Who is your favorite Latin author and why?
Seneca. I read Seneca daily, every morning I get up and the first thing I do is I read Seneca because he writes letters, that’s what he’s mostly known for, and all the letters are readable in a single sitting. So you get to enjoy from the beginning of a thought to an end of a thought in one sitting, which is very fulfilling and enriching. And then the philosophy behind it, I think, guides the way that you can go through a day. So he’s my favorite. I also enjoy tremendously, Aulus Gellius, he wrote Noctes Atticae, Attic Nights. He writes a lot of, it’s like One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, he writes little, two-page stories and some of them are grammatical explanations and some are fables and some are additions to history, so I just enjoy it because it’s fun reading.
Do you have anything you want to say to Latin students and students in JCL now?
Stay with it. I mean, it’s hard to learn a language and when I watch my students, and students everywhere, working so hard, I always get a little sad because I know that a lot of them are going to leave high school and forget all the Latin they’ve ever learned. They’ll go to college and take another language, or maybe not take any language at all. I always think back to my high school when I played trumpet and I left high school and I never played trumpet again, and I’m so sad now because now I probably don’t know how to play trumpet. I hate the thought of students who are so good at Latin, all of a sudden forgetting it. And there is a lifetime--twenty lifetimes-- of literature out there. I just want all the students to stay with it and enjoy it for a lifetime. It can be a passion forever.
Do you have anything you want to plug?
Besides myself!? Yes, I do have something: I am one of three hosts of a podcast called "Quomodo Dicitur?" And it’s found at quomododicitur.com, iTunes and Google Play. We consist of three Latin teachers, one is in Michigan, one is in New Mexico, I'm in Virginia. We do it every week, we say it’s a “weekly conversation about whatever,” so we discuss ancient authors, or baseball, or what noises pigs make. We just, whatever we feel about talking about, we talk, and it gives people a really good exposure to what Latin sounds like and what Latin can be like when it’s truly lived.
Editor's note: If you are looking to experience something completely unique, definitely go take a listen to "Quomodo Dicitur." It's a truly interesting way to hear the language being used, not to mention a good challenge for a Latin student looking to test his or her knowledge of the language.