Found in Antiquity

We need to be allowed to talk about Latinitas in the context of Latin teaching. What follows is a 7,000 word explanation why. In the course of this essay we will explore the effects of mandating a veneer of public positivity about CI Latin novellas and why this is problematic. As a community we need to be able to face uncomfortable discussions and question whether our current practices are helping or harming fellow teachers.

As a very brief definition, ‘Latinitas’ is the quality of Latin writing which reflects the character of the Latin language. Just like in any language, it is possible to write a grammatically correct sentence which is awkward or unnatural sounding. In Latin discussion, unidiomatic phrasing might be called ‘bad Latinitas’, while idiomatic word choices might be called ‘good Latinitas’. I will unpack the fuzziness of defining Latinitas and critique the moral overtones of these labels later in the essay, but this very rough definition is a reasonable place to start.

I’ve been intending to write this essay for several years but stopped many times as my views on the topic have changed considerably. Now I feel that I cannot continue to stay silent about the issue due to the wider harms it is causing our community.

This essay is motivated by a long term trend, not strictly written in response to a recent incident in which a commenter was banned from the Latin Teacher Idea Exchange Facebook group after posting comments on this topic.

An earlier version of this essay contained de-identified screenshots and quotes from the incident. I hadn’t realised until after posting that this violated the community rules of the LTIE facebook group, but once I was notified, I took the post down and have now edited out all screenshots and direct quotes.

I mentioned this incident because some people say they have never seen an example of community rules being invoked to silence discussion of language quality in published teaching materials. This is a single instance of a broader and usually more well-hidden phenomenon.

A person whom I renamed ‘Red’ posted three comments about novellas in response to an unrelated thread about AI-written Latin materials. This commenter claimed that Latin novellas had been of highly questionable to simply low quality (paraphrasing, since direct quotes are banned – but this commenter did not use any profanity to describe Latin novellas, nor did he name any specific novella or author). Other commenters in the thread then escalated the tension, such as by labelling Red’s opinion as crap. In Red’ third comment he denied his opinion was crap, and said that the person who had called him that did so because he was unable to judge novella quality.

A moderator then posted a comment saying they had now banned Red from the LTIE facebook group. When I asked for clarification in that thread whether he was banned specifically for the three comments, the reply was that Red’s comments had violated the group rules of maintaining a protected space and being kind and courteous, which would normally simply result in a reminder of rules, but in this instance Red had been banned for a larger pattern of behaviour beyond these three comments. Nothing was said about the comment calling Red’s opinion crap; using the crap-word was not publicly said to be a violation of a kind and courteous space. (However, giving moderators the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the commenter was privately messaged a reminder to be kind and courteous next time – I would not know.)

I do not have any dispute with moderators making decisions to ban someone in any particular instance, since moderators have information about the wider situation which I do not and should not have. Red was also derailing the original post. When I say that this issue is harmful, I am not talking about harm done specifically to Red, but harm done to the community as a whole, including the authors of novellas.

My problem is with the manner in which the emotions in this thread were allowed and encouraged to escalate, and what that suggests about our community. Red did not actually say ‘Latinitas’, ‘Latin style’, ‘word choice’, ‘editing’ or ‘idiom’ when he spoke of low or bad quality in novellas. He left it vague. But even saying that novellas were of bad quality while mentioning no specific authors or books was enough to make the community react very strongly, sending a message that the community believes it’s okay to say the equivalent of ‘this is crap’ in response to someone saying the equivalent of ‘these are bad quality’, but not okay to say the equivalent of ‘these are bad quality’ when one refers to novellas.

What surprised me most about this incident is that it happened on the Latin Teacher Idea Exchange, not on one of the CI-based Latin teacher facebook groups. The LTIE is larger and regularly posts a more diverse set of views about pedagogy than the more specialised CI Latin facebook groups – you will find people sharing grammar translation resources as often as CI resources. It should be expected that people have differing views about the quality of pedagogical resources, even simply from the fact that not everyone shares the same pedagogical frameworks. But novellas, it seemed, were to be considered immune to criticism.

This is part of the worrying trend I’ve been noticing, now not just in CI Latin circles, but even in general Latin teacher circles: namely, you are not allowed to put forward the opinion that Latin novellas are ‘bad’. You are not allowed to write a public comment that you think you found a specific mistake in a Latin novella, or that you think a novella has multiple errors per page, or even just that novellas in general have errors. Instead, a series of arguments are enlisted to silence public criticism.

In this essay I aim to examine and refute the arguments used to silence criticism and discussion.

