Time transcripts of Josh [00:00:00:00] Interviewer: Okay, so go ahead and tell us a bit about yourself. [00:00:02:29] Josh: Alright, my name is Josh Clasen, [00:00:04:16] I'm an Ancient Greek and Latin major at The Ohio State University, [00:00:09:06] I'm the President of Kappa Kappa Psi, the National Honorary Band Fraternity, [00:00:13:06] and I am the Head Squad Leader of T-Row, [00:00:15:20] which is a row in The Best Damn Band In The Land, [00:00:20:14] and that's pretty much it. [00:00:22:00] I: Okay, so go ahead and tell us your narrative. [00:00:23:29] J: Okay, so when I came to Ohio State, my intention was to be a music major. [00:00:32:00] I was in the School of Music for one quarter as a Trumpet major... [00:00:37:12] Music Education... and as I... [00:00:41:06] I made the band my freshman year, [00:00:42:12] so on top of that, memorizing music, and just practicing for that, [00:00:49:07] I just didn't want to put up with any more. [00:00:50:16] So I went to History, and I became a US History major [00:00:56:02] until I decided to switch to Military History, [00:00:59:21] and to do that, I decided to start taking Latin for some reason. [00:01:03:10] I took Spanish for four years in high school. I had no Latin experience. [00:01:08:02] I knew a little bit about Rome... [00:01:12:07] So I started taking Latin and then I kind of fell in love with Latin. [00:01:15:09] I switched from being Military History to being Ancient History and... [00:01:21:01] with a Latin minor, and I just completely dropped the whole History thing altogether [00:01:24:07] and became a Latin and Greek major. Um... [00:01:27:19] I: What was it about Latin that you said that you "fell in love with?" [00:01:31:09] J: So, [ sigh ] it's...it was pretty much just the language itself. [00:01:38:06] The... it's very "formulatic..." [00:01:41:15] That's not a word. [00:01:42:08] [ Stammering ] It kinda... I: Formulaic? [00:01:44:15] J: Formulaic, I guess, I don't know. [00:01:45:22] Once you learn the grammar, it's kinda easy to put stuff together. [00:01:49:00] You learn words, vocabulary is important, [00:01:51:13] but the STRUCTURES in the sentence is what is actually interesting. [00:01:56:10] And the thing that actually intrigued me the most about Latin and then, later on, Greek too, [00:02:03:07] was just the difference between, not only, like, styles of Latin, [00:02:07:14] like poetry and prose and battle narrative and that kind of stuff, [00:02:11:29] but even each author had his own style and literary voice and that kind of stuff. [00:02:20:02] So the person that I first started reading was Cicero, [00:02:25:14] and Cicero has a very difficult and poetic style. [00:02:33:22] If you read any philosophy at all, Latin or Greek, [00:02:37:05] it's difficult because philosophers like to flourish their language with a whole bunch of stuff, [00:02:43:02] and then Cicero even flourishes his language, like in his his law speeches. [00:02:47:28] He's a famous lawyer, he has a ton of speeches [00:02:50:19] against and for people he's representing or trying to put away. [00:02:59:14] His famous...I guess, technique, [00:03:04:02] is called "coloned," where you have a sentence, [00:03:10:28] and Ciceronian sentences are famous for being like, pages of text. [00:03:14:28] Like, one sentence can be 100 lines of...that's an overexaggeration. [00:03:19:24] One sentence of Cicero can be as many as 50 lines, at least. [00:03:24:05] And it gets pretty difficult to read, until you figure out the grammar, [00:03:30:18] where everything is kind of, like, blocked off in certain sections, [00:03:33:25] and if you can figure out the overarching structure, [00:03:36:02] then you can put the sentence together, back... [00:03:38:20] so that it makes sense. [00:03:41:21] So Cicero was a good place to start because anything after Cicero [00:03:45:06] seems pretty easy in comparison. Julius Caesar I read next, [00:03:49:10] and Julius Caesar was famous for writing to the people of Rome, [00:03:55:10] so, like, the normal ordinary person could read it, and, like, agree with what he was doing. [00:04:01:02] He wrote about his expedition to Gaul, [00:04:06:08] and his expedition against Pompey during the civil wars, [00:04:11:19] and he wrote specifically to an audience that basically was propaganda to an extent, [00:04:17:14] but most of the stuff we have about that time period came from Caesar himself. [00:04:25:10] And Caesar, he's just fun to read... [00:04:27:22] he's a big historian, he writes battle narratives [00:04:30:26] and battle narratives are always pretty fun to read. [00:04:35:07] And then eventually I got into Greek, and Greek is very... [00:04:38:22] Greek's a very similar language to Latin, aside from the different alphabet, [00:04:43:11] and then, I guess, the different way you form words, [00:04:46:01] but the grammar is pretty much almost identical. [00:04:50:28] And the same held true about Greek authors that it did to Latin authors, [00:04:55:16] except to a bigger extent because Greek is a much more flowery language in itself. [00:05:03:27] Latin's kind of...proper and right, and it's just, there's one way to do it, [00:05:09:18] but Greek, there's just... [ hits the table ] it's just all over the place. [00:05:12:16] So, right now I'm reading Xenophon, which is similar to Caesar [00:05:17:03] in that it's a very simple structure written to... [00:05:23:25] I guess, for the general population to read. [00:05:28:10] But the thing about Xenophon was his work actually went on to be [00:05:33:29] the basis for Alexander the Great's entire campaign, [00:05:37:19] so it's an incredibly important work, even though it's written pretty easily. [00:05:42:26] And then you can go to someone like Aeschylus, who wrote tragedy. [00:05:47:05] He was one of the three Greek tragedy writers in Athens. [00:05:51:10] And his tragedy is so difficult to read that if you have one play... [00:05:58:19] I just read "Agamemnon," which is about basically Agamemnon's wife, Clytemnestra, [00:06:06:06] killing him on his return to Mycenae from Troy, and that play is a pretty short play. [00:06:14:26] Performance time, probably about an hour and a half, tops. [00:06:20:22] But if you were to read it in Greek, it would take...[ chuckle ] [00:06:26:20] it could take multiple years. [00:06:29:29] There's a saying that you read Aeschylus not to learn Greek, [00:06:34:23] but you read Aeschylus to learn Aeschylus. [00:06:36:29] Even the most... the most experienced professors in Greek, [00:06:45:03] people who have been studying Greek their entire lives, [00:06:48:06] read at about a third grade level. [00:06:50:15] It just...it's a difficult language to pick up [00:06:54:02] and the different nuances that go into different authors is just... [00:06:59:08] it keeps you on your toes and it's what keeps me interested [00:07:02:00] and reading different authors and just the language in itself.