Laudator Temporis Acti

I am now having a chat with your letter, I embrace it, it speaks to me. It is the only thing here that understands Latin. Here in your aging days you must either learn to talk a barbarous language or else remain silent.⁶ As often as the familiar handwriting brings back to me your dear faces, so often am I no longer here, or else you are here. Do believe my love, that it is speaking the truth: in this case too, as I write this letter, you are here with me.

⁶ hic enim aut barbarus seni sermo discendus est aut tacendum est. Jerome gives a small sample of this “barbarous language” in his Vita Pauli 6.—Note the use here of the word seni, “for an old man” (“in your aging days”). If Jerome was born around the middle of the century, say between 345 and 350, and this letter was written in 375 or 376, then Jerome at this time was at the most thirty or thirty-one years old. References by Jerome to his age, evidently at times exaggerated, have complicated determination of a chronology. On the date of Jerome’s birth, cf. Cavallera 2.1—12. Cf. also n. 1 to Letter 14 below.

nunc cum vestris litteris fabulor, illas amplexor, illae mecum loquuntur, illae hic tantum Latine sciunt. hic enim aut barbarus seni sermo discendus est aut tacendum est. quotiensque carissimos mihi vultus notae manus referunt inpressa vestigia, totiens aut ego hic non sum aut vos hic estis. credite amori vera dicenti: et cum has scriberem, vos videbam.

Another [monk] in an old cistern (called in the country dialect of Syria Gubba) kept himself alive on five dried figs a day.

alter in cisterna veteri — quam gentili sermone Syri "gubbam" vocant — quinque caricis per singulos dies sustentatur.

hoc autem Latinus lector intelligat, ut semel dixisse sufficiat, "lacum" non "stagnum" sonare iuxta Graecos, sed "cisternam", quae sermone Syro et Hebraico "gubba" appellatur.

Three things he declared to be indispensable for education: natural endowment, study, and constant practice.

τριῶν ἔφη δεῖν παιδείᾳ, φύσεως, μαθήσεως, ἀσκήσεως.

For whenever the curse of desolation lays hold on a city,
religion grows sickly and there is no will to honour the gods.

ἐρημία γὰρ πόλιν ὅταν λάβῃ κακή,
νοσεῖ τὰ τῶν θεῶν οὐδὲ τιμᾶσθαι θέλει.

He called old age the harbour of all ills; at least they all take refuge there.

τὸ γῆρας ἔλεγεν ὅρμον εἶναι τῶν κακῶν· εἰς αὐτὸ γοῦν πάντα καταφεύγειν.

The ravages, of course, began long before the war. The invention of the internal-combustion engine may be regarded with justice as the greatest single disaster in the history of mankind. Not only has it destroyed the security of England and made wholesale death and mutilation familiar things; it has also destroyed the beauty of England, killed quiet, and, with quiet, dignity. Take, for example, the case of Sussex. Who would have thought, as we wandered years ago through the Weald in spring and saw that incredible profusion of primroses and wild daffodils, or in summer through the empty spaces of the high downs, that these things upon which we had been nourished in childhood and had grown to rely upon in manhood, turning to them again and again for rest and refreshment of the spirit, would in our time be destroyed, dying before we ourselves should die? Yet so it is. First, the railways scattered their scurf of 'resorts' along the coast and accumulated little ganglions of vulgarity around their stations, as an alien body thrust into the flesh accumulates a zone of inflamed tissue around its place of entry; but the county as a whole remained inviolate. Then came the cars. The south and south-east of England were brought within the range of daily accessibility from the centre, with the result that London burst like a bomb and scattered its debris far and wide over the faces of Surrey and Kent, and presently over that of Sussex. With the coming of the car the peace of the county was broken, its traditions destroyed, its power to refresh and reinvigorate the spirit, a power which depended in part upon its emptiness and its peace, impaired. Its inhabitants bought gramophones and grew basely rich; its roads became maelstroms of traffic along which cars hurled their inert occupants to the coast, its valleys came out in a rash of angry pink; every hilltop had its villa, every village its multiple store, while the sacred peace of the downs was broken by the snorts of motor-bicycles and the hoots of straining cars. If the horde of invaders had derived benefit from their defilements, the case though bad would have been bearable. In fact, however, the majority of those who rifled beauty were unaware of what they did. Walking, just before the war, on Amberley Down, I came upon a small Austin perched upon its highest point, outraging the sight of all beholders. I approached, intending to draw the attention of the occupants to the beneficent but unobserved law which forbids a car to park itself more than fifteen yards from the highway (see the Road Traffic Act 1930). Within it sat a young man and his girl. Their backs were to the view, their windows shut. Were they engaged in the fulfilment of a function intelligible, if there misplaced? They were not. They were sitting stolidly, side by side, listening to the fat-stock prices over the wireless.

• Born Too Late
• A Gloomy Milestone
• What is the Advantage of Locomotion?
• Jouyl
• A Bionic Roach
• No Respect for Mechanical Genius
• American Culture
• Going for the Sake of Going

Labels: Luddism

Lawrence did not know Italian sufficiently well, nor did he have enough time to do justice to the original. As a result, his Verga is full of oddities. He misunderstood or misread many Italian words, so that "a picnic in the country" became "the ringing of the bells," a "fiancée" became a "wife," a "mother" a "midwife," a "hard bed on the ground" a "hard biscuit," a "storeroom" a "millstone," a "rump" a "group"; the olive trees instead of "fading gradually in the twilight," "fumed upon the twilight," etc. He translated southern Italian idioms literally, and thus the common expressions meaning "they had spent a fortune" and "as happy as a king" became "they had spent the very eyes out of their head" and "as happy as an Easter Day."

