Coming from a school where English and Chinese were the only options for a second language, the word “Latin” was nothing more than a foreign word that I had never heard before (maybe I had seen it on a Spanish cuisine menu). In fact, the irony of my choosing Latin as my second language at a boarding high school in the United States was how my complete ignorance of this language motivated me to dive deeper into it.
As I started to learn where the Latin language originated from and how it was used throughout history, my interest in this language escalated. It is true that my Latin 1 class didn’t immediately grasp my attention about the beauty of the Latin language. In fact, I had to spend the last year and a half in order to learn all the basic Latin grammar that I needed to know for reading poetry and literature. However, as I started to read texts such as De Bello Gallico, Metamorphoses, Aeneid, and Ovid’s Daedalus et Icarus, I was struck by the fact that I was able to translate and understand literature that was written thousands of years ago. I believe that my current Latin teacher put it best when he said, “a Latin class is very similar to your English class. It’s just that while you read 30 pages of English in your English class, you focus on 30 lines of Latin and really try to savor each and every word in that literature.”
My interest in Latin has led me not only to join activities regarding classics such as being a board member of the classics club at my school, attending the classics conference at BU, or even tutoring Latin 1 students, but also made me want to visit Italy and experience both modern and ancient Roman culture by myself. That is why this summer I applied to the Living Latin in Rome high school program from the Paideia Institute. Being a part of this program boosted my passion for carving the ancient Roman world into my heart. Seeing architecture and natural locations that I had only seen through documentaries and books, I was mesmerized by the vividness of the Roman culture.
While my Latin and Greek skills and knowledge are still at the very basic level of learning, classics has taught me the beauty of acquiring new knowledge and applying it to historical texts and context. Now, classics is something that I would want studere, not in the sense of just studying but directing my zeal towards for the rest of my high school years.
By Tobias, a Milton Academy student