In Britain, the Iris Project promotes "Latin through literacy", which has introduced Latin courses to 40 inner-city state primary schools. My old school, Gayhurst Primary in Hackney, has embraced the initiative and it has proved very successful. Sara Waymont, a Latin teacher at Gayhurst, assumed that her students' lack of grammatical knowledge of English would inhibit them from learning Latin. But she was surprised. "The children have been increasingly keen to get involved with the language element of the course," she says. "All the teachers have noticed that the children's grammar has greatly improved since the beginning of term."

Or as the great 19th-century American classicist Isaac Flagg put it, "Bene legere saecla vincere" ("To read well is to master the ages").