Dido and Aeneas, bravado, scandal and passion

Latin came up during a recent physiotherapy session. It turned out that both Marianne and I had studied Latin in high school, she in the Netherlands, I in Sydney. That day, I was lying face down looking through the hole in the treatment table, so I could only see her strong, brown, Birkenstocked feet moving around as she pressed and manipulated and dry-needled my shoulders, but I could hear the glee in her voice. We had both studied Virgil’s Aeneid Book IV – Queen Dido’s ill-fated love affair with Aeneas – in our final year.

At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura
vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni.

‘But the queen, wounded long since by intense love,
feeds the hurt with her life-blood, weakened by hidden fire.’

It always sounded better in Latin.

Back at home that day, I found an old textbook on the shelf, A New Approach to Latin: Part 2 (Macnaughton and McDougall, 1974). I flicked through its pages, and my response was warmly visceral, remembering how, at school, I had lost myself in Latin, declining nouns, conjugating verbs.

In Year Seven at SCECGS Redlands in Cremorne, Latin was compulsory and our teacher was Mrs Reading (pronounced ‘Redding’). She was English. She wore flouncy, frilly pastel frocks and strappy sandals and, we were sure, false eyelashes behind her gold-rimmed spectacles.

Amo, amas, amat. I love; you love; he, she or it loves. Amamus, amatis, amant. We love; you (plural) love; they love.

Mrs Reading left at the end of Year Seven. From Year Eight onwards we had Mrs Richardson for Latin. Sensible clothes, sensible shoes. A neat blonde bob. Ever laconic. Vicki failed Mrs Richardson’s first Latin test – I knew because I was sitting beside her in class when we checked our marks. In a fit of uncharacteristic bravado I stood up and glared at our new teacher. ‘Vicki never failed Latin tests last year!’ Mrs Richardson looked up from her desk and sighed. ‘Oh, do sit down, Jenny.’

As well as Latin language we studied the day-to-day lives of the ancient Romans. The public baths fascinated us prudish private school girls. After sweating out impurities in the sauna, the men would lie on stone slabs to have slaves massage their naked bodies with aromatic oil, which was then removed with wooden spatulas. Then they would get back into their togas and continue with their day. ‘So sensible,’ said Mrs Richardson. ‘The oil would dissolve all the dirt from their skin and then the whole lot would be scraped off. Whereas we silly modern people just rub it all back in with a towel.’ We were scandalised. We didn’t talk about bathroom matters with our teachers. Not at Redlands.

I sometimes wonder if I’d have had a better education at our local public school, Mackellar Girls’ High. For all the prestige, the smart uniforms, the tennis courts and grand buildings, the teaching at Redlands wasn’t great (with the possible exception of Mrs Richardson). Our English teacher, year after year, targeted certain students, marked them down and humiliated them in class. Our chemistry teacher was sacked halfway through our final year for turning up drunk. But I wouldn’t have had Latin at Mackellar.

Even at Redlands Latin was not compulsory after Year Seven and over the years attendance dwindled until by Year Twelve there were only four of us (including Vicki). Over the years I had fallen more and more in love with the ancient language. Between the voices, the tenses, the moods and more, every Latin verb had 128 different endings. There could be no mistaking what an ancient Roman had meant. I liked that.

So when I reached my final year I decided to do Three Unit Latin; these days it’s called Latin Extension. I was the only one doing the advanced curriculum and Mrs Richardson and I sat on the back veranda of Staff Cottage. I studied the historian Sallust and the poems of Catullus. From Catullus’s Poem 5:

… da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum,
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

I used pale yellow Spirax notebooks – spiral-bound, foolscap-size. I can smell them even now. I would carefully transcribe the Latin onto every third line in the notebook. On the line beneath I would parse the sentences in lead pencil (with an eraser at hand) – I would identify the verb and its voice, its tense, its mood; from that, I’d deduce the subject and object; then the adjectives and adverbs, prepositions if used (in Latin they usually dictated the case of the noun) and conjunctions … Then on the next line I’d produce a translation, as lyrical as I could manage while staying true to the Latin.

‘Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
then another thousand, then a second hundred,
then yet another thousand, then a hundred,
then, when we’ve made many thousands,
we’ll blend them so that we lose count,
so no scoundrel can envy us,
when he learns how many kisses there are.’

There on the cottage veranda I would squirm, infused with teenage hormones. Mrs Richardson was oblivious – or pretended to be. But the process! Whether of poetry, or of historical, oratory or epistolary prose, I found the translation process comforting, reassuring. At my little desk in my bedroom at night, in those Spirax notebooks, I distanced myself from family life outside my bedroom door. I was good at Latin. I could handle it. It made sense.

A few years later Mrs Richardson asked me to tutor a student having trouble with HSC Latin. I stopped by the school for a chat; it was the first time I’d been back. I was a medical rep by then so was dressed in my favourite ruby-red, jacquard-woven skirt and jacket, silk blouse and heels. I found Mrs Richardson on bus-stop duty at the school’s front gate. She looked me up and down. ‘Well,’ she said, mildly. ‘Aren’t you all grown up now.’

I would visit the student at her home in North Sydney a couple of evenings a week. I bought a clutch of those Spirax notebooks and happily spent much of my weekends translating the text in preparation for our lessons. Again, it was The Aeneid, Book IV. I was back in the zone.

One Saturday afternoon, now in jeans, T-shirt and sandals, I left my notebooks and dictionaries, my texts and pencils and pens, scattered across my boyfriend’s dining table and found a bunch of friends drinking coffee and eating strudels at the Hungarian Café on Bondi Road. Later, back at Ramsgate Avenue, my boyfriend had returned. Bent over my translations, he was strangely aroused by Aeneas and Queen Dido’s exploits.

venisse Aenean Troiano sanguine cretum,
cui se pulchra viro dignetur iungere Dido;
nunc hiemem inter se luxu, quam longa, fovere
regnorum immemores turpique cupidine captos.

‘… how Aeneas is come, born of Trojan blood, to whom Dido deigns to join herself in beautiful union; now they spend the winter, the length of it, in wanton ease together, forgetful of their realms and enthralled by shameless passion.’

It wasn’t long before we were ensconced in our own wanton ease in the bedroom. Mrs Richardson would have been … proud? No, just wryly amused.