Last week, I finalized the details for my SJU Latin students and our guests to celebrate – and commemorate – the traditional founding of Rome on what we call April 21, in the year 753 B.C.
With two female students present in class and a dozen young men, I offered them the choice between Whole Foods wraps or Anthony’s Coal-Fired Pizza.
The student whose persona name is Marcus Antonius, true to his historic character, pulled back in his seat and said, “do you call that a choice?”
Obviously, we are going to go with the coal-fired pizza, just the sound of it oozes testosterone.
We are planning to fête the day, a Friday, with an on-campus field trip, first meeting on Lapsley Lane in the front of Regis Hall, now the headquarters of our new President Dr. Cheryl McConnell.
There will be thirty-two of us and we will make our way on-foot past the handsome Jesuit residence called Arrupe Hall and come into the back of the Barnes Arboretum, now a campus treasure.
I will have parked my car in the Barnes lot, so we can tailgate, enjoying freshly-baked croissants and muffins, and organic juices, as we all begin to orient ourselves.
Next, we will proceed to the front of the Barnes Mansion and take photos of the excellent “you are here” map of the grounds and arboretum. This photo on our phones will come in handy in case anyone gets lost in meandering the gardens and woodlands.
Our objective – since we are Latin and Greek language students – will be to search the gardens for our “favorite botanical.” With our camera phones, we will take a minimum of 2 photos, one of the botanical and one of the taxonomic tag.
Two students by their persona names, Gorgo and Hypatia, have set up an Instagram account for us to post our photos with comments.
This is so exciting – I have done this many, many times with my SJU students – because the selected favorite botanicals are wonderful conversation starters about our likes and dislikes, and even about our travel experiences.
At this point in the academic year, second semester, using our textbook called Wheelock’s Latin, we can decode on the taxonomic tags five declensions of nouns, three declensions of adjectives, and verb roots from four-and-a-half conjugations. Plus, our phones are dictionaries.
Prior to our outing for Rome’s birthday, each student has presented a slide show on his or her persona, in the first semester, and taught us about an event in Ancient Roman history recorded for posterity in our Google doc with sources cited.
Those presentations begin with Rome’s founding in 753 B.C. as a small settlement on the banks of the Tiber River, through the period of the Etruscan kings to their ouster in 510-509 B.C. and the start of the Roman Republic.
In our class, as personae, we have the Roman Emperors Traianus, Aurelianus, and Iustinianus II. As mentioned, Marcus Antonius is in our class along with his lover Queen Cleopatra of Egypt whose ancestor was one of the military commanders of Alexander the Great.
Appius Claudius, the famous entrepreneur and subsidizer of ancient Roman infrastructure, sits next to Mithradates VI Eupator, in Greek Μιθραδάτης, 135–63 BC and ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus in northern Anatolia from 120 to 63 BC, and one of the Roman Republic’s most formidable and determined opponents.
Mithridates was an effective, ambitious and ruthless ruler who sought to dominate Asia Minor and the Black Sea region, waging several hard-fought but ultimately unsuccessful campaigns, known as the Mithridatic Wars, to break Roman dominion over Asia and the Hellenic world.
In our entourage, we also have literary and philosophical personae including Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Younger, born ca. 4 B.C. in Corduba, Spain and died A.D. 65 in Rome, a Roman philosopher, statesman, orator, and tragedian.
We must not omit Marcus Tullius Cicero, the world-renown ancient Roman political leader and orator who saved his city from a dramatic attempted takeover by Catiline and his fellow conspirators in 63 B.C.
And Plotinus, Hortensia, Socrates, and Sulpicia will also be in attendance for the excursion.
Finally, we have reserved the classroom, solarium, and veranda for us to upload and share our favorite botanical photos and enjoy pizza, cookies and chocolates for our second hour.
Amidst all of this, we will be thankful for the bounty provided to us at The Barnes Arboretum at Saint Joseph’s University, a 12-acre arboretum astonishingly diverse for its size and home to more than 2,500 taxa of woody and herbaceous plants, many of which are rare.
The peony, lilac, and fern collections, which date from the early 1900s, are important genetic resources for conservation and study, along with an herbarium which contains more than 10,000 specimens, invaluable supplements for teaching and research.
In 1922, when Dr. Albert C. Barnes and his wife, Laura Leggett Barnes, purchased the property, it already housed a collection of specimen trees which its previous owner, Captain Joseph Lapsley Wilson, had started assembling in the 1880s.
While Dr. Barnes concentrated on building his art collection, Laura Barnes devoted herself to the arboretum and gardens. Her legacy lives on in the beauty of the landscape and in the horticulture school which she established in 1940.
The Arboretum is located at 50 Lapsley Lane, Merion, PA 19066. Plan a visit on Saint Joseph’s website.
Mary Brown, a weekly columnist and feature writer for Main Line Media News, teaches Latin at Saint Joseph’s University.
