We’re often asked these days to think about the role of Classics in Empire, the ways in which the classical educations and general conditioning enjoyed by many colonial officials shaped their perceptions and practice. I’ve written about such things myself, here for instance, and here, and here. But studying Europe in the 19th century, as I’ve been spending a lot of time doing this last year, has alerted me to something like the direct opposite. Step away from the colonial powers of Western Europe, as Mateusz Stróżyński has explained of Polish national self-expression, and the role of Latin in particular can get a bit more complicated.

In what follows I offer some examples of Latin deployed to resist imperial power. I’ve encountered them in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Latin-language newspaper Alaudae (1889-95), and it’s fair to say that, even though it is an explicit aim of Alaudae to promote Latin as a language that can overcome differences and inequalities between the peoples of Europe, he sometimes seems not to appreciate the full implications of what he is describing.

It would certainly have been grist to Ulrichs’ mill if he had appreciated what he was looking at. There’s a powerful moment in Issue 23 of Alaudae, from April 1892, where Ulrichs has reproduced the conclusion of a Latin oration delivered by Arthur Palmer marking the conferment of an honorary degree (from Trinity College Dublin) on Arthur Balfour, Chief Secretary for Ireland and later PM. The first part of the speech had featured in an earlier issue back in March 1891, just a month after the actual ceremony. Ulrichs’ source for the event was the Freeman’s Journal, a leading Dublin newspaper edited by William H Brayden, a regular correspondent of Ulrichs who is later spotted in the Aeolus chapter of Ulysses. Freeman’s Journal deployed its powerful voice in support of Home Rule, a kind of qualified independence for Ireland vigorously opposed by Balfour.

The conclusion of the Journal‘s account follows Balfour out of the gates of Trinity, a bastion of Unionism, and onto the streets of Dublin. Here are Ulrichs’ Latin version and a translation, at the end of which Ulrichs editorialises interestingly. By way of explanation: Charles Stewart Parnell had been the leading proponent of Home Rule, but was in fact at the time of the Journal‘s report already caught up in a scandal that would undermine his dominance of nationalist politics. By the time of Alaudae 23 he was dead at 45. Dublin Castle, meanwhile, just a couple of hundred yards up Dame St. from Trinity College, was the seat of British administration in Ireland:

“With the conclusion of the ceremony, Balfour left the University premises in a carriage to return to Dublin Castle, accompanied by a great throng of students. Seeing this, passers-by stopped and began to shout ‘Long live Parnell’!

We have in front of us the newspaper Freeman’s Journal, dated Dublin, Feb. 11, 1891, which describes these events and presents the whole speech in Latin, without translation.

Thus has Latin served the ruling party. Who knows whether tomorrow it may be destined to serve those who struggle and toil? Why indeed should honours not be conferred in this universal tongue upon those also who earn them in the national cause of the Irish people?”

Why indeed not? Vivat Parnell certainly has a ring to it. For Ulrichs Latin is a language that belongs to no one, and thus can as well celebrate the underdog as the powerful. In two moments at least in Alaudae we can see Latin doing pretty much that, I think, even if Ulrichs doesn’t quite realise it.

The first is some information Ulrichs has received from Istanbul, and the recollection it provokes of two medical students he had met during his residence in Würzburg, thus 1867-70:

“Not even in Constantinople is the Latin language spurned. In a high school in the Greek suburb of Pera, whose headmaster is Ch. Hadjichristou, Esq., it is taught by two masters. And years ago in Würzburg I knew two young men studying medicine there originating from Asia Minor, Greek speakers who had been taught Latin. “I have read,” said one of them, “beta of the Aeneid” (Book 2 of the Virgilian poem). Moreover, I remember they said, “We are Romi”. (Romii, that is, ‘We are Romans’.) They declared themselves to be Romans, not Hellenes, Romans of the eastern branch, descendants of those Romans who fought under the Comneni and the last of the Palaeologi.”

Ulrichs is talking about Greeks within the Ottoman Empire, whose identity was very much bound up with the continuation of the Roman Empire in East until the Ottoman capture of Constantinople/Istanbul in 1453. Maintaining that Roman identity even extended to learning the Latin language and reading Virgil’s epic of the foundation of Rome. What is this if not a minority community resisting the majority imperial culture by recourse to the Latin language?

My second example is from another empire to the north. Ulrichs has received a communication concerning a professor at the Universität Dorpat, a German-language institution in what is now Tartu, Estonia, at this stage well within the borders of the Russian Empire:

“At the Universität Dorpat Prof. Hoerschelmann has been teaching several subjects in Latin since 1892. Others he does still continue to teach in German; but he has decided, from Jan. 1, 1895, to deliver all of them in Latin. (So I was informed by letter on Dec. 9, 1894, in German.)”

In fact neither Wilhelm Hoerschelmann, a professor of Latin and Greek, nor Ulrichs would survive 1895. Ulrichs I think understands Hoerschelmann’s decision to teach in Latin as reflecting a recognition on the professor’s part of Ulrichs’ ideal of Latin as a universal language. But a more likely explanation is that a German-language university like Dorpat, which dispatched Lutheran pastors and well-educated German administrators across the Russian Empire, was at this point in history under pressure to Russify, a policy pursued by the last two Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II (who assumed the throne in November 1894). What does a German-speaking classical philologist do in these circumstances? To avoid teaching in Russian, he adopts a language to which the authorities cannot object (Ulrichs provides evidence elsewhere of the high status Latin could claim in Imperial Russia) and which is neither German nor the demanded alternative. Again, it seems, a beleaguered minority reaches for Latin to defend its identity.

There are other moments in Alaudae comparable to this, among them my favourite passage in the whole run of issues, and almost the first bit I translated, the account of the pharmacists’ ball in Brno (Brünn), now in the Czech Republic but then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where an awkward choice between Czech and German—and the default option was presumably German—was sidestepped by composing the dance card entirely in Latin. It is a beautiful, and in retrospect deeply poignant, anecdote. I wrote about it back here, at the very start of my involvement with Ulrichs.

I owe to Kresho Vuković my familiarity with Lav Subaric, “National identities and the Latin language in Hungary and Croatia: Language conflicts, 1784-1848”, in Th. D’haen, I. Goerlandt & R. D. Sell (eds.), Major versus Minor? – Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World (2015), pp. 53-66. Let me just quote part of Subaric’s summary of his fascinating account of developments within the Austro-Hungarian Empire:

“Confronted with the threat of the imperial politics of Germanization under Joseph II, the elite of the lands of the crown of St. Stephen [roughly Hungary and Croatia], united in their Hungarian identity, reacted by insisting on the use of Latin. After the threat was removed, the emerging Magyar identity saw Latin as a problem and tried to replace it with the national language. Other inhabitants of Hungary and Croatia, faced with the Magyar aspirations, initially held on to Latin, but the Croatian national movement soon saw Latin as a problem and tried to abolish it. Finally, inside Croatia, those who opposed the new national language saw Latin as a safeguard of their political identity.”

I did suggest that the historical role of Latin is complicated. But Subaric’s next observation is hard to dispute: “The dual role of Latin in this series of language conflicts, and especially its role as a defence for the national identity, has faded from collective memory.”