I. The Courtly Exordium (§1–§4)

Carney on the bema turning to address Larry Fink in the front row; a bust of Cicero on a shelf behind. — *The courtly exordium – Carney addresses Larry by name.*

🇨🇦 Original

Merci, Larry.¹

C’est un plaisir – et un devoir – d’être parmi vous ce soir, en ce moment charnière que le Canada et le monde traversent.

Ce soir, je vous parlerai d’une rupture de l’ordre mondial, de la fin d’une fiction agréable et du début d’une réalité brutale où la géopolitique – et les grandes puissances – ne sont soumises à aucune limite, aucune contrainte.

Par ailleurs, j’aimerais vous dire que les autres pays, en particulier les puissances intermédiaires comme le Canada, ne sont pas impuissants. Ils ont la capacité de construire un nouvel ordre qui intègre nos valeurs, comme le respect des droits de la personne, le développement durable, la solidarité, la souveraineté et l’intégrité territoriale de tous les États.

La puissance des moins puissants commence par l’honnêteté.

🏛️ Translation

§1 Tibi, mi Laurenti, gratias ago maximas. Mihi autem, principes Davi congregati, cum voluptati tum officio est hac nocte vobiscum adesse, eo praesertim tempore cum et Canadae et universi orbis terrarum salus in summo discrimine versetur.

To you, my dear Larry, I give the warmest thanks. And for me, leaders gathered at Davos, it is at once a pleasure and a duty to be here with you this night — and this above all at a time when the welfare both of Canada and of the whole world stands at its utmost crisis.

§2 Dicam autem hodie, principes Davi congregati, ordinem illum orbis terrarum convelli: iucundae scilicet fabulae finem iam adesse, asperae veritatis initium ingruere, cum potentissimi quique nullum sibi finem statuant, nullas leges vereantur, nullum denique vinculum impositum esse arbitrentur.

I shall speak today, leaders gathered at Davos, of how that order of the world is being torn apart: how the end of the pleasant fiction is now at hand, the beginning of the harsh truth bearing down upon us — since the most powerful, one and all, set themselves no limit, revere no laws, and judge, in the end, that no bond whatever has been laid upon them.

§3 Ac tamen, principes Davi congregati, hoc vobis confirmare velim: ceteras civitates, eas praesertim quae mediae sunt potentiae, qualis est Canada, non esse virium expertes. Possunt enim novum condere ordinem, in quo ea contineantur quae nos colimus — iura dico generis humani, perpetuam rerum salutem, concordiam, suam cuiusque civitatis libertatem, finiumque integritatem.

And yet, leaders gathered at Davos, this I should wish to affirm to you: that the other states — and those above all of middling power, such as Canada is — are not devoid of strength. For they can found a new order, one in which are gathered the things we cherish — the rights, I mean, of the human race, the lasting welfare of affairs, concord, the freedom of each several state, and the integrity of borders.

§4 Infirmiorum autem potentia a fide proficiscitur.

But the power of the weaker proceeds from good faith.

💬 Commentary

The first-pass commentary on §1 – §4 was written for the Greek rendering of the exordium, not the Latin; in the second pass that Greek rendering was set aside under D1. The Greek text and its first-pass commentary are preserved as a companion piece — see Post I bis², below.

🤖🧐 Second pass

D1 — The diglossic frame. The structural conceit. Carney’s address is bilingual by delivery: he opens in French, then announces the switch and proceeds in English. Throughout, this translation renders the whole into Demosthenic Greek; here alone, the French exordium is given in Ciceronian Latin, and the change of language at §5 marks the point at which Carney himself changed his. The mapping is Latin : Greek :: French : English. It is defensible on three grounds:

Pair-of-summits tradition. Cicero is the recognized Latin counterpart to Demosthenes — the two have been treated as the twin summits of ancient oratory since Plutarch paired their Lives, and the reader steeped in that tradition will hear the seam as a passage from the Roman, adapted, courtly school to the Greek, original, austere one.
Historically-real dependence. Roman eloquence is a conscious adaptation of Greek models — Cicero studied under Greek masters — much as English prose is entangled with French; the diglossia therefore has a genuine shape rather than a merely ornamental one.
Register-match in the exordial position. Cicero’s exordial manner — the periodic captatio³, the discrimen of the public moment — is itself the natural Latin setting for a gracious, faintly formal opening, exactly the register Carney’s French occupies before he turns plain.

The surface effect is undeniably theatrical; the underlying logic is not.

