By Adrastos Omissi
Earlier this year I went to see in the cinema what is unquestionably my favourite movie ever made, The Matrix. Despite the fact that I was confident at the age of eighteen that I had already seen the film at least one hundred times, whenever it makes an appearance in theatres – in this instance, for the 25th anniversary of its release – I take the opportunity to enjoy it on a big screen.
The Matrix is widely recognised to be a densely woven – its critics would doubtless say ‘incoherent’ – tapestry of borrowings and illusions from an exceptionally wide range of different media. Its visual style is an jarring blend of film noir, cyberpunk classics like Bladerunner (1982), anime (most especially Akira [1988] and Ghost in the Shell [1995]), and the mind bending action of the Hong Kong martial arts greats, above all John Woo. Its overarching plot – and I suppose at the point I should say this article contains minor plot spoilers for a twenty five year old movie so influential that every action director spent the following decade trying to copy it – is generally compared to Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’, to the monomyth of Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), or to the narrative arc of Christ’s ministry, death, and resurrection. Characters draw their names from Biblical history, classical myth, modern computing, and even (by the film’s 2003 sequel) the ruling dynasty of early medieval Gaul. Alice in Wonderland, Jean Baudrillard, and William Gibson all get their tips of the cap.
It’s on one particular scene in the movie that I’d like to focus here, however. It is a scene laden with classical allusion. Neo, the protagonist, is taken as part of his rite of initiation into the society he has just joined to visit a prophet, known simply as ‘the Oracle’. Led to this meeting by his mentor, Morpheus (his name that of the Greek god of dreams and sleep), this encounter is obviously and intentionally redolent of the oracles of ancient Greece, the most famous of whom was the Pythia at Delphi. Like the Pythia, The Matrix’s oracle is a female guide, possessed of knowledge of the future, dwelling in a sacred location at which she must be visited by those seeking answers, surrounded by attendants and acolytes, giving to each person that comes to see her a single, cryptic premonition of what their future holds. Like many of the Pythia’s pronouncements to the Greeks, the Oracle’s words to Neo carry a hidden double meaning of which he, on receipt of them, is blissfully unaware. The Matrix’s Oracle waits for Neo sat on a kitchen stool above the waft of baking cookies, as the Pythia sat upon her tripod above the fumes that rose from the earth beneath her temple (cf. Plut. De def. or. 437c). She is even dressed in a grandmotherly 1990s reimagining of the costume worn by Michelangelo’s Delphic Sibyl on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
That this comparison is an explicit one intended by the filmmakers, not giddy overreach by adoring fans, is made explicit within the text of film itself. In the course of their discussion, the Oracle draws Neo’s attention to an inscribed wooden panel above the lintel of her kitchen door which bears the message ‘Know thyself’. Anyone even passingly familiar with the history of Delphi will recognise this as the most famous of the Delphic maxims that were inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the Pythia’s sacred home. In its Greek original, it reads γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnōthi se-auton).
What’s interesting about this scene, however, and the point that I want to make in this post, is that the Oracle’s pronouncement in The Matrix is written neither in English (the language of the film), nor in Classical Greek (the language of the statement it so clearly references), but rather in Latin: temet nosce. If we the audience are in any doubt about the language, the character herself tells us: “You know what that means? It’s Latin. It means ‘know thyself’.” Given how densely and consciously layered the imagery within this scene is, the filmmakers cannot have been unaware that they were rendering the motto in a language that has no more immediate relevance to the parent text than would Old Persian, Hittite, Classical Arabic, French, German, or any other language of the wider Mediterranean world. Why did they choose Latin?
There’s no firm answer that I can give to this, since I’m not aware of any explicit commentary by any of the filmmakers on this choice (do tell me know if you know of such!). But I’m confident I can hazard a relatively sure guess. Had The Matrix’s Oracle indicated to Neo a sign written in what, to most people, would be the unintelligible squiggles of Greek and informed him “It’s Greek. It means ‘know thyself’ ”, audiences could be expected to be drawn out of the dramatic moment. Why does she speak Greek? Is the character supposed to be Greek? Why on earth is this written in Greek?! Latin presents, within our cultural imagination, none of these problems. When the character indicates that her motto is written in Latin, it immediately presents to a the audience a series of easily intelligible messages: if this character knows Latin, she is learned, she is profound, she is possession of secret knowledge.
