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The Current Transcript for August 3, 2016

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I’d say you evil people. How dare you put innocent people through hell?

LAURA LYNCH: Maureen Smith issues her verdict on the RCMP moments after a BC judge stayed the terrorism charges against her son and his wife. John Nuttall and Amanda Korody are now free after the judge ruled that they were manipulated into carrying out a bomb plot by the police themselves. Today, we’ll look at the impact of the case on future terrorism investigations. And then…

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Are you insulting me, scoundrel? May you be crucified.

VOICE 2: Why? Because I am a freeborn man and you are a useless slave?

LL: How to sound classy even when you're issuing an insult? Use Latin, of course. The ancient language comes alive in our second half hour today, when we open the book on how people learned Latin in ancient times. What it tells us about how they lived is a fascinating lesson in itself. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

Judge says 'police manufactured' Canada Day bomb plot, defendants entrapped

Guests: Geordon Omand, Mubin Shaikh, Breese Davies

SOUNDCLIP

Is there any better way to die than in a way that propagates Islam and the restoration of the khalifa, the caliphate? Right before I pull the trigger, I want to say, taste what you used to deny and send them straight to the hellfire, okay?

LL: In the run up to Canada Day in 2013, John Nuttall certainly talked the talk about mounting a terror attack and it was all secretly recorded by the RCMP. He and his wife Amanda Korody were arrested and later found guilty by a jury of planning to bomb the grounds of the BC legislature intending to kill as many Canada Day revelers as possible. But last Friday, those guilty verdicts were set aside after a BC Supreme Court judge ruled that Mr. Nuttall and his wife could never have walked the walk without help from the RCMP. Justice Catherine Bruce ruled the two were victims of police entrapment. They were tricked by police officers posing as extremists and led into plotting a “police manufactured” crime. It's a ruling that may have consequences for anti-terror operations across the country and prompt Canadian police to rethink the way they go undercover. But first for more details on the ruling in the sting that led to it, we go to Geordon Omand. He's a Vancouver based reporter for The Canadian Press and he has closely followed this case. He joins us from Vancouver. Hello.

GEORDON OMAND: Good morning.

LL: Geordon, let's go back to the beginning. Remind us who John Nuttall and Amanda Korody are and what their history is with Islamic extremism.

GEORDON OMAND: Mhm. John Nuttall and Amanda Korody are two Vancouver area-based folks. They are former drug addicts and heroin dependent. They lived [unintelligible] at the time this whole thing was going on. They lived on subsistence welfare in a basement suite, played video games most of the time, smoked marijuana. They were essentially recent converts at the time to Islam and seemed to be sort of finding their way in the faith.

LL: How did they get on the RCMP’s radar?

GEORDON OMAND: So, what happened, as we understand from the trial, is that John Nuttall was reported to CSIS, to Canada’s spy agency, as having stood outside mosques in the Lower Mainland in BC and basically made a call to jihad, asked people to engage in violent extremism against infidels, as he would say. And that eventually came to the attention of CSIS who then notified the RCMP about Mr. Nuttall and that sort of got the whole ball rolling.

LL: So what did the RCMP do, given that information?

GEORDON OMAND: So eventually, they quickly began an undercover sting operation, a sort of kind of a Mr. Big sting, where they had undercover officers, one primary, befriend John Nuttall and eventually Amanda Korody as well. And their intention with that, as they say, as they testified in court, was to sort of gauge the threat that the two posed to the public and to see whether really they did, they were at all likely to carry out some of the actions that they spoke about.

LL: So then—but then what happened? Because it obviously became a much bigger operation over time. And according to the judge's ruling, it became illegal, a lot of things that they did. What did the RCMP do?

GEORDON OMAND: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. So this thing basically ballooned into an operation, four month long, involved more than 240 officers, more than a million in overtime. Just overtime that is, to pay for it. The ruse essentially got to the point where the police—as the judge wrote in her ruling—the police should have known that these two were like you say, all talk but no walk, that they essentially were not intelligent but naïve, that the police committed egregious acts and that the whole crime, really, was manufactured by the police.

LL: What kinds of things were the police doing?

GEORDON OMAND: So essentially they were bringing—they isolated these two, as the judge said, they isolated the two of them from their family, from any kind of outside religious influence. Nuttall would tell them he wanted to know what—the consequences were to a soul for example, if you committed violent jihad. And they told him to look into his heart and discouraged him from looking for outside mainstream Muslim, Islamic guidance, They brought him into sort of thinly veiled criminal acts, having to deliver packages and that kind of thing. Have him believe that he was a part of some, as the judge said, some sort of bigger international terrorist organization and that he eventually believed he would be killed if he didn't follow through with this plan.

