reading classics

I've been reading some classics in Latin the last two weeks, even if it's only classic comics ...

I recently spotted two Asterix albums in the excellent Latin translation of Rubricastellanus (1934-2019) at a charity shop, and took that as a sign to reread the others I have, including one I quickly ordered, now adding up to seven albums (no point in using the numbers as the numbering of the Latin editions is all over the place):

• Falx aurea - I had since my school years, can't remember how I got it.
• Cleopatra -
• Laurea Caesaris - we bought these two for Latin-learning children.
• Papyrus Caesaris - I bought this one when it came out because I loved the original so much and given the topic (the history of Caesar's famous book De bello gallico) I felt I needed the Latin version.
• Gladiator
• Clipeus Arvernus - these two I discovered last month.
• Gallus - this I ordered this month, the only one I found online at a reasonable price.

Well, after reading all seven in a couple of months, I feel I know the translator's style well enough to read anything by him (18 volumes to go, and I also have a comic adaptation of Bellum helveticum for which he prepared the text). It's not Cicero, obviously, so much easier than the proper classics, as he aims for a colloquial tone realistically reflecting how people might have spoken in the street. Classical rhetoric only occurs in quotes from the classics and occasionally to make fun of speakers. Each album comes with a vocabulary prepared by the translator - in some I have each word is translated into five languages (German, English, Spanish, French, Italian), in others it's only German.

Given the obvious issues with the early albums (absence of women, racist stereotypes), I would tend to recommend Papyrus Caesaris for the modern reader (and classics student):

available eg from Abe Books

PS searching for individual titles rather than for the name Rubricastellanus I now ordered a copy of

• Apud Britannos

Completing the translations of the classical series until the death of Goscinny seems like an achievable goal. Only 17 of the 24 have been published in Latin.

PPS: I can partially blame it on all those clergymen and Latin teachers who popped up in my family history, including several called Caesar ...

Update 29.7.2026: Added to the collection:

• Iter gallicum (Tour de France)

sicut pater sic filius

(like father, like son)

Philipp Nicolaus Ebner (1682-1734), vicar of Alterkülz is one of the two clergymen in the family tree we knew about from the Weiß Chronicles. He was the father in law of the other one, namely Johannes Weiß, the vicar of Eckweiler. Earlier in his life, he was a teacher at the Lateinschule Trarbach (a secondary school teaching mostly Latin, preparing pupils for university), following in the footsteps of his father, Johann Jacob Ebner. The school had confirmed this, but we didn't know much more about the Trarbach times.

Recently, when I was looking for details concerning the difficulties that Johann Conon had in Trarbach (from the other side of the Weiß family tree, so not linked to the Ebners in his lifetime), I found the book Trarbach in alter Zeit by Ernst Schütz online, which dates from 1909. It contains a lot of information about the Lateinschule and provides enough material for biographies of Ebner father and son:

A German version is available on request - deutsche Fassung auf Anfrage.

 

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Johann Jacob Ebner

Johann Jacob Ebner came from Hungary - as the book states in agreement with the Weiß Chronicles. We don't know any specifics. Intriguingly, there is another Ebner family from the Black Forest, whose members emigrated to Hungary and came back a few generations later, but the timings don't match. (See eg this Joseph Ebner from Zechenwihl who emigrated to Hungary in 1767, long after our Ebners arrived from there.)

He arrived at the Lateinschule in 1675, where he taught the younger pupils (Infima, admitting boys and girls) at first in his dual role as Kantor and Präzeptor. At that time, Johann Thomas Hase was the Konrektor, which meant that he taught the middle section (Secunda) students, boys only from here onwards, who learned Latin and the basics of Greek, and Johann Tobias Germann was the Rektor teaching the Prima, preparing them for university. The whole school was under the supervision of the vicar of Trarbach in his role as the inspector of the Oberamt. From 1671-78 that role was held by Johann Heinrich Horb. He was replaced with Johann Peter Rodaug who served until his death in 1699.

