Rare Creature

I am a rare creature, a former state school pupil who studied Latin. I should probably have done something more sensible and, dare I say it, useful, like German. However, the romance, the brutality and the logic of Latin appealed to me (read into that what you will!).

Natalie Haynes expressed the appeal of Classics beautifully in The Times this morning: “I ran straight into the welcoming folds of A-level Latin and Greek, where I was reasonably certain to be reading about people killing their mothers (Electra), embarking on an elephantine alpine excursion (Livy XXI) or committing big, messy suicide (all classical literature).”

One beautiful day in early spring, in a little town of no consequence except to those fortunate enough to have lived in it, we began translating Orpheus and Eurydice. To this day, the description of Hades and the Underworld fills my head as I trot down the steps into the tube. “Then Orpheus held a torch as he entered a pitch-black region where horrible sounds echoed through a cavernous landscape, and buried ghosts and phantom dwellers floated by.” One question that occupies my thoughts as I stand, phantom-like, in the train is whether there were any advertisements for hair loss treatments in the Underworld? Ixion’s Wheel strikes me as prime advertising space.