There will come an epoch late in time
when Ocean will loosen the bonds of the world
and the earth lie open in its vastness,
when Tethys will disclose new worlds
and Thule not be the farthest of lands.

venient annis saecula seris,
quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
laxet et ingens pateat tellus
Tethysque novos detegat orbes
nec sit terris ultima Thule.

Farnaby reports that Abraham Oertel (the sixteenth-century Flemish geographer) regarded this passage as a prophecy by a Spaniard of the discovery of America by his fellow countrymen. Thinking on the same lines Ferdinand Columbus wrote in the margin of his copy of Seneca's tragedies 'haec prophetia expleta est per patrem meum Christoforum Colon almirantem anno 1492' (Damsté, Mnem. 46 (1918), 134).

A jolly life has the frog, my lads. No care has he
for one to pour out his drink, for he has it by him unstinted.

εὐκτὸς ὁ τῶ βατράχω, παῖδες, βίος· οὐ μελεδαίνει
τὸν τὸ πιεῖν ἐγχεῦντα· πάρεστι γὰρ ἄφθονον αὐτῷ.

When I approached Viterbo I first saw an astonishing wall, perpendicular to my road, untouched, the bones of the Middle Ages. It stood up straight before one like a range of cliffs, seeming much higher than it should; its hundred feet or so were exaggerated by the severity of its stones and by their sheer fall. For they had no ornament whatever, and few marks of decay, though many of age. Tall towers, exactly square and equally bare of carving or machicolation, stood at intervals along this forbidding defence and flanked its curtain. Then nearer by, one saw that it was not a huge castle, but the wall of a city, for at a corner it went sharp round to contain the town, and through one uneven place I saw houses. Many men were walking in the roads alongside these walls, and there were gates pierced in them whereby the citizens went in and out of the city as bees go in and out of the little opening in a hive.

During those years several New York banks refused to do business with democrats, and a parson refused at the font to christen a child Thomas Jefferson.

It is a misfortune to be born into a position in society from which there is no possibility of escape, however uncongenial this inescapable position may be to the victim's temperament, gifts, and consequent inclinations. This misfortune is a rare one. There are few stations in life that have held everyone that has been born into them as their life-long prisoner. One prisoner in a thousand, or one in a million at least, has succeeded in breaking his way out of even the most cramping and most crushing original confinement. At least one person, out of the many born into this position, will have found his position uncongenial enough, and will have had importunate enough incompatible ambitions, to have nerved him to make the necessary effort of will for breaking out, hard and painful though the act of self-liberation may have been.

Perhaps the only social position from which escape is impossible for those born into it is royalty; for this continues to haunt its victim psychologically even if he has managed to extricate himself from it officially. A royal personage who, so long as he has remained officially royal, has been longing to enjoy the satisfactions and amenities of private life, is apt to find, if and when he has had his way, that he now misses the servitude that was so irksome to him so long as he was officially subject to it. He now discovers, too late, that, unconsciously, he had been wishing to have the best of both worlds; and he has actually got the worst of both as an ironical result of his apparently successful fight to win his freedom. Moreover, the royal personage who is free to divest himself of his royalty officially is relatively fortunate. Even this limited degree of self-liberation can be attained by a royal personage only in a society that has become so orderly, or that has reduced royalty to so insignificant a social role, that, in this society, it has ceased to be dangerous either to wear a crown or to doff one. In most societies, at most times and places, the wearer of a crown has been holding a wolf by the ears.

In the present-day Western World, to be royal has ceased to be dangerous, yet royalty continues to be awkward for inheritors of it who are irked by it.

Also that it was provided in other plebiscites that no one might hold the same office twice within ten years...

item aliis plebi scitis cautum ne quis eundem magistratum intra decem annos caperet...

Mayst thou sleep in nettles.

ἐν κνίδαισι καθεύδοις.

Three kappas [are] worst — Kappadokia, Krete and Kilikia.

τρία κάππα κάκιστα· Καππαδοκία, Κρήτη καὶ Κιλικία.

Liars achieve that they are not believed even when they tell the truth.

mendaces faciunt ut nec vera dicentibus credatur.

To the question, "What do people gain by telling lies?" his answer was, "Just this, that when they speak the truth they are not believed."

ἐρωτηθεὶς τί περιγίνεται κέρδος τοῖς ψευδομένοις, "ὅταν," ἔφη, "λέγωσιν ἀληθῆ, μὴ πιστεύεσθαι."

As a rule we do not believe a liar even when he tells the truth.

cum mendaci homini ne verum quidem dicenti credere soleamus.

