Laudator Temporis Acti

Iacchus, dwelling exalted here in your abode,
Iacchus, Iacchus,
come to this meadow to dance
with your reverent followers,
brandishing about your brow
a fruitful, a burgeoning
garland of myrtle, and stamping
with bold foot in our licentious,
fun-loving worship,
that is richly endowed by the Graces, a dance
pure and holy to pious initiates.

[....]

Awaken blazing torches, tossing them in your hands,
Iacchus, Iacchus,
brilliant star of our nighttime rite!
Lo, the meadow's ablaze with flame,
and old men's knees are aleap
as they shed their cares
and the longdrawn seasons of ancient years,
owing to your worship.
Now illuminate with torchlight
and lead forth to blooming meadowland
our dancing youth, o blest one!

Ἴακχ᾿, ὦ πολυτίμητ᾿ ἐν ἕδραις ἐνθάδε ναίων,
Ἴακχ᾿, ὦ Ἴακχε,        325
ἐλθὲ τόνδ᾿ ἀνὰ λειμῶνα χορεύσων
ὁσίους εἰς θιασώτας,
πολύκαρπον μὲν τινάσσων
περὶ κρατὶ σῷ βρύοντα
στέφανον μύρτων, θρασεῖ δ᾿ ἐγκατακρούων      330/1
ποδὶ τὴν ἀκόλαστον
φιλοπαίγμονα τιμήν,
Χαρίτων πλεῖστον ἔχουσαν μέρος, ἁγνήν, ἱερὰν      334/5
ὁσίοις μύσταις χορείαν.

[....]

ἔγειρ᾿ <ὦ> φλογέας λάμπαδας ἐν χερσὶ τινάσσων,      340/1
Ἴακχ᾿, ὦ Ἴακχε,
νυκτέρου τελετῆς φωσφόρος ἀστήρ.
φλέγεται δὴ φλογὶ λειμών·
γόνυ πάλλεται γερόντων·      345
ἀποσείονται δὲ λύπας
χρονίους τ᾿ ἐτῶν παλαιῶν ἐνιαυτοὺς
ἱερᾶς ὑπὸ τιμῆς.
σὺ δὲ λαμπάδι φέγγων      350
προβάδην ἔξαγ᾿ ἐπ᾿ ἀνθηρὸν ἕλειον δάπεδον
χορποιόν, μάκαρ, ἥβαν.

How delightful it is that we forget our age!

ἐπιλελήσμεθ᾽ ἡδέως
γέροντες ὄντες.

"The earth," he said, "has a skin, and this skin has diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called 'man'."

Die Erde, sagte er, hat eine Haut; und diese Haut hat Krankheiten. Eine dieser Krankheiten heißt zum Beispiel: »Mensch«.

• Beware
• Toadstools by the Wayside
• Homo sapiens

Ask most companies who their founders and key staff are and they happily real off a list. But Darktrace, which was set up in Cambridge, England, in 2013, has to be a bit more discrete.

Ask most companies who their founders and key staff are and they happily reel off a list. But Darktrace, which was set up in Cambridge, England, in 2013, has to be a bit more discreet.

Labels: typographical and other errors

'When I hear the Word of God speak from above, I believe, though I cannot understand, and do not see how I can get it through my head. I can understand that two and five make seven and no one can prove the contrary. But if God from above says that they make eight, then I must believe against my reason and feeling.'<sup>1

1</sup> W, 37, 402.

Wenn ich das wort höre lauten als von oben herab, so gleube ichs, ob ichs wol nicht kan fassen und nicht verstehen noch inn meinen kopff wil, wie ich das kan fassen, das zwey und funffe sind sieben, mit der vernunfft, und las mich niemand anders weisen. Noch wenn Er oben erab sagte: Nein, sondern es sind achte, so solte ichs gleuben widder meine vernunfft und fülen.

Labels: typographical and other errors

I like English cookery and English beer, French red wines, Spanish white wines, Indian tea, strong tobacco, coal fires, candlelight and comfortable chairs. I dislike big towns, noise, motor cars, the radio, tinned food, central heating and "modern" furniture.

Talk is dangerous, because it takes young males away from physical exercise, encourages them to question their fathers' values, and undermines the discipline which a city with its back to the wall needs.<sup>35

35</sup> Each generation tends to believe that its children are the first rebels. Xen. M. i.2.46 is a useful corrective: Perikles, trapped in an argument by the young Alkibiades, says, 'We were clever at that kind of argument when I was young!' Robert Louis Stevenson, as an Edinburgh student in the 1870s, was a founder-member of a society whose declared purpose was to reject all the values of the older generation.

                                                           Then there stood up
a man with no check on his tongue, strong in his brashness;
he was an Argive but no Argive, suborned,
relying on noise from the crowd and the obtuse license of his tongue,
persuasive enough to involve them in the future in some misfortune.
When someone of pleasing speech but without sense
persuades the people, it is a great misfortune for the city.

                                   κἀπὶ τῷδ᾿ ἀνίσταται
ἀνήρ τις ἀθυρόγλωσσος, ἰσχύων θράσει·
Ἀργεῖος οὐκ Ἀργεῖος, ἠναγκασμένος,
θορύβῳ τε πίσυνος κἀμαθεῖ παρρησίᾳ,        905
πιθανὸς ἔτ᾿ αὐτοὺς περιβαλεῖν κακῷ τινι.
ὅταν γὰρ ἡδύς τις λόγοις φρονῶν κακῶς
πείθῃ τὸ πλῆθος, τῇ πόλει κακὸν μέγα.

904-913 del. Hartung, seq. Kovacs
906 αὐτοὺς C: ἀστοὺς Valckenaer
907 τις Musgrave: τοῖς C

Aristophanes may have been thinking of the first when he has Euripides say (in Frogs) that Aeschylus has an ἀπύλωτον στόμα.

Human types supposedly extinct for centuries, the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor, have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as the masters of the world.

I have, for example, a copy of Enoch Powell's edition of Herodotus Book VIII, with a Latin dedication to his colleague Guy Manton written on September 4, 1939, three days after the invasion of Poland and one day after the declaration of war, implying that they might both expect to die in the imminent conflict: moriturus morituro.

Powell, a prodigiously brilliant stud­ent at Cambridge who had become at 25 the youngest professor of Greek to be appointed to the University of Sydney, had immediately ­resigned when war broke out to join the army. In the event, both survived, Powell to pursue a polit­ical career and Manton to become professor of Greek at the University of Otago and later dean of arts at Monash University.

We approach a preface to the plays of Euripides with more confidence than we could summon to the critical consideration of any other Greek dramatist. We know more about Euripides. We have read more of him. We once read five lines of him in the original Greek. It is true that we did not know what they were about when we read them, and should not know now; but we read them thirty or forty times and something about the manner in which we read them saved a man's life.

We were fussing around the office of the Atlanta (Ga.) Journal one morning about three o'clock, having just finished writing an editorial which we thought would likely elect Hoke Smith governor, if he were able to live up to it, when we ran across a copy of "Iphigenia in Tauris." It was a new edition, and some trusting publisher had sent it along in the vain hope that it would be noticed. We happened to know the alphabet and could mispronounce a few words, and we turned over the pages wishing that we were able to read the thing—it might give us a chance to elevate our mind, which was suffering from the frightful strain of writing about Hoke Smith in such a way that even Hoke would believe himself a statesman. And thinking how great a man Euripides probably was, for all we knew, and how superior to Hoke Smith he must have been in many ways, we got very hungry.

