Amanda propaganda agenda by Anthony Gibbins

What do these three words have in common? They all began life as a Gerundive of Obligation. Let me explain. There is a very unusual form of a Verb in Latin called a Gerundive. It has a couple of jobs, one of which is expressing obligation. Take the Gerundive legendus for example; it means something like needing to be read. It comes from the Verb lego, legere, legi, lectum to read. If I said liber est legendus I would basically be saying the book needs to be read. It is the root of our word legend.

On today’s page Hadrian says liber est inveniendus the book needs to be found. The Gerundive comes from the verb invenio, invenire, inveni, inventum to find. You may have already guessed that this Verb gives us our word invention. But who has to find this book? In Latin the Gerundive of Obligation is often paired with a Noun or Pronoun in the Dative Case, as here with vobis to you. We might read liber vobis inveniendus est as something like to you a book is needing to be found. But we should understand that as meaning something closer to you need to find a book.

Now what of amanda, propaganda and agenda? These English words began life as the Gerundives of amo, amare, amavi, amatum to love; propago, propagare, propagavi, propagatum to spread; and ago, agere, egi, actum to do. You may notice that these Gerundives all in in an -a. amanda ends in an -a because it is Feminine Singular. propaganda and agenda end in -a because they are Neuter Plural. (Yes, they have the same ending: eheu!) So, to make a long story short, amanda means she who needs to loved, propaganda means things that need to be spread and agenda means things that need to be done.

Miranda, too, is a Gerundive of Obligation. It means she who must be wondered at or admired.

You need to find a book of great importance, lost throughout many generations. I recently obtained a map which will show you where the book is.

remember by Anthony Gibbins

memini meminisse to remember is an interesting Verb, as you can see just by looking at its Principal Parts. They appear to be in the Perfect Tense. Or, as The Oxford Latin Dictionary explains it, they are Perfect Forms with Present force. So, while cognovi means I found out and cognovisse means to have found out, memini and meminisse mean I remember and to remember respectively.

memini is a rather versatile Verb. It can be used with a straight up Object in the Accusative Case; tuam fabulam memini I remember your story. Indeed, that is how it is used on today’s page; omnia memini I remember everything.

It can be used with an Indirect Statement, usually to recount the direct memory of an eyewitness; memini nautam advenire I remember a sailor arrived.

It can be used with an Indirect Question; memeni ubi sarcina sit I remember where the suitcase is.

Or it can stand alone; memini I remember!

And that is only the tip of the iceberg. It can even be used in the Imperative form memento, along with an Infinitive Verb, to remind someone to do something; memento revenire Remember to come back!

Thank you to everyone who responded to my call for names yesterday. I liked many of them, but have chosen one. I finished writing the first draft of Episode Eleven last night - the name features prominently within.

Jessica pauses a little. Miranda and Marcellus watch her intently. At last, she continues. ‘I remember everything well. These are the very words which Hadrian said to them:

those two from the roof - Ravena and .... by Anthony Gibbins

So, it turns out that Jessica’s backstory is also the backstory of Ravena and… hmmm. What is that guy’s name?

Sorry to be so brief, but this weekend I've been busy with that article for PRIMA that I mentioned. Yet I would like to thank everyone who responded to my plea for help, on Twitter, on Facebook and here on the website. It certainly improved the article to include your accounts of using Legonium in the classroom, or indeed in your own learning.

As for, um, what’s his name… If you have an idea for a nomen, please post it as a comment. Crowd sourcing is fun!

Soon I heard three voices in the library. I was able to see nothing, but I heard Hadrian conversing with a man and a woman through the closed bookcase.

Legonium needs your help by Anthony Gibbins

salvete comites. We interrupt our standard schedule to ask for your help. I am writing an article for a Classics magazine called PRIMA. They are particularly interested in hearing how Legonium is used as a resource for people both teaching and learning Latin. Not surprisingly, I have left this to the last minute - the deadline is May 15. I would appreciate any and all help you can give me with this; do you use Legonium in either your teaching or in your own learning? If so, how? You can leave your response as a comment below. A brief two sentences would be a thousand times better than nothing at all.

Thank you so much,

Anthony

ps. How cool is that sliding bookcase?

Therefore, I secretly returned into his house. I silently entered the library and crept to the bookcase. For the bookcase of Hadrian conceals a secret door. With the door opened, I hid myself inside.

the three tenses of the infinitive by Anthony Gibbins

The infinitive of a Verb is the Form that means, when translated into English, to run or to sleep or to read or to help. They are easily enough recognized in Latin as - for all Regular Verbs at least - they end in an -re; currere to run, dormire to sleep, legere to read and iuvare to help. There are a handful of Irregular Verbs in Latin, and these can have unusual looking Infinitives, such as esse to be. When looking up a Latin Verb in a dictionary you will be given the Verb’s Four Principal Parts, the second of which is the Infinitive. If you have a Latin dictionary, give it a try.

curro, currere cucurri, cursum to run; to hasten, fly

lego, legere, legi, lectum to gather, pick; to choose, select, to read, recite

sum, esse, fui to be, exist (no fourth Principal Part)

The Infinitive Verb is very useful in ‘filling-out’ an idea begun by another Verb. Here are some examples; currere debeo I ought to run currere constituo I decide to run currere possum I am able to run currere cupio I want to run currere nequeo I am unable to run currere nolo I refuse to run currere amo I love to run

Infinitive Verbs also play an important part in Indirect Statements. Here is a Direct Statement; Jessica currit Jessica is running. Now, let’s turn that into the Indirect Statement Miranda sees that Jessica is running Miranda videt Jessicam currere. A more literal translation would be Miranda sees Jessica to be running. Think ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’.

