Latin, Lillys And Lions

Don’t forget the English language: 65 percent of all words have a Latin origin.

The power and beauty of Latin is best caught in the story of an English botanist in Rome a few Springs ago. On a tour of the Colosseum, the botanist saw a flower he’d never seen in Rome before.

Puzzled, the botanist started to look closely at the other flowers growing out of the flagstones of the old arena (from “harena” – “sand”, i.e. the sand sprinkled in front of the auditorium – “ a place of audience”) and the cracks in the stone seats of the terraces.

The flowers weren’t native to Rome, nor even to Italy. The bemused botanist left the Colosseum to go and look at the patches of grass nearby, under the Arch of Titus, over the Capitoline Hill and in the stadium (a running track). He couldn’t find a trace of these exotic flowers outside the arena at all.

When he took the flowers back to his Cambridge laboratory, he found that they had come from precise, verifiable places: Libya and Tunisia mostly. The only feasible explanation he could come up with was that the flowers had grown from seeds that had lodged in the coats of lions brought from Africa to eat prisoners in the Colosseum 2000 years ago. The seeds must have fallen off as the lions got stuck into some serious fighting with their Christian victims.