When I was first learning Latin, prose composition was regarded by us students as completely old-fashioned and a waste of time. The way we were taught to compose into Latin from English was rigid and prescriptive and seemed to us young radicals as pointless. We wanted to get to grips with sexual ambiguities in Ovid and Propertius, and in the state propaganda underneath the text of the Aeneid. We didn’t want to have to churn out reams of Ciceronian prose, and Cicero was right out as well: a pompous old windbag, in our opinion. Just as with many opinions these have now run their course and can be seen as symptomatic of their time. Some of our attitudes have been developed and vindicated and have become mainstream thinking, and I find Cicero much less of a windbag these days and a much more interesting rounded character. Yet I begin to wonder if we were right about prose composition. Certainly the way we were taught seemed to make even more rigid the grammatical rules of certain books. Any attempt to break the sentence structures as laid down in Hillard and Botting (or was it North and Hillard?) was greeted with scorn and multiple underlinings in red ink, and any protest that Tacitus actually uses that construction on a number of occasions was regarded as a serious challenge to authority. But then that was the Zeitgeist: authority and challenge; but the rendering of prose as optional in final examinations and even in Oxford entry was taken as a kind of token victory. I am still not sure if my refusal to do the prose paper at Oxford entrance was serious folly or brave individualism. Anyway the examiners did not have much idea of what to do with the alternatives set instead: to have offered them was enough. I was able to take Greek Sculpture instead of prose composition at Oxford, which is surely justification enough.
And yet I am now not convinced that my principled opposition to proses was the right decision. Now I am quite pleased to be required to compose a letter or document in Latin that will allow a little individual expression and the opportunity to put down in a few elegant Latin phrases exactly what is required. In the European Schools this is sometimes a good solution to the otherwise laborious necessity of having to issue a document to Latin teachers of many linguistic origins in a language that a) they will understand and b) not be offended by. Never underestimate the susceptibility of certain nationalities to object to being addressed in one language rather than another.
So my position today is rather that composing in Latin is a creative act, a vehicle for the transmission of ideas in a pleasing form. There is a pleasure to be had from finding an exact equivalent and in using the clearest idiom or construction. Familiarity with the great prose authors is a necessity of course, but trying to imitate them is a form of literary criticism and one which teaches you a lot about the text you are trying to read. The art of parody may be much closer to prose composition than we think. Good parody plays with a well known text and even pokes fun at it. But a good parody will always contain a knowing appreciation of the author in question. Think of all the wonderful parodies of Shakespeare, by practising poets and writers. They are not written out of contempt or slavish imitation, but out of playful admiration and respect. As many other aspects of twentieth century Classics, the teaching of proses became rigid and paid too much attention to its own made-up rules. By emphasising the creative and aesthetic elements of composition could we possibly revive it? I recently came across a copy of Bradley’s Arnold Latin Prose Composition (a volume I cheerfully hurled across the room several times as a student) and found it immensely balanced, informative and encouraging. In looking for the mot juste it was very useful. Should we Classicists start to revive the practice: not as mechanical translations but as free composition or ironic parodies?