What I will not be refuting is any argument that already starts with the proposition that the Latinitas of novellas diverges from classical idiom. For example, it could be argued that pedagogical materials do not need to be written strictly according to the target language dialect, because they represent transitional learner-focused language. This argument does not require anyone to conceal differences between the language of a novella and the target language, but instead argues for acceptance of a different dialect created for classroom use. This discussion is only possible if we can acknowledge when and where there is a difference between the idiom of Latin novellas and standard Latin. Until we are allowed to claim that there really are noticeable divergences in idiom, the discussion over whether such divergences are beneficial to teaching cannot proceed.

Likewise, it can be argued that some authors are not given adequate resources to reliably vet the Latinitas of their works when self-publishing. There is an inequality in Latin education where some Latinists were given rigorous training in Latin prose composition, while others were not. There is an inequality in wealth distribution where some Latinists are willing and able to pay for professional editing services, and others are not. There is an inequality in professional connections where some Latinists are able to pitch their ideas and publish texts through major traditional publishers who then provide the editing services, while others do not think they have a chance of being traditionally published. We should acknowledge and aim to address these structural problems. Unfortunately, we cannot advocate for structural change in favour of CI when we are not even allowed to claim there is any problem with the current quality of self-published CI.

So let me be clear: I am not, in this essay, going to discuss whether all the claims about ‘bad Latinitas’ are valid in all instances, or whether a Latin teacher is obligated to avoid modelling ‘bad Latinitas’ to students at all times. These are derivative arguments. I am instead focusing on the issue of whether mentions of perceived errors in published works should be allowed in public comments. Without being able to hash these things out in the open, the derivative arguments about the degree of Latinitas issues and the usefulness of pedagogical language choices simply cannot be discussed fairly. If we want to give teachers the freedom to choose where they stand on issues of dialect choice, we need to be able to talk about the dialect itself, with specific examples if needed. The problem is that we are not allowed to talk straightforwardly and honestly about our perceptions of the editing quality and language use in self-published novellas.

Here is an example of a CI novella resource advising the community that public comments or rating of Latinitas should be discouraged. The Latin Novella Database (LNDb) appears to have started in 2020, with the earliest novella news post dating to March/April of that year. According to announcements on social media, it ceased to be updated after 2021. The LNDb remains accessible to this day as a resource. One of the pages linked in its side navigation is titled, ‘What about Latinitas?‘. I remember reading this page in 2021 when I had just woken up to CI and was first looking into implementing Latin novellas in my teaching, and I remember agreeing with it wholeheartedly at the time, taking these points in as speech rules for the community and for myself. I have chosen to critique this page precisely because I have no idea who authored it, and I do not want to know who authored it – my dispute is not with any individual, but with the culture of our community.

WHAT ABOUT LATINITAS?

LNDb does not, and will never, give ratings of the supposed Latinitas of the novellas, and it’s something that people shouldn’t be worrying about.

1. What other teachers have written works for them and their students. When you see a bit of Latin that doesn’t seem right to you, remember: it wasn’t written for you. This teacher wrote it for their students, and even if it doesn’t suit your needs, it suits theirs. Respect that.
2. Unsolicited criticisms of Latinitas don’t educate; they embarrass and degrade. They only make the corrector feel superior and the correctee feel inferior. This is especially true if they’re of a group that has been historically shut out of Classics study (e.g. women, POC; cf. mansplaining)
3. You may be wrong. Or both of you may be right. In reading all of these novellas, and [sic] many times I thought I found a little mistake in Latinitas. Yet most of the time, it was I who was incorrect. You know Latin, but they know Latin too. Respect that.
4. “Good Latinitas” is an unknowable construct. While you can make assumptions based on the corpus of Latin literature on what constitutes proper Latin, these are only assumptions. Unless you have regular séances with Cicero, you don’t know better than any of us.
5. If it doesn’t work for you, make your own. Martial 1.91:

Cum tua nōn ēdās, carpis mea carmina, Laelī.
carpere vel nōlī nostra vel ēde tua.

Point number 1, ‘What other teachers have written works for them and their students’, is a derivative argument. It assumes the possibility of a dialect difference: that if the Latinitas of a novella diverges from classical idiom, a teacher should still be allowed to choose it as class material. This is a separate argument as to whether it is acceptable to publicly talk about the classical Latinity of novellas. Talking about Latinitas does not restrict individual choice. Rather, silencing discussion about the dialect limits the opportunities for teachers, especially those new to CI Latin, as I was in 2021, to make informed choices. I will not refute the derivative argument that it is up to the teacher to choose materials which suit their needs. Rather, I disagree with the way this point is used to silence discussion of Latinitas: respecting individual choices means providing teachers with the best opportunities to make informed choices. Talking openly about what is divergent about the idiom of Latin novellas allows for people to draw their own conclusions.

Point number 1 also assumes something dangerous: that published materials are actually developed only for the author’s specific classroom. I will explain why this is a dangerous position to hold below, but for now let us allow that there might be pedagogical reasons for divergences in dialect.