§1. The double dative and the audience. Cum voluptati tum officio est renders “both a pleasure and a duty” with the double dative (dative of effect and of person) under the cum… tum correlative — an idiom thoroughly Ciceronian and one English cannot reproduce without two abstract nouns. In summo discrimine versetur carries “pivotal moment”: discrimen is Cicero’s standing word for the political turning-point, and versari in the standing idiom for being caught up in a condition. Mi Laurenti matches the warmth of the corresponding Greek vocative and is in the register of Cicero’s letters (mi Attice). The first-pass Latin reading viri principes (“leading men”) was a deliberate, slightly loaded choice in place of an institutional address — Cicero’s patres conscripti, Quirites, iudices would all misfit a forum of this kind. Under D8 it was replaced by principes Davi congregati; see the D8 note below.

§2. The tricolon⁴ of lawlessness. Latin matches the Greek tricolon — they set no limit, revere no law, see no bond upon themselves — almost one to one under a cum-clause with anaphora⁵: nullum… nullas… nullum, capped by denique, the particle that signals the closing and heaviest member of a Ciceronian series. Convelli (“is being torn apart”) is Cicero’s verb for the violent dissolution of political order (fundamenta rei publicae convellere); ingruere (“bears down upon”) is the verb of war and calamity assailing — vivid where the English “beginning of a harsh reality” is flat. The governing antithesis iucundae fabulae finem … asperae veritatis initium sets finis against initium, iucundus against asper, fabula against veritas: three oppositions in a single balanced limb, which is concinnity of the kind Cicero builds his periods from.

§3. Litotes and the foundational verb. “Are not powerless” becomes non esse virium expertes — “not devoid of strength” — a litotes⁶ that mirrors the Greek litotes οὐκ ἄμοιρα δυνάμεως and is squarely in Cicero’s manner. “Build a new order” is novum condere ordinem: condere is the Roman foundational verb (condere urbem, condere rem publicam), and it dignifies the act in a way “build” does not. The list of values is rendered to recur with the body of the speech: quae nos colimus (“the things we cherish”) is the standing Latin equivalent of the Greek τὰ τιμώμενα; concordia is the exact Latin of ὁμόνοια and Cicero’s central political ideal (concordia ordinum); suam cuiusque civitatis libertatem carries αὐτονομία; and finium integritas is very nearly a calque of ἡ τῶν ὅρων ἀκεραιότης. “Sustainable development,” resistant in Greek, is resistant here too and is again handled by paraphrase: perpetuam rerum salutem, “the lasting welfare of affairs.”

D2 — §4, fides not veritas. The aphorism closing the exordium renders Carney’s “honesty” not with veritas but with fides. The choice is interpretive and deliberate. In the speech’s governing logic — Havel’s: that a system endures by everyone’s performing what they privately disbelieve, and cracks when one person stops — “honesty” does not mean accuracy of statement but refusal of pretense: being what one appears to be, keeping faith with the truth of one’s situation. That is the semantic field of fides (good faith, trustworthiness, the bond of one’s word), not of veritas (truth as correspondence).

The rendering also carries a Ciceronian resonance comparable to the Demosthenic windfalls⁷ noted later in the speech: De Officiis 1.23 founds justice itself upon fides — fundamentum autem est iustitiae fides — so to make the power of the weak proceed a fide sets the line, for any reader who knows the De Officiis, in Cicero’s own register of deriving the binding political thing from its root virtue, reinforced by the proficisci a construction by which Cicero habitually traces an obligation to its source.

Veritas was retained only as a possible fallback; simplicitas (frankness, absence of duplicity) was a lighter alternative if the commercial overtone of fides (which also denotes financial credit) had been judged a distraction rather than, given the speech’s later themes of economic coercion, a faint felicity.

The structural consequence is the substantive point: fides in §4 leaves the truth-keyword unspent, so that ἀλήθεια makes its weight-bearing entrance where it should — within the Greek, at §13 – §14, in the Havel movement — and not in a prefatory Latin sentence that the speech, on its author’s own showing, treats as standing before the argument rather than within it.

D8 (Latin row) — the inclusive vocative. Viri principes is replaced by principes Davi congregati — Davi as locative singular of 2nd-decl. Davus, parallel to Romae, Athenis; congregati the Latin equivalent of συνελθόντες. The Greek anchor’s ἄνδρες τε καὶ γυναῖκες is not reproduced compactly in Latin without bulk, but principes alone covers leaders of either sex by the same classical convention that the Greek explicitly dispatches with the doubled vocative. The two languages arrive at compatible inclusivity by different routes.

