The Society for Ancient Languages

Verba Penultima

by Dr. Richard Gerberding

     People often ask you why you study Latin, because most people do not understand why you do. You study Latin because it is magnificently, spectacularly, marvelously, and utterly USELESS. Good. I didn't think for a moment that you had forgotten. I shall come back to non-utility of ancient languages in a moment, but first I want to briefly (I mean it) do two other things: 1) Recognize the notables among you (with a group like this you never know what famous, or infamous, person is the one sitting next to you). And 2) quickly recount the Society's year, especially for the benefit of our alumni and our guests tonight.
     On the top of my list of notables is always anyone who feeds me. Nell and her crew from Nell's Catering of Florence have probably left by now, but let us applaud them in absentia anyway. Our night of celebration would not resound as it does without the Voces Angelicae. Huntsville is very, very lucky to have them producing such beauty. We hope you know how grateful our Society is that you add your angelic voices to our celebration. Let's applaud them again.
     You can now hold your applause until I am done with the list. Seated among you is the dean of our College [of Liberal Arts], Dr. Sue Kirkpatrick. It is impossible to describe how often she goes to war to keep the barbarians from the walls of our vulnerable little program. Sue, the Society is very grateful to you. The chair of the Department of History, Dr. Andrew Dunar. Andy? The chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages and long-time member of the Society, Dr. Sandra Neilsen. Sandra? A special guest tonight, Dr. Dominique Perot, Professor Emeritus. I think I'm correct to say that Professor Penot was the first person ever to teach Latin at UAH. Dominique is a true polyglot. His mother tongue is French, he holds a doctorate in Latin and Greek from a German-speaking university, and he spent his professional life teaching in that most difficult of all languages: Northern Alabamian. A special treat for me is the presence of my best friends, Rick and Cathy Black from Chicago. I have known Rick since we were age eleven in the sixth grade together, and that's been nearly seventeen years now [grin!]. Let me tell you now about Rick Black; he is a corporate executive, CEO of one of America's big corporations - hundreds of millions of dollars in business. What was undergraduate major? English. What was his thesis topic? Faulkner. So the next time some foaming Visigoth from Accounting says to you, "Liberal Arts?? Liberal Arts?? Ha, ha! What can you DO with a degree in Liberal Arts?" Look the creature in his boring little eyes, think of Rick Black, and answer, "What can I do with a degree in Liberal Arts? Be your boss."
     Let's see, Pat Newcomb, former vice-president of the Society and now a reporter for the Huntsville Times. It is a special treat to mention the Society's members who are Latin teachers in the high schools. Usually that means Cathy Dunar from Randolf and Ann Bishop from Huntsville High. But Ann didn't get her reservation in on time and got turned away, (as did Professor Brian Martine, among others). Let's applaud that much of the list.
     I now turn my attention to the head table, and, of course, Dr. Christys and Professor Ian Wood. The Society cannot thank Professor Wood enough for his two splendid lectures and for his delightful talk tonight. I really do not know how to thank you for coming all this way and for talking so splendidly without my words appearing overly done thus sounding like what David Ganz calls "making polite noises." (The British, by the way, are much better at polite noises than are we Americans. We are not nearly deceitful enough.) I think it is very difficult, Ian, for those of you who come from a very different academic environment than ours here, to realize what lasting inspiration your visits bring. After Denis Feeney none of us can read Aeneid VIII the same way again; after Barry Powell we think of the Greek alphabet differently. And listen to the way we all in a few minutes will say "magnis dis", the "heavy gods" we try to carry in the work of our Society. Listen, and you will Peter Brown. Ian, your visit is three days, and then like the sparrow of King Edwin's convivium, you will fly off again into the cold and rainy British climate. But unlike that sparrow, you will also stay, longer than I think you can realize. Thank you Ian; thank you Ann.
