buy Ivermectin scabies online Eleven years ago, I attended my first Rusticatio, a week-long Latin immersion experience run by an organization called SALVI that takes place in Bushrod Washington’s (grand-nephew of the pater patriae) old mansion in West Virginia. I thought it made a fascinating story: there was a subculture of Latin speakers in West Virginia? For real? I wrote an article about it, but had no luck shopping it around. Some years later, the Paideia Institute started a new online Classics journal, Eidolon, designed as “another way to write about the Classics.” I submitted my article to them, and they published it as “The Latin Speakers of West Virginia.” It became one of the most-read articles on the site for 2015. It was at Rusticatio that I met David Morgan, whose passing inspired “In Paradisum David Morgan,” a piece I still cannot read today without tears.
Vierzon A year later, when the New Criterion asked the Paideia Institute for an article about Fr. Reginald Foster, Jason Pedicone suggested I write it. I took up the task with some trepidation: Reginaldus is a good friend of mine, and he and I have shared two decades’ worth of every kind of experience. He is a kind of father-figure for me, and writing about him is complex. But I submitted an article and they took it, publishing “The Vatican’s Latinist” in February 2017. It became the magazine’s most-read piece in 2017 and far and away the most popular thing I’ve ever written.
It was around that time I realized just how lucky I have been with regard to the Classics. I have had so many wonderful experiences, met so many incredible people, and read so many marvellous things, as a result of my education in Latin and Greek. There are many, many stories to tell, and I’ve been close enough to many of them to write about them intelligently. Later that summer I attended the conference of the Academia Latinitati Fovendae in Kentucky, and wrote about it, again for the New Criterion. They published it as “Global Latinists,” and again it became one of their more popular pieces that year.
This month I add two more pieces to this list. The Paideia Institute asked me to write a piece about a new Latin course offered at Princeton University, LAT 110, which was taught entirely in Latin. Just a few years ago, attempting such a thing would have been considered outre at at place like Princeton. Initiatives like this really have a chance to energize an entire new generation of Classicists – I’ve seen it my entire life – and I give Princeton tremendous credit for going out on a limb and doing it. I went down to Princeton and wrote the article, which Paideia just published as “The Past Speaks.” The article was held up for several months because Jason Pedicone decided that the article really needed video accompaniment. The result really is splendid, and the video has gone viral, with more than 21,000 views in its first day online.
Two years ago I heard about Rafael Landivar, an 18th century Guatemalan Latin poet hailed as “the American Virgil.” I tried to commission a friend who had visited Guatemala and seen his tomb to write about him for the journal I now edit for Paideia, In Medias Res (formed when Paideia and Eidolon parted ways). The friend was not excited by the prospect, and so I just bought a plane ticket and went down to Guatemala, giving myself one of the most interesting vacations of my life, and producing this month’s lead feature in the New Criterion, “In Search of the American Virgil.”
There really is so much more to be said. I’ve had in mind to do profiles of several of the other remarkable Latinists I’ve met: Terence Tunberg, Milena Minkova, Luigi Miraglia, Nancy Llewellyn. I’d love to write about my experiences teaching Latin in South Africa, and travel to Australia (where SALVI has started holding Rusticationes) and Brazil (which has been trying to get a Rusticatio) and China (where, I hear, interest in the Classics is growing). And I have much, much more to say about Reginaldus. But what I have so far is a good beginning.
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