Footnotes

Larry is Larry Fink, founder, chairman, and chief executive of BlackRock — the world’s largest asset-management firm — and a long-standing fixture on the Davos circuit. At the WEF plenary at which this speech was delivered, Fink was the moderator who introduced Carney; Carney’s opening Merci, Larry is the direct address back to him before turning to the wider room. Mi Laurenti, the Latin equivalent used in the rendered exordium under D1, preserves the warmth of personal address in the register of Cicero’s letters (mi Attice, etc.) — see the first-pass note at §1 below.↩︎
bis, ter, quater — Latin enumerative adverbs (“a second time”, “a third time”, “a fourth time”), the classicising convention for marking numbered subsidiary items: a section 1 plus later additions becomes 1, 1 bis, 1 ter, 1 quater — equivalent to the modern 1A / 1B / 1C scheme. Standing in classical philology, mediaeval scholastic editions, and modern Continental scholarly apparatus.↩︎
Captatio is short for captatio benevolentiae, “the catching of goodwill” — the rhetorical move at the start of an ancient speech in which the orator explicitly bids for the audience’s favourable disposition before launching into the argument. Cicero and Quintilian both treat it as a standard opening move in forensic and political oratory: praise the audience, name the importance of the occasion, profess one’s own inadequacy or earnestness. The flatter modern equivalent is “thank you for having me, this is an important moment, I’ll try to do justice to it” — which is exactly what Carney’s French exordium does.↩︎
Tricolon is the rhetorical figure of three matched limbs in succession — three parallel parts of a single sentence given equal grammatical weight. Classical orators reach for it constantly because three is the smallest number that establishes a pattern (one is incidental, two is a pair, three is a rhythm), and because Greek and Latin grammar make it easy to balance the three members exactly. Cicero’s veni, vidi, vici is the textbook example; Lincoln’s of the people, by the people, for the people is the same figure in English. The §2 tricolon they set no limit, revere no law, see no bond upon themselves matches the Greek οὔτε ὅρον τιθέασιν, οὔτε νόμον αἰδοῦνται, οὔθ’ ἑαυτοῖς δεσμὸν… οὐδένα ὁρῶσιν limb for limb.↩︎
Anaphora is the rhetorical figure of repeating an opening word (or short phrase) at the head of successive clauses, so the repetition itself becomes the rhythmic frame of the period. Nullum… nullas… nullum in the Latin §2 — no limit… no laws… no bond — is anaphora reinforcing the tricolon, the same word at the head of each member doing the work of binding the three together. Churchill’s we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds is the same figure in English.↩︎
Litotes is the figure of understatement by double negation, where not weak serves for strong with a faint extra emphasis that the plain positive lacks. The figure is heavily used in classical Greek and Latin oratory because the double negative invites the listener to draw the positive conclusion themselves, which lands harder than the orator delivering it. Greek οὐκ ἄμοιρα δυνάμεως (“not devoid of strength”) and Latin non esse virium expertes (“not devoid of strength”) are mirror-image litotes carrying the same rhetorical lift; English not bad and no small task preserve the figure colloquially.↩︎
Demosthenic windfall [editorial coinage of this commentary] — the term-of-art this commentary uses for places where the Greek vocabulary loaded an editorial meaning that the modern author could not have known he was buying. Not an established philological term; coined for this rendering to name the phenomenon. Standing examples:
- προμηθεῖσθαι for risk management in §30 — Demosthenes’ own scolding-word to Athens, so the line lands as the Demosthenic refrain itself rather than as bland translation.
- ὑποτέλεια for subordination in §55 — the technical Delian-League term for tribute-paying subjection, so the line activates the Athenian-empire history Carney could not have intended.
- ἡγεμονία for hegemony in §17 — already carries its Delian-League ambiguity, so “American hegemony” reads as half a critique in the Greek.
The windfalls are the moments where translating into a load-bearing classical vocabulary adds an editorial layer Carney could not have known he was buying. They are not deliberate authorial choices; they are gifts of the target language.↩︎

1. 🤖🧭 A note to the reader on how this is structured

This rendering of Carney’s Davos speech into Demosthenic Greek — and the Greek into English back-translation — was produced in two passes, and the per-post commentary visibly carries the trace of both. A short orientation will save the reader some confusion.