     When I note our consulares, our former presidents, sitting up here, the whole Society giggles in pride. I don't think any organization in Northern Alabama has as much right to be as proud of its former officers as does our Society. I can still say that every one, every one, is or has done splendidly in graduate school. Mike Anthony has an M.A. from UAH in English. Kenny Swaim continues his graduate study at UAH in aerospace engineering. Beth Pollard just successfully defended her Ph.D. prospectus in medieval history at Emory. Ann Milner now has a masters in classics from Florida State University and is currently teaching Latin at Louisiana State University. Cliff Vaughn (who is not here) almost has his doctorate in Communications from Bowling Green; Curtis Bridgeman, also not here, is in the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Vanderbilt and Norman Sandridge will complete his M.A. in Classics at Florida State in May and then in the fall is off on a full scholarship in the Ph.D. program in Classics at [the University of North Carolina:] Chapel Hill. What a record!! Put that in your concrete canoe and paddle it!!! More applause, everyone.
     AND what a year this has been! Shortly after last year's convivium, the Society made a dawn raid on the Birmingham airport and flew off to Italy for two weeks. There were ten of us provincials off to the Eternal City and its environs, and I think most of the ten are here tonight. Ask them about the trip when I finally shut up, you will be amazed. Jennifer, Jody, John, Shane, Kathy and Jeff Nelson, Kenny. Now, I am old, and I have tromped around Italy more years than I will admit, but never have I travelled with a group like this one. There were magic moments in addition to the magic food, wine, and museums. These people were prepared. They knew what they were going to see and each evening they would gather to hear one of their number deliver a prepared lecture about the next day's sites. This was usually on the hotel's veranda or some other convenient place. Except for Jody, the hopeless aesthete. His lecture was on Saint Peter's and he wasn't going to give it anywhere but under Bernini's oval arcade. So we all traipsed down the hill to the Vatican and sat there amidst the pigeons, spell-bound by the obelisk, the fountains, and Michelangelo's facade as Jody lectured away.
     The Emperor Tiberius had his Camp David: an elaborate villa perched on a peak atop the enchanting island of Capri. No sooner did Shane and Jeff hear that it was possible for tourists to visit the villa, than there was no earthly alternative but to climb that mountain. Most of us started off jauntily, and most wimped out about half-way up at some Siren of a restaurant. The viri fortissimi among us, however, made it to the top. From Tiberius' villa you look out over the Tyrrhenian Sea to the black and misty crags of the Italian mainland. The view is unforgettable. But more unforgettable to me were the viewers. The entrance to the villa is marked by a huge marble arch on which there is inscribed a long Latin quotation from Tiberius himself. I sat there, out of breath from the climb and agape at the view, and listened to members of your Society read and translate that inscription, adding the magic of Tiberius' own official words to the magic of the moment. Tiberius has been talking to out-of-breath visitors like that for nearly two thousand years. The problem today is that very few can understand him. Your Society did.
     We have enough stories from that trip to make Aesop jealous -- Kenny and ice cream, Jody and Juliette's bare breast (there's a good and we have photographs), the famous lunch where Jennifer and the women discovered Compari. But I must move on.
     Meanwhile, in Huntsville important things were happening, largely through the efforts of our dean. First, UAH, yes this Engineering and Nursing trade school called UAH, began to offer introductory classes in Classical Greek. Dr. James Smeal, (hand up, Jim), who holds a Ph.D. in Classics from Vanderbilt, is now with us teaching Greek and the second-year Latin classes. The reports about what he is doing in those classes are all good. The University is very lucky to have found him, and this Society especially is very grateful that he has come. We are hopeful that he will begin to guide the weekly Greek meetings of the Society next year and make them as strong as the Latin ones. Applause, I think, don't you?
     And second, through a political and bureaucratic miracle wrought largely by Dean Kirkpatrick, UAH now has an official program for an academic minor in Classical Studies. Several of you here tonight are officially enrolled, and in about a month Jody Lawton will be its first official graduate.
     Mention of Jody Lawton brings to mind more good news from this year. Anyone who knows Jody for longer than seven minutes, knows that he impassioned by Milton. Next year he will take up a full scholarship to pursue his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland amid what he describes as a nest of famous Milton scholars. Ted Blanton, after acceptances from such places as Fordham and Minnesota, will take his full scholarship for the Ph.D. at Purdue, where the famous Carolingianist, John Contreni, has already agreed to act as his supervisor. Likewise John McKerley is off to the University of Iowa on a full ride to do his Ph.D. in History. I don't how it gets better than this. I told you there were important people sitting next to you. You new members of the Society have quite a tradition to uphold and rather high standards to meet if you are going to equal this crusty old bunch.
