pursuing medical topics, including mental health issues and quality of life for women in ancient Rome.

Now you can pause to consider what you have just read.  These are utterly extraordinary, ordinary students.  They are perfectly ordinary in that they, like the rest of their peers, follow fashion trends and enjoy popular entertainment.  They care about their friends and about what people think of them.  They are simultaneously excited and apprehensive about college, and they love to goof around.  Yet they are extraordinary in the depth of their curiosity and willingness to pursue it.  Because they are ordinary, however, I would argue that what makes them extraordinary could well be experienced by many more their age.  Depth, breadth, curiosity, eloquence...these are not the things of the rare few, but are the gems common to the human treasury, and when my students hold them up to the light, the sparkle quite often brings a tear to my eyes.

Reading, Warfare, Students, and Love

This post is for me, although I hope others will read it as well.  It is for me because I want to chronicle one of the most wonderful events in my nearly three-decade career and it is for me because it will be filled with the names and personal stories I look forward to re-reading and remembering long after I have left my classroom for the final time.  If you do choose to read this, or even to skim over it, I think you will be amazed and inspired by what students can do and what education can look like when what matters most still matters.

In the spring of 1987, my Latin teacher Marcene (Holverson) Farley made me aware of scholarship opportunities from the Indiana Junior Classical League.  One of the applications required an essay based on a favorite Latin quotation, so I picked one by an author I had studied as a junior the previous year under Alice (Ranck) Hettle.  "Ceteros pudeat si qui ita se litteris abdiderunt ut nihil ex eis possint neque ad communem adferre fructum neque in aspectum lucemque proferre."  (Pro Archia, 12) "Let others be ashamed if they have so hidden themselves in literature that they can offer nothing from it for the common good or can bring forth nothing into the light to be seen." 

That line had stayed with me and came to mind again more than twenty years later when, as I was driving to school one morning in 2009, I had an idea.  I had read once about a group of college students reading Homer's Iliad aloud in Greek and getting pledges as a fundraiser.  Cicero's quotation and that article came rushing through my mind like two pieces of uranium-235 at Los Alamos, and the result was a powerful new idea.  What if high school students read aloud one of the Greco-Roman epic poems to raise money in an effort to fight poverty?

Details quickly came together, and a student named Brent Eickhoff introduced me to Shirley Mullin, owner of Kids Ink Bookstore at 5619 North Illinois Street in Indianapolis. She agreed to host our event and dedicated space in her front window where the students could sit to read.  Zoe (Smith) Crafton, another student, designed a logo for us that we used on t-shirts for the readers and on a banner to advertise what we called Reading The War On Poverty, or RTWOP.

That first year saw Latin students from North Central High School reading aloud the entirety of Homer's Iliad in English translation.  With the money they raised and a donation from the bookstore from that day's sales, we were able to give more than $1000 to Shepherd Community Center, whose mission is to help break the cycle of poverty in Indianapolis.  The event was so successful that we wanted to do it again, and Shirley and her staff at Kids Ink were pleased to help.

The following year our Latin students read Homer's Odyssey, the year after that Vergil's Aeneid, and the fourth year started the cycle over with the Iliad.  Each year saw them raise more than $1000 for Shepherd, and RTWOP quickly became a flagship event in our Latin program.

In April of 2017, I was listening to students read the Aeneid in our ninth RTWOP and began thinking of what we could do to celebrate our tenth anniversary in 2018.  People had often asked if we would read one of the epics in its original language, so we decided to break our repeating three-year cycle to read the Aeneid again, but in Latin.  More ideas developed, and we decided that RTWOP 10 would feature

• students reading in Latin
• a microphone and speaker to project the reading outside the store
• an invitation for alumni to participate with current students
• a commemorative edition of the Aeneid to give each reader
• the goal of raising $10,000

That last feature was by far the most ambitious, so we started a GoFundMe campaign to help.  Within minutes of launching it, we started receiving donations, and as the 2017-2018 school year progressed, we dared to hope we might actually reach our goal.

The next most ambitious part of RTWOP 10 was producing a commemorative edition of the Aeneid.  There are many editions available, but I wanted something special, something personal for the readers, and the only way to get that was to produce it myself.  I used a version that was in the public domain and formatted the text throughout the summer and fall of 2017 and the winter of 2018.  For the front cover I used a t-shirt design created by one of my students, Alexandria Ruschman, and included Zoe Crafton's original logo on the back along with our logo for North Central Latin, which had been designed years ago by my sister-in-law, Melanee (Stillions) Habig.  My son, Austin, helped with the cover design, and I added a preface that concluded, "I could say regarding my pride in all my students what Jupiter said in Aeneid I.278 of the achievements that would come from the Romans, 'His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono.'  I set neither limit nor time to it."

 

Far less daunting was assembling the readers.  RTWOP has become a much-anticipated event in our classes, and the reading times always fill up quickly.  I had established an alumni group on Facebook and through it was able to invite former students.  Twelve alumni eagerly signed up, and the remaining spots were filled with first- through fifth-year students.  A small army of fifty-nine readers would read in fifteen minute shifts for four hours on a Friday evening and eleven more on Saturday.  From the money they would raise, along with the GoFundMe contributions and a donation from Kids Ink, we hoped to reach our $10K goal.

One of my stock lines in class is, "But wait!  There's more!" and indeed there was.  Shirley at Kids Ink reached out to her business neighbors up and down Illinois Street, and many of them decided to help as well.   Secret Ingredient, The Flying Cupcake, Byrne's Pizza, Be The Boutique, Petite G Jewelers, Kincaid's Meat Market, and Illinois Street Food Emporium all joined Kids Ink in supporting RTWOP in a variety of ways.

