The ciceroeuropa competition

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It was a sunny Saturday at the beginning of a welcome bank holiday weekend, with temperatures reaching 20°C at times.

It would have been the perfect day for a cricket match in a quiet Cotswold field, a picnic-cum-walk across Cleeve Hill or simply a chance to revise for the impending exams in the garden, so the four AS level Latin students (Tom Percy, Amy Hunt, Amy Buchanan-Hughes and Max Drinkwater) chose to partake in a translation and classical culture competition in Malvern, which involved being shut in a school and taking what was essentially a voluntary examination.

Why? Because we like Latin, because we wanted to meet other people who liked Latin to the same degree as ourselves, and because we wanted to have some Latin-based fun.

“Oxymoron!” cry the English scholars (“Twits!” cry everyone else).

Neither so. We managed to combine an afternoon of exploring Latin and classical art with enjoyment.

We had only entered this competition for the fun - we were not expecting to win anything - but, having been driven to Malvern St James School by an enthusiastic Mrs Fayter, we were still not prepared for that with which we were greeted.

Over a provided lunch of delicious sandwiches and mysterious bread-crumbed cheese, we met some of the other classicists who had chosen to spend their day in the same fashion as we had.

We were slightly perturbed by the depth of the discussions of some of the circles and the thick folio of sheets labelled “Last minute revision?”, but we found a lonely student from Liverpool who was just as apprehensive as we were to befriend.

It was unfortunate that one of our number was unable to attend the day due to the onset of an unwelcome illness, but we promised to keep Tom informed of our progress throughout the competition.

Hurried up to another room according to a tight schedule, we encountered a projection screen upon which was displayed a live video link to a school in Paris and another in Berlin, both of whom were running the same competition at the same time - the competition was originally run in Paris for a single school of students, but grew to accommodate, for the first time ever, two new countries this year.

It was fortunate that both the technical and the academic side of the organisation ran fairly smoothly throughout the day, especially when the time came for the conversation between the heads of each country’s sections (using preprepared statements, as the lady in charge of the English side of affairs, Mrs Anne Dicks, Head of Classics at Malvern St James, spoke neither French or German) before the ‘competition’ began.

However, before any of this conversing, the entrants were treated to a recorded message from Boris Johnson MP, Shadow Minister for Higher Education, videoed in Bath during a spare five minutes which he managed to find in which to wish us “bonne chance” and to tell us to “vote Latin, not the Common Agricultural Policy” because “this is the big one”, an addition welcomed greatly by two of his fans, our own Amy H and our friend from Liverpool.

The competition itself was comprised of two parts:

• one hour long paper of twenty questions about the myth, “The Rape of Europa”, as told by Homer, Ovid and many other poets and artists throughout the evolution of history [1];
• and one paper of almost two hours - though the continental students were given a third - which gave us the opportunity to tackle a rather difficult and obscure passage of Latin text.

While, in relation to the former, we felt ourselves under prepared and therefore had no idea “Who was the father of Europa and of what city was he king?”, in relation to the latter, we were at once puzzled and bemused at the convoluted argument presented by the author Apuleius about the importance of nationality, involving the surprising use of the word holus, meaning cabbage.

However, the factor we (Mrs Fayter included) found most unexpected and fearsome was the fact that this competition was run as an individual examination, strictly invigilated, where we had thought that group work was to ensue and indeed a discussion would have been more appropriate and complementary to the event.

This was not to say that we did not have fun; there was great amusement found by all four of our group in making up answers to both sections of the paper, and there were many interesting people from all over the country (Sheffield, Worcester and Cheltenham Ladies’ College to name a few) whom we met who were not all absorbed by the studious necessity to complete the papers meticulously.

The day concluded with a cup of tea and the left-overs from lunch, before the drive home in the sunshine with the wind blowing through the open sun-roof.

This was when conversations enlightened us with the answers we were supposed to notate a few hours previously.

We were grateful to Mrs Fayter for organising our participation in the event, and we hope that next year, with a little more preparation and knowledge about what we will be letting ourselves in for, we will be able to reconvene with our fellow Latin scholars and enjoy the challenge of the day once again.

Max Drinkwater, Year 11, Pate’s Grammar School, Cheltenham
www.pates.gloucs.sch.uk

Addendum from Mrs Anne Dicks:

We would like to express our thanks to all the people who supported the competition in so many ways,

• Sir Anthony Cleaver (former chief executive of IBM and now chairman of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority),
• the novelist, Lyndsey Davis,
• Tony Robinson from Time Team,
• Boris Johnson and
• UNESCO.
<.ul> We also appreciate the prizes donated by local businesses, by Lindsey Davis, Tony Robinson, and also UNESCO who will send a framed painting to the school of the winner. In addition Malvern St James has contributed a beautiful silver trophy for the school of the winner of the Latin translation section of the competition.
• We would like to thank the schools who took part, from as far a field as Liverpool and Sheffield. There were 80 students in Paris and about 14 in Berlin. We hope to hold the competition again next year with more countries and even more students competing.

Pictures courtesy Pate’s website Ready for the test!