by Jennifer Roberts
“I’ll be taking Spanish.”
My Sorbonne-educated mother greeted this news with an expression more commonly seen after announcements like “I’m pregnant” or “No, he’s not Jewish” (phrases sometimes combined in a single sentence).
Maman’s entire world seemed to collapse like a soufflé. Why would anyone choose Spanish over French? Sure, Spanish had a certain practical value, but without French I would never be able to appreciate Molière or Montaigne or Flaubert or Voltaire or Hugo or Camus or…. And not only that. What would I make of the work of Renoir, Monet, Cezanne, or Degas? And I could just forget about listening to the music of Debussy, Ravel….
Sacre bleu! What was the world coming to?
In vain did I point out that I had been enjoying Renoir and Monet and Debussy for some time (my mother had seen to that), and that there were, after all, such things as translations.
My mother was convinced that I was taking this bizarre path simply to spite her.
She was mostly right. It is true that I had been exposed to Spanish and come to love it when my father was working in Venezuela, but it was also true that I have always been disposed to take the opposite path from the one my mother had mapped out for me. Since my mother was a fairly sensible person, the results of this have often been pretty dreadful—I forbear to mention my first marriage*—but there you have it.
I did, however, have a bit of Spanish under my belt, with the result that while my classmates had to choose between Latin and Ancient History, I would be placing out of eighth grade Spanish and taking them both. I would then join my classmates in ninth grade Spanish.
You see where this is going. That was 1959. Now, 67 years later, my job consists primarily of teaching…. You got it. Latin and Ancient History.
I don’t mean to suggest that opting for Spanish over French doomed me to study antiquity for the rest of my life. Au contraire: there was a second event, quite possibly a divine intervention. I am not great at math, but my grandfather was a mathematician, and math always interested me enormously. Having completed differential calculus by the skin of my teeth in high school, therefore, I decided to enroll in integral calculus the first semester of college. As I had played several instruments, moreover (albeit none of them very well), I thought I would flourish in Harmony. Well, I failed the first calculus exam with a 25, but no worries; so did a few others, so the instructor offered a make-up exam. Failed that one with a 16. And in the lunchroom I overhead a young woman saying, “You’ll never believe the stupid questions this girl asked in my harmony class.” Yup, they were my questions.
Suddenly I was in dire need of a class that met M W F morning. So I headed to the administration building for a tête à tête with the dean.
“I see you had a couple of years of Latin in high school,” she said. “Cicero’s Letters meets M W F at 10….”
And voilà, I became a Classics major.
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*Footnote:
The words “I forbear to mention” remind me of one of the joys of teaching Latin, namely teaching students about the rhetorical art of praeteritio, by which a speaker calls attention to a subject by claiming to pass over it. Cicero against Clodius, 56 BC: “I forbear to mention that he sleeps with his sister.” Latin has its uses.
A wisecracking grandmother and a native New Yorker who has taught in both Texas and Massachusetts, Jennifer Roberts is currently Distinguished Professor of Classics and History at the City University of New York and the author of several books on Greece.