We went across the street to a little basement lunchroom kept by a fellow named George Stefanopoulous, who always put so much onion in his Hamburger steaks one could not taste the beef. If one poured enough Worcestershire sauce over them so that one could not taste the onions they could be eaten. We carried Euripides with us, and George told us proudly that there is no more difference between the Greek of Euripides and the Greek written and spoken in Athens to-day than between the English of Shakespeare's time and the English of to-day. Inquiry revealed that George's knowledge of Shakespeare was about as extensive as our knowledge of Euripides, and so we cannot vouch for his statement.

Interrupting our course in Euripides—some one or some thing has been interrupting us all our life every time we seemed to be on the point of really getting into the classics—in came a young man named Henry.

Henry roomed with us, and roamed with us at that time, and he was a chronic sufferer from false angina pectoris. This is a disease (unknown to Euripides, but Alcibiades undoubtedly developed it) which has all the effects upon patient and observer of real organic affection of the heart; no one takes it lightly but the doctors. In Henry's case it was aggravated by a fondness for Georgia corn whisky and stuff he ate out of tin cans. This diet did things to his stomach; his stomach kicked to his pneumogastric nerve, and his pneumogastric nerve gripped his heart as with iron claws, squeezed it to the size of a peanut, twisted it like a fountain pen that won't unscrew and convinced it that it would never beat again. The chief difference between real angina and pseudo angina (as far as we can gather from Euripides) is that while both can kill you, the real sort kills you more quickly and kindly.

Henry pulled a spasm of it while George was telling us about Euripides; writhed about, and fell to the floor semi-conscious.

Heat, applied to the heart, and strychnine or aromatic ammonia, if you can get hold of them, are (as Aesculapius would say) "indicated."

So we sent George's assistant to telephone for a doctor and applied a hot Hamburger steak, just out of George's frying pan, to Henry's bosom.

We had frequently helped Henry die with his heart, but this time we were alarmed.

"George," said we, "throw another Hamburger steak into the skillet at once. His pulse has stopped entirely. And this steak is cooling."

Just then Henry's eyes fluttered and he strove to speak. We bent over the sufferer.

"I'm dying," murmured Henry. "Pray! Pray for me!"

The request caught us unaware; we could not remember any formal petition. In desperation we took up Euripides, and, as the second Hamburger steak went hot and sizzling and dripping with grease from George's frying-pan to Henry's heart, we began to chant one of the choruses.

There was something about a Basileon in it, whatever a Basileon may be ...

"Thank you!" muttered Henry ...

The third steak was getting cool, and still George's assistant did not return with a doctor. Henry's chest was cooling, too. His feet and hands were cold. He had no more pulse than a wooden Indian or one of the iron dogs in Hoke Smith's front yard. If we had known a real prayer we would have switched to it from Basileon ...

And just as we were putting Basileon over the jumps for the eighteenth time George Stefanopoulous announced:

"Sir, I have no more Hamburger steak to fry!"

"My God!" said we, "Basileon—Basileon—dig up something else—Basileon—Basileon—fry an egg, George—Basileon—Basileon—and be quick about it! Fry two eggs!"

It was at the sixteenth egg that the physician arrived and complimented us on our treatment.

"Heat," he said, "is the great thing in these cases, and it Is well to remove all apprehension from the patient's mind if possible." "The prayer," said Henry, who had been hypodermicked into something like an appetite for corn whisky and tin cans again, "the prayer is what saved me!"

Euripides did not live as long as Sophocles, but was, on the whole, more widely popular. And one has only to compare the "Iphigenia" of Euripides with the "Agamemnon" of Aeschylus to see their entire dissimilarity. They are products of practically the same period of Hellenic culture ... and yet, what a difference!

Henry married, Hoke Smith in the Senate, Euripides dead—how time flies!

The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn't help himself. To him it wasn't a means to a lecture or article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself.

                                    You know the appointed end
of each thing and the ways they are brought to pass;
and the number of the spring leaves earth blossoms, the number
of the sands in the seas and the rivers,
shaken by the waves and the streaming winds; and things to be
and whence they shall come to pass. All this you know.

                 κύριον ὃς πάντων τέλος
οἶσθα καὶ πάσας κελεύθους·        45
ὅσσα τε χθὼν ἠρινὰ φύλλ᾿ ἀναπέμπει, χὠπόσαι
ἐν θαλάσσᾳ καὶ ποταμοῖς ψάμαθοι
κύμασιν ῥιπαῖς τ᾿ ἀνέμων κλονέονται,
    χὤ τι μέλλει, χὠπόθεν
ἔσσεται, εὖ καθορᾷς.

But on the other gods fell strife momentous
and dire, and in different directions the heart in their breasts was blown.
Together then they clashed with a mighty din and the wide earth rang,
and round about great heaven pealed as with a trumpet. And Zeus heard it
where he sat on Olympus, and the heart within him laughed
with joy as he saw the gods joining in strife.

ἐν δ᾿ ἄλλοισι θεοῖσιν ἔρις πέσε βεβριθυῖα        385
ἀργαλέη, δίχα δέ σφιν ἐνὶ φρεσὶ θυμὸς ἄητο.
σὺν δ᾿ ἔπεσον μεγάλῳ πατάγῳ, βράχε δ᾿ εὐρεῖα χθών,
ἀμφὶ δὲ σάλπιγξεν μέγας οὐρανός. ἄιε δὲ Ζεὺς
ἥμενος Οὐλύμπῳ· ἐγέλασσε δέ οἱ φίλον ἦτορ
γηθοσύνῃ, ὅθ᾿ ὁρᾶτο θεοὺς ἔριδι ξυνιόντας.        390

Zeus's delight in the gods' quarrels shocked later critics. Aristotle (quoted by schol. Ge on 21.390) discussed the apparent contradiction between this and 5.890-1, where Zeus hates Ares because of his perpetual love of strife. Chamaeleon (fr. 18 Wehrli) found Zeus's apparent malevolence inexplicable. Other commentators compared Od. 8.78, where Agamemnon rejoices at the quarrel of Odysseus and Akhilleus, and Menander (fr. 784 K.), where someone says that conflict between members of his household helps to keep the family together! Cf. also Phld. Hom. col. 10.13, p. 39 ed. Olivieri.

One defence offered was that Zeus was pleased because the gods were contending περὶ ἀρετῆς and yet without risk (T 21.389, schol. Ge 21.390). But there is not much sign of ἀρετή in what follows (cf. Griffin, HLD 183). It is the lack of risk which is perhaps the point: 'Zeus appears to have a just appreciation of the whole combat as a parody of serious fighting. It is only here and in 508 that Homer's Zeus ever goes beyond a smile, like the Zeus of the hymn to Hermes (389), who "laughs aloud" at the tricks of his naughty son' (Leaf on 390).

Like the landscape, the cow is a man-made object. This helpless box-shaped imbecile on tottering legs, with toothless mouth, was bred for human uses, and steadily deprived of the ability to survive on her own. Yet the cow is also an animal, as remote from us in her feelings as any creature of the wild. Living and working with cows you are immersed in the natural order, responding not to reason or emotion but to instinct and need. The cow is the channel through which nature feeds us — literally, by giving us milk, and also morally, by putting us side by side with silent herds in a living landscape.