Point number 2, ‘Unsolicited criticisms of Latinitas don’t educate; they embarrass and degrade,’ characterises criticism of Latinitas as ‘unsolicited’, ’embarassing’, and ‘degrading’, intended to make the corrector ‘feel superior’ and the correctee ‘feel inferior’, and aimed at people who have experienced structural inequality. I will examine each of these characterisations and their implications.

Comments that include Latinitas criticism are characterised as ‘unsolicited’. This is a very strong word to use for replies to public posts about the content of those posts. If I post a YouTube video and someone writes a detailed comment about, say, my skin, I would readily call that an ‘unsolicited’ comment. Any comments about my physical appearance or personal life are ‘unsolicited’ because these things are not the focus of my content. Similarly, Red’s comment above can be considered unsolicited as it was derailing the actual topic about AI Latin posted by the OP. But if someone comments about my language choices in response to one of my language teaching videos, that is a different matter. I may not agree with what they say, but they are responding to my content, part of which includes my language choices as a language teacher. Someone talking about what I posted is not an ‘unsolicited comment’, it is a ‘reply’.

If comments about language choices on language teaching materials are ‘unsolicited’, what comments if any are truly ‘solicited’? Only comments that do not include dialect-based criticism? Only 100% positive comments? Or are there no ‘solicited’ comments – when authors post their work in a forum or on facebook, do they not wish to get comments at all?

If a comment is only ‘solicited’ if it is not about Latinitas (e.g. someone says that they didn’t like the character development in a novella, or that the pacing was too slow, or the font was too small or big), this seems like a pretty strange definition of ‘unsolicited’ if the author is willing to hear criticism about other aspects of their creative process and is selectively unwilling to hear about their wording choices, which are also part of their writing process. As was alluded in point number 1, authors and readers care about the pedagogical implications of their phrasing. It cannot be argued in point 1 that phrasing is a meaningful pedagogical choice if it is also argued in point 2 to be irrelevant and off-topic to the discussion of a language teaching resource.

If a comment is only ‘solicited’ if it excludes criticism, what does that say about the nature of our community? Part of being in a community is being able to communicate with each other. Do we expect only to hear communication on what we are doing well? Are we supposed to never hear any negativity or disagreement? Does that constitute a genuine community? How could you trust that people are not lying to you to make you feel better? How could you trust that people aren’t pretending to say nice things when they should be warning you against doing something you might regret? What does praise even mean, if criticism is not allowed? The idea of ‘toxic positivity’ comes to mind: it is a damaging mindset in which all difficult emotions are deemed ‘negative’ and all negativity must be avoided. Toxic positivity blinds communities and makes it impossible for us to address issues openly.

If no comment is truly ‘solicited’ (because it comes from a person on the internet typing in the public comments section), why not make intentions clear by disabling comments entirely? If a writer does not want to see any ‘unsolicited’ comments, why are they posting in places where comments are not just expected, but encouraged as part of community engagement?

Publishing in itself is a communicative act, and so discussion about the writing choices in published works should not be considered ‘unsolicited’. If an author wants to protect a work from public comment, they can  choose to share it among friends or private groups, or just use it with their own students. It is completely appropriate for a high school teacher to focus on only serving their own students – anything more than that is actually going beyond their job description. But by publicly sharing their work, they are communicating with the public through it, saying ‘here, this is a Latin language teaching resource’, implying that it should be used as teaching material outside of the author’s own classroom, or as an example to inspire the creation of similar resources outside of their school. Responses to the book from teachers outside of the author’s school are to be expected, because the author has already entered into public discourse through publishing the work outside of their school.

This is not just a matter of custom, it is a matter of law. Employment contracts typically include a legal clause where they prohibit teachers from publishing curriculum materials developed for their school, stating that the intellectual property in this instance belongs to the school. My own state of Victoria rules that ’employers own IP in materials created by employees in the course of their work,’ [source] and this is reflected in US copyright law as well: ‘A copyrightable work is “made for hire”… [when] it is created by an employee as part of the employee’s regular duties,’ in which case ‘the party that hired the individual is considered both the author and the copyright owner of the work.’ [source]. Thankfully my employer congratulated me when I published my book, The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4, although they technically had IP rights to early draft sections created in the course of teaching year 12 in 2022 (patchy sections which would have been unsaleable until I created the rest of the book and independently organised its editing and further development, making it substantially improved from the excerpts I used in class).

Legally, teachers should be advised that their book publishing projects need to be separable from their regular duties as teachers creating in-class material, or else their employer owns their IP. By publishing their IP outside of school, teachers need to acknowledge that they are acting as independently published authors, and not as regular school teachers. Thus, interactions with the public world outside of their school should not be considered ‘unsolicited’ but expected: publishing is not a normal part of teacher duties, it is an action that involves you putting your IP into the public sphere of communication and claiming it as your own.

