Here's Justin Slocum Bailey talking about Aulus Gellius in Latin. Here's Jorge Tárrega teaching one of Horace's most famous poems through the medium of Latin. Here's him delivering a lecture about the possibility of a manned mission to Mars in Latin.
Daniel Gallagher who worked for a decade at the Vatican Secretariat's Latin Office. Anyone who pokes around at, say, the Conventiculum Bostoniense, will find proficient Latin-speakers as readily as Zeus finds incestuous booty-calls. It's that people do actually acquire this kind of competence.
It's not just that this assumption would be news to people like Galileo, Kepler or Descartes. It always strikes me as bizarre and a bit embarrassing to see classicists insisting that it is impossible to acquire fluid or fluent command of Latin or Greek, that "we" can never do this. What irritates me is that -again like most classicists - she treats this as a self-evident fact to be just accepted rather than a problem to be dealt with, as if nobody could hope to actually read Cicero with ease. This admission - from someone like Beard - is good to have out there. She can't sight-read a complex Latin text all that well. Not long ago, Mary Beard graced us with a bit of honorable honesty in the Times Literary Supplement, in which she confessed to what is a bit of an open secret among most classicists.
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