Memories

Last Updated: August 7, 2005

Second Year Latin [Greg Warnusz]

Our second-year teacher of Latin, the Reverend Patrick Keely, C.M., assigned us homework every day, requiring us to prepare translations that we might be called on to deliver in class the next day. In any
given meeting of the class, only five or six of us would be called on, seemingly at random, to translate. So if you didn't prepare by doing the homework, there was a fair chance you would get by with it. Father Keely had no way of knowing, unless he chose you to translate aloud.

But woe betide you if you got caught unprepared. I remember Keely as dour, strict, and capable of withering sarcasm (like most the faculty). If you were unready to recite, you kept your head down, frantically scanned ahead in the text being translated aloud, and hoped not to be noticed.

I skipped the homework one night, and came to the next class in what I hoped was invisible mode. So I was unprepared to hear a classmate utter a translation that went something like: ** "Then the soldiers of Hannibal showed the middle finger to the soldiers of Caesar." **

** CLARIFICATION: For the Record: I went back through our second-year Latin book and found the page about some ancient giving someone the finger. Turns out it was not soldiers in Caesar's time. The expression is in a letter by Erasmus of Rotterdam, dated 1526 A.D. The whole letter can be found here: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/eras.ep.html#21.

I can't read it well any more, but with a little help from other Internet sites, I figured out it's about an explosion in a gunpowder factory in Basel. With the middle-finger reference, Erasmus is comparing the makers of gunpowder to an ancient mythological character Salmoneus, who angered Jove by making his own thunder. Erasmus describes Salmoneus as "able to show Jove himself the middle finger."

So the sentence "Then the soldiers of Hannibal showed the middle finger to the soldiers of Caesar." should actually go something like: "Salmoneus could show the middle finger to Jupiter himself."

I stifled a gasp. I had just assumed that that gesture, like the cuss-words we tried not to let adults hear us say, had been invented by the big brothers of the kids who had taught them to me. But here were
practically pre-historic people doing it! A footnote in our Latin book helpfully said this was "an ancient gesture of contempt." I had no idea.

But out of fear of Father Keely, I had to conceal my surprise. We all had to conceal our amusement. I slowly turned my head. Across the room, crouched in his desk behind a larger classmate, Tom Bokern was grinning at me. I was sure he was trying to make me laugh.

I averted my eyes. The moment passed. The wrath of Keely was not unleashed. But I did my Latin homework every night after that.

Greg Warnusz