Laudator Temporis Acti

G.S. Kirk (1921-2003), The Songs of Homer (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1962), pp. 55-56:

It is a truism that literacy saps memory. In pre-literate societies, even quite unsophisticated ones, the gift of verbal memory is far more highly developed, through constant need and practice, than in societies like our own. Even amid the present welter of letters there remain a few who can learn rapidly by heart and remember what they have learned. They are quite exceptional; and differences in the natural capacity for exact verbal memory exist even in primarily illiterate societies, where the general level is much higher. Oral poets have no doubt always been drawn from an exceptional minority, and their performance far outstrips that of those who compel our admiration by quoting a complete scene of Shakespeare. More than mere learning by heart is involved, of course; yet to assimilate an epic poem of several thousand lines, or to elabo­rate a shorter poem to something like that length by his own additions or by transpositions from other songs, is no feat for the exceptionally gifted oral singer in a largely or wholly unlettered community—as can be illustrated by specific examples from Yugoslavia or south Russia. The modern student of Homer may feel surprised about such capacities, but he must not be too incredulous.

Related post: Writing and Memory

Isobel Williams, Switch: the complete Catullus (Manchester: Carcanet, 2023), p. 36 (supposedly a translation of Catullus' 8th poem):

In tears again, Catullus. Just get out of bed.
Accept the past and have the loss adjusters in.
Oh, once upon a time you were the golden boy —
When you let Mistress use her harshest ropes on you.
You said you loved her more than all the rest blah blah.
She taught you how to show submissiveness and shame,
Following your instinct, and made you feel big.
The rumour was they even liked you in Japan.

So now she’s dumped you and you can’t get tied at will.
Don’t chase vanilla boys or put your life on hold —
Try Buddhist meditation to endure the drought.

Mistress, get lost. Catullus-san’s remade in stone.
He won’t beg favours or come sniffing after you.
You’ll pine for him now he’s not snivelling in your wake.
What’s promised for a has-been/never-was like you?
Who’s next? Who’s going to mumble that you’re beautiful?
Who wants to feel the lash and be your slave by right?
Who’ll let you kiss him, cut and bleeding in your ropes?

But you, Catullus — you’re not even curious.

The original Latin:

Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,
et quod vides perisse perditum ducas.
fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles,
cum ventitabas quo puella ducebat
amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.        5
ibi illa multa cum iocosa fiebant,
quae tu volebas nec puella nolebat,
fulsere vere candidi tibi soles.
nunc iam illa non vult: tu quoque impotens <noli>,
nec quae fugit sectare, nec miser vive,        10
sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura.
vale puella, iam Catullus obdurat,
nec te requiret nec rogabit invitam.
at tu dolebis, cum rogaberis nulla.
scelesta, vae te, quae tibi manet vita?        15
quis nunc te adibit? cui videberis bella?
quem nunc amabis? cuius esse diceris?
quem basiabis? cui labella mordebis?
at tu, Catulle, destinatus obdura.

9 noli add. Avantius

If you want to know what Catullus' poem really means, see the crib by G.P. Goold:

Poor Catullus, 'tis time you should cease your folly,
and account as lost what you see is lost.
Once the days shone bright on you,
when you used to go so often where my mistress led,
she who was loved by me as none will ever be loved.
There and then were given us those joys, so many, so merry,
which you desired nor did my lady not desire.
Bright for you, truly, shone the days.
Now she desires no more—no more should you desire, poor madman,
nor follow her who flees, nor live in misery,
but with resolved mind endure, be firm.
Farewell, my mistress; now Catullus is firm;
he will not seek you nor ask you against your will.
But you will be sorry, when you are a nobody in favours asked for.
Ah, poor wretch! what life is left for you?
Who now will visit you? to whom will you seem fair?
whom now will you love? by whose name will you be called?
whom will you kiss? whose lips will you bite?
But you, Catullus, be resolved and firm.

There are those who swoon in ecstasy over Williams' version, which is apparently influenced by a Japanese sexual practice of rope bondage (Kinbaku, or Shibari). Among the admirers is Daniel Mendelsohn, "Latin Lover. Why Catullus Continues to Seduce Us," The New Yorker (April 7, 2025) 20-22, 24-25 (at 25):

Some old farts may complain about the accuracy of Williams’s new version, but who’d give a penny for their thoughts? As far as I’m concerned, she’s right on the money.

