By Catherine Brewster

Long-timers at Commonwealth eventually lose track of how many hats they’ve worn. Some of Don Conolly’s: teaching Ancient History, coordinating academic support, serving on the admissions committee, leading trips to Rome and Naples, and teaching electives on philosophy, Greek tragedy, art history, Russian literature, and precolonial Mesoamerican cultures. This fall, he embarked on his second year of teaching English 9 and spearheaded the new “Classics of World Cinema” discussion group, launched with the screening of a short film by the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky at Hancock. The next night, the talent show opened with the Beatles’ “Good Day Sunshine,” arranged by Don for an enthusiastic faculty band. His fellow long-timers are used to seeing him pivot from loading speakers and keyboards into the equipment van to paraphrasing Tarkovsky’s idea of the purpose of art: “to plough and harrow the soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”

Amidst all this, he spends most of his time teaching everyone who takes Latin at Commonwealth—a small (about a dozen each year) but committed number, and one that’s remained robust through the decades. If any of them choose Latin because they think a dead language is easier to learn, that impression doesn’t last. “Let’s face it,” said Don, straight-faced, in a speech at the Art Show opening years ago. “The study of Latin is mostly drudgery.” Students need two years to memorize all the “forms” that make meaning in an inflected language, where the endings of words, rather than their order, reflect their function in a sentence. Understanding Latin, then, is a matter of solving puzzles, not mapping Latin onto English word for word. “Kids who can manage it get an enormous amount of satisfaction,” says Don. The motive that most makes such a “cognitively tough” undertaking worthwhile is “being fascinated by an ancient culture, not any practical reason.”

Along the way, “my job is to capture their imaginations,” Don says. “Even in Latin 1, when they think I’m just being Mr. Digression, I want them to use what I’m saying later.” Learning the origins of English words, he’s found, reliably offers a thrill to beginning students. “We get a lot of words from Latin, but a lot come through French,” and his students can read clues like the way interior consonants drop out in words derived from French. Many “war words and trading items” come from Latin through the languages of Germanic tribes. Don shows his students a little Anglo-Saxon and Middle English.

Meanwhile, they make their way through the towering edifice of Latin grammar. This year, Don has replaced the Wheelock’s Latin that alumni/ae will remember with a new textbook, Latin for the New Millennium. “Wheelock introduces larger grammar topics all at once so you can see whole systems, which is great for older minds,” he says, “but younger students need smaller chunks of information and drills that isolate constructions.” He likes the pacing of Latin for the New Millennium and its generous visuals on ancient civilizations. “By the time they get to Latin 4, I’m training them as I was trained to name all the constructions; you never let an ablative go by without assigning it to one of twenty obscure categories. You’re a philologist, able to take part in editing a text.”

He introduces Latin 3 students to the “apparatus criticus”—scholars’ account of how a text is compiled from manuscripts and variant readings—to “keep to the fore the idea that there aren’t the Romans and then us, but in between the people who construct this for us.” Only because of their efforts can we read the texts at all. And the stories in most of those texts, in turn, “were not modern for the Romans” but looked back many hundreds of years.

Latin via Irish & Greek

Don first encountered Latin in high school as “a geeky kid who liked Tolkien and stuff like that” and was most interested in Irish, which he was learning outside school. “I was interested in the ancient world but not so much the Romans. The Lord of the Rings was foundational for me, but believe it or not I’m not a lover of fantasy. What attracted me was more the historical depth and the way in which the books were epic in the sense of actual epics. I was really into Irish mythology, and that led me to Yeats—not so much the poetry as the plays. Those got me away from just the lore and toward the formalistic structure, which he drew from Japanese and Greek drama.”

By the time Don got to Stanford as an undergraduate, he says, “I knew Greek drama was what I really wanted to do.” Alongside Greek and Latin, he learned Old English, Old Norse (“very easy once you’ve done Old English”), Old Irish, and some Italian, French, German, and Russian, though he calls himself “such a nerdy dead-language person that I can’t converse in modern languages.” Nevertheless, he somehow also acquired a formidable knowledge of English literature. To explain why “getting sidetracked by Plato” was part of what kept him from finishing his doctorate at the University of Washington, he cites a passage in Moby-Dick: after a character falls into the brain cavity of a whale and drowns in the spermaceti, Melville asks, “How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there?”

