P O RT S M O U T H A B B E Y S C H O O LP O RT S M O U T H A B B E Y S C H O O L

by Elizabeth Benestad, Classics Department Head

AS I STARTED MY FRESHMAN YEAR OF H IGH SCHOOL a t Scranton Prep, a Jesuit school in Pennsylvania, I asked the question that every other freshman at Prep asked: “Do I have Fr. McGrath for Latin?” Fr. McGrath was a leg-endary Latin teacher and Jesuit priest who was famous for kicking the podium, calling students “bird brain,” and placing the under-performing students in “radiator row” next to the window. After a recent Parents’ Weekend class at Portsmouth Abbey, a fellow Scranton Prep alum, whose daughter now attends the Abbey, told me that my Latin class was certainly different from Fr. McGrath’s. I took that as a compliment!

My fi nal three years of high school Latin were taught by a lay faculty member, Mr. Patrick Marx, himself a gradu-ate of Scranton Prep, who inspired me to study Latin and Greek. A poster in his classroom caught my eye; it read, “Latin is a Living Language.” As a teacher at Portsmouth Abbey School, I think of that poster often. Latin is a liv-ing language, and we do our best here at the Abbey to show our students how Latin permeates the various aca-demic disciplines, especially the English language. When

students begin their Third Form year here, I am sure they experience a feeling of concern similar to my own many years ago: What is this Latin requirement all about? Why do we learn Latin if no one speaks it anymore? Why do I have to take this class?

Latin class at Portsmouth Abbey is a unique experience indeed. The majority of independent schools do not re-quire ninth graders to study Latin. But here at the Abbey, every Third Former must complete one year of Latin. Our current textbook, Latin for the New Millennium, published in 2009, presents Latin a little differently than most Latin textbooks. In addition to the traditional presentation of Lat-in’s grammatical rules, each chapter contains an adapted passage from a Roman author, presented in chronological order. Students learn about and read a brief excerpt by authors such as Plautus, Cicero, Caesar, Catullus, Horace, Ovid and Vergil. As a result, they are learning Latin in the context of the Roman world and as a language that was very much alive in ancient Rome.

As the Third Formers progress through their year of Latin, they quickly learn that the structure of Latin is very differ-ent from the structure of the English language. In English, we use word order to determine the function of a word, whereas in Latin, the endings (or infl ections) of words sig-nify the function. Many students struggle with this concept. Another stumbling block for Latin I students is the structure of the English language itself. Grammatical terms such as subject, direct object, indirect object, tense, mood, voice, and others can be completely foreign to native speakers of English. But as the students learn these terms and how they operate in English, they often discover how fascinat-ing both English and Latin are! They start to think about English in a whole new way as they are learning the ba-sics of a Latin sentence. If I had a nickel for every time a student said to me, “I had no idea that English worked like

LATIN IS A LIVING LANGUAGE

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that,” I would have enough money to own the Yankees.

Nearly one-third of our Latin I students continue on to Latin II. At this level, the Latin sentences become more sophis-ticated. Students learn constructions such as participles, gerunds, dependent clauses, and conditions. Their ability to understand, and then to actually use these grammati-cal forms correctly in English, increases dramatically! In these upper levels of Latin, including Latin II, III, and IV, the students begin to comprehend the nuance of the Latin lan-guage. They discover that Roman authors were very care-ful about their word choice and even word placement. As one student said, “The language is unique because it can say a lot through word structure beyond what the words themselves mean. Translating is really fun (in poetry es-pecially).” Speaking of poetry, students of Latin poetry at the Abbey are introduced to the rhetorical devices of the Roman poets. Identifying these fi gures of speech, and dis-covering why a poet uses them, proves to be much fun for the students. Their eyes light up a bit when they see that the word order actually mimics the meaning of the sentence. I know that I always get excited when explaining a good “word picture” in Latin poetry. Students actually draw out the word pictures on the tests!

Perhaps the best reason for studying Latin is to be able to read works such as Vergil’s Aeneid in the original Latin. Present and past students of mine do not soon forget the Lat-in word lapsus, which means gliding, slipping, or falling. Vergil uses this word several times to refer to the downfall of Troy – the snakes devouring Laocoon, the Trojan horse entering the city, the Greeks descending from the Trojan horse, and the death of Priam. Vergil’s most poignant use of this word occurs in his description of the death of the Tro-jan king, Priam. After Priam’s son has been killed by Achil-les’ son Pyrrhus, Priam himself is killed by Pyrrhus. Vergil says that “Pyrrhus dragged Priam slipping (lapsantem) in

much blood of his son.” A dreadful image, to be sure, but unless it is read in the original Latin, the connection to the other images is completely lost.

It is only fi tting that our students at Portsmouth Abbey per-petuate the study of Latin. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the Benedictine monks of the 6th century and beyond who preserved various invaluable Latin manuscripts. Through our teaching of Latin at the Abbey, our students learn more about our past and are better prepared for their futures.

A classics major at Assumption College, where she focused her collegiate studies on Latin authors such as Cicero, Ovid, Catullus, Vergil, and St. Augustine. Lizzie has been the head of the Classics Department since 2008. She also continued her study of Greek, reading Plato, Euripides, and Homer. Her graduate work was a combination of reading Latin and Greek authors and learning successful techniques in the Latin classroom.

In her professional career, Lizzie has attended many conferences, institutes and workshops. Most notable are the Classical Association of New England Summer Institute, American Classical League Institutes, and two AP workshops at the Taft School. The week-long workshops have sparked her love of teaching Caesar and Vergil at the AP level. Recently, she attended the Classical Association of New Eng-land Summer Institute, “America’s Founding Fathers and the Classics of Greece and Rome” at Brown University.

At Portsmouth Abbey, Lizzie has coached varsity girls’ basketball, softball and track. She is an avid runner and has completed several marathons, three of them for charity.

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