Latin has three tenses of the Infinitive, and while they do turn up in other places, their most common use in in Indirect Statements. They are currere to run, cucurisse to have run and cursurus esse to be going to run.

Miranda scit Jessicam currere Miranda knows that Jessica is running.

Miranda scit Jessicam cucurisse Miranda knows that Jessica ran.

Miranda scit Jessicam cursuram esse Miranda knows that Jessica will run.

The Future Infinitive is a smidge more complicated than the others, because cursurus has to change its form to cursuram to Agree-With Jessicam. eheu!

However, it seemed certain to me that a book of such importance was not the property of one man but of all people. Soon therefore I decided that I myself would find the book.

 

I really like this picture by Anthony Gibbins

This image (to me at least) is the essence of somebody taking a stand; calling wrong out for what it is and refusing to be a part of it. I like that about it.

He, very angry, said that he would find another associate. Moreover, he ordered me to immediately leave his house nor to ever return there. I departed.

everything was born of this by Anthony Gibbins

When Legonium first began, I had no idea where the story would go. I imagined it more like a Days of Our Lives soap opera with one random event following another. The focus was to be more on the language than the story, describing the simplest of actions with clear illustrations to help the reader. Go back to episode one and you will see what I mean - the bulk of the story is Marcellus walking past the bank and returning home to paint. My first draft of that episode ended with Marcellus again walking in the street. Where was he going? That was the big cliff-hanger. It seemed boring to me, so instead I put a minifigure dressed in black and wearing a mask on the bank’s roof. I had no idea who she was - probably a bank robber…

Over the months that character became Jessica, and the part she would play in the story became clearer to me. It didn’t happen all at once, however. First she had no greater motivation than to steal, although she chose to steal from thieves. Then she became something of a vigilante - fighting crime by leaping across roof tops. Afterwards she was the nemesis of that sailor, who turned out to be some sort of crime lord. The story finally fell into place when I realised that the sailor was a collector and that he and Jessica were ex-associates. That they had had a falling out. And that that falling out was the result of a difference in philosophy.

Today’s slide is the genesis of Legonium. The entire story can be traced back to this one moment; the moment where Jessica wants to share a discovery with the world, and Hadrianus wants to keep it hidden, for no better reason than enjoying that he has it to himself.

He, however, was not willing to share this book with others. He wanted rather to hide the book in his bookcase. We fell into a great quarrel and I denied myself to be going to help him (ie: I said that I would not help him).

The Book Hunters by Anthony Gibbins

Almost six hundred years ago, a short, genial man took a very old manuscript off a library shelf. With excitement, he saw what he had discovered and ordered it copied. The book was a miraculously surviving copy of the ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, and it changed the course of history.

He found a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas - that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion. These ideas fueled the Renaissance, inspiring Botticelli, shaping the thought of Montaigne, Darwin and Einstein.

So reads the blurb on Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began. Here is an extract, to give you a feeling for his work, to whet your appetite for Book Hunting, and to introduce the character of Poggio Bracciolini.

ITALIANS HAD BEEN book-hunting for the better part of a century, ever since the poet and scholar Petrarch brought glory on himself in the 1330s by piecing together Livy’s monumental History of Rome and finding forgotten masterpieces by Cicero, Propertius, and others. Petrarch’s achievement had inspired others to seek out lost classics that had been lying unread, often for centuries. The recovered texts were copied, edited, commented upon, and eagerly exchanged, conferring distinction on those who had found them and forming the basis for what became known as the “study of the humanities.”

The “humanists,” as those who were devoted to this study were called, knew from carefully poring over the texts that had survived from classical Rome that many once famous books or parts of books were still missing. Occasionally, the ancient authors whom Poggio and his fellow humanists eagerly read gave tantalizing quotations from these books, often accompanying extravagant praise or vituperative attacks. Alongside discussions of Virgil and Ovid, for example, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian remarked that “Macer and Lucretius are certainly worth reading,” and went on to discuss Varro of Atax, Cornelius Severus, Saleius Bassus, Gaius Rabirius, Albinovanus Pedo, Marcus Furius Bibaculus, Lucius Accius, Marcus Pacuvius, and others whose works he greatly admired. The humanists knew that some of these missing works were likely to have been lost forever—as it turned out, with the exception of Lucretius, all of the authors just mentioned have been lost—but they suspected that others, perhaps many others, were hidden away in dark places, not only in Italy but across the Alps. After all, Petrarch had found the manuscript of Cicero’s Pro Archia in Liège, in Belgium, and the Propertius manuscript in Paris.

The prime hunting grounds for Poggio and his fellow book hunters were the libraries of old monasteries, and for good reason: for long centuries monasteries had been virtually the only institutions that cared about books. Even in the stable and prosperous times of the Roman Empire, literacy rates, by our standards at least, were not high. As the empire crumbled, as cities decayed, trade declined, and the increasingly anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the whole Roman system of elementary and higher education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books.

But all monks were expected to know how to read.

This book, as he explained to me, would be able to teach the reader much about ancient Rome. I very much wanted to find this book and to share it with all peoples.