“We Germans,” civilization’s literary man says in a manifesto that appeared at the turn of the years 1917–18, “now that we have grown up to democracy, have the greatest experience of all before us. A nation does not reach self-government without learning much about human nature and without managing life with more mature organs. The play of social forces lies in nations that govern themselves in full public view with the individuals educating one another and learning about each other. But if we act now at home, the barriers abroad will also soon fall; European distances will become shorter, and we will see our fellow nations as family members travelling the same paths. As long as we persisted in the national status quo, they seemed to us to be enemies—doomed because they did not also persist. Has not every revolution come just before the end? Was it not ruin to try to realize ideas in battles and crises? This destiny shall now be ours as well . . .”

What unspeakably painful resistance rises up in my inner being before this hostile gentleness, before all this beautifully stylized unpleasantness? Should one not laugh? After all, is not every sentence, every word in it, false, translated, basically mistaken, grotesque self-deception—the confusion of the wishes, instincts, and needs of a novelist who has been spiritually naturalized in France with German reality? “This destiny shall now be ours as well!” A sublime and brilliant but basically Latinized literary man who long ago renounced every feeling for the particular ethos of his people, yes, who even ridicules the recognition of such a special national ethos as bestial nationalism, and who opposes it with his humanitarian-democratic civilization and “social” internationalism.

Soon it will be fifty years since Dostoyevsky, who had the eyes to see, asked almost incredulously: “Can it be true that cosmopolitan radicalism has already taken roots in Germany, too?” This is a way of asking that is equivalent to astonished confirmation, and the idea of cosmopolitan, or more correctly, international radicalism, itself contradicts the protestation that it is a “mirage” of our present enemies that the national democracies could ever unite into an intellectually unified European or world democracy. By “cosmopolitan radicalism,” Dostoyevsky meant that intellectual tendency that has the democratic civilization-society of “mankind” as its goal; la république sociale, démocratique et universelle; the empire of human civilization. A mirage of our enemies? But mirage or not: those who see this mirage hovering before them must definitely be enemies of Germany, for it is certainly true that a union of the national democracies into a European, a world democracy, would leave nothing of the German character: the world democracy, the imperium of civilization, the “society of mankind,” could have a character that would be more Latin or more Anglo-Saxon—the German spirit would dissolve and disappear in it, it would be obliterated, it would no longer exist.

From his childhood Dante had been familiar with the image of Lucifer in the mosaic decoration of the cupola of the Baptistery in Florence. Work on these mosaics began in the first half of the thirteenth century and continued during Dante’s early years. The design on the cupola consists of an apocalyptic vision of Christ in majesty presiding over the Last Judgement, the angelic hierarchy, events from the Old and New Testaments and scenes of damnation, arranged symmetrically in rectangular segments and culminating in a central triple-octagonal ornamentation. The image of Lucifer dominates a tumultuous scene in which souls of the damned are tormented by demons. Lucifer himself is a grotesque monster, horned and bearded, munching a soul whose legs and buttocks dangle from his mouth. From his ears protrude two snakes, also munching two souls, who dangle face forwards. Lucifer clenches other souls in his hands, held ready for the continuation of his meal. His feet are clamped on yet another two, and demons force others towards him and towards other snakes. A crude representation of his insides shows a soul being digested and about to be excreted. The devouring is thus represented as endlessly continuous.

[3] There is no disgrace in making concessions to one’s own people — as Dorian does to Dorian or Chalcidian to others of their kin — since we are all of us neighbours and share one island home and one name as Sicilians. We shall no doubt have our wars in future when occasion arises, and we shall no doubt then make peace again by conferring amongst ourselves. [4] But when foreigners invade we would always be wise to act together to repel them, since if any one of us is harmed we are all endangered; and never again in future should we bring in allies or peace-makers from outside.

[3] οὐδὲν γὰρ αἰσχρὸν οἰκείους οἰκείων ἡσσᾶσθαι, ἢ Δωριᾶ τινὰ Δωριῶς ἢ Χαλκιδέα τῶν ξυγγενῶν, τὸ δὲ ξύμπαν γείτονας ὄντας καὶ ξυνοίκους μιᾶς χώρας καὶ περιρρύτου καὶ ὄνομα ἓν κεκλημένους Σικελιώτας· οἳ πολεμήσομέν τε, οἶμαι, ὅταν ξυμβῇ, καὶ ξυγχωρησόμεθά γε πάλιν καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς αὐτοὺς λόγοις κοινοῖς χρώμενοι· [4] τοὺς δὲ ἀλλοφύλους ἐπελθόντας ἁθρόοι αἰεί, ἢν σωφρονῶμεν, ἀμυνούμεθα, εἴπερ καὶ καθ᾽ ἑκάστους βλαπτόμενοι ξύμπαντες κινδυνεύομεν· ξυμμάχους δὲ οὐδέποτε τὸ λοιπὸν ἐπαξόμεθα οὐδὲ διαλλακτάς.