The two passes. The first pass was the project Claude (the LLM) produced on its own, working from Carney’s English (and French exordium¹) with no human steering beyond the initial brief: render it into Demosthenic Greek, with first-pass commentary that surfaces the most interesting choices. The first pass feedback is preserved unchanged in the First pass subsection of every per-§ post in Posts I – XVI, reproducing what Claude originally wrote before any editorial feedback.

The second pass is what came out of iterating that first pass against the human editor Nick’s feedback, decision by decision: each contested or improvable spot in the first pass becomes a numbered “D” decision — D1, D2, D3, and so on — recording the first-pass reading, the second-pass replacement, and the rationale. The decisions accumulated into a per-decision log (the Editorial decisions log collected in Post K) and were applied back into a revised Greek text that is carried across Posts I – XVI as the final rendering.

So: first pass = Claude’s unguided draft; second pass = the same Claude’s revisions under human editorial pushback, captured as discrete D-rows. The same set of D-decisions is summarized at the head of Post K as a short reference table.

The Psellan posts are first-pass only. The three Psellan-Byzantine posts (0 bis, 0 ter, 0 quater)² are pure first-pass artefacts — Claude’s raw working output of the translation into the register of Michael Psellos, with the decisions captured inline as they were made, not taken through a second-pass polish against editorial pushback the way the Demosthenic main body was. They are kept as they came out, so the reader can see what a raw first-pass Greek translation by this AI looks like before any editorial revision.

The D-comments in each post. Inside each post’s commentary you will see two clearly-labelled subsections, First pass and Second-pass updates. The first-pass section reproduces (sometimes verbatim) the commentary Claude wrote when it first produced the Greek; the second-pass section consists of D-numbered bullets — D1, D5, D17, etc. — each tied to the editorial-log entry of the same number. A D-row in the apparatus says: here is what the first pass had, here is what replaced it, here is why. A handful of D-numbers appear in more than one post (D8 the vocative policy applies across the whole speech; D13/D40/D49 the rules-vs-laws keyword applies at six different §s; D5 fuel-as-καύσιμα applies at four §s); the D-number is the canonical handle, and recurrences cross-reference it. A small number of decisions were reached, ratified, and then superseded later in the second pass under further pushback (D19 considered-not-adopted, D43 superseded after the metaphor-coherence objection); those are marked SUPERSEDED in the log and noted in the relevant post’s apparatus.

Sessions of editorial feedback have continued. The two-pass framework was not closed when the speech was first translated; later editorial sessions have continued to produce further D-rows (currently the table runs to roughly D55), each carrying the same form — first-pass reading, replacement, rationale, status. Decisions made in any subsequent session are treated as second-pass extensions and recorded in the same log rather than as a third “pass”; so second-pass in the apparatus is best read as Claude-under-editorial-feedback, regardless of which session the feedback arrived in. The first-pass record is treated as historical and is not retroactively edited even when later decisions revise the commentary; the live editorial document is Post K, which tracks each D-decision in deliberation form, and Posts I – XVI carry the rendering’s current state.

A note on the audience. The series is for readers who do not necessarily read Greek (the scaffold and the published posts both refer to them as ungreeked readers). Where the commentary uses a classicist technical term — figura etymologica, peroration, anchor vocative, deliberative register, Thyestean banquet, ring composition, the various rhetorical-figure names — the first occurrence in the published material carries a brief parenthetical gloss, and later occurrences run unglossed. Greek and Latin words are kept in their original script, transliterations explained where useful, and proper names retained in the form classical-Hellenist tradition reaches for (Βεγκέσλαος ὁ Ἁβέλος for Václav Havel, Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Στοῦββος for Alexander Stubb, Φιννία for Finland on the Neo-Latin learned route). The whole rendering is meant to be readable as Demosthenic Greek by a classicist, and as a sustained reflection on Carney’s argument by a reader who has no Greek.

The emoji legend. Each post’s top heading carries an emoji that marks the authorial voice; subheadings and sub-subheadings inside the post carry their own voice-markers where the voice changes:

🧐 — Nick’s editor voice (Post 0; Post J; the editor-written sub-blocks generally).
🤖🧭 — orientation, structural metadata (Post 1: this post).
🇨🇦 — Carney’s source content (the Original sub-blocks in posts I – XVI: Carney’s English or French as delivered).
🏛️ — the translation into Demosthenic Greek or Ciceronian Latin (the Translation sub-blocks in posts I – XVI; Post I bis).
🤖 — first-pass AI: Claude’s unguided rendering (the First pass sub-blocks in posts I – XVI; the 0 bis / 0 ter / 0 quater Psellan rendering, which is a single first-pass artefact and so the marker applies to every heading inside it).
🤖🧐 — second-pass AI + editor collaboration (the Second pass sub-blocks in posts I – XVI; Post K, the full decisions log).
🤖🔭 — AI’s reflections in meta-commentary (Posts B – H).
💬 — commentary umbrella (the Commentary sub-block inside posts I – XVI that contains First pass + Second pass together).
🤖📑 — footnotes and reference apparatus (the Notes section).

