Latin: Or the Empire of a Sign. (Books: defensor linguae).

Francoise Waquet Latin: Or the Empire of a Sign. Verso, 346 pages, $30

At the Jesuit high school in Manhattan that I attended, my freshman year, 1985, was the first in which Latin was no longer the language required for the first two years. Father Headmaster wrote to explain that the school nevertheless still strongly encouraged its young charges to take Latin, in keeping with Jesuit tradition and as an introduction to Western culture. Most of the entering class followed his advice, and we immersed ourselves, unselfconsciously for middle-class adolescents, in the campaigns of Caesar and the conjugations of irregular verbs. Without knowing exactly why, we had a sense that Latin still had something significant to say to us. Since that time, the situation has changed dramatically; such encouraging letters are no longer written, and Latin is much less emphasized.

We did not know then that we were part of a long intellectual tradition, now almost extinct, that had placed Latin at its center. Francoise Waquet, director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, traces this tradition, as well as the possibilities of its revival, in her richly researched and delightful Latin: Or the Empire of a Sign. The subtitle should not frighten anyone concerned with the fate of "the old language" as the translation nicely puts it. Rather than a nod to chic French theory, Latin as the "empire of a sign" echoes the old French reactionary (and most definitely unchic) Joseph de Maistre, who defended Latin as the "signe europeen" in his 1819 book On the Pope.

Waquet focuses on the Latin of the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, when its fate as a "dead language" was sealed. While Latin had been the common language of Europe since the Middle Ages, its role changed after the Renaissance and Reformation. On the one hand, its use as a common spoken tongue faded almost into insignificance; on the other, Latin expanded its cultural and intellectual place in both Catholic and Protestant Europe.

Waquet describes for us "a unitary intellectual Europe in which, until a relatively recent date, learning was expressed in Latin." And not only in science or literature, which were "nothing ... compared to the enduring predominance of the old language in the schools and the Church: here childhood memories took over, and there came back to me the memory of a time--not so very long ago--when Latin was a part of people's lives." The influence of Latinitas extended from the Old World into the New. Most of the founders (but not all--the physician Benjamin Rush strongly opposed Latin education) thought the classical languages were essential to an informed citizenry, and Roman examples and imagery are staples of early American political culture. In institutions such as the Boston Latin School, the ideals of the Latin educational tradition were continued in America.

The watershed occurred, not surprisingly, in the 1960S. By the end of that decade, Latin was simply no longer considered valuable to Western intellectual life. Not because Latin or its study was out-of-date (of course, it had long since been replaced by the vernaculars), rather, "Latin disappeared because it no longer meant anything to the contemporary world." To the revolutionaries in those heady days, Latin represented all that needed to be overthrown: religion, history, tradition, a system of cultural symbols derided for their "ethnocentric" and "hierarchical" foundations. Echoing arguments used by Rush two centuries earlier, they simply saw no use for Latin. Almost without resistance, the language of Europe disappeared.

Waquet examines Latinity from a variety of historical, literary, and academic sources. The first part, "The European Sign," explores the "familiar world" Latin created. Drawing on Eamon Duffy's work on pre-Reformation England as well as historical research derived from Brittany and elsewhere, Waquet concludes that though formally unknown to the majority of the populace, Latin nevertheless was part of their quotidian lives. The book sheds light on an aspect of the history of the language that is almost incomprehensible in our ironic, ...