LL: What evidence was there presented in the court that particularly John Nuttall really didn't have the wherewithal to do any of this?

GEORDON OMAND: Really up until even the days, the hours before the bomb planting at the BC legislature happened in Canada Day 2013, Nuttall was still talking about all sorts of, as the judge says, “fanciful and grandiose ideas.” That he would talk about hijacking a nuclear submarine. He would speak about sending rockets over the border to Seattle. He would speak about hijacking a passenger train that that didn't even exist anymore. It hadn’t run, operated on Vancouver Island for years. Basically, the judge said if it weren't for the police involvement, this crime would never have happened.

LL: Did the judge suggest a course of action that the police should have taken?

GEORDON OMAND: Certainly, yeah. She spoke about how one alternative could have been de-escalation. That if John Nuttall perhaps had outside guidance, the suggestion was there that he would not have been as radicalized as is what happened while in this sort of isolated police manufactured sting operation.

LL: The prosecution has already said it is going to appeal and in fact, the police re-arrested the couple shortly after they released them, put them under a peace bond. What kind of argument are the prosecutors making? Why are they appealing?

GEORDON OMAND: They're saying that the two are still threats, that they did in fact, plant these bombs and that if the police had not come in—and as they argue, sort of guided them along one of the most controllable safest paths for a violent jihad that they could very well have done any number of independent violent things on their own. So they're saying that these two are still threats, hence why the peace bond has been applied. And they, as you say, are looking to—they have appealed the decision further ahead in court.

LL: Now, you were in the courtroom when the judge gave her ruling. What was the reaction of John Nuttall and Amanda Korody?

GEORDON OMAND: They were surprisingly demure. They didn't react overtly physically. Mr. Nuttall's mother was in the room. She was sitting quite near to me. She gave a fist pump and muttered yes as it became clear that her son and her son's wife would be set free. But in terms of the two themselves, their reaction wasn't very overt. And even after they were released, they just seemed, [unintelligible] on the streets, they just seemed shocked. They seemed sort of out of place and not quite believing that this had happened after three years of being behind bars.

LL: Okay, Geordon. Thank you very much.

GEORDON OMAND: My pleasure.

LL: Geordon Omand is a Vancouver-based reporter for The Canadian Press and he was in Vancouver. Well, for more on what this BC Supreme Court ruling could mean for future undercover anti-terror operations, I'm joined by two guests. Mubin Shaikh was a CSIS and RCMP operative in the Toronto 18 terrorism case. That was al-Qaida-inspired truck bombing and shooting plot that was broken up by the RCMP in 2006. And Breese Davies was also involved on the Toronto 18 case but from the other side of the courtroom. She's a criminal defence lawyer and vice president of the Criminal Lawyers Association and both guests join me here in our studio. Good morning.

BREESE DAVIES: Good morning.

MUBIN SHAIKH: Good morning.

LL: Breese, let me just start with you. What did you think when you heard Justice Catherine Bruce make her ruling?

BREESE DAVIES: Well, it's a shocking ruling, not from a legal perspective but from a factual perspective, in terms of what the RCMP did in that case. It's not a ground-breaking decision in terms of the law of entrapment. The decision doesn't change the law. What she did was apply the existing law that has been in effect for dozens of years to the facts of that case, which in my view is what was shocking. The extent to which the police went to, to fabricate and create this offence using two people who were incredibly vulnerable and preying on those vulnerabilities, to move them to commit an offence that she found they never would have committed. That's what's extraordinary about this case in my view.

LL: And Mubin Shaikh, what did you think?

MUBIN SHAIKH: Yeah, I think it is a message for the RCMP and I guess police services in general that the courts are not going to put up with these kinds of tactics and they'll call them out every single time. And that's actually the good thing out of all of this.

LL: Now, you have seen this sort of from the inside, being an operative as you were in the Toronto 18 case and in fact, I believe that you were accused of entrapment yourself in that case.

MUBIN SHAIKH: That's right.

LL: So where do you see the line being drawn? What did you do that was okay, versus what the RCMP did in this case?

MUBIN SHAIKH: Well, I mean generally speaking, entrapment is making someone do what they would not normally do or are not normally capable of doing of their own accord. You know, of course this was the claim made in the Toronto 18 case, but again with that case, you know, the individuals had plotted and planned well before I was inserted into the group. They had their means and abilities to conduct, you know, things on their own. Making their own detonator, things like that. In this case, it was not that. It was—they really wouldn't know to take a shower without the RCMP telling them to.

LL: And Breese Davies, you actually argued entrapment in the Toronto 18 case, did you?

BREESE DAVIES: No, it was argued in the Toronto 18 by some of the accused—

LL: And so let me ask you that same question. What was the difference between that case and this one?

