The Lamentations

In college, I used to go to these cheese and wine parties that were supposed to be Latin practice sessions, at least until we were all drunk. The group of friends who hosted them would go around saying ‘Salve’ to everybody and handing out Solo cups full of boxed Chardonnay, and then cluster up to make stilted small talk about their Latin homework or the television series Rome, which they were all following eagerly. I got to know them because I took historical linguistics with one of them and Middle Egyptian with another. They had Latin names, which stuck long after the class where they had been assigned: the linguistics guy was Telemachus, the girl from my Egyptian class was Octavia. Bacchus and S