Latin is the language of ancient Rome and the civilization that took root there; expanding through the centuries to cover a remarkably vast territory, the so-called empire, it became a means of expression and communication for a large part of mankind, on the page and in the public sphere, serving even in the modern age—long after spoken Latin forked into distinct tongues (the so-called Romance languages) and loaned thousands of terms to Germanic languages such as English—as a means of expression for poets, intellectuals, and scholars across various disciplines.
Latin is the language of our legal institutions, of architecture, engineering, the military, science, philosophy, worship, and—of greatest relevance here—a flourishing literature, which served as a model for all of Western literature in the centuries to follow. No field of knowledge or linguistic creativity exists that has not been expressed in Latin with superb and exemplary skill: poetry (epic, elegy, epigram, etc.), oratory, comedy, tragedy, satire, personal and official letter writing, the novel, history, dialogue; along with moral philosophy, physics, jurisprudence, the culinary arts, the theory of art, astronomy, agriculture, meteorology, grammar, ancient studies, medicine, technology, systems of measurement, and religion.
Through literature, in hundreds of masterpieces, Latin speaks of love and war, explores body and soul, proposes theories on the meaning of life and the duty of the individual, the destiny of the soul, the structure of matter; it sings the beauty of nature, the greatness of friendship, pain at losing what we love; it challenges corruption, and meditates on death, on the arbitrary nature of power, on violence and cruelty; it constructs images of our inner states, gives shape to our emotions, formulates ideas about the world and about civil life. Latin is the language of the relationship between the one and the many; of the complex confrontation between freedom and constraint, between private and public, between the contemplative life and the active life, between province and capital, between country and city. And it is the language of responsibility and personal duty; the language of inner strength; the language of property and of will; the language of servitude that questions the abuse of power; the language of mourning. Intention speaks Latin; protest speaks Latin; confession speaks Latin; belonging speaks Latin; exile speaks Latin; memory speaks Latin.
Latin is our most striking monument to the civilization of the human word and to faith in the possibility of language, as, for example, extolled by Pliny the Younger (c. 61–112 C.E.). I’m thinking of one of his letters that praises the versatility and linguistic skill of a certain Pompeius Saturninus. Pliny speaks of his “ingenium […] varium, flexibile, quam multiplex,” where for ingenium we are to understand a natural propensity, or, to use another word of Latin origin, “talent.” Pompeius Saturninus, in other words, is talented at any form of verbal expression: a legal document, a historical account, poetry, letters. He lacks nothing: his words are fluid and sublime, light and weighty, bitter and sweet, as the case demands. Pliny never ceases reading and admiring him, as one of the greats of antiquity. It is a sincere shame that—as with many other luminaries—not a single work of his remains.
To speak of “Latin” is first and foremost to speak of a complete dedication to organizing one’s thoughts in a profound and measured discourse, to select meanings in the most pertinent manner possible, to arrange one’s words in a harmonious order, to give verbal evidence of even the most fleeting states of our inner self, to believe in verbal expression and in demonstration, to record the contingent and the transient in a language that survives beyond all circumstance.