BREESE DAVIES: Well, I think what Mubin has said is right. I mean, there were issues about how far the undercover operation went in that case and it was argued and so you know, I think what happened in the Toronto 18 came close to the line but the court obviously determined that they were on the right side of the line in that case and not in the case out in BC in the Nuttall decision. I think the big difference is—well, I think there are a number of differences. One is in this case, the judge was clearly responding to the fact that the police and the Crowns throughout the investigation were raising red flags about their conduct amounting to entrapment over and over again during the investigation. They had discussions and various officers were saying I think we are going too far, I think we have gone too far. Crown attorneys were saying you can't do this and you can't do that and nonetheless they did those things. And so I think there was a clear recognition—by some in this case—that they had already gone too far during the investigation and I think what this case tells us is there needs to be a better oversight mechanism within the RCMP to stop officers, like the officers in this case who clearly had tunnel vision and were determined to get these people to commit this offence, no matter what it took.

LL: Mubin Shaikh, what do you think of that? Is that the kind of thing you'd like to see put in place? Some sort of oversight? I mean, we saw 240 officers involved in this case, almost a million on overtime alone, probably millions more in the investigation. What should happen?

MUBIN SHAIKH: Yeah. This, I think comes at a good time in, you know, the discussions on national security oversight, particularly real time monitoring of national security operations of both CSIS and the RCMP. I'm a big believer in that. I support that and I hope at some point, some kind of real time oversight mechanism does come into existence.

LL: What should have been done in a case like this? When the RCMP start to investigate and perhaps see that these people, as the judge said, weren’t capable of doing anything. What should they have done?

MUBIN SHAIKH: Yeah, I don't know if—I'm pretty sure the RCMP doesn't have a policy on this. They haven’t been directed in terms of what they should be doing. I think one good option for them would be to have gone to an imam or some imams or some Muslim organizations that know what they're doing to kind of say listen, we have this couple. This is how they're thinking. Can you talk to them? That could have been something—maybe that should be something as a matter of policy, where if they do see this kind of instance again, they know what to do the next time.

LL: But I wonder how much it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of the RCMP when they start to invest so much time and so much money in an investigation. Breese Davies?

BREESE DAVIES: I think we see that in this case because they got to a point where they were not going to end this operation until these two committed some offence, whether they had to do it for them which essentially the judge found that they did. And so I think the other interesting thing about this case is the judge's comments about other options. I mean, there were investigative techniques that were not used in this case including monitoring electronic communications, monitoring Internet use, monitoring phone calls. There were things the police could have done that were less intrusive than what they did with the undercover officers. The other thing is, the judge made it clear—

LL: But that sounds more like just keeping an eye on them.

BREESE DAVIES: Right. But if you had kept an eye on them, it seems pretty clear to me that they wouldn't have done anything. And so, there's no difficulty with the police monitoring and keeping an eye on people that they are worried about. That's what we expect them to do. What we don't expect them to do is to create crimes. The job of the police is to prevent crime and enforce crime, not create it.

LL: Now obviously, I'm not a member of the RCMP, but if I could maybe try to stand in their shoes, they might say something like there are so many people who we would have to follow. If you wanted us to monitor every one of them, we'd have to hire a lot more officers and spend a lot more money.

BREESE DAVIES: Well, they could do an awful lot with the millions they spent on this undercover operation monitoring people. And the other point though I think Laura, that's important, is they developed and they garnered the trust of these people and the judge said they could have taken steps to de-radicalize these people. So we have to ask ourselves, what do we want long term in this society? We're concerned about radicalization of people and rightly so. We also are concerned about people's mental health. And the police were in a unique position in this case with these people's trust that they could have taken a different step to de-radicalize them, to get them help and not push them towards more serious criminal offences than they were ever going to commit themselves

LL: Mubin Shaikh, I wonder. You've worked with the RCMP and CSIS. Do you see them as willing to step beyond just simple policing and do this kind of monitoring and what you're even suggesting, which is almost counseling them to get help?

MUBIN SHAIKH: Yeah. You know, it becomes very difficult for police agencies because I mean, we see in recent attacks in Nice and then everywhere else, where mentally vulnerable people like this do commit these kinds of attacks, right. And how long are you going to monitor them for? Now of course, you don't have to follow everybody. You can actually follow them quite a bit just by monitoring their communications, as Breese was saying. They can do a lot of things before they need to send in undercovers. And I think, again, this will be a matter of policy discussions that they'll have to have. At what point, what's the threshold before you need to send an undercover in? What's the threshold before you have to deploy a full cover surveillance team? These are things which I hope will lead them to realize that these more egregious, intrusive, aggressive tactics should be used very, very sparingly.