When people describe what they love in the English countryside, they mention the many small green fields with their meticulous boundaries; the streams that run through pasture, and the copses that crown the hills; sometimes too they remember the shady trees in the parklands, their branches cropped level six feet above the ground. These features of the landscape were made either by cows or for them. Every children's animal book dwells on the cow as the moral centre of the farmyard. Not for nothing does the Koran open with the great Surah of the Cow, describing the reluctant sacrifice of a perfect animal at the command of Moses. Not for nothing do the Hindus venerate this creature, who so perfectly illustrates the interdependence of nature and man.

The ideal to be striven after, then, appears to be something like this: a hundred thousand pounds, a quaint old house with plenty of ivy on it, a sweetly womanly wife, a horde of children, and no work. Everything is safe, soft, peaceful and, above all, domestic. In the moss-grown churchyard down the road are the graves of the loved ones who passed away before the happy ending happened. The servants are comic and feudal, the children prattle round your feet, the old friends sit at your fireside, talking of past days, there is the endless succession of enormous meals, the cold punch and sherry negus, the feather beds and warming-pans, the Christmas parties with charades and blind man's buff; but nothing ever happens, except the yearly childbirth. The curious thing is that it is a genuinely happy picture, or so Dickens is able to make it appear. The thought of that kind of existence is satisfying to him.

By coincidence, just this afternoon I've been reading some similar sentiments on Dickens from Carlyle.

David Alec Wilson, Carlyle at his Zenith (1848-53) (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1927), p. 126:

"Dickens" said Carlyle [to Gavan Duffy], "is a good little fellow, one of the most cheery, innocent natures I have ever encountered, and maintains something of the reporter's independence." But "his theory of life is entirely wrong. He thinks men ought to be buttered up, and the world made soft and accommodating for them, and all sorts of fellows have turkey for Christmas dinner. Commanding and controlling and punishing them he would give up without any misgivings, in order to coax and soothe and delude them into doing right. But it is not in this manner the eternal laws operate but quite otherwise. Dickens has not written anything which will be found of much use in solving the problems of life. But he is worth something; worth a penny to read of an evening before going to bed."

So he spoke, and the goddess, flashing-eyed Athene, rejoiced,
since to her first of all the gods he made his prayer.

ὣς φάτο, γήθησεν δὲ θεὰ γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη,
ὅττί ῥά οἱ πάμπρωτα θεῶν ἠρήσατο πάντων.

This sentiment may be accounted for in two ways. It may be due to the vulgar vanity of a merely mythological divinity scuffling for precedence. It may be a remnant of the tradition of a wisdom that knew no superior. The former cause would be scarcely suitable even to the deities of invention in Homer. The latter seems wholly in keeping with the character and position of his Minerva.

The comparison editors make to the sentiment of Od. 3.52-3 means little, since there Athene is warmed by Peisistratos' courtesy to the old man she is pretending to be, a different thing from her appreciation here of Menelaos' choice of her godhead to turn to for help in his trouble. The scholia (bT) with more relevance quote Euripides: ἔνεστι γὰρ δὴ κἀν θεῶν γένει τόδε· | τιμώμενοι χαίρουσιν ἀνθρώπων ὕπο (Hipp. 7-8).

'The gods too [as well as men] have this trait: they take delight in honour from men.' Similarly Ba. 321 κἀκεῖνοϲ (sc. Dionysos), οἶμαι, τέρπεται τιμώμενοϲ, Al. 53 (Death speaking) τιμαῖϲ κἀμὲ τέρπεϲθαι δόκει.

'We ourselves fix boundaries to the sanctuaries and precincts of the gods, so that nobody may cross them unless he be pure; and when we enter we sprinkle ourselves, not as defiling ourselves thereby, but to wash away any pollution we may already have contracted .'³ There is abundant evidence from literature, vase paintings, and excavation for these stoups of lustral water sited at the entrance to sanctuaries, for the purification of those who entered. In inventories, they appear as part of a temple's normal furnishing; Hero, in his Pneumatica, tells of a mechanical device that gave forth lustral water at the drop of a coin.⁴ It is very revealing for Greek conceptions of the sacred that in Athens the agora, civic and political centre of the city, was marked off by similar lustral stoups.

³ Hippoc. Morb. Sacr. 148.55 ff. J., 1.46 G.

⁴ Cf. SIG³ index s.v. περιρραντήριον; Hero, Spir. 21. Full treatment by Ginouvès, 229-310 (my debt to this learned and comprehensive work is very large). For the earliest perirrhanteria see J. Ducat, BCH 88 (1964), 577-606. On their function cf. Lucian, Sacr. 13, Pollux 1.8.

• René Ginouvès, Balaneutikè. Recherches sur le bain dans l'antiquité grecque (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1962 = Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d'Athènes et de Rome, fasc. 200)
• Jean Ducat, "Périrrhantèria," Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 88.2 (1964) 577-606

αὐτοί τε ὅρους τοῖσι θεοῖσι τῶν ἱερῶν καὶ τῶν τεμενέων ἀποδείκνυμεν, ὡς ἂν μηδεὶς ὑπερβαίνῃ ἢν μὴ ἁγνεύῃ, ἐσιόντες τε ἡμεῖς περιρραινόμεθα οὐχ ὡς μιαινόμενοι, ἀλλ᾿ εἴ τι καὶ πρότερον ἔχομεν μύσος, τοῦτο ἀφαγνιούμενοι.

Much about your good people nauseates me; and verily, it is not their evil.

Vieles an euren Guten macht mir Ekel, und wahrlich nicht ihr Böses.

All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are.

To me, the depths and refinement of mathematical and physical theories are a joy; by comparison, the aesthete and the physiologist are fumblers. I would sooner have the fine mind-begotten forms of a fast steamer, a steel structure, a precision-lathe, the subtlety and elegance of many chemical and optical processes, than all the pickings and stealings of present-day "arts and crafts," architecture and painting included. I prefer one Roman aqueduct to all Roman temples and statues. I love the Colosseum and the giant vault of the Palatine, for they display for me to-day in the brown massiveness of their brick construction the real Rome and the grand practical sense of her engineers, but it is a matter of indifference to me whether the empty and pretentious marblery of the Caesars — their rows of statuary, their friezes, their overloaded architraves — is preserved or not. Glance at some reconstruction of the Imperial Fora — do we not find them the true counterpart of a modern International Exhibition, obtrusive, bulky, empty, a boasting in materials and dimensions wholly alien to Periclean Greece and the Rococo alike, but exactly paralleled in the Egyptian modernism that is displayed in the ruins of Rameses II (1300 B.C.) at Luxor and Karnak? It was not for nothing that the genuine Roman despised the Graeculus histrio, the kind of "artist" and the kind of "philosopher" to be found on the soil of Roman Civilization. The time for art and philosophy had passed; they were exhausted, used up, superfluous, and his instinct for the realities of life told him so. One Roman law weighed more than all the lyrics and school-metaphysics of the time together.

Ten times a day you must laugh and be cheerful.

Zehn Mal musst du lachen am Tage und heiter sein.

Yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more, and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

παρακαλοῦμεν δὲ ὑμᾶς, ἀδελφοί, περισσεύειν μᾶλλον, καὶ φιλοτιμεῖσθαι ἡσυχάζειν καὶ πράσσειν τὰ ἴδια καὶ ἐργάζεσθαι ταῖς χερσὶν ὑμῶν, καθὼς ὑμῖν παρηγγείλαμεν, ἵνα περιπατῆτε εὐσχημόνως πρὸς τοὺς ἔξω καὶ μηδενὸς χρείαν ἔχητε.

