- cross-posted to:
- linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works
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Explanation: The image is from a famous (if not entirely accurate) 19th century painting depicting the Roman conspirator Catiline (pictured) being harangued by the politician and famed orator Cicero.
Catiline was accused (almost certainly correctly) of attempting to overthrow the Roman Republic… but Cicero’s oratory is infamous amongst Latin students for taking forever to place the verb and stop filling up space with nested statements. DRAMATIC EFFECT
If Cicero doesn’t reach the damn verb in the next 15 minutes, Catiline’s coup is perfectly legal!
It’s the only way Roman law could stop Cicero from going on indefinitely. 😔
there’s a scene from a Samuel Beckett play - one of my favorites but definitely for the hard-core Beckett fan - in which two administrators are examinaning testimonials from a man’s life while he stands on a window ledge working out whether he should jump to his death or not. In it they interview someone he knows and leads to one of the administrators yelling “WHERES THE VERB?!?!!” which in a better world I could post as a Relatable Meme
High school latin ptsd flashbacks.
I got curious what that would even sound like and tried to look it up. Is it the First of the four Catilinarian Orations?
That would be it!
Okay then, this is wild
And yet…
Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?
Imagine being the most boring guy in the Republic and still being remembered for this kind of sentences.
Cicero certainly has some damn good lines! I just wouldn’t want to read an entire oratory in the original Latin.
Considering that the Romans were intensely aware of the spoken rhythm of rhetoric, it may also be just that we are a less oral culture than the Romans were.