Johann Jacob Ebner married a woman from Trarbach in December 1674 (the same year he started teaching at the Lateinschule), but we aren't told her name. In Gedbas she appears as Maria Brigitta, without a family name, calculated birth year 1646. Schütz notes, however, that among the ten godparents of his first child there are four members of the local nobility, adding that he appears to have been well connected. I might add that it could be a hint that she was from a well-connected local family?

Stop Press - familysearch names the wife as Brigitta Maria Christophor, baptised 21.12.1650, surprisingly in a Catholic church in Cologne (St. Paul which no longer exists). This entry reveals six children, three more than in Gedbas, namely:

Hetwig Magdalena Sophia Ebner 2.10. 1676– apparently the first child with the big baptism.
Christianus Ebner 1679–1679
Johann Andreas baptism 30. January 1680 Trarbach,
Philipp Nicolaus baptism 25. May 1682 Trarbach, see his CV below
Anna Elisabetha Ebner 1685–1749 She married Philipp Georg Hornmann in 1711.
Carl Ludwig baptism 18. January 1688 Trarbach, died 1692

Familysearch also provides names for her parents but not for his. The site suggests that Johann Jacob Ebner was born in Wurttemberg, which is rather vague and in conflict with the statements elsewhere that he was from Hungary. Maybe his parents were, and he was born en route to Trarbach. The site pins his birth to 30. July 1660 which can't be right as it would mean he started teaching and got married at age 14. A plausible interpretation would be a reading error with the real birth year being 1650, which would match the birth year of his wife too. However, the age noted with the record of his death would give us 1646 or late 1645.

Johann Jacob was promoted to Konrektor at the Lateinschule in 1686. Johann Conrad Arnoldi, the son of an earlier Rektor and himself an alumnus of the school had replaced Rektor Germann the year before and stayed on until 1708 (more about him below and in Wikipedia). Johann Friedrich Fritzsche became the new teacher for the Infima.

In 1693 his wife died. In 1695 he married the widow of the mayor Mülberger. Earlier in the book, the mayor is further identified as Johann Ruprecht Mülberger from Cronweißenburg (Wissembourg, Alsace), who came to the town after the war and became its first apothecary. In 1665, he married the daughter of the Kirchenzensor Meurer. From this incomplete info I could pin down Johann Jacob's second wife as:

Ursula Elisabeth Meurer, born 11.12.1646 Trarbach, died 9.10.1705 Trarbach. Her parents were both born in Trarbach, the origin of her grandparents aren't specified in the Gedbas entries. Note that her mother was born Haussmann. The Lateinschule had a schoolmaster by that name for many years until 1618. Her husband the apothecary Mülberger had been the mayor from 1673 until his death in 1692 at the age of 56.

After Ursula Elisabeth died in 1705, Johann Jacob felt his forces dwindle (although he was only 60) and relied on the help of his son Philipp Nicolaus (see below) who served as an adjunctus.

In 1708, Johann Jacob retired and Philipp Nicolaus took over his role, although some church records after that still call the father the Konrektor and the son the adjunctus.

When his son moved to Alterkülz, Johann Jacob may have gone along with him, as it was there that he died in October 1726 at the age of 80.

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Trarbach - The Lateinschule is the building to the left of the church. Source: Wikipedia. Von Rolf Kranz - Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 4.0

 

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Philipp Nicolaus Ebner,

He was born in 1682 in Trarbach.

In 1708, he officially took over his father's role as Konrektor at the Lateinschule. The same year, he married Dorothea Elisabetha Hammers in Traben, just across the river. As I only found out in the process of preparing this blog entry, Dorothea was the daughter of Christoph Hammes and Anna Dorothea Arnoldi. Her maternal grandfather, Johann Conrad Arnoldi was the vicar of Traben until his death in 1711, so he may have well held her wedding service. Oh, and his brother Johann Justus Arnoldi was the Rektor at the Lateinschule back in the 1650s. Johann Conrad Arnoldi II, the Rektor of the Lateinschule from 1685 until 1708, was Johann Justus Arnoldi's son and thus Anna Dorothea's first cousin. He became quite famous later as a professor at Giessen, see his Wikipedia entry.

