The most frequent charge laid against the door of Latin - aside from the absurd accusation of elitism - is that it is useless. Why not learn Mandarin, people ask, or Russian or French? For me the pleasure of Latin is precisely because it is "useless". Latin doesn't help to turn out factory-made mini-consumers fit for a globalised 21st-century society. It helps create curious, intellectually rigorous kids with a rich interior world, people who have the tools to see our world as it really is because they have encountered and imaginatively experienced another that is so like, and so very unlike, our own.
<b>Charlotte Higgins, http://m.guardian.co.uk/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2009/may/24/latin-in-schools</b>
«Siamo ormai stanchi dell'antifona, ripetuta dal nazionalismo della filosofia tedesca, secondo cui la luce greca sarebbe stata affievolita se non spenta dai Romani, prima di essere completamente sotterrata dalla Chiesa romana, per riapparire infine nella lingua di Fichte e nella musica di Wagner. [...] da Cicerone ad Agostino, abbiamo di fronte una di quelle occasioni rare e meravigliose, in cui la parola "progresso" non è un abuso, ma è l'esatto sinonimo di tradizione viva e di maturazione del pensiero, di tappa in tappa, nel tempo storico».
«Est ... haec saeculi quaedam macula atque labes, virtuti invidere, velle ipsum florem dignitatis infringere».
«Not seldom I find myself labelled, with whatever adjuncts, as a Ciceronian scholar. That may be a convenient mode of reference, but I always feel inclined to put in a caveat. Cicero as a personality and actor in the historical drama, yes, I have spent much time and ink on him but Cicero the philosopher and political theorist, Cicero the Latin stylist, Cicero the rhetorical technician, Cicero the lawyer, Cicero the animating influence on western thought and culture, to say nothing of Cicero the poet , with these I have never meddled, at least not in print. Even as a philologist, my concern has been with the letters and speeches. On the other hand, most of the items in my bibliography are non-Ciceronian. But the other authors in it came and went. Cicero continues».
