Carpe diem Put a little Latin in your life

NOT only does Latin train the mind; it also polishes the manners. So you might drink from the tone of rueful apology that Harry Mount sometimes adopts in "Carpe Diem," his chatty Latin primer: "The annoying thing is that there's no real way round needing to know adjectives," he writes, before hitting the reader with some "pretty relentless" tables of declensions. It's hard to imagine anyone ambivalent about adjectives tackling a book on Latin, but if one does, he'll be reassured. Books for the Latin hobbyist, whether serious (like Jon R. Stone's "Latin for the Illiterati") or jocular (like Henry Beard's "X-Treme Latin"), tend to be little more than lists of pre-fab phrases. (Me dedo! Quaeso, noli iacere tela ballista!: "I surrender! Please do not fire your catapult!") "Carpe Diem," on the other hand, focuses on the language's raw materials, especially the noun and verb endings that correspond to the various grammatical roles a word can play. Translating a Latin sentence is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, and despite Mount's blithe assurance that would-be armchair Latinists "don't have to work that hard," you can't begin to see how the pieces fit together until you've done a fair amount of rote memorization. Mount promises to whisk the reader on "a pleasurable breeze through the main principles of Latin," yet he claims that if you "take in what follows ... you should be able to negotiate all Latin sentences." Perhaps, but Mount makes some odd omissions in his pursuit of simplicity. For example, every Latin vowel comes in two sizes, long and short, and the same letter is used for both. Knowing the difference is important, particularly in poetry. Often the only distinction between two forms of a word is the length of a single vowel. Grammar books typically use "long marks" to indicate which is which; "Carpe Diem" doesn't. Why memorize words without long marks at first, only to relearn them later? After all, as Mount himself says, "There's not really much point in doing Latin unless you do it properly and learn it from its first principles." Mount cushions his lessons with a hodgepodge of anecdotes, puns ("Latin's tense future," goes the title of his conclusion), historical trivia, quotations from "Monty Python" and other diversions. Some of them are amusing and even useful. His field guide to the different "orders," or styles, of classical columns illuminates an inheritance from ancient architecture that will be both familiar and mysterious to most readers. But even the padding comes with filler, as when he rounds out his sketch of Constantine I with the complete lyrics to the novelty song "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)." A journalist who studied classics at Oxford, Mount has also worked as a Latin tutor. It shows in his fondness for the sort of jaunty irreverence that Latin teachers, faced with students who snicker at Roman solemnity, develop as a defensive measure. ("Let's eat caviar!" was my first Latin instructor's very effective mnemonic for the vowels of the subjunctive.) Tiberius, Mount tells us, "spent the last decade of his life in his clifftop palace ... occasionally hurling enemies into the sea," and his goofy example sentences feature members of the British royal family, "Humphreius Bogartus" and even "Mittus Romnus." The silliness is partly tactical, an attempt to counter Latin's rap as a fusty "relic to be worshiped." Mount's pragmatism springs from an infectious love for the language whose "power and beauty," refreshingly, he touts above any practical benefit. He works hard to convert readers to the Latinist cause, and in the end, "Carpe Diem" makes a better recruiting pamphlet than textbook. Mount cushions his lessons with anecdotes, puns, trivia, 'Monty Python' quotations and other diversions. Timothy Farrington is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.