And then there was the social media campaign.  For a full year there were Facebook and Instagram posts and tweets promoting what we were doing, and there were two, true highlights, but to understand why they were so special, you need to know something about me.  In the words of Joan Jett, "I love rock 'n' roll!"  In fact, I publish a blog called The Roman Rocker.  Classic rock, hard rock, and metal are what I love, so I was beyond thrilled when Michael Sweet, the lead singer of Stryper, tweeted about the project to nearly 76k followers and David Coverdale of Whitesnake, who has 218k followers, liked one of our tweets.

When the weekend finally arrived for RTWOP 10, the students and I were quite excited.  The weather was beautiful, and blue sky, white clouds, and temperatures in the 70s guaranteed a lot of people would be out in the delightful neighborhood of Illinois Street.  From 4:00-8:00 p.m. on Friday, April 27, and from 9:00 a.m.-8:00 p.m. on Saturday, April 28, current Latin students and alumni read the Aeneid aloud in Latin.  That ancient language was heard along Illinois Street as it was broadcast through our speaker, and people took notice.  Many customers came in, eager to learn more about the event, and almost all gave a donation.  When all was said and done, these Latin students and alumni had helped raise more than $12K for Shepherd Community Center, garnering the attention of the Indianapolis ABC affiliate, RTV6 as well.

Pride, joy, overwhelming satisfaction in the achievement of students...these come nowhere to close to describing how I felt and continue to feel.  Can you even imagine what it was like to see students using their learning to benefit others this way?  You can gain some sense of it from the pictures and videos that follow, but before I include those, I want to say a word about the alumni and others who dropped by.  In addition to my twelve former students who read, including three who had read in the inaugural event ten years before, other alumni stopped in just to say hi and to support what was going on.  With all of them it was a thrill beyond words to hear stories about what they had studied after high school, where they were working, and developments in their families.  Two of my former students had married each other, and two others are dating.  One is currently a Classical Studies major at my alma mater Indiana University.  She hopes to be the first woman to translate the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid into English.  And one young man was excited to tell me he had achieved his dream of joining his father as a firefighter with the Indianapolis Fire Department.

Along with these were Indiana Senior Classical League advisor Tony Martin, co-chair of the Indiana Junior Classical League Lisanne Pierson, and Latin teachers Kelly Williams-Ihlendorf of Bishop Chatard High School, Matt Hilton of Chatard, and Melissa Perkins of The Master's Study.  Their presence during the event along with messages of support from Jeremy Walker, IJCL co-chair, and many others meant all the world.

If you have read this far, you know two things.  You know both what amazing things students can do and are doing to use their education for the betterment of others and how incredibly proud I am of all of them.  Now treat yourself to some pictures and video from this amazing event, including the presentation of what we raised to the folks at Shepherd Community Center.

The Alumni

Brooke was of the readers in the first RTWOP and again in RTWOP 10.

She is in her fourth year of veterinary school at Purdue University. 

Brenda (left) studied film making and is making a documentary of RTWOP 10.

Sara (right) is an instructional aide at one of our elementary schools. 

 

Serenity (left) is currently studying at Butler University.

 Rachel is graduating from IUPUI with a degree in medical humanities. 

Eliot (left) is studying aquatic biology at Ball State University.

Hannah (right) is majoring in Classical Studies at Indiana University and hopes to be the first woman to translate all three Greek and Latin epics.

 

Ian (left) stopped by to support his former Latin Club, and we had fun reminiscing about a video he had made when he was a senior.

Greg (right) was one of early Latin students at North Central. His inquisitive mind had him asking me many questions ranging from German to the ancient city of Tyre! 

 

Jay and Lauren (Hill) left Latin, got married, and are now an engineer and science teacher.

Morgan (right) studied biology and came by to support her alma mater.

 

Ginny and Alex (left) are studying computers, and Ted (right) just achieved his dream of becoming a firefighter with the Indianapolis Fire Department.

 

Shanice wants to be an elementary teacher, and Brandon studied music education at Howard University.  They were among the original readers ten years ago, and Brandon even recreated the picture that has become the symbol of Reading The War On Poverty for a decade.

 

Current Students

 

Special note:  Nathan used to visit this bookstore when he was a boy and put his hand print on the wall when he was 5.

 

  

 

  

 

Extras

Matt Hilton and Tony Martin (left) are the Latin teacher at Bishop Chatard High School and the Indiana Senior Classical League Advisor.

Shirley Mullin (right) and her employees have graciously hosted us for ten years!

 

The plaque (left) we gave Kids Ink to thank them for their service.

My wife standing between Lisanne Pierson, Indiana Junior Classical Co-Chair, and me (right).  Melissa is a Latin teacher at The Master's Study.

    

 Videos

  What does Latin sound like?  Listen as these students read Vergil's Aeneid in the original language.

And what did it look like to promote this project in the age of social media?  Check out our promotional videos, including one that sees me getting pied in the face by my students!

The Presentation

When all was said and done, North Central Latin students had helped raise $12,455.34 to help fight poverty in their city, which was even more than our giant check indicated thanks to additional donations.  Some of our club officers as well as Indiana Junior Classical League state officers who attend North Central presented the check to Steve DeBuhr and the good people at Shepherd Community Center on the last day of school, May 24, 2018.