“You are not in a classroom,” he said. “You are on the Via Appia. It is dawn. Smell the rosemary. Hear the cart wheel crack a stone. And there—look—a girl is about to pull a fool out of the street. Her name was Flavia. And she is about to teach you the dative case.”
He looked down. The cheap synthetic carpet of his rental was gone. He was sitting on a wooden stool, his sneakers planted on a floor of gritty, uneven sampietrini —basalt cobblestones. via latina de lingua et vita romanorum pdf
He finished the thesis in three days. It was rejected by his committee. Too poetic, they said. Too unorthodox. They wanted charts, not eulogies. “You are not in a classroom,” he said