Joseph Conlon of Ralston College spoke about learning Latin and Greek.
He said something quite beautiful about the feeling of friendship and of belonging to a family that can come from knowing Latin well enough to read the ancient authors:
Petrarch himself— and you’ve probably heard me speak about this before— saw the ancients not just as people, but also as interlocutors. He saw them as friends. He wrote letters in Latin to Cicero and to Seneca. He wrote a beautiful dialogue between himself and Augustine, talking about the difficult times that he lived through and looking to Augustine to help him cure the suffering and the depression that he had in his soul, losing all of his loved ones. He really believed that these individuals were his friends and that they were participants in the same community with him. He really, quite literally, grafted himself onto this tradition— this long family tradition. It really is the— you know, Greek and Latin are the languages of the big family that we call the West.
Here’s the lecture:
