A lively exploration of the joys of a not-so-dead languageFrom the acclaimed novelist and Oxford professor Nicola Gardini, a personal and passionate look at the Latin language: its history, its authors, its essential role in education, and its enduring impact on modern life-whether we call it "dead" or not.What use is Latin? It's a question we're often asked by those who see the language of Cicero as no more than a cumbersome heap of ruins, something to remove from the curriculum. In this sustained meditation, Gardini gives us his sincere and brilliant reply: Latin is, quite simply, the means of expression that made us-and continues to make us-who we are. In Latin, the rigorous and inventive thinker Lucretius examined the nature of our world; the poet Propertius told of love and emotion in a dizzying variety of registers; Caesar affirmed man's capacity to shape reality through reason; Virgil composed the Aeneid, without which we'd see all of Western history in a different light. In Long Live Latin, Gardini shares his deep love for the language-enriched by his tireless intellectual curiosity-and warmly encourages us to engage with a civilization that has never ceased to exist, because it's here with us now, whether we know it or not. Thanks to his careful guidance, even without a single lick of Latin grammar readers can discover how this language is still capable of restoring our sense of identity, with a power that only useless things can miraculously express.

Ode to a Useless Language1. A Home2. What Is Latin?3. Which Latin?4. A Divine Alphabet5. Understanding Latin with Catullus6. Cicero's Star-Studded Sky7. Ennius's Ghost8. Caesar, or the Measures of Reality 9. The Power of Clarity: Lucretius 10. The Meaning of Sex: Back to Catullus 11. Syntactic Goose Bumps, or Virgil's Shivering Sentences 12. The Master of Diffraction, Tacitus, and Sallust's Brevity13. Ovid, or the End of Identity 14. Breathing and Creaking: Reflections on Livy 15. The Word Umbra: Virgil's Eclogues 16. Seneca, or the Serenity of Saying It All 17. Deviances and Dental Care: Apuleius and Petronius 18. Brambles, Chasms, and Memories: Augustine's Linguistic Reformation 19. The Duty of Self-Improvement: Juvenal and Satire 20. The Loneliness of Love: Propertius 21. More on Happiness: The Lesson of Horace 22. Conclusion as Exhortation: Study Latin! Notes Acknowledgments Index of Names