Classics Club

lingua Latina Ἑλληνικὴ γλῶσσα

Two languages, a buzzer game, and the set of stories that every ancient book expects you to have read already.

The inscription

A formal Roman inscription is cut in capitals and in nothing else: the small letters we read every day grew out of handwriting centuries later. Before a chisel touched the stone, the ordinator ruled a cap line and a base line across it and drew the letters between them, so the whole text was laid out before any of it was cut. Twenty-three letters did the work. I stood for J as well, and V for both U and W.

The words were not spaced apart. A point cut at mid height, the interpunct, divides one word from the next; the gap we leave between words came in with the manuscript hand a long time afterwards. A long vowel could carry an apex, a short stroke cut above it, and a long I was often simply cut taller than the letters either side of it. None of these is decoration. Each one is telling you how to read the word.

Marks on the stone

The languages

  • Latin

    lingua Latina

    The language of Rome, and then of law, letters and scholarship for more than a thousand years after Rome.

    The twenty-three letters

  • Greek

    Ἑλληνικὴ γλῶσσα

    Not one language but a family of them: Homer's, the Attic of Athens, and the common Greek of the later Mediterranean.

    The twenty-four letters

Certamen

Buzz first and the question is yours alone; answer it and the next two are yours as well.

Certamen is Latin for a contest, and the contest it names is a buzzer quiz on the ancient world: language, literature, history, myth, daily life. A toss-up goes to every team at once and the first player to buzz answers it, with no conferring. A right answer opens two bonus questions that belong to that team and nobody else, and on those the team may talk it over. Everything else about the game is detail on that shape.

The course of play

μυθολογία

Mythology

Ancient writers take it for granted that you know the stories. A tragedy can turn on a name; an epic can mention a bow or a ship and expect you to know whose it was. Six cycles carry most of what is assumed: how the gods came to power, the labours of Heracles, the voyage of the Argo, the house of Thebes, the war at Troy, and the stories Rome told about its own beginnings. Learn those and much of what an ancient text leaves unsaid starts filling itself in.

The cycles