Return of the Dark Ages

Harry Mount laments the passing of an age when children had to recite Greek verbs before breakfast

Ivyhatever you might think of The Passion of The Christ, at least Mel Gibson tried with the Latin. There aren't many films with a credit for 'Theological Consulting and Aramaic/Latin Translation', and Dr William J. Fulco, the Jesuit priest brought in to sort out the locatives and the subjunctives, gets an alpha beta, if not quite an alpha, for his homework.

The Latin is pretty straightforward, though. 'Sanctus es!, is Mrs Pilate's view of Jesus. 'Facta non verba,' is the Roman soldier's order to Christ, when he starts talking too much. `Mortutts est,' says Longinus, the soldier who sticks a spear in Jesus's side to check whether he's alive. There's only one slip — noticed by the editor of this magazine. If you are addressing a man from Judaea, you should use the vocative Judaee', not Judaeus'; vide Julian the Apostate's Vicisti, Gall/ace.

Still, even Father Fulco's simple Latin will be beyond most schoolboys now. Latin in Britain is not quite yet a dead language. But it is dying.

For all the supposed life that Harry Potter breathed back into the language, a negligible number of children are now actually learning it in any rigorous way. Yes, they might be able to translate the Hogwart's motto — 'Draco dormiens numquam titillandus' Meyer tickle a sleeping dragon'). But they won't be able to write a Latin poem in praise of Maggie Smith's acting skills or J.K. Rowling's philanthropy, or recite screeds of Virgil as any halfwit grammar school boy or public school boy could half a century ago.

The number of grammar schools has slumped in that time; and the number of children studying Latin in public schools and the remaining grammar schools has collapsed. In 1960, 60,000 children did Latin 0 level, Now 10,000 do the much more basic replacement, GCSE. When it comes to A levels, it's time to drag in the life-support machine: only 5,000 children a year take a classical A level of any sort, less than 0.8 per cent of all A levels taken.

And, if the future looks less than rosy for Latin, it's wine-dark for Greek. Fewer than a thousand children a year do GCSE Greek, squeezed out by its declining stablemate, Latin. Of the three classical A levels (Latin, Greek and classical civilisation), it's easiest to score high marks for a correct translation in Latin.

The amount these few Latinists are expected to know about the mechanics of the language has withered away. Bye-bye to long summer afternoons spent in sweaty terror of chalk-stained bachelors slamming desk-lids down on your fingertips if you don't know the gerund of yob or the Latin for a funeral feast (silicernium), Hello, Cambridge Latin Course — the evil Latin-for-idiots school textbooks which say that learning things like cases, genders and vocabulary puts people off; much better to give you the translations at the bottom of the page and let you work out how the words fit together by feel. The course just plain doesn't work: it's like dumping a carburettor, a spark plug and a windscreen-washer-fluid holder in front of you, and expecting you to build an engine Out of them.

The standard expected at GCSE has plummeted. When I did my 0 levels in 1986, we were asked to translate a 15-line chunk of a speech by Cicero to the Senate, In Catilinam, attacking his enemy who conspired against Rome in 63 Bc. And we'd never seen the passage before — that's why the exercise was called an 'Unseen'. Ciceronian prose is nice pellucid stuff, full of lovely rhetorical tricks. In one passage we had to translate, Cicero demonstrated the ancient art of the tricolon: arranging words or phrases in triplets, often of ascending lengths, for dramatic effect. Your native land, which is the mother of us all, hates you and dreads you and has long since decided that you have been planning nothing but her destruction. Will you not respect her authority, bow to her judgment, or fear her power?'

And now what does the average 16-yearold have to do? Yes, he's given a chunk of Cicero, but he doesn't have to translate it word for word. All he does is answer a few spoon-fed questions on a book he's already prepared. Last year's GCSE passage concentrated on Cicero's speech about a conman called Pythius. Pythius fooled a Roman gentleman, Canius, into buying a country estate with supposed excellent fish ing rights by paying some fishermen to fish in front of the grounds on the day Canius inspected the property. The questions are fantastically simple: 'Who was Canius?'; 'What kind of work did Pythius do?' The only question that involves any translation says, 'Pick out two Latin words which describe Canius and translate them.' Two words! Forget learning about tricolons, with three clauses building up to a crescendo. Three words is too much nowadays.

And it's no better at university.

The Vice-Chancellor of Oxford and the proctors are still rigorous about the conduct of examinations: 'Rule (vi): Invigilators are strongly encouraged not to allow more than one person of each sex to go to the toilet at any time . . . Rule (xiv): Except for the drawing of diagrams, no candidate shall use pencil for the writing of an examination unless prior permission has been obtained from the proctors.'

But when it comes to how much Greek or Latin you need, the Vice-Chancellor and his proctors are pussy-cats. When I did my Greek A level to get into Oxford in 1988, we translated chunks of Herodotus out of 1950s 0 level papers to practise. The slide downhill has become an avalanche. Now, to get into Oxford to read the alternative Classics degree, Mods B, you don't need any Greek at all. After two years of the degree, where all classics undergraduates used to have to be able to translate all 24 books of the Iliad, you can now get away with just books one, nine, 22 and 24. If you want to get in to do a related classical subject, like Classical Archaeology and Ancient History, not only do you not need Greek; don't bother with Latin either.

It's going to get worse. Brilliant classi

cists don't become schoolmasters any more. All the men who taught me Latin and Greek at school, now in their forties and fifties, had been Oxbridge scholars. Of all my contemporaries who did Latin and Greek at school and Oxford, scholar or not, there isn't a single one teaching at a school. One tried for a while at Dulwich College, but the children no longer had the prep-school training that was standard 20 years ago. Exasperated, he left by a familiar route: first by train to Balliol; then by plane to Boston.

Cicero had the right words for this desperate situation in the opening line of his attack on Catiline. 'How long will you abuse our patience, Catiline?' he said, in one of the first recorded rhetorical questions. 'Oh, the times! Oh, the habits!'

Or, as every schoolboy doesn't know, '0 temporal 0 mores!'

Harry Mount's My Brief Career — the Trials of a Young Lawyer is published by Short Books (£9.99).

THE SPECTATOR CUP In order to do what little we can to turn the clock back, The Spectator hereby announces a monthly prize for composition in Latin or Greek. Readers are invited to submit versions of any excerpt of the magazine of roughly 300 words. The version may be in either language, prose or verse. We offer a bottle of champagne for the winning entry. At the end of this year the judges will reward the most distinguished composition with a cup.