Philipp Nicolaus and Dorothea Elisabetha had at least ten children, as I conclude from combining incomplete lists from Gedbas and from a Pfalzdorf researcher.

Gedbas lists six children born in Trarbach:
11. June 1709 Johann Conrad - died in October that year
16. September 1710 Johann Christoph - died February 1712
6. November 1712 Catharina Elisabetha
30. April 1715 Maria Margaretha
27. August 1717 Anna Maria
17. March 1720 Susanna Margaretha

In 1720, he became the vicar of Alterkülz, where he remained for the rest of his life. Times were particularly hard for the people of Trarbach around this time, as the latest peace settlement had assigned the strategically important castle Grevenburg just next door to the Archbishop Elector of Trier, who refused to pay for the repair of its unusable living quarters and instead ordered his garrison to be housed in the town. Thus the fiercely protestant little town was, for the third time in a century, under a hostile occupation lasting many years. This situation may have made the move to remote village of Alterkülz look attractive.

In Alterkülz, four more children were born. Two died in infancy, and of the other two we have no further information.

In 1732, the firstborn, Catharina Elisabeth married Johannes Weiß, who became the vicar of Eckweiler.

Philipp Nicolaus died in August 1734 in Alterkülz aged 53. In 1741, his widow married Johann Hasselbach (Familienbuch Kastellaun, he also appears in Gedbas with his previous wife)

In 1742, Maria Margaretha married Johann Matthias Krämer in Traben. The couple had six children according to GedBas.

In 1749, Anna Maria married Carl Morlang from Weiler and had four children with him. The family settled at Pfalzdorf in the Lower Rhine area, together with a whole group of would-be migrants who had wanted to go to America via Rotterdam but only got that far as the Netherlands refused to let them pass.

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Long story short, between them, Ebner father and/or son taught at the Lateinschule for a continuous period of 45 years.

 

And I just found out that the building of the Lateinschule now serves as a hostel for pilgrims, I think I will have to make a pilgrimage too! They do mention cyclists too, so I'll bring a bike.

A brief history of Trarbach and its Lateinschule will follow in two weeks time.

PS A glimpse of my own experience of learning and teaching Latin is in the first paragraph of this book review.

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Confused about who is who? - see my new name index for all things family history.

mind the gender gap

Some thoughts on

A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women
Emma Southon
Oneworld 2023

One of my Latin teachers at school was a textbook case of testosterone poisoning, so on top of all the manliness in the ancient sources, he had to add an extra layer of testosterone with his made-up example sentences. I've always loved the language for its mathematical clarity and studied it for six years (against the wishes of my parents), but the male chest-beating and gender imbalance was less appealing to me. And then I went on to study sciences rather than Romance languages, Latin memories took a back seat. Nearly 30 years later I had the chance of revisiting the buried knowledge when one of my daughters became interested in learning Latin. As the course which the school had promised didn't materialise, I taught her to GCSE.

Now, another decade later, with a reasonably refreshed memory of all the manliness in the works of Caesar, Livius, Tacitus et al., I found it extremely enlightening to learn about 21 women who also shaped Roman history but somehow weren't mentioned in our school books. Or if they were mentioned, they only served as an trigger to launch men into action. Like a jigsaw that was previously missing half the pieces, Roman history makes a lot more sense with this addition. I'm only amazed this hasn't been done a generation earlier. While there are biographies of some of the women featured here, there is no work on Roman history across the 11 centuries until the fall of the Western Roman Empire where the significance of women is mentioned in any significant way. (At least Southon says she couldn't find any.)

Headline stars of the chapters include Augustus's daughter Julia (but not his wife Livia, who starred in the recent TV series Domina), four other Julias, the Brits Cartimandua and Boudicca, as well as the Syrian princess Zenobia. So we do get to travel the Roman world as well, with interesting insights into the more remote territories.

