As someone who teaches Latin, I am often surprised by the ways in which popular culture sometimes generates interest in this long-dead classical language. A few years ago, I noticed a trend of students who were registering for Introduction to Latin courses after reading the Harry Potter books or playing Total War: Rome. The interest of these students wasn't purely academic, but rather, the language connected them more deeply with something they already loved.
These days you practically need to be a Latinist to make sense of what’s happening in the world. Not so long ago, quid pro quo was on the lips of nearly every journalist and politician involved in the Trump Ukraine scandal. As was explained at the time, this phrase means “something for something,” and is used in the context of the exchange of goods or favors.
These days you practically need to be a Latinist to make sense of what’s happening in the world. Not so long ago, quid pro quo was on the lips of nearly every journalist and politician involved in the Trump Ukraine scandal. As was explained at the time, this phrase means “something for something,” and is used in the context of the exchange of goods or favors.
Now, a few months later, the daily news cycle is dominated by references to the “crowned poison” (coronavirus) COVID-19 wreaking havoc throughout the world as governments struggle to contain a global pandemic (itself a technical term from Greek, meaning “all-district”).
It would seem, then, that Latin is enjoying a kind of micro-renaissance in the current moment. Even popular culture is hopping on the linguistic bandwagon. In just the last couple of weeks, two much anticipated science fiction TV series have employed Latin phrases in key episode titles.
Season 3 of HBO’s Westworld recently began streaming, with Episode 1 being titled, “Parce domine.” This little bit of liturgical Latin is taken from a medieval chant based on Joel 2:17.
Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo:
ne in aeternum irascaris nobis.
Spare, Lord, spare your people:
Be not angry with us forever
Presumably, this phrase is meant to foreshadow the violence soon to be unleashed by surviving artificial “hosts” on humanity. However, who turns out to be “Lord” and who will be “spared” remains to be seen.
Similarly, the penultimate (“next to last”) episode of Star Trek: Picard Season 1 was called “Et in Arcadia ego.” This phrase, meaning “I, too, in Arcadia…” is the title of a 17th century pastoral painting by French baroque painter Nicolas Poussin. The painted scene, which depicts classical shepherds gathered around a tomb, is often interpreted to mean that even in the idealized, pastoral landscape of Arcadia (a kind of classical utopia), death too is present.
The phrase is also the title of 1965 poem by W. H. Auden:
Who, now, seeing Her so
Happily married,
Housewife, helpmate to Man,
Can imagine the screeching
Virago, the Amazon,
Earth Mother was?
Her jungle growths
Are abated,
Her exorbitant monsters abashed,
Her soil mumbled,
Where crops, aligned precisely,
Will soon be orient:
Levant or couchant,
Well-daunted thoroughbreds
Graze on mead and pasture,
A church clock subdivides the day,
Up the lane at sundown
Geese podge home.
As for Him:
What has happened to the Brute
Epics and nightmares tell of?
No bishops pursue
Their archdeacons with axes,
In the crumbling lair
Of a robber baron
Sightseers picnic
Who carry no daggers.
I well might think myself
A humanist,
Could I manage not to see
How the autobahn
Thwarts the landscape
In godless Roman arrogance,
The farmer’s children
Tiptoe past the shed
Where the gelding knife is kept.
The poem describes a primordial wildness subjugated and subdued by technological intervention, while at the same time ominously invoking the violent potential of that same intervention’s tools. Incidentally, a “gelding knife” is used in castration.
Aside from their individual artistic merits, both Westworld and Picard are currently dealing in different ways with anxieties around artificial intelligence. In both cases, dreams of techno-utopia threaten to collapse into dystopian nightmares as the savage realities of the slavery, exploitation, and violence upon which these future Arcadiae are built begin to be laid bare. As such, they are again exploring the well-worn sci-fi question—what happens when the creature turns on its creator? A question previously explored in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, etc., and one that, as it happens, is as old as the Bible itself.
The same theme was also explored in the 2014 film Ex machina, the title of which is based on the Latin phrase Deus ex machina, usually referring to a contrived plot device. The deliberate excision of Deus from the title emphasizes through omission the terrifying (quasi-divine) creative power of technology and invites philosophical and even theological reflection.
In all these cases, the use of Latin serves as an effective form of exegetical shorthand, which points the viewer to other works of art or literature which offer an important reservoir of humanistic reflections on the unprecedented pace of technological change. They speak to the valuable contribution that past artistic, literary, and intellectual traditions can and must make to understanding and giving meaning not only to our present, but to our many possible futures.