I will not urge you, therefore, to do¹³ what you are doing of your own accord, but rather to surpass yourselves in what you are doing at the prompting of the Spirit, as you move forward always to what is better.

However, you should take care that your tranquillity be not disturbed by idlers and busybodies, but that each person look after his own business. If anyone does not have sufficient means, let him provide for himself with his own hands resources both to support himself and to share with others in need, just as we have instructed you previously also.¹⁴ In this way you will be able to behave with dignity towards those who are outsiders to the profession of faith in Christ, for to beg for alms among them,¹⁵ or to act shamelessly on account of need would bring dishonour on your profession. Instead of this, let each person provide for himself with his own hands so that there be no need. And there will easily be enough for the one who is content with a little.¹⁶

13 to do what you are doing of your own accord] First in 1532; previously, 'to do of your own accord what you are doing'

14 Although the paraphrase here apparently follows the biblical text of 4:11 in referring to instruction during Paul's earlier visit to the Thessalonians, the injunction is also found elsewhere in the Epistles. Cf 1 Cor 4:12 and Eph 4:28. For Paul's own example, see 2:9; 2 Thess 3:8–12; and Acts 18:3, 20:34.

15 Erasmus' 1516 annotation on 4:11 (ut vestrum negotium agatis) betrays hostility to the mendicants: 'He [Paul] dissuades them from seeking what belongs to others, and from idleness to which many, even then [in Paul's day], were inclined under the pretext of religion. Now the world is crammed full of this sort of fellow.' In a 1535 addition, Erasmus goes on with biting sarcasm to implicate monks in the charge of mendacity. For Erasmus on beggars, see CWE 50 26 n5. Theophylact Expos in 1 Thess (on 4:12) PG 124 1309d also criticizes Christians who live by begging.

16 To be content with a little is praised also by Horace Satires 2.2.110.

I would be foolish if I took care of my neighbours' business.

ἄφρων ἂν εἴην εἰ τρέφοιν τὰ τῶν πέλας.

A rude and scaring note, my friend!

My life around me gives off a pungent smell.

Ma vie autour de moi répand une odeur âcre.

If the Analhusten is a muffled, windy one, the first few lines of Verlaine's poem could also serve:

Ecoutez la chanson bien douce
Qui ne pleure que pour vous plaire,
Elle est discrète, elle est légère!

Labels: noctes scatologicae

In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the "classical" English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century novel people say "Oh, but that's old!" and shy away immediately.

I see wars, horrid wars, the Tiber foaming
with much blood.

                                      bella, horrida bella
et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno.

86. HORRIDA BELLA quae contra hospitem cognatumque suscepta sunt, ut Latinus dicturus est <XII 31> arma impia sumpsi promissam eripui.
87. SPVMANTEM SANGVINE CERNO quasi non praedicit, sed videt quod facturus est Turnus, ut <XII 35> recalent nostro Tiberina fluenta sanguine adhuc.

86. SAVAGE WARS which are waged against guest and kindred, as Latinus is going to say <XII 31> I took up unholy weapons, I stole the betrothed.
87. FOAMING WITH BLOOD I SEE as if she is not prophesying but seeing what Turnus is going to do, as <XII 35> Tiber's streams are still warm with our blood.

At that time, Rome, your harsh sufferings will all be fulfilled.
For a broad host will come that will destroy your entire land,
Make desolate your market-places, waste your cities with fire,
Fill your rivers with blood, fill also Hades,
And bring upon you slavery, piteous, hateful, and obscure.

καὶ τότε σοί, Ῥώμη, χαλέπ' ἄλγεα πάντα τελεῖται.
ἥξει γὰρ στρατὸς εὐρύς, ὅ σου χθόνα πάσαν ὀλέσσει,
χηρώσει δ' ἀγοράς, ἄστη δέ τε πυρπόλα θήσει,
αἴματι δὲ πλήσει ποταμούς, πλήσει δὲ καὶ Ἅιδην,
δουλoσύνην τ' οἰκτρήν, στυγερήν, ἀτέκμαρτον ἐφήσει.

Life or death: small words for large things.

ἢ θανεῖν ἢ ζῆν· ὁ μῦθος οὐ μακρὸς μακρῶν πέρι.

With Carlyle—Christianity—age fifteen, spoke to his mother—her horror. 'Did God Almighty come down and make wheelbarrows in a shop?' She lay awake at night for hours praying and weeping bitterly.

Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him.

To represent the Virgin's flight into Egypt, a strange holiday was celebrated yearly in many towns during the Middle Ages. The following account² of the Beauvais celebration is found in a letter of December 18, 1697 from a Canon in Beauvais, Foy de Saint-Hilaire, to M. de Francastel, Assistant Librarian of the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris.

'On the first day after the Octave of the [three] Kings,³ they chose a beautiful young girl, put a child in her hands, and mounted her on an ass which they led in procession from the Cathedral Church to the Church of St Stephen. Placing the ass and his lovely burden in the Sanctuary there on the Gospel side, they sang a solemn mass, whose prose [of the Ass] is in Louvet,⁴ and whose Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, etc., end in hin ham [he haw], to the point where in fine missae sacerdos versus ad populum vice "Ite Missa est" ter hinhanabit [he-hawed], populus vero vice "Deo gratias" ter respondavit, "Hinham, Hinham, Hinham".'.⁵

² Dom Paul Denis, Lettres Autographes de la Collection de Troussures (Paris: Champion, 1912), p. 312.

³ Foy de Saint-Hilaire is emphatic as to dates: 'We must not confuse the holiday of the Ass with the day [other days] when the prose [of the Ass] was sung; for it is certain that this holiday [when the Ass went into St Stephen's] was neither on Christmas day nor on the day of the Circumcision, nor on the [Three] Kings' day, [but on] the first day after the octave of the [Three] Kings.'

⁴ Pierre Louvet, Histoire et Antiquités du Diocese de Beauvais (Beauvais, 1631-1635), ii.301.

⁵ In connection with this story, Foy de Saint-Hilaire added: 'See what I heard said by my late father, who had seen the whole Donkey Mass, [of] which [the MS.] was kept in our parish church of St Stephen, and which a clerk of the Curé's ... seized and cruelly burned because of conscientious scruples. His name was Davennes, and I knew him when I was a child.' (Denis, op. cit., 312).

• D. Thomas Benediktson, "Polemius Silvius' Voces varie animancium and related catalogues of animal sounds," Mnemosyne 53 (2000) 71-79
• C.E. Finch, "Suetonius' catalogue of animal sounds in codex Vat. Lat. 6018," American Journal of Philology 90 (1969) 459-463
  
• Paul Kretschmer, "Συς und andere lautnachahmende Wörter," Glotta 13 (1924) 132-138
• Karl Kunst, "mugire und rugire," Glotta 14 (1925) 109-113
• J.H.H. Schmidt, Handbuch der lateinischen und griechischen Synonymik (Leipzig: Teubner, 1889), pp. 157-162 (Stimmen der Säugetiere) and 162-166 (Stimmen der Vögel, Lurche und Kerfe)
• Bruno Snell, "Das I-Ah des goldenes Esel," Hermes 70 (1935) 355-356
• W.B. Stanford, The Sounds of Greek (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), ch. V (Mimesis in Words), pp. 98-121, esp. 102-103
• Wilhelm Wackernagel, Voces Variae Animantium (diss. Basel, 1867)

Swiftly these pulled down the walls that their fathers had made them—
The impregnable ramparts of old, they razed and relaid them
As playgrounds of pleasure and leisure with limitless entries,
And havens of rest for the wastrels where once walked the sentries;
And because there was need of more pay for the shouters and marchers,
They disbanded in face of their foemen their yeomen and archers.