Based on the way our community is reacting to public comments on novellas, I don’t think we are doing a good job at educating teachers about the legal reasons we need to distinguish our role as teachers from our role as authors. Legally, we need to accept that being a published author means investing independently in developing our own IP outside of normal school duties. What this doesn’t mean is sharing un-edited resources developed in the course of our regular duties out of ‘generosity’ (which would violate the IP of our employer). The scenario described in point 1, where a teacher publishes materials developed solely for their own class without any modification or consideration for an external audience, is technically copyright theft.

This may, in practice, be unlikely to be prosecuted. Schools, when run ethically, usually do not care about teachers publishing materials. However I have had the unfortunate experience of being hired by an unethical boss once before. I have had the experience, in a different school to where I currently am, where senior leadership were looking for ways to catch teachers for minor infractions in order to threaten their job security and control the staff by fear and punishments. Most schools are not run like that, but for some teachers, it is possible to get burned by one’s employer or ex-employer over legal technicalities.

But getting back to the larger point, teaching and publishing are legally distinct industries and involve different roles. It would be out of place to see regular teachers criticised in public for simply doing their regular teacher duties in school. But it is part of the role of a published author that their work invites public discussion. Legally, publishing is not part of the regular duties of a school teacher and organisations could be making themselves liable for encouraging copyright theft if they encourage publication without mentioning this distinction.

For this reason, while we can offer writing advice for in-class materials, perhaps we should not be offering instruction for publishing novellas as part of teacher training and teacher conferences. We could bring in experts from the publishing industry to give talks about publishing, and encourage interested teachers to attend, but these should not be counted as official teacher training hours, because publishing is not part of the regular duties of a teacher. Our teacher training PD should be focusing on the creation of classroom resources strictly for use within the school. Professional development in publishing is a separate venture which should be performed by experts in that industry and according to those industry standards.

When you communicate, you are agreeing to possibility of relevant communication in response. To be clear: you are not consenting to receive unsolicited comments about your physical appearance or personal life or any other irrelevant topic. But by posting something, you invite comments on the specific topic which you posted about: if this topic is your own work, you invite comments on your own work. And by publishing, you participate in the publishing industry and are expected to act as someone who has communicated publicly through their own independently developed work.

Next, criticism of dialect is characterised as ’embarassing’ and ‘degrading’, making one feel ‘superior’ while another feels ‘inferior’. I will point out that point number 1 already assumes that dialect differences can be pedagogically justified. If this is the case, why are these justifiable pedagogical decisions ’embarassing’ or ‘degrading’ to the person who chose them? Should we be embarassed by our pedagogical choices? Say someone ridicules me for using spoken Latin in the classroom, saying that this is ‘just Roman LARPing’ in an attempt to degrade and humiliate Latin speakers and make them feel inferior. Is any Latin speaker genuinely embarassed by such an ignorant comment? Rather, I am embarassed for the person making such a comment. Why, if authors are proud of their pedagogical dialect choices, should they feel ’embarassed’ for having made those conscious language decisions?

In all seriousness, I understand what is felt here, and that it is a genuine and deep-seated hurt. People do feel ‘inferior’ when they are told that their Latin writing might have areas for improvement. I want to validate that feeling, because it is a natural response to the way Latin has been presented to us in schools: ‘if you are good at Latin, you must be smart, so if you’re bad at Latin, you must be dumb.’ I don’t think anyone can be blamed for feeling inferior when their Latin is not perfect, after so many years of that lie being conditioned into us.

But my question is, how should we respond to our feelings of inferiority? Should we allow ourselves to continue believing the lie that we are ‘dumb’ if our Latin is ‘bad’? I think we owe it – not to our critics but to ourselves – to separate our sense of worth from our work. We need to replace the old lie with a new truth: no one’s self-worth should be based on their competence in Latin. There are many horrible people who have ‘good Latin’, and many wonderful people who have ‘bad Latin’. As a community, we should encourage each other and ourselves to see that criticism of Latin style is not a criticism of one’s character.

The point stating that ‘criticisms of Latinitas… embarass and degrade’ goes part of the way towards acknowledging the hurt that exists. This is good, to an extent. We should take it one step further, towards a message of healing: ‘criticisms of Latinitas feel embarassing and degrading because of years of previous conditioning, but we need to affirm now that no one can judge character based on Latinitas. These two things are not the same.’

