Harry Mount - Carpe Diem

A ngelina Jolie did not study Latin at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute in Los Angeles, which she attended from the age of eleven in the mid-80s. Nor did the subject crop up at NYU where she went on to do film studies. But all the same, when she was photographed passing through Londons Heathrow Airport on January 25, 2006, on the way to the economic summit at Davos, the tattoo she revealed on the lower slopes of her pregnant belly was in Latin.

Quod me nutrit me destruit , read the tattooWhat nourishes me destroys me. I also notice that Miss Jolie has decided to change the name of her newly adopted, three-year-old Vietnamese son, Pham Quang Sang, to Pax Thien Jolie ( Pax, pacis f. peace).

David Beckham, the English soccer player who has just started playing with the Los Angeles Galaxy, shares her tastes. He, too, was no Latin scholar at Chingford School in Essex, England, when he was there in the late 1980s. But still, when it comes to his body art, the soccer star is a dedicated Latinist. Of the nine tattoos on his body, three are in Latin (and two of the others, Victoria and Romeo, are Latin-inspired names).

On his left forearm, he has the tricky little expression Ut Amem et Foveam That I might love and cherishwhich makes careful and correct use of the subjunctive.

On his right forearm, he has the number of the soccer shirt he wears7although he opts for the Roman numeral, VII. Under the VII, Beckham has had his Manchester tat tooist, Louis Malloy, retained since the soccer players days at Manchester United, write Perfectio in Spiritu Perfection in Spirit.

Why do these stars, with no formal knowledge of the language, go crazy for it?

As Miss Jolie is no doubt aware, the Latin on her tummy and in her sons new name has echoes resonating back through the ages and through the pens of the greatest writers of all time. Thats why she has the quote and name in Latin, and not in English or Swahili; for the same reason, she had it printed in a Gothic fontto give an impression of ancient wisdom.

The same desire for something old and highbrow means that the former French president, Jacques Chirac, wanted to call his new European Internet search engine (if it comes off) Quaero meaning I seek in Latinrather than Je cherche.

When it comes to body art, David Beckham is a dedicated Latinist
2007 FIFO FATO/WIREIMAGE.COM

Quaero meaning I seek in Latinrather than Jecherche.

Latins ancient grandeur has appealed for centuries to people who want to come across as a little bit special. Because the study of classics had no practical use, it tended to gain cachet among those who could afford to dedicate their time to fine prose, poetry, and history rather than to money-making disciplines such as science or engineering. It flourished in American Catholic and prep schools, and in Britains public and grammar schoolsand today proper teaching of it only really survives in these privileged little pockets.

Although Angelina Jolie and David Beckham may not be aware of the history of Latin in the American and British education systems, they will be aware of the inherited baggage of poshness that comes with the language. For the same reason, the organizers of the Superbowl are careful to call it Superbowl XLI and not Superbowl 41. Arabic numerals just dont have the same cachetand that has nothing to do with al-Qaeda.

Miss Jolie will have noticed the chunk of Latin associated with the MGM studio Ars gratia artis, Art for the sake of artwhich is seen above the roaring lion at the opening of all their films. Beckham will have picked up on the Latin in the mottos of soccer clubs (the motto of one of the great English soccer teams, Arsenal, is Victoria Concordia Crescit not Posh Spice goes by Concorde, but Victory grows through togetherness). Beckham might have noticed, too, the classical influence behind the grouped Ionic columns that frame the pedimented porch of his mockQueen Anne house, Beckingham Palace in Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire. Jolie and Beckham will have seen Latin, too, in dates on war memorials and in epitaphs on tombstones, and carved as inscriptions on the facades of ancient houses. Wherever Angelina Jolie and Beckham will have spotted Latin, its setting will have been grand, or attached to the portentous things in life: birth, death, scholarship boards. The setting will also have tended to be an old one, or one that wants to conjure up connotations of oldness.

The knowledge that Latin has survived in written, if not in spoken, form for 2,500 years gives Quod me nutrit me destruit an elemental force that just isnt there in What nourishes me destroys me. Angelina Jolie may not be able to read Latin, but she will recognize it when she hears it in everyday speech: RIP ( requiescat in pace ); i.e. ( id est that is); and so on.

All of these terms are mental triggers, little ticsdotted through the English language and cropping up in solid form all over Britain and Americathat give Latin what Angelina Jolies agent would call tremendous branding potential.

And so to the point of this book: to make the jump from a Hollywood tattooists knowledge of Latin to a level where you can understand most of those inscriptions on tombstones, and get real pleasure from reading bits of Horace and Catullus, is not difficult.

If you never learned Latin at schoolno matter. If you did, all the better. You might think youve forgotten it. You havent. If you spent even the tiniest part of your teenage years learning dreary declensions and conjugations, the effort made to do so, and the young age at which you did it, means that a ghost of that knowledge is still there, tattooed to the back of your brain. Somewhere in your mind there still beat the old rhythms amo, amas, amat ; ablative absolutes; the future perfect; subjunctives.

As you go down the list, and the rules behind each idiom get a little more complicated, they may grow a little more faded; but all those rules need is a little memory boost, and they come flooding back. It will only take a quick trawl through this friendly Latin primer, with its reminders of a few of those declensions and conjugations, to bring the ghost to life. The joy that a little learning of Latin brings is immense.

Alexander Pope was quite wrong, by the way, when he said, A little learning is a dangerous thing, drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.

His miscalculation is particularly disappointing in somebody who certainly knew his classics, and would have known that Pieria was the place where, according to Hesiod, the Nine Muses were bornClio, in charge of history; Urania, astronomy; Calliope, epic poetry; Melpomene, tragedies; Euterpe, harmony; Erato, lyric and love poetry; Terpsichore, dancing; Thalia, comedy; and Polyhymnia, music. All of these Muses are delightful subjects, of which a little knowledge can bring vast pleasure.

Okay, I do have to admit the Muses were Greek, like an awful lot of things absorbed by the Romans: tragedy, comedy, architecture; so many things in fact that Quintilian said with some relief, Satura quidem tota nostra est At least satire is completely ours.