[....]

They ran panting in haste to lay waste and embitter for ever
The wellsprings of Wisdom and Strength which are Faith and Endeavour.
They nosed out and digged up and dragged forth and exposed to derision
All doctrine of purpose and worth and restraint and prevision:
And it ceased, and God granted them all things for which they had striven,
And the heart of a beast in the place of a man's heart was given....

[....]

There was no need of a steed nor a lance to pursue them;
It was decreed their own deed, and not chance, should undo them.
The tares they had laughingly sown were ripe to the reaping.
The trust they had leagued to disown was removed from their keeping.
The eaters of other men's bread, the exempted from hardship,
The excusers of impotence fled, abdicating their wardship,
For the hate they had taught through the State brought the State no defender,
And it passed from the roll of the Nations in headlong surrender!

This age makes me so sick that sometimes I am almost impelled to stop at a corner and start calling down curses from Heaven like Jeremiah or Ezra or somebody — "Woe upon thee, O Israel, for thy adulteries with the Egyptians" etc etc.

Sunday brought me the queerest experience of all — a revelation of barbarism complete. I found a place that was officially described as a church. It was a circus really, but that the worshippers did not know. There were flowers all about the building, which was fitted up with plush and stained oak and much luxury, including twisted brass candlesticks of severest Gothic design. To these things, and a congregation of savages, entered suddenly a wonderful man completely in the confidence of their God, whom he treated colloquially and exploited very much as a newspaper reporter would exploit a foreign potentate. But, unlike the newspaper reporter, he never allowed his listeners to forget that he and not He was the centre of attraction. With a voice of silver and with imagery borrowed from the auction-room, he built up for his hearers a heaven on the lines of the Palmer House (but with all the gilding real gold and all the plate-glass diamond) and set in the centre of it a loud-voiced, argumentative, and very shrewd creation that he called God. One sentence at this point caught my delighted ear. It was apropos of some question of the Judgment Day and ran: "No! I tell you God doesn't do business that way." He was giving them a deity whom they could comprehend, in a gold and jewel heaven in which they could take a natural interest. He interlarded his performance with the slang of the streets, the counter, and the Exchange, and he said that religion ought to enter into daily life. Consequently I presume he introduced it as daily life — his own and the life of his friends.

Then I escaped before the blessing, desiring no benediction at such hands.

So I continued with Greek and Latin, becoming progressively disillusioned, and it was not until my final term, when I had twice failed scholarships at Oxford, that I moved to the history side. By that time my dislike of the classics had become so strong that I have never opened a Greek or Latin book since, and I, who once read these languages almost as easily as I did English, now have difficulty in understanding any but the simplest words and phrases. Sometimes, now that I am old, it occurs to me that it might be an amusing exercise to revive my knowledge of, at any rate, Greek by going through Homer or Sophocles with a dictionary or a crib, but I do not suppose that I ever will.

At about eight in the morning we all had a shave in the Trafalgar Square fountains, and I spent most of the day reading Eugénie Grandet, which was the only book I had brought with me. The sight of a French book produced the usual remarks — "Ah, French? That'll be something pretty warm, eh?" etc. Evidently most English people have no idea that there are French books which are not pornographic.

I discovered how wretched we modern men appear when compared with the Greeks and Romans even merely in the matter of a serious understanding of the tasks of education.

Ich fand, wie elend wir modernen Menschen uns gegen Griechen und Römer ausnehmen, selbst nur in Hinsicht auf das Ernst- und Streng-Verstehen der Erziehungsaufgaben.

Aeschylus? Aeschylus? Was this not the man who fought at Marathon and Salamis against the forces of the East? The poet who first articulated the antithesis of Hellene and barbarian, and posited the all-round inferiority of the latter to the former? Pioneer of the most quintessentially and autonomously Greek of literary forms, Attic tragedy? Is even he now to be found prey to these insidious oriental influences that seem to reach everywhere?

Let us start from the famous invocation in the Supplices,

ἄναξ ἀνάκτων, μακάρων
μακάρτατε καὶ τελέων
τελειότατον κράτος, ὄλβιε Ζεῦ.

Lord of lords, most blessed of the blessed ones and most powerful of powers, felicitous Zeus.

Unprecedented and indeed almost unparalleled in Greek, this is an absolutely clear imitation of divine titles current in the Near East. Not only were deities addressed there with individual expressions such as 'lord of lords', 'king of kings', 'god of gods'; it was common for two or three such phrases to be juxtaposed, as in the Aeschylean passage. Thus an Akkadian-Hittite bilingual has the combination 'mistress of mistresses, goddess of goddesses'. Enlil is addressed in Assyrian prayers as 'lord of lords, king of kings'. On a stele of Nabonidus at Harran, Sin is called 'Enlil of the gods, king of kings, lord of lords'. Similarly in the Old Testament: 'For Yahweh your god is the god of gods and lord of lords'; 'the god of gods ... the lord of lords'. There are also Egyptian parallels.²⁶ It is to be noted that according to Semitic idiom 'king of kings' or 'god of gods' does not mean a king who rules over kings or a god whom other gods worship, but (like 'song of songs') the most kingly among kings, the most divine among deities. By coupling ἄναξ ἀνάκτων with the superlative phrases μακάρων μακάρτατε and τελέων τελειότατον κράτος, Aeschylus implies that he understands it in the same way.<sup>27

26</sup> Supp. 524-6; CTH 312 (E. Reiner and H.G. Güterbock, JCS 21, 1967, 257); KAR 68 (Seux, 272, cf. 274; Foster, 562, cf. 564); W. Röllig, ZA 56, 1964, 221 ii 20 (ΑΝΕT 562 f.; Foster, 757); cf. Tallqvist (1938), 12, 42, 237; Deut. 10.17, Ps. 136.2 f., cf. 84.8(7), Dan. 8.25; J. Gwyn Griffiths, Classical Philology 48, 1953, 145-54 = his Atlantis and Egypt, With Other Selected Essays, Cardiff 1991, 252-65. See further Friis Johansen-Whittle, (as ch. 9, n. 25), ii.408-10.

²⁷ Cf. Gesenius-Kautzsch (as ch. 5, n. 140), 452 (§ 133h): Johansen-Whittle, loc. cit.

• King of Kings, and Lord of Lords
• King of Kings Again

Hast thou faith? have it to thyself before God.

σὺ πίστιν ἣν ἔχεις κατὰ σεαυτὸν ἔχε ἐνώπιον τοῦ Θεοῦ.

Whenever you see me despondent,
you must cure the grim derangement of my mind
and encourage me. And when you are groaning,
I must stand by you and offer friendly admonition.
Aid like this is proper for kin to offer.

               ὅταν δὲ τἄμ᾿ ἀθυμήσαντ᾿ ἴδῃς,
σύ μου τὸ δεινὸν καὶ διαφθαρὲν φρενῶν
ἴσχναινε παραμυθοῦ θ᾿· ὅταν δὲ σὺ στένῃς,
ἡμᾶς παρόντας χρή σε νουθετεῖν φίλα·
ἐπικουρίαι γὰρ αἵδε τοῖς φίλοις καλαί.

