Written by Clare Horvath
Most people who are interested in classical education are not surprised at the presence of several “dead languages” at Hillsdale College. A typical classical school is expected to teach its students Latin and sometimes Greek as well. Most people would be surprised that some students at Hillsdale both read and speak Latin.
Students have been practicing spoken Latin at Hillsdale College for many years now through “Mensa Latina,” a lunch table that is reserved for students who are interested in speaking Latin. This small group is greatly expanding thanks to the presence of a new Classics professor, Dr. Patricia Aeschliman, and her husband, Mr. Aloysius Aeschliman.
While Dr. Aeschliman originally went to college planning to be an English major, she didn’t realize that she wanted to study the classical languages until she had a professor who taught her that there was “something deeper and more beautiful to be found in Latin literature that I wanted to find for myself.” On top of the desire to recognize this beauty for herself, she wanted to be able to read the Latin and Greek classics in their original languages.
“I didn’t realize how far I was from fluency in Latin,” she said, “until I went to a spoken Latin event. I became much better at reading, understanding, and speaking Latin after one week of immersion. I activated all of my passive knowledge, and I immediately noticed a difference in how I was reading Latin. I was reading it more as a language and less as a code, even though I had already studied it for ten years. I started to feel it as a language, and my studies finally started to fulfill what my professor had promised.”
Dr. Aeschliman knew immediately that she wanted to implement spoken Latin into her teaching, even though she was not yet fluent in it.
Her husband, Mr. Aeschliman, teaches Latin to 7th-9th graders both online and in-person, and on top of this, he is very involved with spoken Latin at Hillsdale. While he is one of the best Latin speakers that you will find, surprisingly he doesn’t have any degrees in Latin. Before the couple was married, he spent many years in a monastery, where he had his first Latin class. During this time of study, however, he noticed that he was not progressing quickly. Looking for a better way to learn Latin, he discovered online sources for speaking Latin, and he studied Latin and Greek independently for two years, after which he started teaching the languages to his confreres..
After Mr. Aeschliman discerned out of the monastery, he and Dr. Aeschliman met through a great Latinist living in Poland, who introduced them to work together on their Latin studies, and the rest is history. What makes them especially unique is that they are both so skilled in their Latin that they speak the language to each other on a regular basis. The couple is nearly always present at “Mensa Latina,” and they can be heard walking across campus or in the library speaking in Latin. They will work together in a new and exciting way at the end of November when they welcome a new member to their family. They plan to raise their daughter as a Latin speaker as well.
In August 2024, Dr. and Mr. Aeschliman led a spoken Latin week, titled the “Palaestra,” at the Dow Hotel and Conference Center. Many Hillsdale students had the opportunity to develop their Latin skills by speaking only Latin to each other for an entire week.
Ashton St. John, ’27, a Classics major at Hillsdale, decided to attend Palaestra after only a year of previous Latin study. After being immersed in the Latin language for an entire week, her Latin skills improved dramatically. “Being immersed in Latin has helped me to better grasp the language so that it is not like figuring out a puzzle, but learning a language like any other.”
Ashton is just one example of how the Aeschlimans’ skills and love for Latin have inspired great growth in the number of students who are pursuing the language in the active method. Furthermore, this love is shared between both undergraduate and graduate students. The majors and class years of the students do not matter. All present at “Mensa Latina,” the “Palaestra,” or Dr. Aeschliman’s Living Latin class are united in their love for Latin and the vast heritage that this language contains.
Dr. Aeschliman noted that speaking Latin makes your endeavor in Latin less individualistic. “When you are in a group trying to speak and communicate, you’re sharing an intellectual endeavor with others that is very fun and bonding,” she said. “You can be doing very hard intellectual work, but with others in a way that is actually productive.” Because of this, some people have bonded over their studies in a way that they certainly wouldn’t have if they didn’t speak Latin. There is a core group of students who frequent “Mensa Latina” and are now good friends and excellent Latin speakers.
While the pursuit of learning to speak Latin is aimed at Latin fluency, there is also a larger goal in mind. Dr. Aeschliman noted that Latin is important to many of the disciplines among the liberal arts because “it puts you in conversation with centuries of literature and history, such that you can read works pertinent to various fields, including psychology, philosophy, and theology. Something that people have forgotten in the past 150 years or so is how important Latin was to education throughout the West for centuries.”
Thus, at Hillsdale, where we spend so much time studying the Western culture and the liberal arts, the study of Latin is invaluable for expanding our access to the works that we want to study. The Aeschlimans’ work, then, is most certainly aiding Hillsdale in its attempt to give students a good liberal arts education.
“What’s special about Classics is that while studying it, you can be a philosopher, a poet, a historian, a philosopher, or a theologian — as well as a classicist,” Dr. Aeschliman concluded. “Classics is a great foundation for all of those things. It should be a foundation for all of the liberal arts. We can join in the Western tradition not just by speaking Latin, but by knowing it well enough through hearing the language that we actually can read it.”
Clare Horvath is a junior studying English with minors in Latin and classical education. When she is not studying, she loves to spend time outside, attending Catholic Society events, and chatting with friends. After college, she hopes to teach at a classical school and continue writing.
Published in December 2024