Looking back at his own education, Don reflects that “probably my most basic interest” wasn’t even in written literature but in “oral formulaic structure”—Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s theory of Homeric composition, which put the ancient singers of tales on an equal footing with their “authors.” Like the “skalds” of Old Norse tales, these singers, Parry and his student Albert Lord posited, could “expand or contract the tale at will based on the interests of the audience.” Parry and Lord did their field research in what was then Yugoslavia, where tales of mostly Serbian heroes were performed by mostly Bosnian singers filling time during Ramadan. “They wanted to find a modern Homer.”

Given Don’s willingness to follow the paths from one culture to another, it’s unsurprising that he now says that his Mesoamerica elective, which he taught for the second time in 2023–2024, is “the course I’m most committed to. The overriding thing I like to instill is appreciation, the same kind of reverence people have for ancient Greek. I love the idea that when we get to the classic Maya, let’s say their names, attach ‘the Great’ to them.”

It’s simply fascinating to dig up the origin of an idea and see how it evolves. On the other hand, it reminds us that we might be trapped inside concepts that we fail to see are malleable, arbitrary, and/or dangerous. Going back to the origin of ideas and ‘destroying’ or ‘deconstructing’ them allows us to engage in the important, never-ending task of critiquing and refining our own thinking and perception—and sharpening our compassion.”

Examined & Unexamined Categories

“Whenever I’ve done an elective, I’ve tried to make it a new discipline,” Don says. In the case of the Mesoamerica course, “I naively thought I was really comfortable reading archeological stuff and could pick it up. There’s so much material—city plans, buildings, artifacts. I was amazed at the response of the kids.” Russian literature offers points of entry into existentialism and intellectual history. In Greek tragedy, “the big philosophical questions” take center stage through Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, with its study of the human spirit’s “unrelenting search to uncover the truth about itself even to the point of its own destruction and humiliation.”

Most of all, he wants to encourage students to ask questions about “where we get our basic categories and ideas.” Just as words do, such concepts “arise from historical circumstances and have their own histories. We cannot help but think using these concepts, but we must never consider our categories decisively defined and determined. On the one hand, it’s simply fascinating to dig up the origin of an idea and see how it evolves. On the other hand, it reminds us that we might be trapped inside concepts that we fail to see are malleable, arbitrary, and/or dangerous. Going back to the origin of ideas and ‘destroying’ or ‘deconstructing’ them allows us to engage in the important, never-ending task of critiquing and refining our own thinking and perception—and sharpening our compassion.”

For instance, looking at human sacrifice in Mesoamerican cultures makes students uncomfortable, “but we have to look at ourselves, too. Our obsession with technology—and its prestigious problem solvers—makes sense when you conceive of everything human, our thoughts, emotions, and sense of right and wrong, as merely physical processes emerging from evolutionary necessity. It’s not that there’s no value in those assumptions, but when they are accepted uncritically, it can lead people to dismiss all the hard work thinkers have done for millennia trying to articulate the human condition.”

One category Don thinks we should revise is “Classics,” which “privileges Greeks and Romans as some kind of geniuses” compared with everyone else. Instead, turning back to “the story of transmission” by scholars doing the same work he trains Latin students to do, he cites “the theory that ninety-eight percent of what humans produce is forgettable and two percent is good, and the best stuff survived the triage since antiquity” (seven of Sophocles’ hundred or so plays, for instance).

Don recognizes, too, how ancient literature can be seen as an extension of Western triumphalism and how centering this particular definition of “Classics” contributes to white hegemony. That’s not his goal. What if we did away with the word “Classics” altogether and called it “Greek and Roman literature” instead? “The people who produced those things are, in every case, not us. We can learn most from them by acknowledging the discontinuity between our world and theirs.” If no one can claim these voices as “us,” then in a sense everyone can. Don offers one example from the Aeneid, the reward for making it to Latin 4, of how “the big philosophical questions” permeate the texts he loves to teach. “Aeneas’s descent into Hades is a symbolic deep dive into the poetic tradition and human consciousness. At the gate, Aeneas passes horrible monsters and allegorical figures, like Death and Sickness, suggesting perhaps the ultimate origin of mythological stories in our primordial fears. Then he meets the mangled Greek and Trojan heroes who populate the violent epic cycle. He even encounters an uncomfortable reminder of his own misdeeds in the form of Dido. Only in the rarified air of the Elysian Fields do both Aeneas and Virgil discover the redemption and transfiguration of the dark traditions to which they belong.”

Catherine Brewster has taught English at Commonwealth since 2000. This article originally appeared in the winter 2025 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.

Explore Our Curriculum