Saturday, 14 March 2015

A pox on them all - correction.

An e-mail from a friend corrects the Latin in my last post. As he was a house-master at Eton (he taught David Cameron and Justin Wellby, amongst others), I am delighted to stand corrected! You learn something new every day.
 
"I’ve been having further thoughts! Monumentum mortuis would certainly mean literally a monument to the dead but I don’t think the Romans of the day would ever have said it – and in point of fact I don’t think it’s what you really mean: you are not going to give this monument to the dead so that it becomes their possession. What you want is a memorial of their existence, and I think the Romans would have said monumentum mortuorum – literally a memorial of the dead".

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