The Linguist

18 The Linguist Vol/65 No/3 ciol.org.uk/thelinguist FEATURES Author Caroline Lawrence tells Miranda Moore why classical languages enable her to transport children to ancient worlds When I arrange to interview children's author and classicist Caroline Lawrence, there is one day she can't make: the release of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. It's a story she knows well and has studied in the original Greek. In fact, she's just published an Odyssey colouring book to coincide with the film's release, including a scattering of Greek words. So when she meets me online a few days later, from her home in London, I naturally ask for a review. Sadly, her excitement to see the Ancient Greek world brought to a global audience on the big screen quickly turned to disappointment. "But that's because I have such a clear idea of who Odysseus is, what the world looks and feels like," she explains. For her, knowing classical languages (principally Ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew) is to be transported to the world they once inhabited, and in this respect Nolan's epic falls short. "It's a very dark film. It doesn't have the look or feel of Greece, even though some of it was filmed in the Med. It feels more like a Norse saga." "I'm thrilled, though, that everyone loves it because what I want is for more people to study Classics, that is Greek and Latin," she adds in the breezy Californian accent she has retained despite living most of her adult life in the UK. Indeed, before becoming an author – notably of a 17-book mystery series set in the Roman Empire – she taught French, Latin and Art in primary schools. Growing up with an artist mother and a teacher father, she was always aware of the possibilities languages offered, but her father – who moved the family to Stanford to study Linguistics when Lawrence was 12 – was less than encouraging. "I begged him to teach me French, but he said 'No, I have enough kids to teach already!'" she laughs. "It's often the way that when your parents withhold something you want it more." And so it was that she found her way to Ancient Greek in her late teens. She had travelled to Switzerland to improve her French before going to university, but wound up in a ski resort where everyone spoke Swiss German. "It was so expensive I couldn't even afford the lift pass! There was nothing to do but read," she says. Then a gift arrived from her parents that changed her life: The Last of the Wine by Mary Reynolds and Penguin Classics' The Iliad. "I remember thinking, 'This can't have been composed 2,500 years ago.' It seemed so modern – the goddesses bitching, having tantrums, and also the compassion, the cleverness and humour." At Berkeley she chose Classics after doing a taster unit in Ancient Greek with a teacher she compares to the terrifying instructor in Whiplash. She went on to study Classical Art and Archaeology at Cambridge, an MA in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL (her thesis was on Syriac grammar in the Old Testament) and various ancient languages over the years. I tentatively pose the question I was often asked when I opted to take GCSE Latin aged 14: Why study a dead language? "That's the reason! No one's fluent in Latin; you all start from the same place," she laughs. Like me, she was also attracted to the puzzle-like nature of studying a language that no one speaks. As a child, she loved solving cryptograms with her father. "That's what, for me, Latin and Greek are like: a giant code. And when you break the code you're in another world, aren't you? You're in someone's head who lived 2,500 years ago." She vividly recalls the experience of cramming for a Latin exam as an undergraduate and finding she could read the Virgil passages unseen: "It felt like flying!" She came to love Latin, with its familiar Roman alphabet, but one of the things that first captivated her about Greek was its script. "It just entranced me, the letters themselves are so beautiful. It's a kind of exotic, wonderful species of worm." She compares learning another alphabet to having a secret key. When it came to Hebrew, the experience was almost religious. Though her father was Jewish and her mother came from a Unitarian Mormon background, she was raised an atheist, her spiritual awakening coming after her son was born. One night she read a prayer she had been given and when she woke "the world looked fresh and new and sparkly". As she read, and marvelled at, the Bible she realised it was part of her Jewish heritage. "I started learning the Hebrew alphabet and it was an intensely spiritual experience. I felt this sensation of joy, almost lifting me up to the ceiling," she says. "And I've read that when rabbis teach the alphabet, they put honey on the letters and get the kids to trace the Hebrew letters and then taste the sweetness." It seems apt that she is now making colouring books that allow people to interact with Greek characters in a similarly tactile manner. This sensory way of experiencing language seems intuitive for Lawrence. As a teacher, she used to hold an annual Latin party where the class reclined on a rug and ate only food available to the Romans (figs, olives, pitta). She still does school visits and always brings objects that open up the classical world: a wax tablet smelling of honey; a sponge on a stick that the Romans used as toilet paper. Her own learning journey continues by listening to Bible verses in Ancient Greek and Hebrew each morning, and working on Virgil's A key to the past

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