The society in which we are now living has two determining characteristics: it is a technological and a democratic society. The stress that it places on scientific applications on the one hand and on the manifestations of popular opinion on the other, imposes on every member of the society the obligation to become and to remain literate, i.e. to cultivate the capacity to read and to write the language that is in use for these partly cultural, partly political operations. The upshot of this requirement is that suspicion and contempt attach themselves necessarily to the illiterate person, and his economic possibilities are correspondingly limited. This estimate of the sociological situation in modern states is not exaggerated. Here is a typical statement of the current point of view: "The dimensions of illiteracy throughout the world and its grave economic, social, cultural, and political con sequences point up the need to find practical means for the eradication of this brake on human progress and welfare ..."¹⁾

Graeco-Roman Egypt presents us with the spectacle of a society very different in kind, living on quite other presuppositions and with purposes remote from those of our day. That society was both pre-technological and pre-democratic. We shall find that it made a large place for illiteracy. The illiterate person was able to function in a broad variety of occupations, to be recognized as a respectable member of his class, to attain financial success, to hold public office, to associate on equal terms with his literate neighbors.

1) L.H. Hughs, Innovator (Univ. Mich. School of Education) 6, No. 7, 1975, 8. Indicative of modern concern with world literacy is the series published by Unesco under the title "Literacy:, beginning with the report for 1965-7 (Paris).

This summary enables us to recognize three main categories of writers for the illiterate: (1) relatives, preferably close relatives, but when these were lacking, more remote connections; (2) business associates or colleagues in government service; and finally (3) professional scribes, who might or might not have personal knowledge of their clients. Of these, the first group is by far the most striking because it shows illiteracy operating as a centripetal force in an ancient non-technological society. The special needs that stemmed from wide spread illiteracy confirmed the traditional rules that governed the selection of kyrioi or male "guardians" as well as the selection of guardians for minor children. These were kept as far as possible within the family. Illiteracy similarly promoted domestic cooperation, what we should be inclined to call family solidarity. This is nowhere seen more clearly than in the frequency with which illiterate fathers and mothers supplemented their own lack with the literate capacities of their sons.

The conversation ended with an exchange of stories among the soldiers. One of them told me a story about a priest. He wondered whether I knew what a priest meant, and to make it plain he said: "A priest, you know, is a man who always lies."

But indeed, that was quite a clever remark which Cato made many years ago: "I wonder," said he, "that a soothsayer doesn't laugh when he sees another soothsayer."

vetus autem illud Catonis admodum scitum est, qui mirari se aiebat quod non rideret haruspex haruspicem cum vidisset.

Certainly these people have a benediction upon them, granted them for their simple lives and their justice. Their eyes are fearless and kindly. They are courteous, straight, and all have in them laughter and sadness. They are full of songs, of memories, of the stories of their native place; and their worship is conformable to the world that God made. May they possess their own land, and may their influence come again from Italy to save from jar, and boasting, and ineptitude the foolish, valourless cities, and the garish crowds of shouting men. . . . And let us especially pray that the revival of the faith may do something for our poor old universities.

It was now that I regretted the early years which had been wasted in sickness or idleness, or more idle reading, that I condemned the perverse method of our schoolmasters who, by first teaching the mother language, might descend with so much ease and perspicuity to the origin and etymology of a derivative idiom. In the nineteenth year of my age I determined to supply this defect, and the lessons of Pavilliard again contributed to smooth the entrance of the way, the Greek alphabet, the grammar and the pronunciation according to the French accent. As he possessed only such a stock as was requisite for an ecclesiastic, our first book was St John’s Gospel, and we should probably have construed the whole of the New Testament had I not represented the absurdity of adhering to the corrupt dialect of the Hellenist Jews. At my earnest request we presumed to open the Iliad; and I had the pleasure of beholding, though darkly and through a glass, the true image of Homer, whom I had long since admired in an English dress. After my tutor, conscious of his inability, had left me to myself I worked my way through about half the Iliad, and afterwards interpreted alone a large portion of Xenophon and Herodotus. But my ardour, destitute of aid and emulation, was gradually cooled, and from the barren task of searching words in a lexicon, I withdrew to the free and familiar conversation of Virgil and Tacitus. Yet in my residence at Lausanne I had laid a solid foundation, which enabled me in a more propitious season to prosecute the study of Grecian literature.

There is, in fact, profound peace and tranquillity; war has ceased, there are no wanderings of peoples, no civil strifes, no despotisms, nor other maladies and ills in Greece requiring many unusual remedial forces.

πολλὴ γὰρ εἰρήνη καὶ ἡσυχία, πέπαυται δὲ πόλεμος, καὶ πλάναι καὶ στάσεις οὐκ εἰσὶν οὐδὲ τυραννίδες, οὐδ᾽ ἄλλα νοσήματα καὶ κακὰ τῆς Ἑλλάδος ὥσπερ πολυδυνάμων φαρμάκων χρῄζοντα καὶ περιττῶν.

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.

So you there, greedy man, money-grubber, looking for profit from any source, whether honest or shady makes no difference to you, you are amassing for yourself a great deal of mud. You're collecting mud, and you aren't in the least worried about sticking in it, material, earthly things are so dear to you.

O tu avare homo adquisitor, undecumque sive honeste sive turpiter lucra conquirens, congeris ad te multum lutum; lutum colligis, et ne ibi haereas non pertimescis, cara sunt tibi terrena.

All this good had its rateable proportion of evil. Even an admitted nuisance, of ancient standing, should not be abated without some caution.

We are not made of wood or stone, and the things which connect themselves with our hearts and habits cannot, like bark or lichen, be rent away without our missing them.

There was never a commander who more endeared himself to his men by cheerfully sharing all their duties with the meanest of the soldiers.

non alias militi familiarior dux fuit omnia inter infimos militum haud gravate munia obeundo.