LL: Okay. Breese Davies, you see that still in spite of all of this, the so-called lone wolf attacks being carried out in Canada. And I'm thinking of Michael Zehaf-Bibeau on Parliament Hill and others. How can the RCMP and CSIS do their jobs and try to assure Canadians that they will be safe?

BREESE DAVIES: Well, I think we had a discussion after those two incidents as well, about the use of some of the preventive measures that are in the Criminal Code and within the purview of the police. So for example, there's the peace bond application that has been made now to put them under conditions—

LL: To put this couple under conditions.

BREESE DAVIES: This couple. Yeah. That could have been used earlier in the investigation. That can be used when the police identify people. They can request conditions including electronic monitoring, including taking treatment, including curfews and physical sort of geographical restrictions. That can be done on a much lower threshold than is required to lay a charge. All the police need to get a peace bond is a reasonable basis to fear that someone may commit a terrorism offence.

LL: It’s a pretty low bar.

BREESE DAVIES: It's an incredibly low bar and there is a process that goes along with it. It has to be a fair process to impose those conditions but they can be arrested, they can be put on bail, they can have conditions placed on them if there is someone that they're concerned about. So they could have taken those steps earlier in this investigation or I think we've learned that they might have had enough information to have taken those steps in other investigations as well.

LL: Now, even as we speak, I'm pretty sure there must be some operations being carried out by the RCMP and or CSIS—

BREESE DAVIES: Undoubtedly.

LL: And probably some pretty large scale operations. Do you think that this ruling is going to change the way they're carrying out operations from here forward?

BREESE DAVIES: I hope it will. In the sense that I hope it will be a wake-up call to the RCMP that they need better oversight of their undercover operations and they need to be very clear about where the line is between appropriate undercover work, which has always been recognised, and when they cross a line. And I think this is a clear example of it and we should all learn from it and I hope they do.

LL: Mubin Shaikh?

MUBIN SHAIKH: Yeah. I mean I would just reinforce the points about interventions, that there needs to be a policy in place. And there's been some discussion now in the coming year, the setting up of this Office of the Community Outreach and Counter-radicalization Coordinator. Maybe that's going to be a hub through which the RCMP can send people. It's an opportunity for communities to get the training they need to deal with mental vulnerabilities and these sorts of cases. I think what's going to be needed is really policy changes right from the top, not just in national security operations but national security oversight of national security operations.

LL: Well, it's going to be interesting to see what happens going forward because this case, this finding is going to be now appealed and they're under a peace bond, so this case isn't over yet. And we'll be watching other investigations going forward. Thanks to both of you for coming in.

BREESE DAVIES: Thanks, Laura.

MUBIN SHAIKH: You’re most welcome.

LL: Mubin Shaikh was a CSIS and RCMP operative in the Toronto 18 terrorism case. He's also the co-author of Undercover Jihadi documenting his experience in that case. Breese Davies is vice president of the Criminal Lawyers Association. She was a defence lawyer in the Toronto 18 terrorism case and both guests were with me here in our Toronto studio. Now, we reached out to the RCMP for comment and they sent us a statement which said in part that the RCMP respects the judicial decision and says the detection, disruption and deterrence of national security-related threats in Canada is a priority for the RCMP and its partner agencies. The RCMP and its partners remain committed to the safety and protection of the public. Well, coming up next, it’s the news, then we will teach you how to insult your enemies in Latin and so much more—how some freshly translated Latin texts offer new insights into the ancient Roman world. I’m Laura Lynch and you are listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Sting]

ENCORE: Translations of ancient Latin give unique insights into Roman culture

Guests: Eleanor Dickey

LL: Hello, I’m Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: “Romanes eunt domus”? People called Romanes, they go, the house?

VOICE 2: It says, “Romans go home.”

VOICE 1: No, it doesn’t. What’s the latin for “Roman”? Come on, come on.

VOICE 2: Romanus?

VOICE 1: Goes like?

VOICE 2: Annus?

VOICE 2: Vocative plural of “annus” is?

VOICE 2: Anni?

VOICE 1: Romani. Eunt? What is “eunt”?

VOICE 2: Go.

VOICE 1: Conjugate the verb “to go.”

VOICE 2: Ire. Er. Eo. Is. It. Imus. Itis. Eunt.

VOICE 1: So “eunt” is?

VOICE 2: Third person plural present indicative, “they go.”

VOICE 1: But “Romans go home” is an order, so you must use the…?

VOICE 2: The imperative.

VOICE 1: Which is?