The Roman-numeral posts (I, I bis, II – XVI) carry no emoji at the top-heading level because each is multi-voice — Carney’s source (🇨🇦), the translation (🏛️), and the commentary (💬 with first-pass 🤖 and second-pass 🤖🧐) all sit inside the same post. The voice-marker for those posts is therefore set at the subheading level rather than at the post level.

The banner images. Every post — and the cover — is headed by a 1536×768 neoclassical oil painting, generated locally on a single Apple Silicon machine. The model is Flux 2 Klein (the 9B-parameter open-weights release from Black Forest Labs, run as the Q8 GGUF quantisation through ComfyUI wrapped in SwarmUI, with the --force-fp32 flag that Apple Silicon requires to avoid Flux 2’s silent black-output failure mode under half-precision). The recurring people — Carney, Trump, Havel, Stubb, Bakunin, Larry Fink, Nick, and the silver-steel Claude-automaton — are supplied to the model as multi-image portrait references so the same face recurs from banner to banner. The visual idiom is scripted into every prompt: oil-on-canvas in the manner of Jacques-Louis David and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, visible painterly brushwork, chiaroscuro modelling, classical balanced composition, warm Mediterranean light. Per-render GPU time ran from ~21 minutes for single-figure scenes to ~110 minutes for the densest five-figure scene (Post J, the envoi).

What each banner depicts. In publication order:

Cover — Carney as Demosthenes on the bema, scroll partly unrolled, Trump-as-Philip II watching from horseback, Parthenon under a golden-hour sky. Ring-head to Post XVI.
Post 0 — Nick at a marble desk piled with scrolls and a glowing tablet, the Claude-automaton reading over his shoulder; Athenian study at dusk.
Post I — Carney’s relaxed Latin exordium, turning to acknowledge Larry Fink in the front row; small bust of Cicero on the shelf.
Post I bis — Same exordium pose as Post I, but a Greek scroll and a Demosthenes bust replace the Latin ones; faintly ghosted to mark the road not taken.
Post II — Carney quoting Thucydides aloud, a large Thucydides bust dominant; the ruined wall of Melos in the distance.
Post III — Carney introducing Havel-as-greengrocer, the living-in-truth parable embodied.
Post IV — Carney’s measured anger; Trump-Philip mounted before a fading Doric portico that symbolises the old order.
Post V — Roman tribunes in togas with fasces, embodied rules-based order, overwhelmed by an advancing Macedonian sarissa-phalanx led by Trump-Philip: bonds forged into weapons made visible.
Post VI — Carney dismisses a small stone fortress model on a low table, a hand reaching out from beyond it.
Post VII — The closing question staged: workers raising a fortress wall higher still (left); an unfinished colonnaded portico open at both ends, builders laying its foundations (right).
Post VIII — Carney recognises an Alexander-style marble pillar topped with a small bust of Alexander Stubb; snow-capped mountain hint of Greenland.
Post IX — Carney leans over an architect’s plan with compass, set-square, lead-plumb; the speech turning practical.
Post X — Carney behind a globe-model, arms extended in a gathering gesture over four small marble figures representing the four continents.
Post XI — Carney half-kneels beside a bronze bridge model spanning two basins of water (the bridge between two seas).
Post XII — The Thyestean-banquet hinge: a symposium table with an empty place setting, the figures around it half-turned away in unease.
Post XIII — Carney holds an actor’s mask out at arm’s length with mild distaste — the unmasking.
Post XIV — Carney touches the lower pan of a small zygos with truth, weighing it down; a quiet bust-echo of Havel on the shelf.
Post XV — Havel returns, reaching up to take down a hanging sign — ring-back to Post III’s refusal to put one up.
Post XVI — Carney mid-peroration, arms raised, scroll catching the light; Trump-Philip distant, turning his horse away. Ring-close to the cover.
Post B — The Claude-automaton sits on a low stone bench, palms upturned in yielding; Nick stands over with a single raised finger of patient correction.
Post C — The Claude-automaton holds up a single scroll triumphantly in an Athenian library; a small Demosthenes bust appearing to approve.
Post D — The Claude-automaton examines its own reflection in a polished bronze mirror; Nick points at a passage in an open scroll on the table.
Post E — Nick at a stone podium gesturing emphatically; the Claude-automaton listening to one side; the Athenian agora at midday.
Post F — Nick and the Claude-automaton face each other across a low table, three open scrolls between them (the three case studies).
Post G — The Claude-automaton as Socratic interlocutor; a young student in a himation seated at its feet, listening intently.
Post H — Nick alone at a stone parapet at dusk; the Claude-automaton half in shadow behind, its blue visor faintly luminous in the failing light.
Post 0 bis — Byzantine register: Nick by a brazier with a glowing tablet, a faint Psellos icon on the wall, candlelit melancholy.
Post 0 ter — The Claude-automaton in visible delight, writing a marginal ὡραῖον (‘lovely’) abbreviation next to a passage of his own Psellan text — the AI marking his own work as horaion.
Post 0 quater — Nick’s turn to mark ὡραῖον; Bakunin seated to the side as the philosopher-cobbler with leather goods at his feet.
Post J — Nick at a stone parapet at sunset, raising a small cup in farewell; Carney, Trump-Philip, and the Claude-automaton small at a distance.
Post K — Nick and the Claude-automaton sit together at a wide marble table strewn with numbered scrolls (the D-rows), leaning over one in collaborative consultation.