Under the shop lights in front of the sweet-meat and ghee seller's booths, the press and din of words is thickest. Faces of dogs, swine, weazles and goats, all the more hideous for being set on human bodies, and lighted with human intelligence, gather in front of the ring of lamp-light, where they may be studied for half an hour at a stretch. Pathans, Afreedees, Logas, Kohistanis, Turkomans, and a hundred other varieties of the turbulent Afghan race, are gathered in the vast human menagerie between the Gate and the Ghar Khutri. As an Englishman passes, they will turn to scowl upon him, and in many cases to spit fluently on the ground after he has passed. One burly big-paunched ruffian, with a shaven head and a neck creased and dimpled with rolls of fat, is specially zealous in this religious rite — contenting himself with no perfunctory performance, but with a whole-souled expectoration, that must be as refreshing to his comrades, as it is disgusting to the European, sir.

The rancorous expectoration of our red-bearded friend — still on the culvert — as he performs his devoirs for the fourth time in the track of the on-going kafir may mean anything you please. A wanderer from the hills takes this opportunity of expressing his contempt for a whole nation — not even the long suffering missionary could credit him with influenza: or again neither security to life and goods, law, order, discipline, or the best blood of England wasted on their care, reconcile the calibans of the city of evil countenances to the white stranger within their gates.

I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street comers and jeer at Europeans.

I do not like the "New Testament," that should be plain; I find it almost disturbing that my taste in regard to this most highly esteemed and overestimated work should be so singular (I have the taste of two millennia against me): but there it is! "Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise"²—I have the courage of my bad taste. The Old Testament—that is something else again: all honor to the Old Testament! I find in it great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something of the very rarest quality in the world, the incomparable naïveté of the strong heart; what is more, I find a people. In the New one, on the other hand, I find nothing but petty sectarianism, mere rococo of the soul, mere involutions, nooks, queer things, the air of the conventicle, not to forget an occasional whiff of bucolic mawkishness that belongs to the epoch (and to the Roman province) and is not so much Jewish as Hellenistic. Humility and self-importance cheek-by-jowl; a garrulousness of feeling that almost stupefies; impassioned vehemence, not passion; embarrassing gesticulation; it is plain that there is no trace of good breeding. How can one make such a fuss about one's little lapses as these pious little men do! Who gives a damn? Certainly not God. Finally, they even want "the crown of eternal life," these little provincial people; but for what? to what purpose? Presumption can go no further. An "immortal" Peter: who could stand him? Their ambition is laughable: people of that sort regurgitating their most private affairs, their stupidities, sorrows, and petty worries, as if the Heart of Being were obliged to concern itself with them; they never grow tired of involving God himself in even the pettiest troubles they have got themselves into. And the appalling taste of this perpetual familiarity with God! This Jewish and not merely Jewish obtrusiveness of pawing and nuzzling God!

² Luther's famous words at the Diet of Worms.

---

Ich liebe das "neue Testament" nicht, man erräth es bereits; es beunruhigt mich beinahe, mit meinem Geschmack in Betreff dieses geschätztesten, überschätztesten Schriftwerks dermaassen allein zu stehn (der Geschmack zweier Jahrtausende ist gegen mich): aber, was hilft es! "Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders,"—ich habe den Muth zu meinem schlechten Geschmack. Das alte Testament—ja das ist ganz etwas Anderes: alle Achtung vor dem alten Testament! In ihm finde ich grosse Menschen, eine heroische Landschaft und Etwas vom Allerseltensten auf Erden, die unvergleichliche Naivität des starken Herzens; mehr noch, ich finde ein Volk. Im neuen dagegen lauter kleine Sekten-Wirthschaft, lauter Rokoko der Seele, lauter Verschnörkeltes, Winkliges, Wunderliches, lauter Conventikel-Luft, nicht zu vergessen einen gelegentlichen Hauch bukolischer Süsslichkeit, welcher der Epoche (und der römischen Provinz) angehört und nicht sowohl jüdisch als hellenistisch ist. Demuth und Wichtigthuerei dicht nebeneinander; eine Geschwätzigkeit des Gefühls, die fast betäubt; Leidenschaftlichkeit, keine Leidenschaft; peinliches Gebärdenspiel; hier hat ersichtlich jede gute Erziehung gefehlt. Wie darf man von seinen kleinen Untugenden so viel Wesens machen, wie es diese frommen Männlein thun! Kein Hahn kräht danach; geschweige denn Gott. Zuletzt wollen sie gar noch "die Krone des ewigen Lebens" haben, alle diese kleinen Leute der Provinz: wozu doch? wofür doch? man kann die Unbescheidenheit nicht weiter treiben. Ein "unsterblicher" Petrus: wer hielte den aus! Sie haben einen Ehrgeiz, der lachen macht: das käut sein Persönlichstes, seine Dummheiten, Traurigkeiten und Eckensteher-Sorgen vor, als ob das An-sich-der-Dinge verpflichtet sei, sich darum zu kümmern; das wird nicht müde, Gott selber in den kleinsten Jammer hinein zu wickeln, in dem sie drin stecken. Und dieses beständige Auf-du-und-du mit Gott des schlechtesten Geschmacks! Diese jüdische, nicht bloss jüdische Zudringlichkeit gegen Gott mit Maul und Tatze!

And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.

O goddess, be pleased to rear our young, and to grant success to the Fathers' edicts on the yoking together of men and women and on the marriage law for raising a new crop of children...

diva, producas subolem, patrumque
prosperes decreta super iugandis
feminis prolisque novae feraci
         lege marita...

But, seriously, without idealizing the past, should we not try to understand that not everything that to us sounds dry or technical or downright prosaic must necessarily have sounded so to an Athenian or a Roman? Could we not consider the possibility that a subject which we shy at when when we meet it in the daily paper may, to many contemporaries of Augustus, despite all their sophistication, still have seemed dignified enough for serious poetry? But even if we keep to our own primary reaction, unaffected by any thought of historical relativity, even then we ought to find it easy to respond to the feeling in this particular stanza. For the legislation which is the theme of these lines is not concerned with technicalities of private or public law but goes straight to the roots of the life of human society. I, for one, am not ashamed to confess that I am moved when I picture these handsome children, who represent Rome's finest youth, singing to the goddess diva, producas subolem, patrumque prosperes decreta .... Here they are, radiant, grateful for the unique distinction that has come to them, and aware that, while they are singing and praying, the eyes and ears of the men and women of Rome and of thousands of boys and girls are upon them, and that they are singing and praying for them all. Will they not wish that in a future saeculum there will again be Roman children, many Roman children, to be as happy as they and the others are now, and is it not fitting for them to implore Heaven's favour for the decrees of the Fathers (what a blessing for a poet if the constitutional life of his nation knows such a term)?

He had an unbridled tongue, a most disgraceful malady.

ἀκόλαστον ἔσχε γλῶσσαν, αἰσχίστην νόσον.

