Historian Patrick Biernat
why I study Classics
that’s thousands of years old that excited me. Sometimes I forget about that magic, but it has never faded away. As the years passed and the texts got harder, I always went back to “the magic” whenever I felt like I was in over my head with all these grammatical concepts; if people not only read in Latin but also spoke and wrote in it thousands of years ago, I knew I could try.
However, “the magic” isn’t the only thing that draws me to the Classics, the people do too. Maybe it’s the fact that one generally doesn’t go into classics to make the big bucks, or that our society generally values other
am honestly glad that it was required at my former school; it was practically a life-changing experience for me.
As my class pulled out our copies of Ecce Romani I (the superior Latin text) we began with translating the line “Ecce! In pictura est puella, nomine Cornelia.”
That was about all we got through before the bell rang, but right as we finished, I remember my teacher telling us something along the lines of “You’ve just translated a sentence in another language.”
Although I come from a bilingual household, there was just something about translating even a single sentence from a language
As a senior in high school, my life for the past few months has been college applications and, as tedious and boring many of them are, they do have one side-effect I’m grateful for: It made me figure out what exactly I do outside of school, but more importantly why I do those things. I’m sure many of us have been asked the question “why are you learning a dead language?” While I know we all have different reasons for being in the OJCL, I’ll give you some of mine.
Before my freshman year, I never really had an interest in learning Latin and I doubt that I would have chosen to take it out of my own accord, but I
OJCL Torch
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