     A word about the coming year. In the fall we will offer classes in beginning Latin and beginning Greek. Our classes this year are better than they have been in some time. These things go in cycles, and we are currently on a roll. Those first-year students seated among you are going to be very, very good and there is no reason why they will not launch themselves off into wonderful graduate schools as their predecessors have done. The classes are good, but they are this year small. Some years our first-year classes have enrolled between forty and fifty students. This year I have nine in Latin 102. As you know, the powers both administrative and political, which control Alabama's academic instititutions make their decisions these days based far more on size than on quality, and consequently for the academic classes in Greek and Latin, and in turn for your Society, small classes are dangerous; we can only occasionally experience small years, no matter how good we are. So make noise. Let your friends and the community know what absolutely and wonderfully useless things are going on at UAH. Three years ago when I stood here and asked you to send us good students, you did and we burst at the seams. Do it again.
     And now (with three minutes to go -- I promise) let me return to ancient languages and their "usefulness." In the Latin classes or in the Society meetings, when I should, I suppose, be thinking of the academic matters at hand, I am actually often looking in amazement at you and wondering why you are there. Christy Reid, Brent Newson, Jeremy Saint, Caleb Clanton, Russell Newquist, Jason Sheffield -- just to mention the first-year students here tonight, all, I think, have more relevant things to do in their busy lives than to spend hours memorizing the vocabulary and studying the intricate grammar of a dead language. I didn't do it at their age and I am amazed that they, well that all of you, do it. And you do not do it halfheartedly, as your success shows. Those are demanding classes and your Society demands much of your time. Slowly, I think, by watching you over the years I am coming to speculate more intelligently why you do it, and it may have to do with a word the ancients, especially the Greeks, knew well: beauty.
     We Americans like to stab beauty squarely in the eye of the beholder. This fits our temperament -- makes beauty wonderfully democratic, relevant, diverse, multi-cultural, and tolerant. The Romans, being Romans, would want more aristocracy and more definition in their idea of beauty. One of them who defined it rather carefully was, as you know, Vitruvius. He lists stabilitas, a kind of heavy durability, as one of its major components. I think I have been seeing lately that your generation (and by "your generation" I do not mean the hordes of recruitment-and-retention students who are poured into our college classrooms where they don't last, but I mean you, the committed and successful). I think I have been seeing lately that your generation is tiring somewhat of the relative and relevant. One piece of evidence for this is, perhaps, your passionate commitment to your music. My generation in its youth largely had a sock-hopping, uncritical commitment to the Top 40 and not much beyond. Or at least most of us did, even the good students. You are different. In addition to Wide Spread Panic's latest, you cling to the oldies, to Dylan, the Beatles, the Boss, and beyond to Glenn Miller, even Mozart and Co. This is as if we would have found Cohen, Berlin, or Cab Calloway "groovy." We didn't. You grown up in a much more throw-away, efficient culture, where the value of most things is measured by its immediate usefulness, where the food you eat is efficiently served on paper and plastic, where your families are full of efficient temporary marriages, your careers whisk you from one job and one part of the country to the next, a culture here at UAH where the buildings you study in, look no more elegant and no more permanent than the buildings in which you shop, to which you take your dry-cleaning, or the ones which treat your city water. And then amid all these very efficient and useful things in your busy young lives, here comes Latin. A language from a culture which consciously and proudly looked backward, not forward, backward to its oldies -- and they were very old. No fast-food, efficient progress in Cicero, or at least none that I can find. Latin is a language which often, and often rather pompously, hails permanent verities and does not shy from telling you what works because it has worked for centuries. Not just Latin's contents but its own permanence, its own antiquity, may be a very large part of the reason why your generation finds it beautiful and why you, bless you, spend so many long hours battling me and Professor Smeal and the grammar books in order to get at it. You could do easier, more useful languages, ones you could actually speak. But you don't. It isn't its usefullness, it must its beauty, its stabilitas, which draws you. An ancient language is a beautiful thing, and like all beautiful things, it takes hard work. As your sweatshirts say, "Chalepa Ta Kala."

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