Article: Latin: Or the Empire of a Sign. (Books: defensor linguae).

Francoise Waquet Latin: Or the Empire of a Sign. Verso, 346 pages, $30

At the Jesuit high school in Manhattan that I attended, my freshman year, 1985, was the first in which Latin was no longer the language required for the first two years. Father Headmaster wrote to explain that the school nevertheless still strongly encouraged its young charges to take Latin, in keeping with Jesuit tradition and as an introduction to Western culture. Most of the entering class followed his advice, and we immersed ourselves, unselfconsciously for middle-class adolescents, in the campaigns of Caesar and the conjugations of irregular verbs. Without knowing exactly why, we had a ...

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