LL: The folks from Monty Python with a Latin lesson there. So perhaps you already knew that “Romani ite domum”—doing my best to pronounce that right—is proper Latin for “Romans go home.” Brian from the Life of Brian was certainly learning it the hard way there. And if you ever sat through Latin lessons in school, you might be inclined to believe there's no such thing as an easy way to learn the ancient language. Well, some recently translated ancient texts would seem to suggest that that's been the case for centuries. Eleanor Dickey is a classics professor at the University of Reading in England and she's the first to translate centuries-old Latin as a second language teaching materials into English. Her book is titled Learning Latin The Ancient Way: Latin Textbooks From the Ancient World and Eleanor Dickey joined me back in April. Hello.

ELEANOR DICKEY: Hello.

LL: So Eleanor, was that Roman centurion using correct Latin?

ELEANOR DICKEY: He was using correct Latin, yes. He was not using the correct ancient procedures but it was correct Latin.

LL: [laughs] Why was it not the correct procedure?

ELEANOR DICKEY: Well, they tend not to sort of get you drag you through the grammar as a way of coming up with the sentence.

LL: Okay.

ELEANOR DICKEY: That's a very modern way of way of approaching things.

LL: [laughs] Okay, we're going to get into all of that but let's just start with this is the first time that we've actually seen ancient Latin learning texts translated into English. How significant is that?

ELEANOR DICKEY: I think it's quite major actually because we really didn't know how they learned foreign languages in antiquity.

LL: And why is that important?

ELEANOR DICKEY: For two reasons. First of all, it's important because we made a lot of assumptions that turned out to be wrong about how they did teach and secondly, it's important because of what the textbooks said because they teach ancient culture just as much as they teach ancient language. So for example, if you're learning French today, you might get a textbook where you go to a cafe in Paris and you order a sandwich and it's a little dialogue where you have, what the customer says, what the waiter says. And you learn that dialogue and it will be deliberately teaching you how to order a sandwich in a cafe in Paris. And the same is true in antiquity. You have a little dialogue where you go to a Roman bath and you hire someone to wash your clothes and you get a ball to play in the ball court and all of that is teaching you how to handle a Roman bath and that information is really valuable as well.

LL: It's almost anthropological then.

ELEANOR DICKEY: Yes.

LL: Why were they never translated before?

ELEANOR DICKEY: Probably because they were very difficult. They survive in medieval manuscripts. That's true of most ancient literature, most of it we don’t have it the way in the author's autograph version. We have it in a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy and they get corrupted over time and these were very, very hard to read and they had not been edited. Editing is the process where you take a lot of different manuscripts and you put them together and you work out what the author originally wrote and no one had done that. And until somebody does that, you haven't got a Latin text that you can really translate.

LL: So how did you do this? I have this image of bits and pieces of old manuscript being secreted away somewhere and you had to blow the dust off to have a look.

ELEANOR DICKEY: In some ways, it wasn't that different from that actually. A lot of them are in Austrian monasteries and the Austrian monasteries are really fun. So I went from Austrian monastery to Austrian monastery reading their manuscripts and they’re absolutely beautiful monasteries and they’re beautiful manuscripts and the Austrian mountains are beautiful. So you know, it was tons of fun to do.

LL: Why were they in Austrian monasteries of all places?

ELEANOR DICKEY: Because they were considered in the Middle Ages to be really valuable tools. Now, they are not really valuable tools for the purposes that the monks thought they were useful. The monks thought you could use these tools for learning Greek and you couldn't really because they were designed for learning Latin rather than for learning Greek and they had been quite significantly corrupted. But nonetheless, they were the only Greek learning tools that people had in the 13th century.

LL: So you were going from monastery to monastery piecing all of this together. How old are the texts?

ELEANOR DICKEY: The manuscripts only back sort of ninth to 12th century but the text themselves go back at least to the first century A.D. possibly earlier but not certainly earlier.

LL: So these texts were being used to teach Latin to Greeks.

ELEANOR DICKEY: That's right. So as the Romans conquer the Greek speaking world, you get people who are Greek speakers who want to learn Latin and these are the texts that they use.

LL: These were to help people then, in the ancient world. Tell me how they compare to modern language learning tools.

ELEANOR DICKEY: In some ways, they are very similar. Like for example, you have these little dialogues that teach you about culture as well as teaching you about language. But one thing that's importantly different is that the dialogues are bilingual. Now, actually one thing you would never do today, is give a beginning language learner a running translation into English because you think well, they're not going to look at the Latin or the French or whatever it is, they are just going to read the English. But in antiquity, you do give people a running translation and the reason you do it is that they haven't invented word division yet. So it's really, really hard to read a foreign language with a dictionary because you can't look the words up in the dictionary because you don't know where one word ends and the next word begins.

LL: They were all running together.

ELEANOR DICKEY: They all run together and therefore, you give people a parallel translation because they have to have one. They cannot use a dictionary.

