Nathaniel Im

  

Volume 10 | Issue II | June 2026

Portsmouth Abbey School ’27

Rhode Island, United States

  

My Latin teacher mentioned almost in passing that the word for a metrical foot, and the word for the foot you walk on, are the same in Latin. The observation lasted about ten seconds before the class moved on. I could not stop thinking about it. That small etymological coincidence became the seed of this essay. The question it raised—whether Roman poets understood meter as something genuinely bodily, not just formally—sent me into territory I had not expected to occupy: Roman medical theory, funerary epigraphy, and eventually a 2009 biomechanics study using motion capture technology to measure the gait of people experiencing depression. When the findings from that study aligned almost exactly with the prosodic features I had been identifying in Catullus and Ovid—the slowed tempo, the instability, the arrested forward movement—I realized the essay had found its argument. I study Latin and Greek at Portsmouth Abbey, where I am also involved in the school's literary magazine and compete in mathematics. Outside the classroom, I am interested in the intersection of computation and language—how formal systems encode meaning, and what those systems reveal about the people who built them. That interest is part of what drew me to the question at the center of this essay: not what Latin elegy says about grief, but what it does. The revision process with The Schola pushed me to make the argument sharper and more honest at every stage. I am grateful for the editorial attention and glad the essay found a home here.