Literacy, in the old sense, was learned primarily from Latin, from concentrating slowly and often painfully on the way words are put together. Nunc et latentis. Someone, in the genitive, now hiding. Proditor. Something, modifying the subject, not yet stated, which betrays or conceals. Intimo. (In?) the innermost. Gratus. The something that reveals is charming. Puellae. A girl's. So a girl is hiding. Risus. A girl's laugh, revealing where she is hiding. Ab angulo. From the corner—the shadows at the edge of the evening piazza. And suddenly, from this dense linguistic medium, a picture stands out sharp and clear:

Nunc et latentis proditor intimo
gratus puellae risus ab angulo.

No English poem needs to be read quite as hard as these lines of Horace. The sheer difficulty of construing has I think a positive value. English attracts a lot of people who are not, as we say, strongly motivated; they want a light rinse of humane letters and suppose that the English department is the least disagreeable place to get it. The briefest exposure to Horace would send these people packing. And there is something else. No doubt the student did not always profit from the old philological grind, but one thing it did impress upon him. It forced him, at however crude a level, to be conscious of the phenomenon of language.

But the ancient
splendor sleeps; and mortals forget...

ἀλλὰ παλαιὰ γάρ
εὕδει χάρις, ἀμνάμονες δὲ βροτοί...

Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one's strength―to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!

Frühmorgens beim Anbruch des Tags, in aller Frische, in der Morgenröthe seiner Kraft, ein Buch lesen―das nenne ich lasterhaft!

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,        5
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,        10
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough        15
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.        20

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,        25
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,        30
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;        35
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

18 Roach: type of fish
25 the worm who never turned: cf. the proverb "Even a worm will turn"
28 Eugene Aram: scholar and murderer (1704-1759)
31 Austin Seven: type of automobile
32 Duggie: bookie Douglas Stuart, whose motto was "Duggie never owes"
33 I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls: aria from opera The Bohemian Girl

The Saxon in Heaven's just balance is weighed,
    His doom like Belshazzar's in death has been cast,
And the hand of the venger shall never be stayed
    Till his race, faith, and speech are a dream of the past.

Piscis primum a capite foetet
The head of a fish is the first part to smell

Ἰχθὺς ἐκ τῆς κεφαλῆς ὄζειν ἄρχεται, The head of a fish begins to stink first. Used of bad rulers, whose contagion poisons the rest of the people. The expression seems to derive from the language of common people.

Apostolius 9.18. Tilley F 304 A fish begins first to smell at the head

PISCIS PRIMVM A CAPITE FOETET

Ἰχθὺς ἐκ τῆς κεφαλῆς ὄζειν ἄρχεται, id est Piscis a capite primum incipit putere. Dictum in malos principes, quorum contagione reliquum vulgus inficitur. Apparet ab idiotarum vulgo sumptum.

The FISH always stinks from the head downwards

The freshness of a dead fish can be judged from the condition of its head. Thus, when the responsible part (as the leaders of a country, etc.) is rotten, the rest will soon follow. ἰχθὺς ἐκ τῆς κεφαλῆς ὄζειν ἄρχεται, a fish begins to stink from the head.

1581 G. PETTIE tr. S. Guazzo's Civil Conversation III.51 If the prouerbe be true,...that a fishe beginneth first to smell at the head,...the faultes of our seruantes will be layed vppon vs. 1611 R. COTGRAVE Dict. French & English s.v. Teste, Fish euer begins to taint at the head; the first thing that's deprau'd in man's his wit. 1915 W.S. CHURCHILL Letter 3 Dec. in M. Gilbert Winston S. Churchill (1972) III. Compan. II.1309 The guilt of criminality attaches to those responsible. 'Well,' said the Aga Khan, 'fish goes rotten by the head.' 1981 Sunday Telegraph 3 May 16 'The fish', as the saying goes, 'always stinks from the head downwards.' Last Sunday we deplored Mr. Michael Foot's liking for the street politics of marches and 'demos'. Since then, a hundred Labour MPs...have followed their leader's example. 2012 Times 2 July 20 The fish rots from the head. The appetite of employee for dishonesty is largely governed by the signals from the top floor.

Every fault of character lays itself open to criticism—and the higher the wrongdoer's status, the more glaring the criticism.

omne animi vitium tanto conspectius in se
crimen habet, quanto maior qui peccat habetur.

Alc. Avit. II 51 in ignoto minor est peccante reatus. Salvian. Gub. dei IV 57 Halm I 1, 47 criminosior enim culpa est ubi honestior status. Si honestior est persona peccantis, peccati quoque maior invidia.

For, if anyone in his early youth has the responsibility of living up to a distinguished name acquired either by inheritance from his father (as, I think, my dear Cicero, is your good fortune) or by some chance or happy combination of circumstances, the eyes of the world are turned upon him; his life and character are scrutinized; and, as if he moved in a blaze of light, not a word and not a deed of his can be kept a secret.

nam si quis ab ineunte aetate habet causam celebritatis et nominis aut a patre acceptam, quod tibi, mi Cicero, arbitror contigisse, aut aliquo casu atque fortuna, in hunc oculi omnium coniciuntur atque in eum, quid agat, quemadmodum vivat, inquiritur, et, tamquam in clarissima luce versetur, ita nullum obscurum potest nec dictum eius esse nec factum.

If unimportant persons, who pass their lives in obscurity, commit any offense out of anger, few know about it; their fame and fortune are alike. But the actions of those who hold great power and pass their lives in a lofty station are known to all mortals.

qui demissi in obscuro vitam habent si quid iracundia deliquere, pauci sciunt; fama atque fortuna eorum pares sunt; qui magno imperio praediti in excelso aetatem agunt, eorum facta cuncti mortales novere.

"But he worships strange gods," said the prime minister, deferentially.

"For that I have no concern," said the king, who was as tolerant as Akbar in matters of belief. "To each man his own god, and the fire or Mother Earth for us all at the last."

"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day....Light came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine—what d'ye call 'em?—trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries,—a wonderful lot of handy men they must have been too—used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilised man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death,—death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here. Oh yes—he did it. Did it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either, except afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his time, perhaps. They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he was cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet at Ravenna by-and-by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga—perhaps too much dice, you know—coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him,—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."

Lord Apollo, would that I had lived when I was not.<sup>a

a</sup> i.e. in other, older times.

εἴθ᾿ ἦν, ἄναξ ὤπολλον, ἡνίκ᾿ οὐκ ἦα.

My dear Caroline, you will know, when you have lived and observed a little longer, that nothing is so difficult to obtain as truth. If any uncommon circumstance were to happen at the end of this village, I am convinced that six different people would tell it six different ways. I never therefore expect, even in this country, to hear a thing related exactly as it happened. In another country this becomes so difficult, that I doubt every thing I hear; and if news is to be brought from that country to this, I know it is more than probable, that the event it relates has never happened at all.

When we hear all this nonsense about how we should be teaching poor students about the peasants of Guatemala in Marxist rhetoric, I say, excuse me, the factory workers I have had contact with, black and white, they don't want to read about the peasants of Guatemala. They want Sophocles and Shakespeare. That's why they're taking the damn course, OK? They want to learn about art. It's the height of condescension to teach ghetto sensibility to people who are trying to escape the ghetto.

But the chief point for consideration is this. The land is fertile, the soil rich and well watered, and the whole made up of fields, vineyards, and woods which produce enough to yield a steady income if not a very large one.

iam, quod deliberationis nostrae caput est, agri sunt fertiles pingues aquosi; constant campis vineis silvis, quae materiam et ex ea reditum sicut modicum ita statum praestant.