If we can un-couple criticism of Latin style from condemnation of character by affirming each other’s worth while talking about possible strengths and weaknesses in their writing, we can rewrite the script and heal from the harmful lies of our past. This long journey of healing is not possible if we always avoid confronting the lies, by making speech rules which freeze short of correcting a moralistic attitude that we know is false. Ruling that criticism doesn’t educate but only shames will only continue to conflate Latinitas with character and prohibit us from talking about our work as something separate from our worth.

Lastly for point number 2, the LNDb mentions that the experience of structural inequality is a factor in determining who corrects and who is corrected. I would argue that structural inequality impacts many other aspects of writing too: the degree to which we receive instruction on constructing characters and plots, our familiarity with Greco-Roman myths, our networking skills in finding editors and in being accepted by traditional publishers. There are many ways in which structural inequality unfairly impacts the quality of our work in ways we will never be able to precisely measure or appreciate. It is therefore the responsibility of the structurally privileged to share their knowledge and skills with the structurally disadvantaged, and for us all to advocate for community practices which reduce the gap between the haves and have-nots. But we cannot advocate for change if we are not allowed to mention any problems with current practices.

For this very reason, the people who care the most about the structural inequality of academic Latinists correcting the Latinitas of high school teachers should be the most interested in collaborative efforts which can bridge the skill and resource gap. We cannot protest the skill and resource gap unless we acknowledge that there is an inequality of outcomes in the quality of self-published CI Latin materials versus traditionally published Latin materials.

Point number 3 states that a commenter ‘may be wrong’, or ‘both of you may be right’.

So what if a commenter is wrong? Correct the commenter, or let someone else do it, or let it go. People can be wrong about anything in a comment. You can’t prevent people from having wrong opinions, but you can give opportunity for wrong opinions to be voiced and then corrected in community discussion. If a commenter is wrong in a public forum where they are corrected publicly, they are not a lasting threat to an author’s reputation; at most they are an embarassment to themselves.

I don’t think anyone reads comments sections believing that every commenter is a reliable source. If we ban topics because sometimes people comment on them wrongly, we would have to ban every topic from discussion.

Point 3 also urges us to respect that ‘you know Latin, but they know Latin too’.

Respecting other people’s knowledge of the language means believing that they are confident about what they do and don’t know, that they care about further improving their use of the language, and would be more than capable of answering back if you were wrong. When you respect someone as being strong in the language, you approach topics with them gently and warmly with an attitude of shared curiosity, not condemnation. You are open to being persuaded by their views, and are curious as to how they might respond to your views as a fellow enthusasiast.

The following attitude is not ‘respecting that they know Latin’: assuming that the other person is so weak in their Latin that they will be devastated by the slightest suggestion that they wrote something wrong. If you instead assume that the other person is strong, it follows that they should be open to talking about their use of the language, or if they’re busy, they would be fine with ignoring you and leaving others to correct you. You should fear more for embarassing yourself than embarassing them in talking to a strong Latinist.

Criticism can be offered respectfully to competent Latinists. The need to respect someone doesn’t prohibit you from talking them about their work, but on the contrary, respecting someone’s expertise allows for a candour that would otherwise be more difficult with someone whom you knew was more self-conscious about their Latin.

Point 4 states ‘”Good Latinitas” is an unknowable construct’. In support of this, it argues that the assumptions we make about usage based on the classical corpus will always be, to some extent, assumptions. It then denies that anyone can hold better or worse assumptions than another, stating, ‘Unless you have regular séances with Cicero, you don’t know better than any of us.’

Some of the propositions are true, but the conclusion is flawed.

I will certainly grant that ‘good Latinitas’ has fuzzy edges. Should the features of Silver Latin be counted as ‘good Latinitas’ on par with Golden Latin? Should historically attested post-classical Latin idiom be excluded from ‘good Latinitas’? Should ecclesiastical Latin be avoided? Should the linguistic quirks of Plautus and Terrence’s much earlier form of Latin be included or excluded? There are worthwhile arguments to be made around the definition of ‘good Latinitas’, especially depending on whether you are writing in prose or poetry, high or low register, secular or religious texts, for absolute beginners or for advanced Latinists.

The Latinitas of self-published novellas should most appropriately be compared to the Latinitas of educational materials in general: Familia Romana, for example, would make a much better benchmark for language style in novellas than unadapted Cicero. While there is a massive difference between the register of Cicero and ‘Rōma in Italiā est’, practically no one takes issue with the Latinitas of Familia Romana in carrying out its educational purpose.

However, I would argue that classifying Latinitas as ‘an unknowable construct’ imbues it with more mystery than it deserves.

Perhaps ‘standard Etruscan’ or ‘standard Eteocretan’ are an unknowable entities. But ‘classical Latin’, according to how finely or coarsely we wish to define it, is at least an observable phenomenon, and anything you can observe you can to some degree ‘know’.

