Dr. Gil Gigliotti
President, ClassConn
Professor, CCSU
When most people ponder matters Latin and Greek, they usually recall their specific teachers or classes, if they ever studied either of them at all. If not, they tend to think in Hollywood cliches—togas, ruins, gladiators, Spartans, chariots, and/or the poisonous backstabbing within the Roman imperial families. But, no matter what, they usually do not expect Greek or Latin to pop up in a western. When it does, it is worth noting.
There is a brief allusion to Classics in the new Jane Campion film The Power of the Dog, based on the 1967 novel of the same name by Thomas Savage and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst. Without giving anything away here, mention is made of the classical learning of one of the cowboys at the Burbank ranch. After affirming that the cowboy indeed had been “Phi Beta Kappa at Yale” in Classics, the Governor of Montana, a dinner guest at the ranch, jokes:
So, does he swear at the cattle in Greek or Latin?
That’s all of it. But it’s significant, if for no other reason than that it’s meant to confound our view of the cowboy.
However, in the novel, the cowboy’s classical erudition plays a far more pivotal role. It is used to underscore both the educational snobbery of a medical doctor and the cruelty of the cowboy. The doctor, when he drinks, is “known to stand up there . . . in his dark doctor’s suit and a starched collar and expound his theories on politics, education, and Europe” (38). We are given an example of this when he waxes eloquent on “civic pride, from the Latin civatas [sic] meaning city” (39). His mistake regarding civitas speaks volumes to the cowboy, and he stands for none of this.
In the exchange that follows, the cowboy condescendingly corrects some Greek quoted by the doctor (though not included in the text), who, for reasons I won’t reveal, had felt “a sudden need to impress” the cowboy (41). The cowboy answers:
You better go back then to your little school, wherever it was. The word in Greek for that sort of flower is “πόθος.” They put them on graves. (41)
The cowboy then further taunts the doctor with an unspecified obscene quotation from Ovid in Latin. The doctor, while understanding the Latin (41), can only blush, and, after a brief, ineffective scuffle, leaves humiliated.
I’ll leave the rest to your own viewing and reading.
In most popular media, classicists are usually reduced to silly, bookish, ineffectual stick figures. Any time they’re portrayed in more complex, even unflattering, ways, it is certainly worth a shout-out. As history has made clear, knowledge isn’t equivalent to virtue. But neither is it the same as dull.
Feel free to reach out with other unexpected appearances of Latin and/or Greek. It’ll be interesting—and perhaps illuminating to us all—to see the popular reach of the Classics.
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For another example of Classics in a western, see the 1989 miniseries Lonesome Dove, based upon the 1985 Larry McMurtry novel and starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. There was much ado about the meaning of the Latin motto of the Hat Creek Cattle Company, uva uvam vivendo varia fit. (For a fuller discussion of it and the other Latin in the novel, check out the brief article cited below.)
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Works Cited
Barker, Jamie. “Why Gus McCray Don’t Rent Pigs: An Examination of Latin in Lonesome Dove.” The Explicator 76.1 (2018): 30–32.
Campion, Jane. The Power of the Dog. Film. Bad Girl Creek, et alia, 2021.
McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.
Savage, Thomas. The Power of the Dog. Cambridge, MA: Van Factor & Goodheart, Inc, 1982.
Wincer, Simon. Lonesome Dove. Miniseries. CBS, 1989.