Count me among the old farts.

Hat tip: John Robertson, my former classmate at the University of Virginia (where Daniel Mendelsohn read Catullus under the tuition of Professor Arthur Stocker). John's impersonations of Stocker were a hit among graduate students.

Anthony Grafton, "Rhetoric and Divination in Erasmus's Edition of Jerome," in Renate Dürr, ed., Threatened Knowledge: Practices of Knowing and Ignoring from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 181-211 (at 182):

Yet readers found plenty of bones to pick. Errors cropped up. The word "accuratissima", of all things, was misspelled on the title page of volume I, which suggested that Froben's proofreaders were anything but eagle-eyed.⁵

5 Jerome, Opera, I, title page: "apud inclytam Basileam ex acuratissima officina Frobeniana".

Labels: typographical and other errors

Augustine, Sermons 362.29 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 39, col. 1632; tr. Edmund Hill):

Our whole activity will consist of Amen and Alleluia. What do you say, brothers and sisters? I can see that you hear and are delighted. But don't let yourselves again be depressed by the flesh-bound thought that if any of you were to stand and say Amen and Alleluia all day long, you would droop with fatigue and boredom; and you will drop off to sleep in the middle of your words, and long to keep quiet; and for that reason you might suppose it is a life you can well do without, not at all desirable, and might say to yourselves, "Amen and Alleluia, we're going to say that forever and ever? Who will be able to endure it?"

Tota actio nostra, Amen et Alleluia erit. Quid dicitis, fratres? Video quod auditis et gavisi estis. Sed nolite iterum carnali cogitatione contristari, quia si forte aliquis vestrum steterit et dixerit quotidie: Amen et Alleluia, taedio marcescet, et in ipsis vocibus dormitabit, et tacere iam volet: et propterea putet sibi esse aspernabilem vitam, et non desiderabilem, dicentes vobismetipsis: Amen et Alleluia semper dicturi sumus, quis durabit?

Related posts:

• Heaven and Hell
• The Hereafter

Petronius, Satyricon 42.4-5 (tr. P.G. Walsh):

Dammit, we're nothing but walking bags of wind. Flies rank higher; they do have a bit of spark, whereas we're no more than bubbles.

heu, eheu. utres inflati ambulamus. minoris quam muscae sumus, muscae tamen aliquam virtutem habent, nos non pluris sumus quam bullae.

Gareth Schmeling ad loc.:

Herodotus 2.79 (tr. J. Enoch Powell):

And they follow the customs of their fathers, and receive no new custom.

πατρίοισι δὲ χρεώμενοι νόμοισι ἄλλον οὐδένα ἐπικτῶνται.

Thucydides 6.82.2 (Athenian envoy Euphemus to the men of Camarina; tr. Charles Forster Smith):

Ionians have always been enemies to the Dorians.

οἱ Ἴωνες αἰεί ποτε πολέμιοι τοῖς Δωριεῦσίν εἰσιν.

Diogenes Laertius 7.4.166 (tr. R.D. Hicks):

Dionysius, the Renegade, declared that pleasure was the end of action; this under the trying circumstance of an attack of ophthalmia. For so violent was his suffering that he could not bring himself to call pain a thing indifferent.

Διονύσιος δ' ὁ Μεταθέμενος τέλος εἶπε τὴν ἡδονὴν διὰ περίστασιν ὀφθαλμίας· ἀλγήσας γὰρ ἐπιπόνως ὤκνησεν εἰπεῖν τὸν πόνον ἀδιάφορον.

William Arrowsmith (1924-1992), "Luxury and Death in the Satyricon," Arion 5.3 (Autumn, 1966) 304-331 (at 305):

Any attempt to revise our estimate of a classic will inevitably seem an impertinence. A reasonable economy, it will be said, supports the notion that sixty or seventy generations cannot have been wholly mistaken about a classic. On the other hand the classics, simply because they are classics, are particularly susceptible to distortion and stultification. They constantly serve, after all, extraliterary purposes, and these other, "cultural" uses of the classic frequently interfere with critical judgment, preventing the reassessment, or even the assessment, of the work. Many classics—I think of Sophocles—are far more subversive of Christian culture than we suppose, and for this reason interpretations that reveal subversiveness are particularly resisted.