Latin for losers
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.”
Mira quaedam vis
I’ve been spending a lot of my summer, happily but quite unexpectedly, in the late Nineteenth Century. This is partly related to a book I’m co-writing on the origins of archaeology in Swat, modern Pakistan, but also to a week I spent translating an issue of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Latin newsletter Alaudae (“Larks”).
My translation of issue 27 of Alaudae, from May 1893, is part of a project coordinated by Michael Lombardi-Nash to get all issues of Alaudae — there were 33 of them between 1889 and 1895, the year of Ulrichs’ death — translated into English in time for the bicentenary of Ulrichs’ birth in 2025. Ulrichs, a lawyer and journalist from Hanover, was a passionate promoter of the Latin language, but his greater significance lies elsewhere, as a fearless campaigner for the recognition and acceptance of same-sex attraction in writings and public statements that required, in nineteenth-century Germany, immense personal courage. This is a good account of Ulrich’s life and importance.
Toward the end of his life, disenchanted with his reception in Germany and with broader developments there, Ulrichs relocated to Italy, and settled in L’Aquila as the guest of Niccolò Persichetti, who shared his interest in Greco-Roman antiquity and was sympathetic to his campaigning in defence of homosexuality. It was from L’Aquila that Ulrichs published Alaudae, and in issue 27 at least this meant gathering together items in Latin that had been sent to him from all corners.
It makes for a wonderful mishmash of material. On a train into London I found myself translating the Latin oration for a graduation ceremony at Trinity College Dublin, where an honorary degree was being conferred on General Sir George Stuart White. An hour later I was looking at a statue of George Stuart White, a man I confess I’d never heard of before, as I hurried down Portland Place. Ulrichs is not very sympathetic to the military, it’s fair to say, having encountered too many militaristic Prussians back home, no doubt, and he spends more time humorously discussing the kilt worn by Major Napier of the 92nd (Gordon Highlanders), who was accompanying White to the ceremony. When I talk about vivid glimpses of the late Nineteenth Century, though, I don’t mean British generals so much as things like Ulrichs’ source for this chunk of Latin from Trinity Dublin. He was sent it by W. H. Brayden, the editor (who is later mentioned in Joyce’s Ulysses) of the “constitutional nationalist” newspaper the Freeman’s Journal—you are reading Latin in Alaudae, in other words, then suddenly deep in the complicated politics of pre-Easter-Rising Ireland.
Most of the issue I was translating was taken up by a celebration of the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s arrival as a teacher at the University of Padua in 1592, to which Padua had invited, in Latin of course, representatives from universities across Europe and in the United States, and received Latin responses back from a number of them. Ulrichs reproduces a few, and we’ll return later to the Latin letter from the University of Kazan on the Volga, an important centre for Classical studies, as my colleague Georgy Kantor has informed me. I’ll also come back later to a dance card sent to Ulrichs from a Society of Pharmacists in Brno, now the Czech Republic (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), written in Latin so as not to upset either Czech or German pharmacists in this bilingual city. It’s again odd to view this after an intervening century of Czech-German relations, though my immediate need was for someone to make sense of Latin terms for dances like Polonaisa, Polka Frankogallica and Saltatio germanica. My colleague Sophie Bocksberger, an expert on dance ancient and modern, stepped deftly into the breach. But for Ulrichs such an event embodied the motto that prefaces every issue of Alaudae, Latinae linguae mira quaedam vis inest ad jungendas nationes, “The Latin language has a remarkable power to bring nations together”—Latin, no one’s language and thus potentially everyone’s.
I volunteered for this project because Ulrichs deserves all the recognition he can get, and because Latin and late-nineteenth-century intellectual life are a couple of my favourite things. But I found here something far more varied and interesting than I anticipated, and closely engaged with a fascinating moment in European history. What holds it all together, though, are Ulrichs’ journalistic skills of editing and composition, and the light touch and humour with which he threads it all together. He skips out of Latin at the end of my issue to share a French joke that is of its time but still quite funny, explaining why the English use “Esq.” in addresses: we are rather chilly in manner, and it stands for Esquimau. It’s a great project that Michael is leading, in short, and it deserves success—deserves, dare I say it, a publisher who’ll put these remarkable documents from a formative time between hard covers. If anyone is interested, feel free to get in touch.
