ABSTRACT
The world is full, and used to be much fuller, of people who think that the human race suffers from a surfeit of Latin grammar, people to whom there can be nothing more perverse than the pursuit of yet more knowledge about the subject. For more than two millennia, indeed, teaching of the classical languages has involved such a large dose of grammar that manyprobably most-students never really come to appreciate what is being said in the text, let alone how it is being said, because their attention is taken up with subjunctives, ablative absolutes, concessive clauses and verbs of fear and caution. Many teachers of Latin and of other languages nowadays prefer methods that offer the student more text and less grammar, putting up with a certain amount of inexactitude in order to get closer to the wide experience of reading that alone can produce familiarity with the language. By now many people taught with these methods have graduated into the world of teaching (as, indeed, it was to be hoped that they would), and their grasp of grammar is not as firm as their teachers’ was. Still worse, the pressure to publish in modern universities leaves the professional classicist much less time to read, so that few classicists feel as comfortable with the ancient languages as their teachers (much less their teachers’ teachers) did; and even when we read,
as possible. If lexicology is the area of classics where childlike trust is most to be found, grammar is the area where fatigue and incuriosity are most likely to prevent questions from being asked at all. Students have generally learned to use a dictionary before reaching the university, and its organization is clear and offers few problems: the extra difficulties posed by the Greek augment and the uncertainties of Latin spelling are occasionally frustrating but not frightening. Grammar books, on the other hand, are a genre that the modern student has not encountered before, and people often continue to look up grammatical points in their first-year primer, through which they thumb desperately, with a vague memory of where the item they are seeking stood on the page.
