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Oh, how I'm looking forward to this Latin class. Judging by the syllabus, the professor will show no mercy for tardiness, absences, or any other sort of failure. (It specifically notes that absences for funerals will only be accepted with a newspaper clipping of the obituary that lists you by name as one of the surviving immediate family members.) Judging by the first class session, the professor is an enthusiastic and amiable scholar who knows his stuff and is happy to answer questions.

And judging by the projected speed of translation, I am going to die. I've just been assigned five sections of Cato's De Agricultura for Wednesday, which looks to be about as much as I would've done for Cicero in two days of classes, on top of being more archaic Latin. Fortunately, non-legal archaic Latin doesn't tend to be as convoluted as Cicero's legal speeches (really, what is?), so that should make it go faster. And it was interesting to see how older Latin looked rather more like Greek in terms of how it used vowels, compared to the classical Latin that I'm much more used to.

Anyway. I will post some Cato translation here as I manage it. I don't think we're actually going to get to his cabbage hymn, which is a pity, but he's not the class's focus, so I think we're only doing one week on this work.

Fun With Archaic Latin

So, Cato. Did a lot of legal stuff, wrote a lot of legal stuff. But this text that I’m translating is his work on agriculture, in which he was wildly unusual for his time period: namely, he wrote it in Latin, instead of (like other Romans of that era and before) writing it in Greek. He wasn’t the very first, but this is the only complete text of this sort that we have surviving from that era, and he was certainly among the early adopters of this sort of approach. Its style (though it has several) tends towards repetition of vocabulary, bluntness, a lack of special connectives showing the logical connection between different thoughts, and an occasional redundancy as he seems to have added to it and edited it over a long period of time.

It also includes a hymn to cabbages. How cool is that? But I’m not sure we’ll be getting to it.

( No cabbages, but a lot of text on farming, eh? )