'A love letter to the finest language ever created. ... Gardini explains lucidly, compellingly and passionately how and why Latin is so elegant, beautiful, expressive and succinct.' Susan Hill, Spectator
'Enthrals, illuminates, and convinces. Nobody could possibly describe Latin as a dead or useless language after reading it.' David Crystal
Virgil gave us the Aeneid, and Ovid the Metamorphoses; Lucretius analysed the material world and Caesar interrogated how we view reality through the lens of reason - but what does Latin offer us today?
Often seen as the bulky relic of school curricula long forgotten, Latin seems to have lost its punch in the popular conscious. Oxford academic Nicola Gardini, however, argues the case for its lasting importance, offering a personal and passionate defence of the beauty and future of the language. From these ancient writers, we can learn about such vital aspects of life as love, purpose, eloquence, beauty and loss. These lessons from the past can illuminate our present, and Gardini encourages us to dig to the roots of our own language to consider how Latin has influenced the ways in which we communicate, think and live today.
A formidable mix of history, memoir and criticism, this is a beautiful love letter to one language that ultimately celebrates the vital power of all literature.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Ode to a Useless Language
- 1. A Home
- 2. What Is Latin?
- 3. Which Latin?
- 4. A Divine Alphabet
- 5. Understanding Latin with Catullus
- 6. Cicero’s Star-Studded Sky
- 7. Ennius’s Ghost
- 8. Caesar, or the Mea sures of Reality
- 9. The Power of Clarity: Lucretius
- 10. The Meaning of Sex: Back to Catullus
- 11. Syntactic Goose Bumps, or Virgil’s Shivering Sentences
- 12. The Master of Diffraction, Tacitus, and Sallust’s Brevity
- 13. Ovid, or the End of Identity
- 14. Breathing and Creaking: Reflections on Livy
- 15. The Word Umbra: Virgil’s Eclogues
- 16. Seneca, or the Serenity of Saying It All
- 17. Deviances and Dental Care: Apuleius and Petronius
- 18. Brambles, Chasms, and Memories: Augustine’s Linguistic Reformation
- 19. The Duty of Self-Improvement: Juvenal and Satire
- 20. The Loneliness of Love: Propertius
- 21. More on Happiness: The Lesson of Horace
- 22. Conclusion as Exhortation: Study Latin!
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
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Yes, you can access Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Ancient Languages. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.