Point 4 itself states that there is a corpus of classical works from which we can make assumptions about the dialect. One way is to search the corpus for phrases and check whether such phrases are used to mean what we think they mean. Another way is to read large amounts of the corpus and so develop an intuitive understanding of the language habits of those writers. Another way is to consult composition manuals and reference works compiled from that corpus – of which there are many, such as Meissner’s Latin Phrase Book – for practical advice gathered from other people’s experience in replicating classical idiom. The fact that Latin prose composition courses can be taught and formally assessed at all suggests that there is a standard language which we can learn to write in, and even be given a grade for. (‘Rating’ Latinitas is exactly what the teachers do in a composition course!) This is a standard practice in continental Europe. Latinitas may be fuzzily defined, but we do have a body of evidence from which we can observe and study it.

Next, let us grant the second statement, that our knowledge of Latinitas will always be incomplete. This is an appropriate stance to hold. We can draw assumptions about the language from what we observe in the classical corpus, and these can be called assumptions. We should be willing to consider that our assumptions, even the best ones, might be false.

What does not hold up is the conclusion: that there are no better or worse assumptions.

Just because perfect knowledge cannot be attained, it does not follow that all assumptions should be considered equally valid.

Imagine if we applied this same reasoning to other topics:

‘Scientific knowledge cannot be proven indisputably; therefore no person has a better understanding of science than anyone else.’

‘Fun is an unknowable construct. We can only make assumptions about what is fun. Therefore, no one can advise on how to plan fun Latin lessons.’

‘All knowledge is ultimately impossible to prove. We can only make assumptions about it. Therefore no one knows more than anyone else.’

This line of reasoning excludes the possibility that there can be degrees to which claims are based on evidence: relative probabilities. Some claims may be based on outright misunderstandings, some on weak evidence, and others on stronger evidence. The strongest claim can still have some degree of uncertainty, but that does not mean all claims have the same degree of uncertainty.

We should be open to the possibility that we are wrong, but aim to arrive at the most probable answer. This is a lot easier when we can talk openly about our hypotheses and share our experiences with the language. I have learnt so much more about Latin usage through talking with other people about the word choices I made in my language teaching materials. Commenters can and do comment incorrectly about word choice. But banning discussion about word choices is not a good method for discovering the truth. As a community, we are more likely to arrive at a better solution when we are allowed to talk things through.

For this reason, because Latinitas is a complex topic, we should want to hear multiple perspectives about it before settling on a conclusion. ‘Good Latinitas’ is a fuzzy, intricate, contextually murky, and yet beautiful phenomenon. It is the nature of human languages to have their quirks and hidden treasures. This is part of the joy of studying natural human languages in contrast to constructed languages. Every language is different in surprising ways. We can appreciate that diversity and strangeness better when we talk about it together, approaching it with an attitude of curiosity and wonder instead of seeking merely justification and expedience.

The fifth and final point states, ‘If it doesn’t work for you, make your own’ and quotes Martial 1.91, which I translate below:

Cum tua nōn ēdās, carpis mea carmina, Laelī.
      carpere vel nōlī nostra vel ēde tua.

While you do not publish your own poems, you disparage mine, Laelius.
      Either don’t disparage mine, or publish your own.

It is for this reason that I waited years before writing up an opinion about Latinitas. I knew that unless I published my own Latin educational text, people would not take me seriously for speaking out about this topic. Well, my tiered reader for upper high school, The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4 came out in September last year, 2023. My editor Jessica McCormack and I are very pleased to see that it is being enjoyed by students around the world, making Vergil’s poetry more comprehensible to more readers.

The book has enjoyed a positive reception for its illustrations, its clarity of Latin explanations, and – importantly for this topic – its overall writing and language quality.

I could not have achieved this language standard without hiring a professional editor. Indeed, the only reason that more mainstream CI Latin textbooks such as Familia Romana, Via Latina, and Forum (by Polis) are so much more standard in their use of Latin than the average self-published novella is because the publishers or institutions provided professional editing services to ensure quality. I – Carla Hurt – did not write a book of clear, flowing prose with consistently good Latinitas (just ask my editor…!); I wrote a manuscript which was then heavily edited and turned into a quality book. This didn’t destroy my authorial vision – it brought my authorial vision more sharply to life in a way I could never have achieved without the editor.

Most people don’t realise this, but no one is a good writer, even when writing in their native language, without a good editor. By ‘editor’ I mean a line editor: someone who reads the text and advises on changes to sentences and paragraphs to improve flow, readability, factual accuracy, and language consistency. This type of editor makes copious changes to the wording of sentences and may even advise for whole paragraphs to be rephrased, deleted, or inserted. Their work is at a totally different scale to that of the proofreader, whose job is only to catch spelling, formatting, and obvious grammar errors at the word-level.

