It is not hard to find examples of the use of Latin in nineteenth-century Cambridge to reject modernity or to mystify and police the boundaries of elite status and existing social and imperial hierarchies. But concentration on such examples obscures a history of the expression of radical ideas in Latin and of engagement with here-and-now issues. How can we incorporate such complexity into our understanding of the history of Latin studies, and avoid mistaking one side of an argument for the standard view of the elite? And how should Latin face its future or even its present? We should be brave enough to insist that the history of ‘western civilisation’ (not uniquely admirable or the only one to deserve attention) is incomprehensible without Latin.