However, two tiny and trivial thoughts that occurred to me while translating, chosen because they brought me quite close to Ulrichs and to these other people speaking Latin to each other 130 years ago.
At the end of the elegant Latin letter from Kazan University to Padua, a copy of which Kazan had sent him, Ulrichs gives the names of the Rector of the University and the Secretary, K. Boporuuno and M. Solovieff. A conversation on Twitter ensued between myself and Georgy Kantor, who like me initially thought that Boporuuno must be a Finnish name, but then established that the Rector in 1893 was not K. Boporuuno but Konstantin Voroshilov. The explanation is clearly that Ulrichs read Voroshilov’s name in Cyrillic, Ворошилов, as if it was in Latin script. But it can’t be quite that simple because Ulrichs reads printed Cyrillic elsewhere in the document from Kazan (and elsewhere again in issue 27) quite happily, identifying Latin derivations in administrative Russian. What’s happened, then, I think, is that Ulrichs was presented with two signatures from Rector and Secretary. One of them, that of Secretary M. Solovieff, was in Latin characters, leading Ulrichs to assume that the Rector’s was too. I can easily imagine a handwritten К. Ворощилов being read as K. Boporuuno. As for Ulrichs, to err is human, and one can encounter the human in a silly mistake. Here I felt like I was looking over Ulrichs’ shoulder as he struggled to decipher someone’s handwriting, something I’ve done quite a bit of myself in the recent past.
I’m not at all sure about my second thought. But it takes us back to those pharmacists in Brno. I couldn’t initially make sense of an abbreviation that prefaces each half of the dance card, “Rp.”: Rp. Polonaisa. Saltat. german. Polka francogallica … Rp. Saltat. german. Polka mazur. IVta Quadrilla …, and I think Ulrichs was as foxed as I was. But then I had a thought. One piece of Latin that’s quite peculiar to pharmacists, or at least pharmacists in Central Europe, is “Rp./” short for “Recipe”, “Take…”, the instruction from the medical practitioner to the chemist/pharmacist as to what they should give the patient. (An English “recipe” was originally a medical prescription; and Rx or ℞ is the local equivalent of Rp./, I believe.) Here is a guide to writing medical prescriptions that I was delighted to find on the website of Masaryk University, Brno, with some important abbreviations on the first page, and a model prescription on p. 7. The invocatio, Rp., is what we’re concerned with:
“Take a Polonaise, Allemande, Polka Française…” instructs the pharmacists’ dance card. If I’m wrong about this, and it’s very likely, errare est humanum and I do it a lot. If I’m right, though, how absolutely lovely that is, pharmacists telling each other, whether they be Czech or German, that an evening of dancing together is just what the doctor ordered.
[01/04/2024. I’m on the final run-through of the issues of Alaudae, or maybe the penultimate or prepenultimate. But on this occasion I confirmed my impression that remarkable things are being achieved in eastern Europe as regards the digitisation of newspaper ephemera, and in the process confirmed this last hunch of mine from two years ago. There are two reports of this ball that I’ve tracked down, aside from Ulrichs’ own. One is in the German-language newspaper Mährisch-schlesischer Correspondent and provides the very pleasing information that the dance card at the ball was in “the form of a prescription”, while both the German newspaper and a Czech-language pharmaceutical journal Časopis českého lékárnictva tell us that a box containing the dance card and two vials of perfume, which was handed to all the ladies attending, was designed to look like a first-aid kit. I think that establishes the character of the fun that was had pretty clearly, and my reading of Rp. fits in pretty neatly. I hope very much I can work more on this intensely moving event. Every time I return to it it reveals new layers.]
My thanks to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs for telling me about about this, and to Michael Lombardi-Nash for introducing me to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.