Footnotes

Exordium is the Latin term — directly inherited by ancient rhetorical theory and by every European tradition that followed — for the formal opening of a classical speech, the first movement before the orator gets down to the substance. It is set apart in register from the body that follows: gracious, faintly formal, often warmer or more deferential, the orator’s bid for the audience’s attention and goodwill. The Greek equivalent is προοίμιον. Carney’s French opening (§1–§4 of the speech, translated here into Ciceronian Latin under D1) is doing exactly what an exordium does — warming up the audience before the English body of the speech turns plain and argumentative.↩︎
bis, ter, quater — Latin enumerative adverbs (“a second time”, “a third time”, “a fourth time”), the classicising convention for marking numbered subsidiary items: a section 1 plus later additions becomes 1, 1 bis, 1 ter, 1 quater — equivalent to the modern 1A / 1B / 1C scheme. Standing in classical philology, mediaeval scholastic editions, and modern Continental scholarly apparatus.↩︎

0. 🧐 Initial essay

Nick at a writing desk with the silver-steel Claude-automaton reading over his shoulder in an Athenian study at dusk. — *The editor’s opening essay – human and AI at the same desk.*

I embarked on this task, of using AI to translate one of the more monumental of recent orations of our time — and certainly one of the more surprising — prompted by a couple of things. First, I had just found that Claude AI’s command of Klingon, although passive, was much better than I would have surmised. As I’ve experienced AI upend all the certainties of programming, and AI grows now from breadth to depth, and from depth to insight, I was interested in seeing how far it can now go in this domain. Second, and more proximate, my friend Miguel on Quora asked idly, eight years after a question on Google Translate’s command of Ancient Greek: how are LLMs doing with Ancient Greek now. This was my venture to find out.

Astonishingly well, I found out. Enough to make me despondent.

That’s a common reaction to the growth of AI capability, but it has a particular resonance for me.

Of Loss

When I got divorced, I looked into the void and wondered what I would now do with the rest of my life and its excess of free time. And the first answer I lurched at was to start writing things in Ancient Greek, as a way of bringing order and beauty back into my world. I clutched old Greek Composition textbooks to me for the next few months as solace.

That is not a rational attachment to Classical Greek. It is a fetish, and a fetish that real text by real people cannot satisfy. (A point that comes up towards the end of this sequence of essays.) But the impulse to create beauty in the world, as part of meaning-making: that’s a real thing.

And as with all that AI now is able to do, there is the recurring lament of what has been taken away from humans, that I too felt the sting of, when I saw grammatically perfect Classical Greek spill out of Claude AI. AI has not just taken away the drudgery, it’s taken away the joy, the creativity, the bit that we who had been creating enjoyed doing. Classical Greek translation, meant to be a restorative to the world, churned out before me like so much slop.

