Six Tuscan Poets, by Giorgio Vasari, 1544. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota.

Communication

Volume V, Number 2 | spring 2012

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Preamble

Word Order

By Lewis H. Lapham

The Internet is blessed with undoubtedly miraculous applications, but language is not yet one of them. Technology cannot displace the primacy of words.

Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia, by Jean-Joseph Taillasson, 1787.

Essay

Tape Delay

By Madeline Miller

How we misread Virgil for two thousand years, and what made it possible for a small group of scholars to figure it out.

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Living Languages

Facts and figures on the languages of the world.

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Miscellany

Using symbolically coded messages hidden in beer barrels, Catholic conspirators communicated with the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, about a plan to kill Elizabeth I. Francis Walsingham, the queen’s spymaster, obtained a message, employed a codebreaker, and found evidence that Mary approved of the assassination. She was beheaded for treason in 1587.