Arma Virumque . . .

For Julius Caesar, another Ides of March was ahead, though this time the main conspirator looked more like Fanny Farmer than Cassius. She is a serious Midwestern schoolmarm, with a bent for poetry, baking cakes, and puttering in a garden. But if Miss Lenore Geweke (pronounced gave-a-key) has her way--and she well might--Latin beginners all over the U.S. will no longer fight their way through Caesar's trim, tight prose.

Miss Geweke began plotting more than ten years ago, and has already won some powerful support. With a Ph.D. in the classics, and years of Latin teaching behind her, she had seen too many schoolkids make hard going of Caesar's Gallic War. When they finished at the end of the second year of Latin, most of them usually dropped Latin forever. Miss Geweke's plan: if most schoolkids are only going to take two years of Latin, why not give them "the best Latin"? Why not give them Vergil and his Aeneid?

More Glamor. To many an old-school Latin teacher, the idea was heresy. Vergil, they said, was much too difficult, too full of poet's irregularities. Besides, boys at least, liked to read about wars. Rubbish, said Miss Geweke. There was adventure and glamor in the Aeneid ("It contains an exciting love affair"). It was a masterpiece, "the most balanced work in all Latin literature." And it was certainly no harder than Caesar, with his long, closely knit sentences, his use of subjunctives, indirect discourse and the historical present. The Classical Association of the Middle West and South (she is chairman of its educational policies committee) backed her up, and the American Council of Learned Societies gave her $7,500 to prove her point.

Last week, in a book-littered room on the University of Chicago campus, Miss Geweke was buried in vocabulary and syntax. She had three scholars working with her; volunteers in schools and colleges all over the U.S. had answered her discreet little notes asking for help, placed in classical journals. A professor at Tulane University had made her a list of 8,000 Latin words which closely resemble the English. A teacher at Pennsylvania's Ursinus College had made a frequency count of Vergil's vocabulary. The chairman of the State University of Iowa's classics department, one of her associates, had made a frequency count of syntax forms. Miss Geweke had begun to write the lessons that would best prepare pupils for Vergil. She had hoped to try out her theories in 30 public & private school systems, has already found 52 willing to try it.

Less Grammar. Miss Geweke & Co. think that grammar should not be taught as if pupils were ever going to speak or teach Latin. She hopes to start pupils reading as soon as possible. In the first year they can learn enough grammar to read Vergil, she thinks, without parsing, and without memorizing the declension of every noun or the conjugation of every verb. They will learn each case "across the board" for nouns of all declensions, rather than all cases for each word. She and her associates have also combined ten types of genitives (measure, quality, possession, etc.) into two basic types, 17 ablatives into three. The important thing, says Miss Geweke, is for beginning pupils to learn to read Latin with understanding and pleasure. Cicero and Caesar, and the additional grammar to understand them, would come in advanced courses.

But even if her experiments succeed (Vergil will get about a four-year try), sha will still have a fight on her hands in one section of the U.S. The Classical Association of the Atlantic States is still unwilling to render unto Vergil the things that are Caesar's. Says Miss Geweke: "We're not trying to disparage Caesar. We just think that Vergil is better."

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