One of the great pleasures of tutoring is that I have the time to talk about words. This probably sounds like a rather strange thing to say for someone who spent 21 years in the classroom teaching Latin. Surely talking about words is what a Latin lesson is for? But the reality is that the time constraints and practicalities of classroom teaching make in-depth exploration genuinely difficult.
One of the luxuries of one-to-one teaching is that when a word presents an opportunity for exploration, I don’t have to worry about whether I am holding up the rest of the class. In the mainstream classroom there are 20 or 30 other students waiting for the lesson to move on, a syllabus to cover and a task that needs to be completed before the bell goes. Every teacher knows that a word such as imperium is worth talking about, but explaining the development of the word from the power or authority to command, through the power exercised by a military commander, to its later association with the Roman Empire would take time. So the student writes down “command” (or, worse still, “empire”, which it hardly ever means in practice) and the class moves on. Unfortunately, this can have a genuinely negative impact on their performance when translating.
The same thing happens with imperator. Most students are convinced that it means “emperor” and are vaguely surprised at some point to discover that it also means “general” and it can be quite hard work to convince them to default to this translation. The explanation is key, should you have time to give it. An imperator was fundamentally somebody who possessed imperium: a successful military commander. Only later did imperator come to mean what we would call an “emperor”, once Caesar crossed that Rubicon and everything was up for grabs. As I have discussed previously, the senate learned the hard way that the boys who ran the army were the ones who were actually in charge all along.
There are plenty of Latin words for which there isn’t really a satisfactory one-word English translation at all. Consul is an obvious example. Unsurprisingly, most students can tell me that they have been told it simply means “consul”, but only a handful of them can tell me what a “consul”actually was. The same applies to forum, which I have been told variously means “a shop”, “a room in the house” and “a platform”. Teachers beware: you wouldn’t believe the misconceptions that can take hold if such knowledge is assumed. Students studying the WJEC specification are also expected to know the word legatus, and the board list that it means “commander” which is actually pretty inadequate. Depending on the context, a legatus might be an envoy or representative or indeed a senior military officer; neither “legate” (a word which I wouldn’t expect any 16-year-old to know) nor any other single English equivalent really does the job.
Nuntius and the verb nuntio is another favourite of mine to explore. Students often encounter the word for “messenger” and the verb “to announce” or “report” and wonder why on earth somebody is constantly arriving from somewhere else to announce something. Why can’t the characters simply send a Snapchat message like normal people? Joking apart, while all students obviously understand that the Romans did not have the internet, the significance of this and indeed their lack of other modern means of communication genuinely does need to be unpicked for them so that they can appreciate how central the role of messengers was in the ancient world: that information travelled at the speed of the person carrying it, and that a message could change the course of a war, announce the arrival of an invading force or bring news of a leader’s death; the person carrying that message may have travelled a quite some distance at considerable risk to deliver it. Messengers were an essential factor in an ever-expanding empire.
There are other words on the list that reveal something about Roman society and are best explored when time allows. Libertus is usually translated as “freedman”, but I find that some students don’t necessarily know what a freedman actually was. The word libero, “to free”, can look like just another vocabulary item until you start thinking about what it meant to be freed from slavery in Roman society and thus reflect upon why this was a frequently-used word for them, while for us it might seem a somewhat obscure choice for the GCSE list. Such vocabulary was connected to social status, patronage and the complicated relationship between a former enslaver and the person he has freed.
While we’re on the subject, it is fascinating to me that within the last five years or so, more and more students have clearly been drilled to translate servus as “enslaved person” and ancilla as “enslaved woman”, whereas I was taught to translate them as “slave” and “slave-girl” respectively. I understand the reasoning that one should not be defining such people by the enslaved status that was imposed upon them, and I am certainly not suggesting that the realities of Roman slavery should be softened by our choice of vocabulary. Quite the opposite. Long before such things were fashionable, whenever a student expressed wonder at the feats of engineering achieved by the Romans, I made it my business to remind them upon whose broken backs those remarkable achievements were built and just how many enslaved humans died in the process. But there is something interesting about the idea that even our attempts to translate an ancient language accurately can reveal the cultural preoccupations of our own time.