Even with the testosterone toned down, the history still contains a lot of senseless slaughter though. One of the other things that have changed since I went to school is that nowadays, classicists write about the ancient world without mincing their words regarding how batshit crazy many of the key events were. The overall tone is a bit like: What can you expect from a city founded by a guy who just murdered his brother. Family values and all that.

Southon's writing is very 21st century with generous pop-cultural references and swearwords, but I guess the Roman men who defined the history as we used to learn it in the 20th century deserve the reckoning that they get here - they were just effing insane and probably had way too much testosterone.

Blackwells

Latin without limits

Some thoughts on

Ad Infinitum – A biography of Latin
by Nicholas Ostler
Harper Press 2007

The remarkable thing about Latin is how little it changed in 2,500 years, so its CV could be told very quickly, as indeed the author does in the last two pages of the book. The exciting story in the rest of the book, however, is mostly about all the other languages that it touched upon or that developed interestingly different trajectories.

So, for instance:

* Etruscan – why don’t we know much about it? The author offers some explanations, and in the appendix a list of presumed Etruscan words that survived in Latin.

* Greek – it is intriguing how the two languages each claiming to represent civilisation co-existed for many centuries and divided the Mediterranean world between them.

* Arabic – fascinating how after the Norman conquest of Sicily from the Arabs and the gradual rollback of Arabic power in Iberia learned texts (including those originally in Greek) were translated from Arabic into Latin and thereby came to lay the foundations of the Renaissance in Europe. Mathematical terms like algorithm and algebra show their Arabic roots.

* Romance languages – by the late 8th century, Latin was a written elite language, coexisting with the local spoken vernaculars drifting away from it. In a similar situation, Arabic and Chinese maintained their unity through the shared written language even though speakers of distant dialects may fail to understand each other. Why did the dialects of Latin crystallise into new languages, even while the elite version was still widely used eg in church and legal texts? According to Ostler, it was kind of an own goal for Alcuin from York, who in 781 was appointed director of Charlemagne’s Palace School in Aachen. He drew up strict rules for standard Latin pronunciation. At the stroke of a pen, those versions spoken in France and Spain were no longer accepted as Latin, so they were free to become their own languages. An immediate practical problem: priests using the standard pronunciation prescribed by Alcuin were harder to understand for their flock, so had to cultivate both Latin and their local Romance language as bilinguals. Using Alcuin's pronunciation rules in the reverse direction, they could easily produce written versions of their local vernaculars. “Romance” interestingly became a word for the type of text typically written in these new languages (hence “roman” in French and German for novel), before being recruited to describe both the language family and the romantic entanglements.

* English – virtually all of the Western Roman Empire now speaks Romance languages, with the interesting exception of Britannia. There isn’t a simple explanation really, and quite a few open questions feed into this, so I can’t answer this here, but the author spends a few pages on this.

* Romanian – in the Eastern Roman Empire, the competition with old rival Greek meant that Latin didn’t stick, even though Roman rule persisted for many centuries longer. The one exception on that side of the map is Romanian.

* Native American languages - it was surprising to me to learn that the Spanish conquest of what we now call Latin America (coined in 1856!) brought quite a few interactions between Latin and the major indigenous languages such as Quechua and Nahuatl. The idea being that to get the approval of the Catholic Church the conquistadores had to create the impression that their endeavour was all about saving more souls for the Lord, which at one stage also required training native people to become Catholic priests, and learn Latin. It was at that stage, in the 16th century, that Latin had a truly global spread that the Romans could not have dreamed about.

* Spanish – in a shocking coincidence, the year 1492, when Columbus reached the Caribbean and the fall of Granada completed the reconquista, also saw the publication of the first grammar of a language that wasn’t Latin or Greek. It described Spanish and with remarkable foresight aimed to provide the language manual for a new empire, following after Rome. Scholars had long written about the classical languages as if they were the only ones worth bothering with. It is shocking in a way that it took until 1492 for people to realise that every language has its own grammar. (Related to this, the infinity of the title alludes to the Roman habit of mistaking their Latin-speaking bubble for the whole world.)