LL: What kinds of insights did you get about Roman life from looking at the translations?

ELEANOR DICKEY: One that I got that surprised me was that Roman baths were really dirty and you think of the Roman baths as being you know, the Romans were so clean, they had running water, they took take a bath every day. But in these texts, you discover that there's a problem that when you get out of a Roman bath, you are so dirty that you can't dry yourself on your towel until you've scraped off the muck.

LL: Oh god. [laughs]

ELEANOR DICKEY: And once you think about it, it's perfectly obvious because you have a relatively small bathtub with a large number of people in it.

LL: [laughs] Sort of makes you think about modern day hot tubs.

ELEANOR DICKEY: It does, yes.

LL: Did that surprise you, learning about that?

ELEANOR DICKEY: It surprised me a lot, yes. I had never thought that the water might be dirty.

LL: And what other things did you learn about what was considered important at the time? That's obviously more of a relaxation cultural aspect. What else did you learn about more serious subjects?

ELEANOR DICKEY: Well there's a lot of law court scenes and that struck me as interesting because that's not something that we would emphasize today, teaching a foreign language. I mean, you know, maybe you will end up in court if you go to a foreign country but you don't think you're going to end up in court when you go to a foreign country so the legal language is not what you prioritize in learning the language. But it is in antiquity and the reason for that is that a lot of people who study Latin do it because they want to become lawyers. And so you’ve got all these law court scenes and they always represent the life of a lawyer as really, really positive. So you always win your case. I know that’s statistically impossible because you've got lawyers on both sides of every case. But the lawyers are only described on the side that's winning, always. And they're extremely well-paid and their clients are very grateful and give them lots of lunches and dinners and things like that. And this is obviously because the Latin teachers are trying to keep up enrolments in their Latin classes because their Latin class is full of people who are learning Latin in order to be a lawyer. They encourage these people to stick with their Latin study by telling them how great it will be when they become a full-fledged lawyer. And a lot of what they're saying isn't really true. Lawyers don't always win their cases. In the ancient world, they're not always terribly well-paid. It's a fascinating kind of misrepresentation in advertising that I didn't necessarily think they were going to have been up to at that stage. [chuckles]

LL: So no lawyer jokes. [laughs]

ELEANOR DICKEY: No, no. There are no lawyer jokes.

LL: Do you have any idea whether in fact, it worked in terms of driving people into the legal profession or are there no statistics and no way of knowing—

ELEANOR DICKEY: There's no statistics on that, no.

LL: And what other things did you learn about—aside from trying to draw people into the school to learn law, what other cultural practices did you learn about?

ELEANOR DICKEY: Well for example, there's an excuses section. And again, that's something we wouldn’t necessarily find in a phrasebook, but also the excuses that you find are not the ones that I would expect. I mean, I'm a teacher. I get excuses all the time. I’m an excuses expert. But there are ones in these books that I've never heard, like I can't do it now, I have to take a bath.

LL: [chuckles] And then scrape yourself off.

ELEANOR DICKEY: [chuckles] Yeah.

LL: Are there also scenes, things that you would expect in a language lesson about going to dinner or going to the market?

ELEANOR DICKEY: Yes. Yes, definitely. We've got a number of dinner scenes with all the different things the host should say, all the different things the guest should say. One thing that's interesting is that the actual serving is of course done by slaves. And so, a lot of what you say at a dinner isn't said necessarily to other diners but it's said to the slaves. You can’t actually you know, get any food if you don't communicate with the slaves in a language the slaves know but that means that a lot of what's said in the dinner scene strikes us as being very rude you know, give me some of that, I want some of this, I already asked for that, give it to me now. And that's because you're not actually talking to the host, you're talking to the slaves.

LL: So you're talking down. Okay, listen. To give us a better idea of what these exchanges sound like, some of our producers recorded themselves reading them. Brave people. Here is one where a wife is scolding her husband for drinking too much. Let's listen to that.

SOUNDCLIP

WOMAN: Sir, is there anyone who acts like you and drinks as much as you do? What will the people who saw you in this condition say? Never before have you acted so greedily at a dinner party.

MAN: I certainly am very much ashamed.

WOMAN: What are other people saying behind your back? You have got yourself great infamy and blame through such intemperance. Oh no. Do you need to vomit now? I can’t believe this.

MAN: I don't know what to say. I'm so upset that I can't explain anything to anyone.

LL: Okay. What does that tell you—if anything—about how much drinking was going on, about how much power women had in the household and about how husbands behaved?

ELEANOR DICKEY: Tragically, I don't know for sure that that’s spoken by a woman.

LL: Ah, okay.

