Скачать или смотреть Aidan Robert Scully Delivers the Latin Salutatory | Harvard Commencement 2025

Graduate Aidan Robert Scully ’25 delivered the Latin Salutatory, De Hereditatibus Peregrinis, at Harvard’s 2025 Commencement Exercises.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION
"On Foreign Inheritances"

President Garber, most esteemed deans, most wise professors, most distinguished guests, friends, families, and my beloved fellow students: welcome all!

It is a great honor for me to address you all. This oration is not only unintelligible to those without Latin, but even the crew of trained students of antiquity who can read and write the Latin language but cannot speak or hear it need a translation, especially me. Therefore, you all who are listening are only waiting for the one funny sentence in English (which is coming, don’t worry!). You check your watches and wonder aloud when Abraham Verghese, or really anyone speaking in English, will speak! What is the reason for speaking Latin? I ask for patience; I will offer an explanation.

Before this day of great joy, the ties that bind us together were hard to see. Our fellow students were not so much our neighbors as strangers. Students of the humanities journeyed to Harvard Yard, while students of sciences journeyed into exile on the far side of the mighty River Charles, a river more important than the Rubicon. Those strange times when we came together — in GenEd discussion section — were frightening. How horrible to say! We might as well have been saying “the barbarians are at the gates!” when we shouted that “there is a mathematician in my literature class!” or that “a Social Studies concentrator is trying to code!”

Oh, the times! Oh, the customs! We do not understand each other, and indeed, even the orator speaks a language so obscure that anyone listening could rightly exclaim “what is this guy saying!?” As we study foreign subjects, so do we speak foreign languages. Some speak the language of history, others the language of Python or C++, some that of microbes, others that of stars. We often lack a common language. Will our many inheritances be forever separated?

Not at all! We speak many foreign languages; but we stand together, and we learn together, we cheer on our athletes and Olympians together, and most importantly, we condemn those detestable Yalies together and their savage tyrant “Handsome Dan.”

In the same way, the Latin language is familiar to some and unfamiliar to others, but it is one inheritance handed down as a benefit for all. Foreign inheritances strengthen the ties that bind us together. Perhaps you have heard from the seat of power that your inheritance is not worthy of praise, but that it is alien or confusing or lesser. To you, I say this: neither powers nor princes can judge your inheritance. Neither powers nor princes can take your inheritance away. And neither powers nor princes can change the truth and deny that diversity is our strength.

What is the reason for speaking Latin? It is this: to remember that every inheritance, however unfamiliar, adds to our fortunes. The cultivation of a better world demands all languages. It demands all of us. The ship of the world will not be righted by the eyebrow-raising hyper-critic complaining that the believer in justice has stepped out of the marching column of ignorance, but by the artist who becomes a prophet of a better world, by the doctor who cares for those wounded by the whips and chains of the world, and by the student of history who tears out the familiar inequities of the world by the root. We will right it, together.

As the dutiful Aeneas once emboldened the spirits of his crew, so now I encourage you: “Endure. And preserve yourselves for better times to come.” Until those better times: Farewell!