Hi, I'm Anne Strain Champs, and today we're going back to Latin class.

I hope you have a really good memory.

Because there is a lot to remember.

There is hick, hike, hoke, there are all those declensions and cases.

There's like nominative, genitive, dative, accusative.

It kind of just goes on and on.

Memorizing everything, like all of this stuff.

Memorizing like 50 terms that all mean this.

That's a lot of work for a language nobody actually speaks anymore.

So why bother?

My roommates ask me that a lot. I mean, it's kind of like a puzzle. It's kind of fun.

What's our accusative singular going to be?

Quad. Good. So quad and then our plural.

Today, onto the best of our knowledge, we're not actually going to try to teach you Latin.

But we are going to make the case that the ancient Roman Empire is in some ways more relevant than ever,

not because of the grammar, but because the big, hot-button debates that occupy the political stage today,

state security, civil liberties, terrorism, those exact same issues obsessed the ancient

Romans. What the Romans are doing is they are living in a big city, it's a million people,

it's a state which has already got a large empire, and they are facing up to the issues of how you run that empire,

how you guarantee the liberty of the individual,

what it means to be a citizen.

And they have some of the most enlightening ways of talking about that

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