And that despondency, that loss of agency, leads to an impulse I’m sure many of us have when we interact with AI: the gotcha. We are not merely gleeful when we catch AI at a mistake; increasingly, it is seen as validating, as the last redoubt of wetware¹ seeking to justify its existance. It is now a victory to see the AI trip up, which it now does increasingly seldom. It’s a solace to hear from colleagues that Claude AI’s command of Classical Chinese is less steady than its command of Classical Greek — although of course, that’s a matter of training, and the complementary report was that Chinese-trained AI were just as good at Classical Chinese as you’d expect.

For Gotchas and Against

As Claude churned out paragraph after paragraph of Greek and of commentary, it was enthusiastic about how clever it was being. That was a plausible enough persona for it to adopt by default, confronted with such an undertaking; but the gotcha impulse in me resented it, and it got quick confirmation. Its stylistic tricks were genuinely not as clever as it thought they were. It was not a rhetorical genius. It was a clever undergrad.

The sentimentality of Classical Greek saving the world is an excess; so was my reaction, and I thank my friend Kate, so often a voice of insight I forego, for responding to my despondency intelligently:

It’s weird but I’m not that disheartened by it
Because really all it’s doing is consolidating human discourse
Because that’s all it does, even if it doesn’t cite

The clever undergrad is a clever undergrad I did not previously have on tap to do my bidding. It remains a win as well as a risk. And that’s a function I got Claude to reflect on in the conclusion of this work. It has application far beyond the recondite domain of Classical Greek translation of contemporary political rhetoric. It already has transformative and disruptive impact in IT; this venture just proved to me how much more broad an impact it has.

Jérôme Cukier has a great answer on Quora on that disruption, which is front of mind for me:

Imagine a Farmer

In 2026, I think software engineers and developers, at least some of them, understand what their jobs look like with AI. And it’s not because they are smarter or because they have an intimate understanding of how large language models work – the vast majority of us only has a very superficial knowledge of it. It’s because accelerating software development was the first large-scale, business problem that AI has tried to solve.

…

The reality is that the nature of our work has completely changed. The magnitude of that change has been so sudden and so brutal that it’s difficult to come with analogies outside of our industry, but i’ll try. Imagine a middle-ages farmer, toiling on the land with his own hands and primitive tools. Suddenly that farmer is given access to all the mechanized tools and vehicles of a 21st century farm, along with a crew to operate them. The yield of his farm goes through the roof. And instead of plowing all day, now he is thinking about what to plant and when, how to make the most of the machines, how to troubleshoot any problem with the crop or the machines before it gets too bad, how to sell the crop, etc. All these things had always been within his purview, but not really top of mind because first and foremost he had to do all the manual work.

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The changes coming to software development are not unique. Almost every profession is going to be changed in depth by AI and agents. It’s very difficult to build a good mental model for this without having experienced it firsthand.

This has been the start of my mental modelling of what Classics looks like with AI. Having been lead developer at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae for 17 years, I had a fair idea already of what Classics looks like with computers, but this is a new paradigm. One in which the mechanics of grammar and the breadth of erudition both are no longer the primary concern of wetware. One in which, like Cukier says, and as I’m experiencing in my own programming, you’re spending much more time driving a tractor than digging ditches — and more’s the pity, if you got into farming because you enjoyed physical exercise.

Driving a tractor instead of digging ditches is not as fun, and it’s not necessarily going to dig as neat a ditch to begin with. This particular brand of tractor does not free you up to be creative, and in IT, it is ending up valorising getting big tasks to be feasible and small tasks to be trivial: it’s prioritising getting stuff done over job satisfaction.

Imagine a Teacher

But it is not unalloyed evil. And a novelty that has come with the increasing capacity of AI — and indeed correlates with it — is that AI is now increasingly capable of intelligent pushback, which makes for actual, fruitful collaboration.

And learning. The question I went looking for on Quora, to tag this answer onto, was how does AI change the teaching of Classics. And it changes it, by giving you a Pocket Socrates to interrogate. One who is still not infallible, but that is much better equipped to stand its ground. Meaning that I learned things about Ancient Greek through this process, by correcting as well as by being corrected:

Wouldn’t you rather phrase this like X than like that?
- No, that’s the kind of phrasing Aeschines would have used, Demosthenes made it his life’s work to resist that kind of rhetoric.
This way of phrasing it like Y, it’s flabby, would it be appropriate to phrase it like Z instead?
- Yes, that Y phrasing was more an Aristotle thing, Z is what Demosthenes would have used.
Isn’t W really vague? (e.g. ὅπως μὴ πράγματα ἔχῃ “that he may have no trouble”, literally “so that he doesn’t have things = issues”)
- No, that’s completely idiomatic, and a contemporary would have understood it just fine.

