Christian Flow’s third year at Harvard proved pivotal.
The classics major lacked direction and as the challenges of the real world loomed close on the horizon, he still hadn’t found his passion.
When Flow learned about the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae and everything changed.
“It was famously, unprecedentedly comprehensive,” he said. “I was fascinated by it.”
The thesaurus, known in short as the T.L.L., now occupies a few floors in the Bavarian Academy of Sciences — a former castle — in Munich, Germany. But from its beginnings in a bunker in the 1890s, it has survived two world wars and a divided German state through the work of several generations of lexicographers over the last 125 years. So far, the dictionary/thesaurus meant to catalog every meaning for every use of every known Latin word has been completed to the letter R. It’s full completion isn’t expected until at least 2050.
In the meantime, Flow, a visiting assistant professor in Mississippi State University’s Shackouls Honors College, has become the de facto historian for the T.L.L., spending much of the last decade immersed in the task. He’s visited the Munich site at least a half-dozen times, making friends with the 12 to 15 lexicographers working full-time on the project and gaining full access to the archives. He defended his dissertation in May on the T.L.L. and plans to write a book soon in which the project will feature heavily.
But in his first visit to Munich in 2009, he was nearly overwhelmed with the monumental task ahead of him.
“I didn’t speak a lick of German, so I did all my interviews in English,” Flow said. “They were very kind to take so much time with me. … I just remember being struck by the picture of life and work there.”
While completing his post-graduate studies at Princeton — and between working various internships and other projects — Flow kept returning to Munich, each time bringing with him more of the necessary skills to complete the task.
He learned German, at least well enough to proficiently read and communicate. He even spent several months in Rome speaking nothing but Latin.
By 2016, when he spent 10 weeks poring through the thesaurus archives, he felt he had proper command of the subject.
He found letters from project founders from the late 19th century, as well as notes, methodologies and research from 125 years’ worth of experts. There were more humorous discoveries as well, including “beer papers” — in-house satirical newspapers — produced by the T.L.L. staff over the first 15 years or so of the project.
“As a historian, it was the purest sort of feeling of discovery, just going through cabinets and having no idea what was going to be in there,” he said. “Types of documents like (the beer papers) were really exciting because they gave a look at the culture of the thesaurus office.”
But Flow found deep meaning in the T.L.L. work itself, which he believes can be useful in today’s world.
The T.L.L. is being built using excerpts from ancient texts to build an entire “biography” of each Latin word, as a recent New York Times article on the subject put it. Flow said this allows scholars and lay people, alike, to discover new things about the language and what certain texts are saying as each new word is translated.
“This is a language that is thousands of years old and has had such an impact on history,” Flow said. “… For professionals, the thesaurus is constantly generating things we did not previously know and giving new insights on how to interpret ancient texts. For the res of us, it represents our relationship with historical texts in general, specifically the dynamic, ongoing process of reinterpretation and re-translation. It always has new things to say and poses new questions for our time.
“I compare it to trying to explain an English rap lyric to someone for whom English is a second language,” he added. “That person can read the words on the page, but there’s all these sorts of double entendres, vernacular references and textured meaning that person, by dint of English not being their first language, might not pick up on. Since Latin is widely spoken or read (and the texts are not contemporary) we’re all in that position of the second language person reading the rap line.”
Flow finished his dissertation after moving to Starkville in August 2018 with his partner, Morgan Robinson, after she landed a history professor job at MSU. Flow started last fall teaching courses in Shackouls on “great books” and will begin teaching a “histories through time” course in the spring. One day, he might throw in some Latin for good measure, he said.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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