Whatever hardship the emperor imposed on the troops, he inflicted with equal severity on himself; their labour, their diet, their sleep were measured by the inflexible rules of discipline; and, without despising the enemy, they were taught to repose an implicit confidence in their own valour and the wisdom of their leader.

But it is tempting to associate this heroic tale of one woman’s stand against an invading would-be rapist with the circumstances surroung the successive waves of Viking raiders who scoured and spoiled and eventually settled great swathes of Anglo-Saxon England from 793 until the generation after the Beowulf manuscript was written, when indeed Anglo-Saxon England was ruled by the Danish King Cnut.

The chant was based on The Book of Isaiah, chapter 9, verse 6, in whose Latin the last phase is magni consilii Angelus. In The Dream, the Tree of Life, spanning the universe, is looked on by ‘holy spirits, men on earth and all this glorious creation’. Now this phase is a clear reminiscence of a New Testament text, St Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, chapter 2, verse 10, which says that, when God exalted Christ who had been obedient unto death, ‘at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, on heaven and on earth and under the earth’.

Similar cosmic imagery lies behind the celebration of Christmas on 25 December, the Winter Solstice in the Roman calendar and the ancient Mithradatic Roman feast of Sol Invictus, the unconquered Sun: at the darkest time of the year, Christ the ‘Light of the World’ was seen to make a triumphal entry into the world where darkness had reigned up to then.

At Whitby, Cædmon’s initial tests concerned the versification of ‘discourse relating to sacred history or doctrine’ (quaedam sacrae historiae sive doctinae sermo). Entering the monastery, Hild had Cædmon instructed in the cycle of sacred history (iussutque illum seriem sacrae historiae doceri), from Creation to Judgement.

Edgar was King Alfred’s great-grandson and in due course he became known as ‘the Peacemaker’(Pacifus).

Labels: typographical and other errors

Then, besides, there is nothing in poetry more serviceable to language than that the ideas communicated, by being bound up and interwoven with verse, are better remembered and kept firmly in mind. Men in those days had to have a memory for many things.

ἔτι τοίνυν οὐδὲν ἀπὸ ποιητικῆς λόγῳ χρησιμώτερον ὑπάρχει τοῦ δεθέντα μέτροις τὰ φραζόμενα καὶ συμπλακέντα μᾶλλον μνημονεύεσθαι καὶ κρατεῖσθαι. τοῖς μὲν οὖν τότε πολλὴν ἔδει μνήμην παρεῖναι.

No, granted, I am not a knight of the times, nor am I a “leader,” and I do not want to be. I do not love “leaders,” and I do not love “teachers,” either, for example, “teachers of democracy.” But least of all do I love and respect those small, empty people who have good noses and who live from knowing what is going on and from following the right scent, those servile and conforming vermin of the times who, with incessant announcements of their contempt for all those who are less quick and mobile, trot alongside the new; or also the fops and up-to-date people, those intellectual swells and elegant ones who wear the most recent ideas and catchwords just as they wear their monocles: for example, “spirit,” “love,” “democracy,”—so that one can hardly hear this jargon today without being disgusted. All of these people, the conformers as well as the snobs, enjoy the freedom of their nothingness.

Nein, zugegeben, ich bin kein Ritter der Zeit, bin auch kein ›Führer‹ und will es nicht sein. Ich liebe nicht ›Führer‹, und auch ›Lehrer‹ liebe ich nicht, zum Beispiel ›Lehrer der Demokratie‹. Am wenigsten aber liebe und achte ich jene Kleinen, Nichtigen, Spürnäsigen, die davon leben, daß sie Bescheid wissen und Fährte haben, jenes Bedienten- und Läufergeschmeiß der Zeit, das unter unaufhörlichen Kundgebungen der Geringschätzung für alle weniger Mobilen und Behenden dem Neuen zur Seite trabt; oder auch die Stutzer und Zeitkorrekten, jene geistigen Swells und Elegants, welche die letzten Ideen und Worte tragen, wie sie ihr Monokel tragen: zum Beispiel ›Geist‹, ›Liebe‹, ›Demokratie‹, — so daß es heute schon schwer ist, diesen Jargon ohne Ekel zu hören. Diese alle, die Heulenden sowohl wie die Snobs, genießen die Freiheit ihrer Nichtigkeit.

A quotation without a reference is like a geological specimen of unknown locality.

I find my students by and large fairly pig ignorant even about their own culture and region. Scottish schoolchildren I gather have never heard of Sir Walter Scott (https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/sir-walter-scott-comeback-for-school-lessons-d5kmstrdp). Millions of brains, better otherwise employed, are being daily fried with trivia and tik-tok nonsense, creating a lobotomized generation of coofs and ninnies, likely to spawn an even viler brood. Damnosa quid …?