Another interesting thing to explore with students is how two Latin words which we would translate in exactly the same way actually mean something rather different. Hostis and inimicus are a good example. Both can be translated as “enemy”, but hostis generally refers to an enemy in the context of war, whereas inimicus is a personal enemy. Once you point out that inimicus is simply in- plus amicus, the distinction becomes much easier to remember. An amicus is a friend; an inimicus is literally somebody who is the antonym of a personal friend: in such a case, the vocabulary is suddenly doing some of the teaching for you. I like doing the same thing with cogito and puto. Both words translate as “think”, but they don’t describe quite the same activity. Cogito meant thinking something over, considering or reflecting upon it, whereas puto was more about forming an opinion. The English derivatives are not especially helpful to most students at first, as “cogitate” is not exactly a word that crops up in everyday conversation and “putative” is unlikely to be in the vernacular of the average 16-year-old. Nevertheless, I hope that in later life they will encounter such words and reflect upon why something that is putative is substantially different from something that has been cogitated upon.
Then there are the words which appear to have a bewildering number of meanings. Peto is one of my favourites because the vocabulary list can make it look as though the Romans had decided to give one small verb an unreasonable amount of work to do. “Make for, beg for, seek, attack” is quite a lot to remember. It becomes considerably less mysterious when you start with the underlying idea of directing yourself towards something. You can make for somewhere, seek something, make a request for something and even direct an attack towards somebody. The English word “petition” derives from it, and people’s motives for bringing a petition to the government can give students another way into the variety of meanings. Once the connections have been explained, the apparent collection of unrelated definitions begins to look rather less arbitrary.
Another word which benefits from being unpicked is clarus. Students need to be aware that is usually means “famous” and then wonder why the same word can also mean “clear” or “bright” and is of course the source of our word “clarity”. Again, the history of the meaning helps. Something that is clear or bright is conspicuous and can be easily seen. Somebody who is conspicuous can become very visible or well known, like a celebrity, and from there “famous” is not such a great leap. The word hasn’t randomly acquired three meanings which have to be memorised separately, the meanings have grown out of one another.
This is one of the things I particularly enjoy about teaching vocabulary in a one-to-one lesson. I can see when a student has encountered a word which is going to cause them trouble and we can stop and investigate it rather than simply adding another item to a list to be learned. Sometimes it takes thirty seconds, sometimes it leads to a five-minute diversion into Roman politics, social history or the English language. I don’t mind the diversion because it isn’t really a diversion at all: the more connections a student can make around a word, the more securely that word tends to lodge in their memory.
Occasionally, vocabulary can even help with grammar. Deponent verbs are notoriously strange. Students are asked to learn that they look passive but have active meanings, and for a while this can seem like yet another arbitrary feature of Latin which exists for no reason other than to make their lives difficult. But videor provides a rather nice way into the idea. The verb can be translated as the passive form of video, thus “I am seen”. From there it is not too difficult to understand how the active deponent version of the word means “I seem” or “I appear”: if I am seen in a particular way, I appear to be that way, so the deponent meaning arose out of the passive form. This gives the student something to hold on to. Instead of being told simply that videor means “I seem”, they can see why the Latin form might have developed that way. I like to suggest to them that it is highly likely that all deponent verbs were originally the passive form of an active verb that is now lost to us.
Another route into the grammar worth exploring is the concept of adjectives which are really perfect passive participles. Words such as “frightened” and “terrified” are used so commonly that they feel like straightforward adjectives in English. They can provide a useful reminder to a Latin student that a perfect passive participle is fundamentally adjectival. Once students begin to notice this, the grammar becomes much less abstract. They are no longer simply memorising a definition of a participle; they are seeing the same idea operating in words they already understand.
This is the joy of tutoring and the time it affords. A vocabulary list necessarily strips words down to their most useful English equivalents because students have to learn them, but the English gloss is only the beginning. Words have histories, associations and relationships with other words, and they exist within a particular culture. Sometimes a word can tell you something about Roman society; sometimes it can explain an English word you already know; occasionally it can even illuminate a piece of grammar that otherwise seems completely bizarre. This can make the difference between vocabulary being merely to memorise and something that not only makes sense, but enriches and underpins a learner’s grasp of the subject.
