Last week, Brendan O’Neill described in this magazine how students regulate ‘unacceptable’ political views with ‘no platform’ policies, safe spaces and trigger warnings. Two weeks ago a student Latin course (Reading Latin, P. Jones and K. Sidwell) was ‘outed’ by an American PhD student, because the text featured three goddesses, each confidently stripping off, determined to win the golden apple from Paris, and two rapes. Such ‘offensive’ choices, she said, did not help the cause of Latin, ‘or make the historically racist and classist discipline of classics any more accessible’.
Both rapes featured in a foundation myth of early Roman history. The most important was that of Lucretia by Sextus, son of king Tarquinius Superbus (‘the arrogant’). After explaining the situation to her husband and father, Lucretia said: ‘But while my body alone is violated, my mind is innocent. My death will bear witness to that.’
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