Latin

Thursday

Harry Mount

Horace and Me, by Harry Eyres – review

After Zorba the Greek, here comes Horace the Roman. The peasant Zorba, you’ll remember from the film, releases uptight, genteel Alan Bates from his cage of repressed Englishness. Now it’s Horace, the Augustan lyric poet, releasing another repressed Englishman: Harry Eyres, Old Etonian scholar, Cambridge graduate, poet and author of the ‘Slow Lane’ column in the Financial Times. This charming, moving book calls itself ‘Life Lessons’, as if it were a general teaching guide for the reader. Really, though, it’s a personal guide for Eyres — who realises that the poet he first struggled to appreciate at school has valuable lessons to teach about love, wine and friendship. Now Eyres

Thursday

Peter Jones

It’s vital that children translate English to Latin at GCSE

One of the most rewarding exercises a Latinist can attempt is to turn a piece of English prose into Latin. The reason is quite simple: it means getting under the surface of the English meaning — to ‘get beyond the word to the thought behind it’ (Gilbert Murray) — and transferring it into a form most closely corresponding to a Roman way of thinking and writing. It takes one to the very heart of how Romans made sense of their world. Only someone with a supreme understanding of the Latin language and its culture can do that effectively. That master prose-composer Colin Leach was once asked in an exam to

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Introducing Britain’s skills crisis

Did you know: Britain trails well behind other countries such as the US, Germany and Poland when it comes to educating its workforce? Did you know: the number of young people not in employment, education or training has risen by around 40 per cent over the last decade? Did you know … oh, you get the idea. All the statistics, and more, are in the booklet on Britain’s Skills Crisis that is included in this week’s Spectator. For CoffeeHousers who don’t buy the magazine (although you should, etc – purchasing options here), you can read the supplement for free via this snazzy, page-turning whatsit. We’ll also put one or two

Saturday

The Spectator

Ancient and modern: The art of dying

So everyone is going to live much longer and will therefore have to work much longer to pay for their pensions. But what is so wrong with dying, Greeks and Romans would ask? So everyone is going to live much longer and will therefore have to work much longer to pay for their pensions. But what is so wrong with dying, Greeks and Romans would ask? They came at the problem from different angles. Homeric heroes sought to compensate for death with eternal heroic glory (and got it, judging from the number of people who still read Homer). Plato argued that the soul was immortal. The Roman poet Lucretius thought

Saturday

Peter Jones

Classic mistakes

In a good omen for the newly announced fund-raising charity ‘Classics for All’, the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, stated in his White Paper the other week that Latin and ancient Greek would, after nearly 25 years, become officially permitted national curriculum subjects. So classics has finally come in from the cold. But why on earth were the languages frozen out in the first place? In 2006, Lord Dearing was asked by the then education secretary, Alan Johnson, to see what could be done about the dramatic slump in the number of pupils taking GCSEs in foreign languages. Languages had been made voluntary after the age of 14 in 2004. Since