It takes a significant amount of professional labour to edit a book properly, and it significantly changes the wording of that book, which is why editors should cost hundreds of dollars at least, scaling up and down with the size of the book project and the experience of the editor. Sending copies of your manuscript to a group of fellow Latin teachers of similar skill level who proofread it for free in their spare time without any training in the publishing industry is not the same as hiring a professional editor – not by a mile.

The problem with saying ‘why don’t you write a better book then’ is that it is not the individual writer’s skill which determines the final quality of the book, but the combined skill of the writer and their editorial team. Writing a book manuscript by yourself and self-publishing it using the same proofing process that most CI novellas currently use will result in similar outcomes as most CI novellas. Just because someone can publish 20 books the wrong way doesn’t mean they are an expert on publishing a book the right way. It just means that they have been a cowboy 20 times and are now telling other people to do the same thing, or else hold their tongue about novella quality. This is bad advice. We should be getting our publishing advice from publishing professionals, not from Latin teachers, and we should not be encouraging people to publish without them learning what that process entails.

When I first started observing the flurry of CI novella publishing in 2021, I thought that with enough books written and enough authors involved, eventually some higher quality ones would appear, until the books were at the same level as traditionally published media. This did not happen, because I had a fundamental misunderstanding of the book writing process. Writing quality is not the result of authorial brilliance or sheer luck. It is the result of tried and tested processes which traditional publishers developed over many years, and which the most successful self-publishers replicate by hiring professional editors.

We need to move from putting all the responsibility for book publishing on the shoulders of authors to helping people find what really works. But that is a derivative discussion. In order to encourage, promote, sponsor, or subsidise professional editing services to provide avenues for improving CI Latin materials, we have to first be able to honestly look at and discuss the results of current self-publishing practices. Are things as rosy as we make them out to be? Are we covering up the differences in quality between self-published and traditionally published books, which are the results of structural inequality? Are we perpetuating an inequality of access to professional editors in CI Latin? This is what we are doing to ourselves when we silence public criticism of CI Latin novellas.

Attempting to silence public error discussion is also damaging to the CI movement in other ways. The consequence of policing public negativity is to foster both false positivity and hidden negativity. To someone who first stumbles upon CI Latin novellas, like myself in 2021, it looks like everyone is only positive about everything that is in them, and this sets them up to be more disappointed by the editing quality of the real product than if they had a better idea of what they were getting into ahead of time.

On the other hand, it also fosters nasty, hidden whispers between Latin teachers in private conversations about how ‘those novellas have bad Latinitas and are poorly edited’. Banning comments on Latinitas doesn’t make the reader un-see the errors that they thought they saw. It just makes them share their negative reading experiences privately among like-minded Latin teachers, dividing our community, increasing tribalism, and limiting the reach of CI. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but… there is no greater gossip than a Latin teacher.

Another effect of silencing public criticism is that it turns the topic over to rule-breakers with a larger pattern of bad behaviour, like ‘Red’, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that only rude people can have critical opinions. Because we advise the teacher community that is unacceptable to include criticism in public comments about a published book, and tell them to take the discussion away from public venues into private emails, the cautious, well-meaning, and conflict-averse members will comply. However, the uncautious and disrespectful members who don’t care if they get banned will still occasionally voice their opinion on this topic – badly, inaccurately, even abusively. Since they are the only ones reckless enough to comment an unwelcome opinion in this environment, they give the impression that it is impossible to hold different opinions in good faith. This creates a vicious cycle in which authors only experience criticism as ‘unsolicited’, ‘rude’, ’embarrassing’, ‘degrading’, and ‘shaming’ – which that kind of criticism most often is. Authors are not given the opportunity to experience the type of criticism in community that is respectful, encouraging, constructive, process-oriented, fighting against structural inequality, and aligned to furthering the author’s own goals and strengthening the CI Latin movement as a whole.

I want to end this essay on a positive note and make a big shout out to my fellow high school Latin teachers. I am astounded at how many novellas – 150 at my last count in 2023 – have been published since 2015 by early- to mid-career high school teachers working in their spare time typically with no administrative acknowledgement of the preparation required for this, no advance and little in the way of royalties. It took me a little over a year to write and publish The Lover’s Curse, and I consider myself lucky to have completed it in such short time, and at my own expense. But the four most prolific authors published an average of 5, 2.5, 2, and 2 novellas each per year throughout the seven year period 2017-2023, an astonishing rate which makes me worry about teacher burnout and sustainable work practices.