ELEANOR DICKEY: I believe that it is spoken by a woman. But I can't be absolutely certain that that's a woman so I would hesitate to use that to tell me a lot about the status of women, obviously. In terms of drinking, yeah, you know, they had a bit of a problem.

LL: [chuckles] And so did it surprise you to find that kind of an exchange in material meant for language learning?

ELEANOR DICKEY: Yes it did, especially as a lot of the stuff in these books is obviously designed—is pretty—providing a good example. So you have a very good little child who gets up in the morning and he brushes his teeth and he combs his hair and it's really emphasized that he's very, very clean when he goes to school and he's very polite and he always says hello to everybody and then later on, you have that.

LL: Okay. Why is it, do you think, that these translations can teach us things about Roman culture that we wouldn't get from ancient literature or other sources?

ELEANOR DICKEY: Well, ancient literature is mostly written for other Romans. So they're not explaining their culture or presenting it to people who don't know already about it, they're just operating within it and there's certainly a lot that you learn from that. But there's also things that you learn about people's culture when they present it for outsiders.

LL: Now, I’ve got another clip I want to play. This is one section of the book that contains ancient phrasebook of insults and you were talking I think a little bit along that line, you were talking about ordering from slaves. We've recorded a few samples here. Let's listen again.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Your master will hear about this if he encounters me.

VOICE 2: Are you insulting me, scoundrel? May you be crucified.

VOICE 3: Why? Because I am a freeborn man and you are a useless slave?

VOICE 4: I want to find out whether you are a slave or a freed man.

VOICE 5: I won’t give you an explanation.

VOICE 4: Why not?

VOICE 5: Because you don’t deserve one.

VOICE 4: Let’s go to your master.

LL: Now, were these necessarily exchanges with a slave or were they a way to insult others who weren't?

ELEANOR DICKEY: You’ve got it. There are usually ways to insult people who are not slaves because it's a very hierarchical society and the worst insult there is, is to assume that somebody is a slave. So if you say to somebody, I want to find out whether you are slave or a freed man, the assumption is that that person couldn't be a freeborn Roman citizen. That's not possible. And that's a huge insult.

LL: Why?

ELEANOR DICKEY: Because they really think that slaves are subhuman. And anybody who is born as a slave remains subhuman in that kind of way. I think it's a mentality that we don't totally have, which is maybe a good thing. But if you've ever been a slave, you just are not on the same level as somebody who's always been free.

LL: That almost sounds like the caste system in India where you can never rise above your caste.

ELEANOR DICKEY: Yes. It is a very similar thing. The difference is in Rome, you kind of course fall so you can be captured in war and then you become a slave. So you can go down. But once you've been a slave, there is that stigma.

LL: Why do you think language learning tools would even try to teach students insults?

ELEANOR DICKEY: I think people probably thought they were going to need them. I mean our phrasebooks, and that insult section is very much a phrasebook, it's not an argument, it's a collection of insults. Our phrasebooks are mostly reference works. So you buy it. Let's say you're going to Rome, you don't know Italian. You take your phrasebook with you and you kind of hope that you won't have to use it because they'll speak English. But if you find them in a situation, you've got to book this room in the hotel. You're in the hotel. They don't speak English. You haul out the phrasebook and you look up the thing you want to say and the phrasebook is all designed to make that easy. It's colour-coded. It's in sections. And when you find the thing you want to say, if you can't pronounce it, you pass the book to the receptionist and ask the receptionist to try to pronounce it for you. Now, therefore, we can't put insults in our phrasebooks because just picture, if you get into an argument with somebody and you haul out your phrasebook and you leaf through to the insult section then you pass it to them and point to the insult that you want to call them. It just is not going to work. So I think it shows that their phrasebooks—although they look like our phrasebooks—are not like our phrasebooks because they're not reference works. They are things that people learn in advance and clearly the person who does this one thinks that it will be useful, when you go to Rome and when you deal with Latin speakers, to be able to get into a really good argument and win it.

LL: Were there references in there too, to travelling to other parts of the empire?

ELEANOR DICKEY: No, there aren't. And that's something that really surprised me because I would have expected you know, ship vocabulary or caravan vocabulary, and that I don't find, which is very interesting.

LL: What do you think that suggests?

ELEANOR DICKEY: I think that one of the main things these books are for must be dealing with Latin speakers who are already in your Greek-speaking world. So for example, we know that a lot of people had to deal with the Roman army and it's not necessarily easy dealing with the Roman army. I mean they've got a lot of power over you. And that's one reason why people would learn Latin. For example, if you're a fisherman, you might think I really want to sell my fish to the Roman army. I could learn Latin to give me an edge over the other fishermen.

LL: As you were doing this work, as you were in the monasteries, as you were piecing things together, were there times when you felt transported and you were actually living that life?

