In Defense of Latin
&gt; <i>When we study Latin, we must study it for one fundamental reason: because it is the language of a civilization; because the Western world was created on its back.</i><p>I think Greek fits this bill much better.  Archimedes spoke Greek; Marcellus spoke Latin.  Plato and the scholarchs spoke Greek; Sulla, who burned the Academy, spoke Latin.  Euclid, Ptolemy, Chyrippus, and Eratosthenes spoke Greek.  The intellectual achievements of the Romans were, by contrast, as pitiful as their military conquests were amazing.  Even the Roman Empire eventually switched to Greek, which is why the oldest surviving copies of many Christian texts are in Greek, not Latin.  (Perhaps the originals were even written in Greek.)  When the lost knowledge of the ancient philosophers was translated from Arabic into a Western language, that language was, in large part, Greek; Μανουήλ Βρυέννιος and Θεόδωρος Μετοχίτης, to which we can trace the mathematical genealogy of Gauss and Euler, lived in Constantinople (the capital of the Roman Empire) and spoke Greek.<p>And of course if we&#x27;re interested in <i>fecundity</i><p>&gt; <i>Dante would never have composed his </i>Divine Comedy <i>without the model of the </i>Aeneid, <i>nor Milton his </i>Paradise Lost<p>obviously the Greek Homer sang in is considerably more fecund, because the <i>Aeneid</i> is explicitly a fanfic of the <i>Iliad</i>; and Livy was explicitly imitating Herodotus, and Cicero the Athenian rhetors.<p>More generally, the Renaissance Gardini wishes to flatter owes at least as much <i>directly</i> to Greek texts, both from ancient Athens and from Byzantium, as it does to Latin texts.  Gardini&#x27;s attribution of the Renaissance to a revival of exclusively <i>Latin</i> culture is simply wrong.  His complete omission of the importance of Classical Greek influence in the Renaissance is so glaring as to call his integrity into question.<p>So why, then, was Latin an important academic language 400 years after Μανουήλ Βρυέννιος?  Because of the Roman Catholic Church, which was the only refuge of learning remaining in the violent, brutal, ignorant society of medieval Western Europe until the Reformation; and because, after the fall of the Caliphate, the Islamic world, which had been such a light of knowledge throughout that darkest of ages, also succumbed to persecution of scholars and extinguishment of wisdom.  China and India had their own remarkable advancements, but they were too far away to correspond much with European scholars.<p>So Latin filled the role in Europe that Classical Chinese filled throughout the East, being the language of scholarship and culture, permitting the invisible college to transcend the pathetic national borders of the petty thugs that call themselves princes and nobles.  The great universities of Europe mostly arose as seminaries, and for centuries all theses were published in Latin.  This continued to some extent up to the 20th century: a couple of months ago, I was reading an anthropology paper published around 1910 about folktales of the Native American Ute tribe, and at the point where Coyote and Lizard start having sex, the paper abruptly switches from English to Latin for a couple of pages, perhaps to evade the Comstock Act prohibition on distributing obscene materials through the mails.<p>I think studying Latin is worthwhile in order to understand that history, and there&#x27;s a lot of it.  But it&#x27;s not because Western Civilization was built by Rome; on the contrary, Western Civilization barely survived being conquered by Rome, largely thanks to the Muslims.