Latin Insanity

While dutifully studying for my Latin test tomorrow, I realized I needed to make a blog post. Lacking any better ideas, I decided to make it about some of the absurd things those Ancient Romans did that I'm struggling with 2000 years later.

The passages we're responsible for knowing for this test are all prose, Caesar and Cicero. Keep that in mind; none of these wacky sentences are even from poetry, where it's more okay to mess with things. Check out this sentence from Caesar's de Bello Gallico:

"Quod ubi Caesar animavertit, naves longas, quarum et species erat barbaris inusitatior et motus ad usum expeditior, paulum removeri ab onerariis navibus et remis incitari et ad latus apertum hostium constitui, atque inde fundis, sagittis, tormentis hostes propelli ac summoveri iussit."

Note that I said sentence, not sentences. That's all one big, subordinate clause-filled sentence. Even better, the main verb, iussit is the very last word in the sentence, while it's subject, Caesar is way at the beginning. A fairly literal translation would go like this:

"When Caesar noticed this, he ordered that the long ships, whose kind was rather unfamiliar to the barbarians and whose movement was rather convenient for use, be removed a little bit from the transport ships, that they be urged on with oars, and that they be positioned against the exposed flank of the enemies; and he ordered that the enemies then be driven back and forced back with slings, arrows, and artillery."

In Latin, that's not a run-on sentence, that's beautiful prose! Oy vey. That one verb, iussit, governs a whole sequence of subordinate clauses called indirect commands, but you don't know that the verb is actually iussit until you reach the end of the sentence. But wait, it gets better! Romans didn't use all those nice punctuation marks, nor did they use spaces or capital letters at all. They also used the letter V for both u and v. Putting all that together, here's what that lovely Caesar passage would have looked like back in the good ol' days:

QVODVBICAESARANIMAVERTITNAVESLONGASQVARVMETSPECIESERATBARBARISINUSITATIORETMOTVSADVSVMEXPEDITIORPAVLVMREMOVERIABONERARIISNAVIBVSETREMISINCITARIETADLATVSAPERTVMHOSTIVMCONSTITVIATQVEINDEFVNDISSAGITTISTORMENTISHOSTESPROPELLIACSUMMOVERIIVSSIT

I think this is an appropriate time to stop and say thank god for editors.

These passages also get weird when they talk about things that are hard for us to even understand after they've been translated into English. Caesar seems to be talking about unicorns at one point, and elks without joints that the natives hunt by basically knocking them down so they can't get up.

We've also got this fantastically hyperbolic passage from Cicero, railing against the conspirators (which seems to be all he ever does):

"O di immortales! ubinam gentium sumus? quam rem publicam habemus? In qua urbe vivemus? Hic, hic sunt in nostro numero, patres conscripti, in hoc orbis terrae sanctissimo gravissimoque consilio, qui de nostro omnium interitu, qui de huius urbis atque adeo de orbis terrarum exitio cogitent."

Translated, it goes something like this:

"O immortal gods! Where in the world are we? What republic do we have? What city do we live in? Here, here in our number, fellow senators, in this most sacred and most dignified council in all the world,  there are those who plan the ruin of all of us, those who plan the destruction of this city and even of the whole world!"

It sounds as though he's talking about a supervillan, but really it's just Catiline and his conspirators, who were trying to overthrow the Senate and assassinate Cicero; not exactly the destruction of the whole world, but hey, who's counting?

Anyway, enough rambling. Time to get back to actually studying for this test! morituri te salutamus...