ELEANOR DICKEY: Yes, there were. Particularly in these monasteries because of course, they are these medieval buildings and I went in January because I thought, you know, Austria is so cool in January. If I'm going to see the Austrian mountains, I have to do it in the snow. But you know, my God, is it cold. And so, I'm sitting there in these little rooms looking out on these medieval courtyards with their turned off frozen fountains and piles of snow and reading manuscripts that were written in those monasteries by monks who were trying to learn—use them to learn these languages. It certainly transports you to the moment when that text was written in the 13th century to the person who's struggling to learn languages from that. And then once you're in the 13th century—I know it's actually a long time from the 13th century, the first century but it doesn’t totally feel that way when you’ve gone back as far as the 13th century—that you start to imagine yourself because there's a lot of stories about little boys going to school and learning lots and there are some little girls as well, for the record. And you start to, yes, to picture yourself in that school room, which probably was not a lot warmer than those Austrian monasteries.

LL: There isn't an awful lot about women in here, is there?

ELEANOR DICKEY: There's not a lot but I think there's a preface that’s very crucial because there's a preface at the beginning where the author makes a pitch and he says this is the best textbook that's ever been written for learning languages. No one else has ever done it better. It's a great pity he doesn't tell us like who he is when he says I’ve done the best one ever. And then he says and all children need this, all boys and all girls. And I really like that. It shows that it's not just intended for men.

ELEANOR DICKEY: How have these translations changed what you thought you knew about Roman life before you started doing the work?

ELEANOR DICKEY: I just didn't know a lot of this stuff. It's not that I had a different picture. I mean, apart from the baths which I thought were clean. But there's an awful lot of stuff—like what they did in school. We really didn't know what they did in school and now I have these little conversations where you have two little children in school and one of them says move over and the other says no, it’s my seat. I got here first. And the second one says just squash yourself together, for Pete's sake. [laughs]

LL: That sounds like today, doesn’t it? [chuckles]

ELEANOR DICKEY: Exactly. It sounds exactly like you know some kind of primary school today. And I’m thinking wait a minute, I never thought of Roman children as being just like our children in that respect.

LL: How useful would the translations be to modern learners? I mean, you do say learn Latin the ancient way, but how useful would learning this be for modern learners?

ELEANOR DICKEY: I think if you are interested in learning Latin, reading any Latin text is good and reading these texts are good for several reasons. In the first place, they are fun. They were written to be engaging. So like there's a story about a little boy who doesn't come to school and doesn't do what he's supposed to and he's going to get whipped. But he has a really good excuse and he puts the teacher down magnificently and he gets off. They're meant to keep you reading. They’re in short little chunks and each chunk is lively and engaging and makes you want to find out what happens and keeps you going.

ELEANOR DICKEY: And they are culturally very interesting of course, because of the bows and the dinners and how it's different. So it's good reading material for students. It causes them to find what they're reading interesting and accessible because very often what we give students is great Roman literature, Cicero's speeches in the Senate. But those are really remote. It's very hard for modern students to identify with the situation that Cicero was in because it's not a situation that has anything in common with anything they've ever experienced or indeed anything anyone they know has ever experienced. And then you have a little story about someone who goes to the fish market and bargains for fish and it makes sense to them. So I think students really like these and if you like your material and you find it engaging and interesting, then you're much more likely to read it and enjoy it and learn the language.

LL: So if one of your students came to you with an excuse lifted from the textbook, would they get a failing grade or an A? [laughs]

ELEANOR DICKEY: [laughs] I think I would laugh really hard and then I would tell them to tell me what really happened.

LL: [laughs] Just one more thing. Do you think your readers might take advantage of insulting people in Latin knowing that the other person wouldn't have a clue what's being said?

ELEANOR DICKEY: I think it's possible but you know it wouldn't do any harm. The other person's not going to be very upset then, is there?

LL: Well maybe that's good reason to buy the book.

ELEANOR DICKEY: Yes. Indeed.

LL: [laughs] Well Eleanor, let me give this a try. Gratias tibi. How’d I do?

ELEANOR DICKEY: Very, very well. There isn’t—but there’s no—

[crosstalk]

LL: That was thank you listeners, in case you didn’t know.

ELEANOR DICKEY: But there’s no Latin for you’re welcome.

LL: Oh. [laughs] Well then, I’ll take it you’re welcome. Thank you very much, Eleanor. It’s been really interesting and engaging.

ELEANOR DICKEY: Thank you.

LL: Eleanor Dickey is a classics professor at the University of Reading in England and she is the author of the book, Learning Latin the Ancient Way: Latin Textbooks from the Ancient World. I spoke with her in April. I’m Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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August 3, 2016 full episode transcript

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