![]() Like all passive constructions, it raises an otherwise unspoken question- Who did the dividing? What could be more limpid and unambiguous? Yet the words can actually, and just as naturally, be read as a past perfect passive verb: “All Gaul has been divided into three parts,” and this translation makes a mighty political difference. Bohn in 1869: “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” This reads the verb est as a copula, the word divisa as a predicate adjective, fair enough. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the conventional translation has been that of W. Thus, “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres…,” seven words that have become a common enough Latin tag. So, when I look at the opening words of Commentarii de bello Gallico, I find it as politically treacherous as the steamy corruptions and conspiracies that came to trip us up in Cicero’s third-year class. But a literary translator becomes wary of affirmations of limpid prose and unambiguous diction, and very little in language is settled. Circumstances and descriptions repeat themselves and thereby reinforce a solid Roman settlement. The prose is straightforward and limpid, a general’s diction, no nonsense and no ambiguity. The argument was that reading Caesar in second-year Latin made good pedagogical sense. ![]() ![]() We never did get as far as Camilla in her own full armor. We really didn’t come to grips with Roman women’s lives, except perhaps for snippets of Lucretia the raped and Cornelia the mother of sons, unless we survived into the fourth year, when we finally read of Juno’s implacability, Venus’s maternity, and Dido’s fatal passion in the Aeneid. Marcus most certainly non est femina.Īfter that beginning we ploughed and sailed steadfastly through the declensions, constructed bridges over torrential conjugations, built castra of vocabulary, armed ourselves with ablative absolutes, and prepared ourselves for an agrarian and military career to be fulfilled in the readings of second year. But this meant, of course, that the first and easiest declension of nouns, mostly feminine in meaning as well as in form, could be used to construct sentences about men’s activities. The linguistic accident that the Latin words for sailor and farmer-as well as for poet-take feminine grammatical forms was uncomfortably taken for granted. In first-year Latin, farmers and sailors and soldiers predominated. There was a time when every schoolboy knew his second-year Latin class would teach him Julius Caesar’s Gallic War. ![]()
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