This was Abel Sampson, commonly called, from his occupation as a pedagogue, Dominie Sampson. He was of low birth, but evincing, even from his cradle, an uncommon seriousness of disposition, the poor parents were encouraged to hope that their bairn, as they expressed it, "might wag his pow in a pu'pit yet." With an ambitious view to such a consummation, they pinched and pared, rose early and lay down late, eat dry bread and drank cold water, to secure to Abel the means of learning. Meantime, his tall ungainly figure, his taciturn and grave manners, and some grotesque habits of swinging his limbs, and screwing his visage while reciting his task, made poor Sampson the ridicule of all his school-companions. The same qualities secured him at college a plentiful share of the same sort of notice. Half the youthful mob "of the yards" used to assemble regularly to see Dominie Sampson, (for he had already attained that honoured title,) descend the stairs from the Greek class, with his Lexicon under his arm, his long mis-shapen legs sprawling abroad, and keeping awkward time to the play of his immense shoulder-blades, as they raised and depressed the loose and threadbare black coat which seemed his constant and only wear. When he spoke, the efforts of the professor were totally inadequate to restrain the inextinguishable laughter of the students, and sometimes unequal to repress his own. The long sallow visage, the goggle eyes, the huge under-jaw, which appeared not to open and shut by an act of volition, but to be dropped and hoisted up again by some complicated machinery within the inner man, the harsh and dissonant voice, and the screech-owl notes to which it was exalted when he was exhorted to pronounce more distinctly, all added fresh subject for mirth to the torn cloak and tattered shoe, which have afforded legitimate subjects of raillery against a poor scholar from Juvenal's time downward. It was never known that Sampson either exhibited irritability at this ill usage, or made the least attempt to retort upon his tormentors. He slunk from college by the most secret paths he could discover, and plunged himself into his miserable lodgings, where, for eighteen-pence a-week, he was allowed the benefit of a straw mattress, and, if his landlady was in good humour, permission to study his task by her fire. Under all these disadvantages, he attained a competent knowledge of Greek and Latin, and some acquaintance with the sciences.

Finally, because Hilarion found that one of the brothers who lived about five miles away from him was excessively careful and anxious in tending his little garden and had saved a little money, he had driven him from his sight. The brother wanted to be reconciled with the old man and so he came often to the brothers, especially to Hesychius, of whom Hilarion was very fond. One day, then, he brought with him a basket of green peas just as they were in their pods. Hesychius placed the basket on the table in the evening, but the old man cried out, saying that he could not bear the smell, and asked where it came from. When Hesychius answered that a brother had brought the monks the first fruits of his little garden, Hilarion said, 'Do you not notice this foul smell and the stink of greed in these peas? Throw them to the cattle, throw them to the brute animals, and see whether they will eat them.' When Hesychius put them in the manger as he had been told, the cattle were terrified and mooed more loudly than usual; they broke the ropes tethering them and stampeded off in all directions. For the old man had a spiritual gift which enabled him, from the smell of bodies or clothes or other things anyone had touched, to recognize which demon or vice was holding that person in its grip.

Denique unum de fratribus in quinto fere a se milliario manentem, quia comperiebat hortuli sui nimis cautum timidumque custodem, et pauxillum habere nummorum, ab oculis abegerat. Qui volens sibi reconciliari senem, frequenter veniebat ad fratres, et maxime ad Hesychium, quo ille vehementissime delectabatur. Quadam igitur die ciceris fascem virentis, sicut in herbis erat detulit. Quem cum Hesychius posuisset in mensa ad vesperum, exclamavit senex, se putorem ejus ferre non posse, simulque unde esset rogavit. Respondente autem Hesychio, quod frater quidam primitias ageli sui fratribus detulisset. Non sentis, inquit, putorem teterrimum, et in cicere fœtere avaritiam? Mitte bubus, mitte brutis animalibus, et vide an comedant. Quod cum ille juxta præceptum in præsepe posuisset, exterriti boves et plus solito mugientes, ruptis vinculis in diversa fugerunt. Habebat enim senex hanc gratiam, ut ex odore corporum vestiumque, et earum rerum quas quis tetigerat, sciret cui dæmoni, vel cui vitio subjaceret.

The Fathers were profoundly moved by the vicissitudes of human fortune, considering how that great and opulent people, famed for its luxury and pride, of whom a little while before its neighbours had sought assistance, was become so broken in spirit as to yield itself up with all its possessions to the dominion of another.

commoti patres vice fortunarum humanarum, si ille praepotens opibus populus, luxuria superbiaque clarus, a quo paulo ante auxilium finitimi petissent adeo infractos gereret animos ut se ipse suaque omnia potestatis alienae faceret.

Art was their great subject, and I am afraid they found me pretty heavy going. It was their fashion never to admire anything that was obviously beautiful, like a sunset or a pretty woman, but to find surprising loveliness in things which I thought hideous.

I’ve been naive enough to fall for the blurb accompanying “une nouvelle édition des Essais (Bordeaux: Robert Laffont, 2019)… établie par Bernard Combeaud”, the text of which is “non pas ‘modernisée' et encore moins ‘traiduite’ en français moderne mais rajeunie et refraîchie, pour rendre enfin accessible … etc.’. Mendacious tosh. I loathe the sort of nannying editors that, to take a random sample, substitutes ‘vaillance’ for the ‘vertu’ the author wrote. A footnote would do, or an unobtrusive glossary such as furnish Chaucer editions, but tinkering and tampering with Montaigne’s text is beyond the pale. We don’t do the same with Francis Bacon as far as I know, and who’s afraid of the odd lexical puzzle, or a preconsonantal <s> or <c> lost in Modern French orthography? Anathema sit.

