Before It Was a Course

Every name in Humane Letters was chosen for what it meant before it meant a course. A family that asks what the course is will learn a good deal from the words alone.

Humane letters

At Oxford, the course in Greek and Latin literature, ancient history and philosophy has long been called Literae Humaniores, the more humane letters. The idea is older than the university. When the Roman writer Aulus Gellius explained the word humanitas, he insisted that those who spoke Latin well did not mean kindness by it. They meant what the Greeks called paideia: education in the good arts, the learning that makes a person more fully human. Litterae meant the letters of the alphabet and everything written in them. Humane letters, then, are the reading that forms a person.

Volume

Humane Letters comes in five Volumes. A Roman book was a volumen, a roll, from volvere, to turn or roll. You read it by unrolling it with one hand and rolling it up with the other, as the young reader on a Roman tomb near Trier is doing above.

Explication

Each session opens with a poem, explicated. Explicare means to unfold. When a medieval scribe finished copying a book, he often wrote explicit at the end: the roll is unrolled. To explicate a poem is to open it all the way.

Seminar

The center of each session is the Seminar. A seminarium was a seed bed, the plot where young plants were raised before they were set out in the field. I spent my own school years in a minor seminary, where Latin was less a subject than the weather, and I have never been able to hear the word without its first meaning: a place where something is planted and given time.

Commonplace

Fellows keep a commonplace book. Locus communis translates the Greek koinos topos, a common place: a heading under which an orator stored arguments he meant to use again. John Locke kept one, and published his method for indexing it. Ours lives in Notion. The idea is two thousand years old.

Imitatio

Every session includes Imitatio, the composition of sentences after the masters. The Romans did not think imitation was the opposite of originality. They thought it was the road there. Quintilian, who trained Rome’s orators, wrote that there can be no doubt a great part of art lies in imitation.

Viva and Matriculation

Admission ends with a Viva, from viva voce, with the living voice: a conversation about a poem, not an examination on paper. Those admitted matriculate, from matricula, a list or register. To matriculate is simply to have your name written in the roll.

One word in the course is not Latin. Fellow comes to English from Old Norse félagi, a partner, literally one who lays down money in a shared venture. I kept it for that reason. A Fellow is someone who puts something in.

Roots

Each session closes with Roots, the Latin and Greek beneath the week’s words. This essay has been, I suppose, a session of Roots. None of it is decoration. A student who knows that to explicate is to unfold reads a poem differently, and that is the argument of Humane Letters in a single word.

Humane Letters, Volume I, begins on November 21 and 22, for students in grades 9 to 12. Read how admission works, or see the course page.