I’m sure that for many teachers, a big part of why they don’t want to field criticisms about their work is because they feel chronically underappreciated and overworked. After I finished The Lover’s Curse, I felt so relieved to just do my day job and not have a book project looming over me any longer. These teachers, however, returned to dozens more book projects than I have completed in my lifetime. Meanwhile they’ve been shouldering all the ‘normal’ responsibilities of chronically overworked high school teachers.

These teachers are performing a type of work – authoring books – which teachers are neither formally trained for nor expected to do. Publishing is a type of work which, legally and officially, they are not meant to be completing as part of their regular duties as a teacher. Pushing teachers to keep publishing more and more novellas for the good of CI is kind of… cruel. This work shouldn’t be shouldered by teachers alone, and they shouldn’t be made to feel that the future of CI depends on their unpaid overtime. We should be fostering collaborative ties with people outside the teaching profession: retired teachers, academics, even hobbyists (if they are sufficiently skilled and committed). ‘Many hands make light work.’ We should not normalise teachers going above and beyond their already overloaded professional duties.

Please thank your Latin teachers for me, whether they are writing books or not. Whether they are thinking about hiring an editor as part of a publishing process or not. Whether they are taking on unpaid extracurricular responsibilities or not. Please show your appreciation for the teacher who stands up in front a class of teenagers and looks out for them as people.

Latinitas is not the mark of your character. What you do in the classroom every single day, the way you get to know your kids and meet their needs with the limited time you have – that is the mark of your character.

…

As an addendum, I want to address some things people might ask me about this essay.

Why did you write about this drama publicly? Why didn’t you just talk privately with individuals?

I don’t have any dispute with individuals; it is the culture of our community which I have a problem with. I cannot address this to anyone specifically when I know that they didn’t come up with these ideas by themselves. These ideas are our collective responsibility.

Why did you write 7,000 words about wanting to be allowed to write rude comments on other people’s work and bring them down? What makes you want to do that so badly?

It is my hope that the tone of this essay has been one of affirmation, respect, gentleness, and sincerity. It is difficult to convey that tone in less than 7,000 words. I don’t want anyone to feel accused, attacked, or called out. In truth I want us to be friends. Friends don’t lie to each other, they don’t talk behind backs, and they don’t just say what they think the other person wants to hear. Friends don’t shy away from difficult conversations, but they try to make things better and look for solutions together. I fear that the rules and assumptions we made about ‘Latinitas shaming’ are not bringing CI Latin enthusiasts together but drawing us apart into smaller tribes – at least, this is what I observed between 2021 and the present (April 2024). Attitudes have hardened over this issue. In the meantime we are ignoring root issues of inequality, perpetuating the lie that Latinitas is a reflection of character, and shooting down opportunities to collaborate and learn from each other. As someone who cares about CI Latin, I don’t want to see it continuing along this trajectory. The more we hide critical comments from view, silencing or siphoning them into private emails, the bigger our impostor syndrome grows. We only see other people’s work get praised, we never see that every human makes mistakes, even the experts. We compare our failures to everyone else’s apparent successes. The more we sustain the illusion of public perfection out of niceness the more we really hurt each other. I did not write this essay to enable more hurt in the world. I wrote this in the hopes that we, as a caring community with a shared love of Latin and teaching, can heal and grow together.

This is fearmongering. More people will be scared to published novellas after reading this, and we need to encourage the publication of more novellas at all costs.

The idea that ‘writers will be too afraid to try writing if they see books being criticised’ contains the assumption that it is always our duty to encourage more writing, even if we be dishonest in the process: that we have to prevent people from hearing criticism so that they will produce more content for us. It’s as if ‘whatever causes more novellas to be written’ justifies whatever means we use to get there. But as someone who has nearly walked away from the teacher profession in 2022 due to burnout (related in no small part to the extra workload of implementing a CI Latin curriculum), I am strongly opposed to the idea that we should always be encouraging teachers to ‘do more’. Continuing to push teachers to publish more books ignores the human cost of this movement, borne disproportionately by overworked teachers outside their regular hours. A healthy community needs some people who will stand up for the teachers and tell them firmly not to take on more responsibilities unless they really, really want to and know full well what they are getting themselves into. Consider how banning ‘FUD’ (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) led to irrational optimism in cryptocurrency with disastrous results and many lives ruined. If we ban speech for being ‘discouraging’ we will fall into a similar trap of pushing vulnerable members to bear the cost of making the line go up – the line, in this case, being the number of published novellas, now climbing towards 200. Somehow novellas have been equated with the CI Latin movement to such an extent that the total quantity of the former is considered indicative of the success of the latter. I think it is better for the CI Latin movement if we don’t barrel forward uncritically into the future with the same practices that were formed when the movement was just starting and there were a dozen novellas. To adapt to the growing needs of our teachers and students, to be truly progressive in teaching, we need to be open to evaluating our processes, and not just push on the gas pedal at all times.