> 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. She can't sight-read a complex Latin text all that well. Most classicists can't. This admission — from someone like Beard — is good to have out there.

> 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. 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.

https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html

See also the comments at metafilter, where people argue that indeed, it is unrealistic to expect one of the world's most famous classicists to be fluent in ancient greek and latin, because the word order is just so different.

https://www.metafilter.com/181221/Lingua-pulcherrima