As a teacher, I am conscious of the importance of representation in literature. In an effort to find women represented in Latin, I bought a text called A Roman Women Reader, edited by Sheila K. Dickinson and Judith P. Hallet, looking for the possibility of Latin written by women. It contains only a few lines by women, the rest are pieces written by men about women. While this does hold a certain value, in this day and age it seems like not enough. The only ancient woman writer that I was familiar with growing up was Sappho, and she was Greek. I didn’t learn about Aspacia, or any of the other ancient women who also wrote until my Ph.D. program. Because an education in classical languages sticks pretty closely to the world of antiquity, I didn’t truly learn much about the legacy of Latin in the Middle Ages, Medieval period, and the Victorian era until I started doing research for my dissertation. I mean, I knew that people still wrote in Latin, but I never bothered to find that Latin or research anything more than that. I also knew that many of my Latin teachers have been women, and I knew that women have long been involved in classical languages, but where were they?
I want to emphasize the idea of reading. Reading and translation are not the same thing, although they are often equated in the process of learning Latin because we often teach students that the only way to understand a Latin text is to put it into English (or some other language). The translator Sarah Ruden identifies women’s inability “to read by sight” as “the result of a woman’s more truncated classical education” (Balmer, 54). Women learned ancient languages in order to translate them, learned them later in life, or their education stopped completely when they became a certain age, in order to marry and run their own households, rarely had they made careers out of these languages.
In the last year or so, I’ve acquired a few Latin novellas, written for students in levels 1-3 of Latin, many of which have been written by women in the last two years, many of whom are Latin teachers themselves. Just as popular novels retell stories of ancient myths (Madeline Miller’s Circe and The Song of Achilles, Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships, and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, to name a few) so too do these novellas. They retell the myths from the women’s points of view, and so they not only represent the voices and stories of female characters in Latin, but they also represent what women can do with Latin now. In reading Ovid and Vergil, I found women’s silence, stories where I had to imagine women’s voices and responses, and fill in my own. Even their silence marks their presence in these stories. Some of them do get to tell their own stories, just not in the same way as men (weaving is one example). I stuck with Latin in part because I care about retellings, about mining the ancient texts for myths and characters that can be brought forward, given a platform and a chance to speak for themselves, through me. What I have found in these novellas is representation – not just stories about rape and sexual violence, not just misogyny, but language that represents my own lived experiences, characters that I can relate to, strong young women and even LGBT characters. These Latin novellas serve a pedagogical purpose: they are something for students to read, texts that allow students to read twenty, thirty pages of Latin at a time, what students really need to do to prepare to truly read Latin texts. Reading easy Latin prepares you for the word order and sentence structures, grammatical constructions, and just gets your mind in the practice of using context clues to figure out meaning rather than relying on translation.
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“Me non vidit, sed me amavit,” (“She did not see me, but she loved me,” Virgo Ardens, 43). Here, Iphis knows that she has a desire for Ianthe, another girl, and she knows that her mother does not know this and can never know this. A part of the coming out experience is this longing to be fully seen by everyone around you, particularly those you are close to and love, to be loved for who you are to the fullest.
“Contra odium ad feminas,” (“Against hatred towards women,” Hannah et Servilia). Latin texts by men are riddled with misogyny, because that was just life in antiquity, but finding ways to put those ideas into Latin has been nearly impossible for me. Of course as a Latinist and as a teacher and as a woman, I want to fight against, combat, hatred towards women in ways that resonate with my students’ lived experiences and my own. A story that articulates some of these problems with the ancient world and draw connections to our own world is important.
“Cucurri sed monstrum deus erat. Fugi sed crudele monstrum me vi compressit,” (“I ran but the monster was a god. I fled but the cruel monster raped me,” Medusa: Femina Potens et Fortis, 45). Vanderpool gives instruction on how to read this novella, a content warning for Chapter IX to skip if readers don’t want to read about rape. This is another way that women are exposing the Latin terminology for rape, so that when students of Latin approach the stories in Ovid and Vergil, they might see those experiences for what they are.
These short passages stayed with me long after I read these novellas, as simple as they are. Even in their simplicity, they capture experiences that are familiar (probably not only to me) and put them into the target language. They connect my own lived experiences to a language that, at first glance, has very little in common with me and my lived experiences.
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I think about young women Latinists today who have all of this Latin that they can truly read, written by women, retelling myths from women’s perspectives, in Latin. In fact, young women might find representation here as they read about women who are brave and strong and who fight against hatred towards women and who are leaders. Some people might think that Latin is dead, this is another kind of proof to me that the language is far from dead, and in fact, is still growing.
Sources
Balmer, Josephine. Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry. Oxford UP, 2013.
Cunning, Rachel Beth. Virgo Ardens: A Latin Novella. Bombax Press, 2021.
Ma, Xinran. Hannah et Servilia: A Latin Novella. 2021.
Olimpi, Andrew. Clodia: Fabula Criminalis. Comprehensible Classics Press, 2021.
Vanderpool, Emma. Elissa Dux Femina Facti. 2020.
—. Medusa: Femina Potens et Fortis. 2020.
Alexandra Sladky 