The Matrix is hardly an isolated example of Latin’s widely acknowledged primacy as a language of profundity, nor is it a lone example of Latin being used to muscle out Greek where Greek would be more appropriate. Sticking with motto’s and slogans, the motto of our university is written in Latin but is in fact reference to a text originally composed (or at least surviving in) Greek. Via veritas vita, as the university has it, is the core of John 14:6, Christ’s statement that “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.” In the original, this is ἡ ὁδὸς καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια καὶ ἡ ζωή. Indeed, on this score Latin has form for colonising important Greek expressions – deus ex machina, anyone?
Of course, perhaps one of the most culturally significant (if only by sheer volume of sales) users and abusers of Latin in fiction is J. K. Rowling. Rowling, who studied French and Classics at Exeter in the 1980s, chose to imbue the spells of her Harry Potter series with the stamp of Latinness. Some of these spells are bono fide (see what I did there?) Latin: ‘crucio’, one of her unforgivable curses, means ‘I torture’; ‘accio’, her summoning spell, means ‘I summon’; and ‘expecto patronum’, the spell you cast if you want to summon the ghost of an otter (or similar) to come chase off any scary demons that might be attacking you, means ‘I look for a protector’. Others, however, are less authentic. Witches and wizard who want to pick stuff up without the effort and bother of lifting say ‘wingardium leviosa’. The ‘leviosa’ part presumably riffs on Latin levis, ‘light’, but ‘wingardium’ is entirely Rowling.
Wingardium leviosa, however, points us to a further aspect of Latin’s cultural cache as a language of profundity, of heritage, of intellect. Given that virtually no one these days can understand the language, in popular culture its words now take on the character of magic incantations that can be used for a pragmatic purpose utterly divorced of their semantic content. This can yield genuine moments of hilarity. A great example of such is the scene in the otherwise enjoyable 1993 Wild West action romp Tombstone, in which the historic characters Doc Holliday (drunk, in the scene) and Johnny Ringo attempt to establish their intellectual chops in a baffling cut and thrust of Latin, which I render for you here in translation with my own thoughts in square brackets:
Doc Holliday: There is truth in wine [so far so good]
Johnny Ringo: Do what you do [a little oblique, but not insane]
Doc Holliday: The Jew Apella may believe it, not I [here the wheels begin to come off]
Johnny Ringo: Youth is the teacher of fools […what?]
Doc Holliday: May he rest in peace [……?]
Other films too drink deep from this particular draught. Pointing out historical inaccuracies in 1995’s Braveheart is a little bit of an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel, but let it be said that when William Wallace speaks Latin to prove to the pestilent English that he’s man of culture, a genuinely English prelate of the thirteenth century would still have felt entitled to smirk at what comes out of his mouth.[1] Romanes eunt domus, etc.
Latin has a power to it, therefore, that is almost independent of it as an actual linguistic content. If you want to impress people with a witty Latin aphorism at parties (in my experience, the production of Latin at parties is a way to guarantee you spend quite a long time stood by yourself, NB), then hit them with a quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur, a phrase I wrote up in lovely calligraphy on the wall of my undergrad room because it made me laugh to tell people it meant ‘anything said in Latin seems profound’ (all made doubly absurd by the fact I couldn’t read a word of Latin at the time). And given all of this, it surely must strike us as ironic that one of Latin’s most famous maxims, Caesar’s final utterance, et tu, Brute, was in fact penned by William Shakespeare, that bastion of the English language. Whether Caesar said anything as he was surrounded and butchered in the Theatre of Pompey is unknown, but given everything I’ve discussed above, it must surely strike us as ironic that Suetonius reports a tradition (Caes. 82.2) in which the would-be dictator ended his life, confronted by Brutus among his assassins, with the words καὶ σὺ τέκνον (‘And you, my son?’). Caesar, unlike the creators of The Matrix, felt able to give Greek its place.
[1] The Latin in Gibson’s 2005 The Passion of the Christ is, by contrast, much better, though the way that the language is used in that film could itself merit a blog post, with both praise and censure.