Discerning the Roman layer

A Vote for Latin

Op-Ed Contributor
A Vote for Latin
By HARRY MOUNT
Published: December 3, 2007
None of today’s leading presidential candidates studied Latin at a high level. How things have changed since the founding fathers.

Excerpts:

Know Latin and you discern the Roman layer that lies beneath the skin of the Western world. And you open up 500 years of Western literature (plus an additional thousand years of Latin prose and poetry).
...
With a little Roman history and Latin under your belt, you end up seeing more everywhere, not only in literature and language, but in the classical roots of Federal architecture; the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe and, in turn, America; and in the American system of senatorial government. The novelist Alan Hollinghurst describes people who know history’s turning points as being able to look at the world as a sequence of rooms: Greece gives way to Rome, Rome to the Byzantine Empire, to the Renaissance, to the British Empire, to America.


Comment: I had 2 years of Latin in High School and afterwards I took 2 years of Spanish. Knowing Latin helped me learn Spanish - and years later when I attended Seminary, it helped me learn Greek!