Scrawny and lanky a young man sits in a bright cheerful classroom in the “New High School.” He gazes out into the courtyard, a design element the teachers and administrators weren’t quite sure how to use yet. He daydreams but not for long for his harsh, scary old Latin teacher had only 13 students and he could be called to answer a question at any time.
Today Ms. Audrey Cooper was talking about the layout of the tradition Roman villa. These history bits were more interesting to him than the ablative and male versus female nouns. He disconnected from his fantasy of being a rock star swaggering like Roger Daltrey at Woodstock and focused on tile roofs, a fountain in the center of the atrium and the marvelous mosaics the artisans would set out on the floors of these patrician estates.
Ms. Audrey with her pasty white powdered face took a piece of chalk and in precise letters wrote the word “viae” on the chalkboard. Viae was the plural of via the Latin word for road. She talked about how good roads were important for commerce in the empire. Good roads, and these were good roads elevated and with drainage ditches on the sides, could allow the Roman legions move quickly through the countryside. Her love of all things Roman was clear as she happily, almost giddily, told the class these roads were engineered to last and some were still visible today. Looking up and to the side gazing at a map of the Empire she intoned some are still in use in rural areas.
From rock star to Roman centurion, the young man’s fantasies shifted in a nanosecond. Instead of being onstage in bell bottoms and sandals singing in a gravelly voice about stopping the war he was marching with troops in a leather skirt and sandals out into the hinterlands of great Roman empire at the behest of Octavius. Now mind you both of these fantasies had similar components, semi-nude women, modern groupies or roman house keepers. Hey at 15 years old what more could you expect from the mind of a male child of the seventies?
From April 1971 to September 2021 the fifty years flew by. Ms. Cooper, God rest her soul (and I say that with sincerity), is long dead. The new high school is so very far from new. The fifteen-year-old horndog with the attention span of a gnat is now a 65-year-old man, retired from a lifetime of work and afflicted with the maladies that come with advancing years.
But here I stand on the grounds of a Roman villa with a docent explaining how when it was “discovered” in the 1700s this villa was large enough to be thought to be a whole village. One archeologist showed however that it was the home of very rich and very powerful patrician. The temple to animalistic deities was build late in the site’s history because these were holdouts from the Roman empire’s conversion to Christianity. The docent leads me into a sizeable house to show me how a 16th farmer used the ruins as the foundation of his house burying the entryway into the Roman dwelling beneath the living quarters of his traditional Iberian Peninsula home.
And then after we leave the house and step outside on the path back to the interpretive center, he casually throws out that this was a Roman road that led about 15 km to Faro and then from Faro on the Portuguese coast up to Spain. I ask him if the stones are the original stones from the start of time in CE. He tells me some but not all and he laughs saying if you look with even a little bit of care you can tell. And I did. And I could. And suddenly I was a centurion dressed in leather again heading out for a return to the seven hills of Rome. I will not address the question of whether my imagination conjured up tanned women in various states of undress. It is irrelevant. But I can tell you every second I paid attention in Latin I, II & III came flooding back to me.
And God bless the memory of Audrey Cooper and the love of classical history she instilled those of us who dared take her classes. Without her I wouldn't have taken an Uber out to the countryside with my youngest son to gaze upon the wonders of a great fallen empire.
Excellent!
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