Beware of shifty-eyed people. It is not only nervousness, it is also a kind of wickedness. Such people come to no good. I have three of them now in my mind as I write. One is a Professor.

And, by the way, would you like to know why universities suffer from this curse of nervous disease? Why the greatest personages stammer or have St. Vitus' dance, or jabber at the lips, or hop in their walk, or have their heads screwed round, or tremble in the fingers, or go through life with great goggles like a motor car? Eh? I will tell you. It is the punishment of their intellectual pride, than which no sin is more offensive to the angels.

By gods and heroes and your own fathers, whoever you happen to be who possesses this land now and whoever will possess it later and everyone coming here, do not ever ruin the building of this monument or the stones or the mound or the columns or the statues over them; whoever disturbs any body of the ones resting in it or destroys any part of the monument either by having demolished or shattered or knocked it off, or having obliterated any of the letters inscribed on it, may his fatherland not be a home to him, may earth not bear fruit, may sea not be sailed, may women not give birth naturally, but may every evil man perish evilly, both himself root and branch and his children's children and his race and name and house's hearth and fathers' graves, with [these] pursuing and driving him: Helios who looks upon all things, and Olympian Zeus, and Pluto, and Demeter's daughter, and the hounds of Artemis Hecate, and the Furies, and Daeira, and Chthonian Hermes, and Imprecation eldest of spirits, and as many other gods as have care and consideration for good souls; the same curse [is] also upon the first person or persons, whoever commands another or initiates a resolution or recommends a resolution or assists with hands to disturb or take down any of these things; but to the one who guards over the place and honors and strengthens the ordinances, to him be many things and good things, both to himself and his fatherland and his house and his memory hereafter and his descendants.

πρὸς θεῶν καὶ ἡρῴων τῶν τε σεαυτοῦ πατέρων, ὅστις ὢν τυγχάνεις ὁ τὸν χῶρον τοῦτον νῦν τε ἔχων καὶ ὅστις ἔπειτα ἕξεις καὶ πᾶς ὁ δεῦρο ἰών, μή ποτε λυμήνῃ τοῦδε τοῦ σήματος ἢ τῇ δωμήσει τῶν λίθων ἢ τ̣ῶ χώματι τοῖς τε κίοσιν καὶ τοῖς ἐπ’ αὐτῶν ἀνδριᾶσιν· ὅστις δὲ ἢ σῶμα κεινήσειέ τι τῶν ἐν αὐτῶι κειμένων ἢ καθέλοι τι συνχέας ἢ συνθραύσας ἢ ἀποκρούσας τοῦ μνήματος ἢ ἐκκολάψας τι τῶν ἐπιγραμμάτων, τούτωι μὴ πατρὶς οἰκοῖτο, μὴ γῆ καρπὸν ἐκφέροι, μὴ πλέοιτο θάλασσα, μὴ γυναῖκες τίκτοιεν κατὰ φύσιν, κακὸς δὲ κακῶς ἀπόλοιτο πᾶς τε αὐτὸς πρόριζος καὶ παῖδες παίδων καὶ γένος καὶ ὄνομα καὶ οἴκου ἑστία καὶ τάφοι πατέρων, μετιόντων αὐτὸν καὶ ἐλαυνόντων Ἡλίου τε τοῦ πάντα ἐφορῶντος καὶ Διὸς Ὀλυμπίου, Πλούτωνός τε καὶ τῆς Δήμητρος Κόρης, τῶν τε Ἀρτέμιδος Ἑκάτης κυνῶν Ἐρινύων τε καὶ Δαείρας καὶ Ἑρμοῦ Χθονίου καὶ Ἀρᾶς τῆς πρεσβυτάτης δαιμόνων, ὁπόσοις τε ἄλλοις θεῶν ἐπιμέλειά τε καὶ φροντὶς ψυχῶν ἀγαθῶν· καὶ ἐπὶ πρώτωι δὲ καὶ ἐπὶ πρώτοις ἡ αὐτὴ ἀρὰ ὅστις ἢ ἑτέρωι προστάξειεν ἢ γνώμης ἄρξειεν ἢ γνώμηι συμβάλοιτο ἢ χερσὶν ὑπουργήσειεν κεινηθῆναί τι τούτων ἢ καθαιρεθῆναι· τῶι δὲ κατὰ χώραν φυλάττοντι καὶ τιμῶντι τὰ νενομισμένα καὶ αὔξοντι, πολλὰ καὶ ἀγαθὰ εἶναι τούτωι καὶ αὐτῶι καὶ πατρίδι καὶ οἴκωι καὶ τῆι ἔπειτα μνήμηι καὶ ἐκγόνοις.

I never suffered a difficult or corrupt passage to escape till I had viewed it in every light of which it was susceptible; though often disappointed, I always consulted the most learned of ingenious commentators...

I understood what a precious thing this little England was, how old and kindly and comforting, how wholly worth striving for. The freedom of an acre of her soil was cheaply bought by the blood of the best of us.

You will hear everything you regard as sacred laughed at and condemned, and every kind of nauseous folly acclaimed, and you must hold your tongue and pretend to agree.

[11] Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter? [12] Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries? either a vine, figs? so can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh.

