Latin Lover's Lyon: August 16

People thought I was strange for taking so much Latin in school. But I loved its structures, its predictability, and the way that prose and poetry in Latin were puzzles to be unscrambled by those who knew its grammar. Classmates and adults would marvel (then roll their eyes) as I could provide definitions to strange words like "pulchritudinous" by identifying the Latin root ("pulcher, pulchra" - beauty, beautiful). Yes, I was odd that way. But hey, I did well on the SAT-verbal...

Still, until last Saturday, Latin was a beautiful system of long-dead language. Then we went to the Gallo-Roman Museum in Lyon, built on (and into) a hill that includes the oldest parts of the city. Here we're talking really old: as in 40's BC - 200's AD , when the city was called Lugdunum and served as the capital of Roman Gaul. Just outside the museum was the well-preserved Roman amphitheatre, where we could imagine chariots racing... or Christians being martyred...

The museum held artifacts from Bronze Age pre-history through the Christian era of the 300's. And for the first time, right in front of me, were road signs, official proclamations and sarcophogae written in Latin. I could decipher many words (not as many as I'd hoped...) and still puzzle over the grammar. It was cool. Did you know the Romans painted those precisely chiseled letters red? Yep. The paint was still there. I couldn't help touching the stones, making them all the more real to my senses. Somehow those stones, some grand, others mundane, were more impressive to me than the major architectural wonders. This was real Gallo (French) - Roman life, 2000 years old, still painted.

Also incredibly impressive were the collection of mosaics taken from homes and shrines -- we even walked on a very large one, laid out like a quilt with geometric patterns interspersed with more pictorial sections. This pulchritudinous artwork was the floor of one of the galleries! How many sandalled feet at walked across it all those years ago?

Latin may be "dead" but it lives on in Lyon and many other parts of France... Including our next stop, Arles, where we sat in the actual Roman Amphitheatre to watch a regional spectacle (see Margaret's blog on this!); and even the grand, medieval Carcassonne -- built atop an old Roman fort. This Latin lover is happy.

-Susan