Roman Holiday

As the big buses from 32 states rolled into Albuquerque last week, 1,129 teenage voices inside howled in eerie chorus. The tunes sounded oddly like Hail, Hail, The Gang's All Here and Let Me Call You Sweetheart. They came out as "lo, lo, omnes adsunt,/ Quid curae est nobis/ Quid curae est nobis . . ." and "Vocabo te amicam/ Ego amo te/ Audiam te dicer e/ Te amare me . . ." It was the Junior Classical League, holding its seventh national convention at the University of New Mexico.

Latin is supposedly dead: half the country's public high school youngsters studied it in 1900; only 6.9% did in 1955. But those for whom it is a living language have increased their ardor. The Junior Classical League, which had 11,000 members ten years ago, now has 74,634, and chapters in 46 states. Some 475,000 high school students will take Latin this year, and classicists say that the number would double if there were enough teachers to go around.

Last week, in togas and sandals, the Junior Classical League delegates made New Mexico's neo-Pueblo campus look like a set from Ben-Hur. Gorged on deviled eggs in the Student Union, supine banqueters cheered a female snake dancer. Borne on a litter into the football stadium, purple-robed League President Ernest ("The Emperor'') Polansky, 18, gave his pagan blessing to Olympic games, complete with chariot races. In deadly earnest, white-robed candidates for top offices politicked in the ballroom. Taking no chances, they made their convention pitches in English.

Nearly all the 155 adults chaperoning these proceedings believed that they saw a rebirth of Latin back home. In Charleston, S. Dak.. Latin was so unpopular six years ago that it was almost dropped; now one school has 88 Latin students. Arkansas has 69 Latin teachers, could use 32 more. In missile-minding Cheyenne, Wyo., sons of the Air Force's Atlas tenders are stoutly conjugating mittere ("to send"). But apparently, only a few youngsters mull over the ablative absolute out of sheer joy. Said Teacher Belle Gould of Henderson (Texas) High School last week: "Some of my students asked at mid-term if they could drop Latin and still come to this convention. I said no.

So they stayed with Latin, and it didn't hurt them a bit."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.