We have made it to the end of another week! Are you amazed at how fast this school year is going by? We have another Latin phrase to share with you today. This week’s entry is by our High School Latin teacher, Dr. Pamela Bleisch.
This Week’s Latin Phrase:
lacrimae rerum/sunt lacrimae rerum
What does it mean?
Literal translation: “There are tears for things.” This quotation from Vergil’s Aeneid (Book 1.462) is often taken as Vergil’s belief that life is a vale of tears. In the context of the epic, however, this phrase means that people have compassion and can weep for the woe of others. Aeneas, a refugee from fallen Troy, now shipwrecked in North Africa, finds on the temple of Juno in far-off Carthage a series of pictures of the Trojan War, showing the devastating losses his people suffered. Aeneas takes this as an indication that the Carthaginians sympathize with the sufferings of the Trojans. As he begins to hope that the refugees will find a welcome in this strange land, he tells his comrades, “Look here– sunt lacrimae rerum.”
How is it used today?
Today the phrase “lacrimae rerum” is used to refer to the tragedy inherent in human existence. This two-word phrase packs a lot of meaning.
Why should we and our students be familiar with it?
Classical education cultivates the heart and increases the human capacity for compassion. Devoid of this, our world would be a bleak dystopia, as W.H. Auden envisioned in his 1955 poem “The Shield of Achilles”: “who’d never heard of any world where promises are kept, where one could weep because another wept.”
Read some of Vergil’s Aeneid for yourself HERE. See if you can find the translated line of “lacrimae rerum”.
1 thought on “Latin Lingo #4”
So touching and beautiful.