The Cambridge classicist Mary Beard became briefly notorious in 2009 (though not for the first or last time) when she was bleeped at length on NPR for quoting an ancient Roman poem—in Latin. “Catullus 16,” as it’s blandly known, insults and attacks two of the first-century BCE poet’s detractors. The obscenities Catullus uses are, well, a bit obscene to quote here (as they were for centuries of translators), but the point is that ancient Latin, despite its reputation as a learned language of science, religion, and philosophy, was in fact a rough-and-ready language full of strikingly frank insults designed to quickly cut to the bone.
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