I dare say I am wrong and perhaps have missed your drift altogether, but I have a sort of belly-to-earth attitude and always feel uneasy when I get away from the ordinary world where grass is green, stones hard etc.

There is an island, called Syria, you may have heard of it,
lying above Ortygia, where the sun makes his turnings;
not so much a populous island, but a good one, good for        405
cattle and good for sheep, full of vineyards, and wheat raising.
No hunger ever comes on these people, nor any other
hateful sickness, of such as befall wretched humanity;
but when the generations of men grow old in the city,
Apollo of the silver bow, and Artemis with him,        410
comes with a visitation of painless arrows, and kills them.

νῆσός τις Συρίη κικλήσκεται, εἴ που ἀκούεις,
Ὀρτυγίης καθύπερθεν, ὅθι τροπαὶ ἠελίοιο,
οὔ τι περιπληθὴς λίην τόσον, ἀλλ᾽ ἀγαθὴ μέν,        405
εὔβοτος, εὔμηλος, οἰνοπληθής, πολύπυρος.
πείνη δ᾽ οὔ ποτε δῆμον ἐσέρχεται, οὐδέ τις ἄλλη
νοῦσος ἐπὶ στυγερὴ πέλεται δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσιν·
ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε γηράσκωσι πόλιν κάτα φῦλ᾽ ἀνθρώπων,
ἐλθὼν ἀργυρότοξος Ἀπόλλων Ἀρτέμιδι ξὺν        410
οἷς ἀγανοῖς βελέεσσιν ἐποιχόμενος κατέπεφνεν.

• Some Lines in Lucretius
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters in Sidonius
• Verse-Filling Asyndeton
• Verse-Filling Asyndeton: Some Greek Examples
• Another Greek Example of Verse-Filling Asyndeton
• More Examples of Asyndeton Filling Hexameters
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters in Corippus
• Twelve Gods
• Seven Cities
• A Hexameter Consisting of Nouns in Asyndeton
• More Hexameters Consisting of Words in Asyndeton
• Hexameters Consisting of Words in Asyndeton: Dracontius
• Zopyrus' Victims
• A Latin Hexameter Consisting of Adjectives in Asyndeton
• Hexameters Consisting Entirely of Words in Asyndeton: More Greek Examples
• A Sojourn in the Country
• Destruction
• Hexameters Consisting Entirely of Words in Asyndeton: A Horatian Example
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters: Bernard of Cluny, De Contemptu Mundi, Book I

Words are not words without context, motive, and life. Synonyms galore printed in Italics cannot compass a description of their life values. The clumsy devices of letters cannot yield a vision of even their bodily form. To know them really one must know them warm, — warm with the life blood of actual living speech; one must have met them under every variety of life conditions; one must have "summered and wintered" with them.

We arrange them in paradigms, and think we have compassed and measured them; but these paradigm pigeonholes only betray the limitations of our own petty logic. We try to cram words into compartments under our so-called rules of syntax, and the splendid failure which results offers the finest demonstration of the narrow range of reason as compared with the great background of soul life, the vast reaches of the divine indefinite.

Grammar is to the average healthy human being the driest and deathliest of all the disciplines. Except as it serves a temporary practical purpose of offering a first approach to the acquisition of a language, or of presenting to maturer study a convenient tentative and artificial classification of certain facts, it brings spiritual atrophy and death to him who gives and him who takes. Treated as an end unto itself, it desiccates teacher and pupil alike.

We all know the story of the man who went into a London bookshop and asked for a New Testament in Greek. The assistant retired to a back room and after ten minutes came back with a grave look: 'Strange, sir, but Greek seems to be the only language into which the New Testament has not yet been translated.'

Frame explains that the Cyclops stands for the Sun himself because he goes out in the day and comes home at night. (If so, let the world know that Dr. Dawe is the Sun God, having precisely similar habits ... )

On p. 78 Frame treats us to a magnificently hilarious parody of a schoolboy essay: "there is less to say about the rôle of the sun in the final voyage of Odysseus. This voyage takes place by night ... "

Dr. Frame is to be congratulated on slipping this splendid spoof on modern philological techniques and current trends in American literary criticism past the authorities of the Yale University Press.

The whole earth, believe me, Philo, is cursed and polluted. A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want, stimulate the strong and courageous: Fear, anxiety, terror, agitate the weak and infirm. The first entrance into life gives anguish to the new-born infant and to its wretched parent: Weakness, impotence, distress, attend each stage of that life: and 'tis at last finished in agony and horror.

Man is the greatest enemy of man. Oppression, injustice, contempt, contumely, violence, sedition, war, calumny, treachery, fraud; by these they mutually torment each other ...

But we two will drink and feast in the hut, and enjoy
hearing about each other's wretched misfortunes
as we recall them. A man looking back can find pleasure
even in grief, one who's suffered and wandered much.

                         But let us, you and I,
sit in my cottage over food and wine,
and take some joy in hearing how much pain
we each have suffered. After many years
of agony and absence from one's home,
a person can begin enjoying grief.

νῶϊ δ᾽ ἐνὶ κλισίῃ πίνοντέ τε δαινυμένω τε
κήδεσιν ἀλλήλων τερπώμεθα λευγαλέοισι,
μνωομένω· μετὰ γάρ τε καὶ ἄλγεσι τέρπεται ἀνήρ,        400
ὅς τις δὴ μάλα πολλὰ πάθῃ καὶ πόλλ᾽ ἐπαληθῇ.

Beautiful is what we see, more beautiful what we know, but by far the most beautiful is what we do not know.

Pulchra sunt quae videntur, pulchriora quae sciuntur, longe pulcherrima quae ignorantur.

Nevertheless the United States Entomological Commission became a reality, and went to work with a vengeance. The three entomologists were A.S. Packard, a student of Louis Agassiz who had authored the first American textbook of entomology; Cyrus Thomas, a Lutheran minister converted to entomology, and especially to grasshoppers; and of course C.V. Riley as chairman.

'The Poligs of the Oern Vent in dugard to the Brounincinl Coutrick is the colic of the unscrifulouse Gawler.' So ran the printed slip technically known as a 'rough proof'. The Aryan had surpassed himself; but, as he read, light filled the mind of the Reader. He had written — 'The policy of the Government in regard to the Provincial Contract is the policy of the unscrupulous lawyer', and, behold, with a mere turn of his wrist, the Aryan had glorified, and enriched with the wealth of an exuberant Orientalism that simple sentence, till it stood forth a gem, or rather a collection of gems! 'The Poligs of the Oern Vent' — George Meredith might have woven those words into the Shaving of Shagpat, and so made that dazzling piece of broidery yet more gorgeous. 'Brounincinl Coutrick' would suit admirably the manager of a travelling-circus. Conceive the effect, on white and red posters of: — 'To-night! To-night!! To-night!!! The Brounincinl Coutrick!' The words would draw thousands — millions. 'Unscrifulouse Gawler' again would furnish an absolutely unique and startling title for a semi-humourous, semi-grotesque, wholly-horrible story, of the American school, let us say. Think for a moment what fashion of ghoulo-demoniacal, triple-Quilpian, Jekyll-and-Hydeous character, the 'unscrifulouse Gawler' would be. Out of the incult wantonings of a Punjabi Mahommedan with a box of type, had been born the suggestions of three Brilliant Notions, did any man care to use them, exactly as ideas for patterns are conveyed to the designer by the chance-ruled twists of the Kaleidescope.

Labels: typographical and other errors