[11] μήτι ἡ πηγὴ ἐκ τῆς αὐτῆς ὀπῆς βρύει τὸ γλυκὺ καὶ τὸ πικρόν; [12] μὴ δύναται, ἀδελφοί μου, συκῆ ἐλαίας ποιῆσαι ἢ ἄμπελος σῦκα; οὔτε ἁλυκὸν γλυκὺ ποιῆσαι ὕδωρ.

12 οὕτως οὐδεμια πηγὴ ἁλυκὸν καὶ RP

Hence, good does not spring from evil, any more than figs grow from olive-trees. Things which grow correspond to their seed; and goods cannot depart from their class. As that which is honourable does not grow from that which is base, so neither does good grow from evil.

non nascitur itaque ex malo bonum, non magis quam ficus ex olea. ad semen nata respondent, bona degenerare non possunt. quemadmodum ex turpi honestum non nascitur, ita ne ex malo quidem bonum.

For how can a vine be moved to act, not like a vine, but like an olive, or again an olive to act, not like an olive, but like a vine? It is impossible, inconceivable.

πῶς γὰρ δύναται ἄμπελος μὴ ἀμπελικῶς κινεῖσθαι, ἀλλ' ἐλαικῶς, ἢ ἐλαία πάλιν μὴ ἐλαικῶς, ἀλλ' ἀμπελικῶς; ἀμήχανον, ἀδιανόητον.

Cicero in Latin and Xenophon in Greek are indeed the two ancients whom I would first propose to a liberal scholar, not only for the merit of their style and sentiments, but for the admirable lessons which may be applied almost to every situation of public and private life. Cicero's epistles may in particular afford the models of every form of correspondence, from the careless effusions of tenderness and friendship to the well-guarded declaration of discreet and dignified resentment.

I have noticed wherever I have been that in proportion as men are remote and have little to distract them, in that proportion they produce a great crop of peculiar local names for every stream, reach, tuft, hummock, glen, copse, and gully for miles around; and often when I have lost my way and asked it of a peasant in some lonely part I have grown impatient as he wandered on about "leaving on your left the stone we call the Nuggin, and bearing round what some call Holy Dyke till you come to what they call Mary's Ferry" . . . and so forth. Longshoremen and the riparian inhabitants of dreadful and lonely rivers near the sea have just such a habit, and I have in my mind's eye now a short stretch of tidal water in which there are but five shoals, yet they all have names, and are called "The House, the Knowle, Goodman's Plot, Mall, and the Patch."

"Why are you standing there, my men?" he exclaimed. "You have no Latin or Sabine foe to deal with, whom you may overcome in fight and transform from an enemy into an ally; we have drawn the sword against wild beasts, and we must have their blood or yield them ours."

"quid stas, miles?" inquit; "non cum Latino Sabinoque hoste res est, quem victum armis socium ex hoste facias; in beluas strinximus ferrum; hauriendus aut dandus est sanguis."

Peoples pass on,
names fade away,
dark oblivion spreads its night-enfolding wings
over whole generations.

Völker verrauschen,
Namen verklingen,
Finstre Vergessenheit
Breitet die dunkelnachtenden Schwingen
Über ganzen Geschlechtern aus.

In my French and Latin translations I adopted an excellent method, which from my own success I would recommend to the imitation of students. I chose some classic writer, such as Cicero and Vertot, the most approved for purity and elegance of style. I translated, for instance, an epistle of Cicero into French, and after throwing it aside till the words and phrases were obliterated from my memory, I re-translated my French into such Latin as I could find, and then compared each sentence of my imperfect version with the ease, the grace, the propriety of the Roman orator. A similar experiment was made on some pages of the Revolutions of Vertot; I turned them into Latin, returned them after a sufficient interval into my own French, and again scrutinized the resemblance or dissimilitude of the copy and the original. By degrees I was less ashamed, by degrees I was more satisfied with myself, and I persevered in the practice of these double translations, which filled several books, till I had acquired the knowledge of both idioms, and the command at least of a correct style.

Eunuchs are regularly described with a rather extensive language of negation that defines them in terms of what they are not. These adjectives of negation are readily apparent in Greek because they all begin with the alpha privative prefix. Eunuchs are beardless (ἀγένειος), low-born (ἀγεννής), fruitless or unable to bear fruit (ἄκαρπος), unmanly (ἄνανδρας  [sic, read ἄνανδρος]), ignorant of war (ἀπειροπόλεμος), not working (ἀργός or ἀεργός), sickly (ἀσθενής), unsuckled or unweaned (ἄθηλος), unwilling to share (ἀμετάδοτος), not gentle, cruel (ἀπηνής), insatiable (ἀπροσκορής), dishonored (ἄτιμος), unworthy (ἄχρηστος). Theophylaktos of Ohrid is aware of this negative rhetoric and specifically lists negative charges leveled against eunuchs. They are labeled as ill-omened (ἀπαίσιος οἰωνός), disorderly (ἄκοσμος), undignified (ἄσεμνος), and unsociable (ἀκοινώνητος).

εἰκότως οὖν ἄθηλοι, ἄνανδροι [cod. al. ἄνανδρες], ἀνδρόγυνοι, σιδηροκατάδικοι καὶ γυναικομανεῖς προσηγορεύθησαν.

Labels: typographical and other errors