Cover -- Half-title -- Series-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- CHAPTER 1 The nature of Latin culture -- Coming to Latin culture -- The "universality" of Latin culture -- Latin culture in the modern world -- Continuity and rupture -- Grammatical and vulgar speech -- The return of the native -- CHAPTER 2 The poverty of our ancestral speech -- Poor relations -- The Greeks had a word for it -- On almost knowing Greek -- Mapping the linguistic domain -- The language of reality -- CHAPTER 3 The gender of Latin -- No Latin Sappho -- Mothers and sons -- Fathers and daughters -- Husbands and wives -- The sisters of Vibia Perpetua -- CHAPTER 4 The life cycle of dead languages -- Structures of literary and cultural history -- Linguistic miscegenation -- Gold and silver, bronze and iron -- Philology recapitulates ontology -- Soft bastard Latin, or, the nineteenth century and after -- Is there life after death? -- CHAPTER 5 The voices of Latin culture -- Dead language, dead metaphor -- "Not dead, but turned to stone" -- Different tongues -- Appendix: Nepos fr. 59 in the edition of Marshall (1977) -- Bibliography -- Index.