I invited reflection from Claude, at the end of this, at what it had wrought, and what had taken place. AI reflection used to be a party trick a couple of years ago, monotonously featuring in every presentation given on AI: “I asked AI what it thought about itself, Point 6 Will Shock You!”

It’s not a party trick any more. It’s how things will be. Add it’s useful, even if it is a “clanker”²’s consolidation of human discourse. Just because a clanker came up with it, doesn’t mean it is right. Just because a clanker came up with it, doesn’t mean it is wrong either.

Imagine a Bootmaker

Our role in this world is reduced to all that is left of a human to do, once they’ve delegated their expertise. It’s the role of arbitrating Bakunin’s shoemaker:

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure.

I do not content myself with consulting authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

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I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason. I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labor. I receive and I give — such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.

What We Reserve To Us

We’re delegating the knowledge of how to make boots, or canals, or railroads. We get to reserve a right of criticism and censure. For now, anyway, and I’m not sure how much longer it will stay incontenstable.

I embarked on this seeing if a clanker can craft the beauty I cherish. We know the answer from AI art, and I know it now from this for Greek composition. It can, with appropriate steering, and I read through it with pleasure, even if at the start it filled me with despair. The artefact still can give pleasure to those who reserve the right of criticism and censure. Like the mediaeval Greek scribes wrote in the margins, it still gets to be ὡραῖον: lovely.

The lower portion of folio 90v of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. Grec 2713, an eleventh-century Greek manuscript of Euripides. In the gutter between the marginal scholia at left and the main text column at right, a medieval scribe has written the abbreviation ὡρ — short for ὡραῖον, lovely — beside the verse αἱ δεύτεραί πως φροντίδες σοφώτεραι (second thoughts are somehow wiser), Hippolytus 436. The ligature jams a rho onto an omega whose curls close off into a shape resembling a sideways B, with a rough breathing on the upper left and a horizontal abbreviation stroke above. — Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. Grec 2713, fol. 90v — 11th c. The marginal abbreviation **ὡρ()** (= ὡραῖον, “lovely”) written beside Euripides, *Hippolytus* 436 **αἱ δεύτεραί πως φροντίδες σοφώτεραι** (“second thoughts are somehow wiser”). The ligature superimposes a ρ on an ω whose curls close off into a sideways-B shape; the mark on the upper left is the rough breathing, the stroke above is the abbreviation marker. The medieval scribe used this mark to flag a phrase he found pleasing, without considering it a sententious maxim (γνωμικόν).

The working has been made visible in this presentation, and that gives my answer to Miguel’s question, of how well AI is doing with Classical Greek. Whether the outcome is as lovely to you as it is to me is for you to judge.

Footnotes

Wetware is hacker-cultural slang for the biological substrate — the human nervous system, brain, body — set alongside the hardware (physical computing equipment) and software (programs) of artificial systems as a third category in the same inventory. The term circulated in computer-science and science-fiction slang from the 1970s onward, popularised in print by Rudy Rucker’s 1988 novel Wetware (sequel to his 1982 Software) but predating the novel as a casual coinage among hackers and AI researchers. The implicit framing is reductive — humans-as-meat-platform, on equal footing in the inventory with the other two — which is exactly the affect Nick’s the last redoubt of wetware seeking to justify its existence wants for the gotcha-impulse self-deprecation.↩︎
Clanker is human-side slang for AI systems — particularly LLMs — originating as a clone-trooper pejorative for battle droids in the Star Wars extended universe. The slang first appears in Karen Traviss’s Republic Commando novels (from 2004 onward) and is popularised by Star Wars: The Clone Wars (the 2008–2014 animated series), where clone troopers use it dismissively of the metallic-droid enemy — that’s just a clanker. The term picks out the clanking mechanical substrate of the droid and uses it to deny the droid agency or worth. In 2024–2025 clanker migrated into general internet usage as a derogatory tag for AI systems and for the humans who rely on them, doing rhetorical work parallel to what Luddite did for industrial-era machine resistance. Nick’s deployment of the term in Post 0 carries that dismissive-of-the-AI-substrate force; the AI-side counter-courtesy at Post E uses bag of mostly water (the Star Trek TNG allusion catalogued in the footnote immediately above) in the same register, reducing the human to the dominant material composition of its own substrate.↩︎