A Natural History of Latin [Hardcover]

I bought this book because I am very interested in the Classics and the Latin language. I have taken Latin for many years, and can read it pretty well, but have learned almost nothing of its origins or development, and little of its influence on modern languages.

Some chapters, such as the ones about Latin's beginnings, its metamorphosis into the Romance languages, and the way it has affected English, I found interesting. Unfortunately, these only comprised a small portion of the book. The rest told me stuff I already know, like the basics of the language and the Roman Empire's history and literature, or went on and on about medieval philosophers who don't seem very important to Latin.

Also, the text sometimes seemed badly translated, and didn't flow very well overall.

If you have little or no education in Latin and are looking for a comprehensive review of its mechanics and history, then this is the book for you. Otherwise, I would recommend you look elsewhere.

I read Latin and Greek as an undergraduate (mainly with a view to Indo-European linguistics) and have long sought a book I could recommend to friends and family who want to know something about classical languages. I thought A NATURAL HISTORY OF LATIN would be just the thing, but I found the book rather problematic.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF LATIN is a translation and adaptation by Merethe Damsgaard Sorensen and Nigel Vincent of Tore Janson's original "Latin; Kulturn, historien, spraaket" published in Stockholm in 2002. The book is written at a high school level, avoiding jargon and explaining matters as clearly and simply as possibly. Janson starts at the very beginning, with Latin as a single descent of the Indo-European proto-language, a small language confined to Rome overshadowed by its strong neighbour Etruscan. He introduces the major writers of Latin literature, and even quotes passages from the major poets, giving the original Latin and a translation.

Since Latin is a remarkably tenacious language, holding on long after the disappearance of Roman society, and Janson discusses the use of Latin by the Roman Catholic Church, philosophers, and natural scientists. While Janson talks of the rise of new languages after the fall of the Roman Empire that were descended from Latin yet no longer Latin, I was baffled by his omission of the Strasbourg Oaths, which many readers find an entertaining example of language change.

Though Janson avoids discussion of morphology (the changes the endings of Latin words can go through) in the main of the book, the end of the book contains a 35-page appendix on Latin grammar so that the curious reader can learn more. There is also a basic vocabulary of the most common and influential Latin words, and a collection of common phrases and expressions.

In spite of covering many of the basics of the use of Latin, I found the author injected his own personal biases into the text far too often. Some of my other reviews have complained about his comparison of Cato with Fascist party members, Epicurius with Karl Marx, his assertion that Julius Caesar commited genocide. Now, these are intriguing matters, but Janson makes the comparisons so flippantly that it just drags the level of the text down. Beyond these, there are other problematic passages. For example, after discussing Catullus' poems to the boy Juventius, Janson writes, "That a man might be in love with both women and men did not cause any great surprise in antiquity... It was not regarded as deviant behavior." Such a blanket statemetn is dishonest, for while the elites of Roman society condoned pederasty, grown men who took the passive role in homosexual acts were despised in the strongest sense. Just look at the character of the cinaedus in Petronius' "Satyricon", for example.

The author loves to get his digs in at Christianity as well, with a revisionist goal that goes against the long traditions of Oxford University Press' classicist publishing. Of Tertullian, whom classicists have long admired for his eloquent defence of his faith in front of Roman persecution, Janson writes, "[His books'] most striking characteristic is their spiteful attitude to everyone who thought differently from Tertullian himself." Later he writes, "It was not easy to know at the time who actually was a heretic. It depended on who was successful in having their view of original sin or the Trinity finally accepted as the true teaching of the Church." And of St Augustine, Janson writes, "His ideas are strange or even repugnant. This is especially true of the idea of original sin." The doctrine original sin hardly began with Augustine, nor is it a concept limited to Christianity among the world religions (Buddhism, for instance, has us stuck in cycles of samsara because of lusts and desires).

With his peculiar biases, Janson betrays the fine tradition of Oxford University Press' books on the classical world, and I find the book too enervating to recommend to others. Maybe I should look at Joseph Farrell's Latin Language and Latin Culture: From Ancient to Modern Times instead.

Having ordered this book as a Christmas present to myself, I was eager to see a new treatment of the evolution, growth, and spread of the Latin language. Instead, I received a book that should have been titled "Latin Literature, A PC Summary for Women and Children." This may offend some of you more sensitive types, but you should not be upset with me. My new title for this book is not a joke reflecting any personal bias, but on the contrary, it is an accurate description of the arrogance and soft-bigotry of the author/translators in charge of this waste of foliage. The authors make repeated comparisons of ancient literature to "TV soap operas" and at one point they even absurdly compare Plautus' Menaechmi and Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors to our own Dallas! You remember, 'who shot J.R.?' and all that. This, not my politically incorrect title, should be offensive to your 'sensibilities.' The authors constantly insult the intelligence of their intended audience, all the while attempting to stretch similes and metaphors beyond their means. They repeatedly compare Stoic philosophy to Nazism, Lucretius as a forerunner to Marx, old Roman values as repugnant, and also display a blatant disregard for the value of lost literature in general. Here are two small samples of this reprehensible approach:

1. - p.26 - We do know that there were quite a few writers besides Cato and Plautus, whom we have already mentioned, and in particular we have many works by another writer of comedies, Terence. But, as far as we know, the works that have been lost are not terribly many and they were probably not of any great value.

2. - p. 36 - For the most part he [Caesar] marched his army around and fought pitched battles, which makes the narrative rather monotonous, as millions of schoolchildren have discovered, since his account of the Gallic war has quite undeservedly taken up a great deal of time in the traditional Latin syllabus.

It is not necessarily the particulars of the argument but rather the atmosphere of constant complaining and pessimism which I found to be too much to take. If you're one of those clever nay-sayers who would more than likely happily point out that this is hypocritical of me, then by all means pick up a copy of this book, it's perfect for you. If the selections I chose do not seem to fit with my general point, I will post others in the future. Yes, I read the whole book. Yes, I know that my examples come only from part 1. Which reminds me, the last 122 pages is essentially an extremely poor appendix of Latin grammar and Roman sayings. It would have been more useful to append a juice box so that your kid could have a refreshing drink and have something left over to throw at you for buying this. For those of you who made the difficult decision to stay in school past the tenth grade there is a plethora of good alternatives about Roman culture, history, literature, and language any of which would be better than this one.