* Science – these days the binomial names introduced by Linnaeus are the kind of Latin I use most regularly. Although the Industrial Revolution coincided with the loss of Latin as a lingua franca across Europe, it has pervaded most of science and technology, often with pseudo-Latin neologisms. The author points out that it took until the mid-20th century before physicists started to call new elementary things by English names like quark, charm.

All in all fascinating stuff, and I am particularly pleased to have learned of a coherent explanation for the origin of Romance languages (even if the author refers to medieval Galician as “Portuguese” – long before Portugal even existed). A minor moan is his unquestioning support for the Christian church – expressions like “heroic missionaries” make me shiver. That aside, this is a compelling history not just of Latin but of Western Europe and its languages.

Cover of the hardback edition I found at a charity shop.

PS the author's Wikipedia entry in Latin is still a stub, you can help to expand it...

Now made another slow-moving thread: books read in 2022.

romance of wikipedia

I've been slightly obsessed with Galician and some other Romance languages recently, which must have been a side effect of being exposed to and then inheriting the admin of the amazing Galician Session Oxford. I discovered that the Galician version of Wikipedia is quite amazing (considering the number of speakers of the language), so I looked up some other Wiki versions in Romance languages with a view to use one or the other as study aids, and found that their sizes don't necessarily scale with the numbers of speakers:

1 000 000 +

Français 1 975 000+ articles

Italiano 1 430 000+ voci

Español 1 404 000+ artículos

100 000+

Português 997 000+ artigos

Català 577.879 articles.

Română 385.164

Galego 147 109 artigos.

Latina 128 288 paginarum


10 000+


Occitan 84 312 articles
Asturianu 74 671 artículos
Piemontèis 64 327 artìcoj
Aragonés 32 946 articlos
Sicilianu 25 949 vuci
Nnapulitano 14 516 artícule
Vèneto 11 145 voxe

1 000+

Corsu
Emigliàn–Rumagnòl
Lìgure
Malti*
Mirandés
Picard
Rumantsch
Sardu

* NB: I realise Maltese is a semitic language, but half its vocabulary is of romance origin.



Image: Wikipedia

how Romanian lost its romance

I taught a workshop at Bucharest recently and just before the trip I discovered an old French book about the Romanian language at an Oxfam store, so I read much of it on the way there, and found it really intriguing. As the book is probably out of print, I’ll summarise some of the points I found interesting.

Latin heritage: The area was only under Roman control for a century and a half (106-275) – and the Latin derived language only became prevalent after the Romans left. The invasion of the Huns in 375 and destruction of the towns drove the Latin-speaking townsfolk out to the countryside, where they mingled with the peasants who spoke a Thracian language related to modern Albanian, and from this encounter Romanian was born. Then, the language was fairly isolated from the other Romance languages, and thus kept old-fashioned terms when medieval Latin changed and passed those changes on to Italian and French. Intriguingly, the Iberian languages, on the other end of the continent, retain some of the same old-style expressions, so they sometimes resemble Romanian more than the geographically closer languages Italian and French. For instance, when Latin, French and Italian switched from mensa to tabula for table, the peripheral Romance languages in Iberia and Romania didn’t get the memo, so we have mesa in Spanish and Portuguese and masӑ in Romanian.

German influences include cartof (Kartoffel) for potato, and halba (Halbe) for half a measure of beer, and a word derived from “Schmecker” for their argot. The name of the region around Bucharest, Wallachia, derives from the Germanic word for non-Germanic people, as in Welsch, Wallon, Welsh, etc.

Alphabet: Romanian used the Cyrillic alphabet until 1860, which it had originally adopted from Bulgarian for complex reasons linked to the shared orthodox religion.

Romance language that lost the romance: Again as a consequence of being isolated from the Romance languages in central Europe, Romanian lost Latinate terms from the area of love, romance, relationships. While most areas of Western Europe got their romantic ideas from the troubadours, Romanian lost the words derived from Latin amor, amare, carus and sponsa, and replaced them with the Slav words iubi, dragoste, drag and nevasta, respectively. So it became a Romance language that loves in Slav terms.

