“Ille, Ille Juppiter restitit! Ille Capitolium, ille haec templa, ille cunctam urbem, ille vos omnes salvos esse voluit.”
In the picture above, you see me reciting 1/38th of Cicero’s 3rd Catilinarian oration in Latin, encircled by the 38-strong Paideia gang. We stood by the temple of Concord on a hot summer’s day as we recited, but in spirit we stood in the chill of an early December morning in 63 BC and felt all of the tension that only an imminent threat to the republic and the anticipation of public speaking can provide.
You may notice that I have no pieces of paper in my hands. This is because, dear reader, I memorized my section! Without any prompting, I dramatically declaimed some of the most eloquent and difficult oratory from antiquity. With Ciceronian humility, I would just like to say: I did pretty great.
In all seriousness, the act of memorizing that speech was helpful for me as a classicist. I know that passage, including all of its word order, vocabulary, and syntactical quirks. I have built a mental storehouse of Ciceronian tricks. And now I feel much closer to the man himself; I feel honored to be able to carry Cicero’s words around with me.
After we finished reciting the Cicero speech, we read an epitaph of Cicero written by Piccolomini. The last few lines go like this: “As long as the sky looks back on the lands and the sea looks on the sky, no age will escape your praises. You who pass by here, boys and youths and men, stop and say “‘Oh Cicero of ours: hail!’”
Though I don’t quite appreciate the exclusion of women, I think this poem is beautiful. And I hope that it’s accurate. I hope that there will never be a time when people don’t study Cicero, or Piccolomini, or Horace, or Virgil. I hope that in fifty years, in a hundred years, there will still be a group of students standing at the temple of Concord in early July, shouting and spitting and making Cicero’s words their own, making tourists stop and stare, making guards approach and ask what’s going on, making the study of Classics vital and visceral and real. I was and am so honored to be a small part of this tradition, and I am grateful to the Paideia Institute for making it possible.