Later however, Romanian reconnected with French and got many words from modern French (eg bej, ruj, coafor, creion …), as well as lexical and grammatical influences from Hungarian, Turkish, and Slav languages, often even within the same word. So it ended up as a unique mixture not just of several language influences but also of languages from unrelated families, and with connections all across Europe.

Source:

Gilbert Fabre: Parlons roumain, langue et culture Editions L’Harmattan 1991

PS - a quick check on French amazon revealed that it is available as an e-book as well as second-hand. Plus, from the same series there are books about dozens of other languages, mainly those not so commonly taught, so this is a huge temptation. (Lots of them have the same title with only the name of the language exchanged, so you find them easily with the search terms: parlons langue culture. However, there are also recent deviations from the pattern, eg Parlons slovaque, une langue slave, from 2009)

writing history

Asterix: Le papyrus de César

The 36th Asterix album – the second from the new team, Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad – addresses a question of utmost importance for the historical consistency of the whole oeuvre: Why on earth did Caesar not mention the indomitable Gauls and their numerous victories against his legions in his famous De Bello Gallico? Did he falsify the historical record by omission? Are all the zillions of schoolchildren who start their Latin reading with “Gallia est omnis divisa …” fed a pack of lies?

The issue is addressed with a very satisfying story, resulting in an album worthy to be read alongside the Golden Era ones written in the years before Goscinny died. On the basis of this story, there are deep discussions to be had about how history is written, the contribution of reportage, the value of oral tradition, and the philosophy of truth. Oh, and the vanity of writers and the publishing industry. And Assurancetourix the bard (Cacofonix / Troubadix) plays an early example of a Stroh cello, so what’s not to love?

Intriguingly, this arrived on my doorstep just after I started reading another recently published book featuring the origins of Caesar’s famous opus. In the third volume of his fictionalised biography of Cicero, Robert Harris imagines Cicero’s secretary Tiro visiting Caesar in Gaul and reading the beginning of his 12th chapter: “Flumen est Arar quod per fines Haeduorum et Sequanorum in Rhodanum influit, incredibili lenitate ita ut oculis in utram partem fluat iudicari non possit.” Seeing that Tiro is believed to have written a biography of Cicero which is lost, while Caesar’s book is so ubiquitous that it would survive the apocalypse, this encounter between two authors is also an interesting reflection on the vagaries of history writing.

looks like a fragment of the lost scroll survived in the font of the word "papyrus" - maybe the authors should reveal that in full ...

PS: here's an interview with the creators, from the Guardian.

ecce torpet probitas

by sheer coincidence I recently stumbled upon a song from the Carmina Burana which seems to sum up this week’s scandalous events quite nicely – it’s all about how honesty lies in a coma (the title), greed rules the world, people bend the rules to get rich quick, etc. Isn’t it amazing how prescient people were in the 12th century? Or alternatively, have we fallen back to the dark ages?

Latin text below the video, Latin text with English translation here (song no. 4, on page 5).

1.
Ecce torpet probitas,
virtus sepelitur;
fit iam parca largitas,
parcitas largitur;
verum dicit falsitas,
veritas mentitur.
Omnes iura ledunt
et ad res illicitas
licite recedunt.

2.
Regnat avaritia,
regnant et avari;
mente quivis anxia
nititur ditari,
cum sit summa gloria
censu gloriari.
Omnes iura ledunt
et ad prava quelibet
impie recedunt.

3.
Multum habet oneris
do das dedi dare;
verbum hoc pre ceteris
norunt ignorare
divites, quos poteris
mari comparare.
Omnes iura ledunt
et in rerum numeris
numeros excedunt

4.
Cunctis est equaliter
insita cupido;
perit fides turpiter,
nullus fidus fido,
nec Iunoni Iupiter
nec Enee Dido.
Omnes iura ledunt
et ad mala devia
licite recedunt.

5.
Si recte discernere
velis, non est vita,
quod sic vivit temere
gens hec imperita;
non est enim vivere,
si quis vivit ita.
Omnes iura ledunt
et fidem in opere
quolibet excedunt.