Monday, March 18, 2024

 

A Time to Keep Silence, and a Time to Speak

Euripides, Orestes 638-639 (tr. David Kovacs):
That is good advice. Speak. Sometimes speech is better than silence, sometimes silence than speech.

λέγ᾽· εὖ γὰρ εἶπας. ἔστι δ᾽ οὗ σιγὴ λόγου
κρείσσων γένοιτ᾽ ἄν, ἔστι δ᾽ οὗ σιγῆς λόγος.

 

Money-Grubbers

Walter Scott (1771-1832), "Introductory Epistle," The Fortunes of Nigel:
Nay, I will venture to say, that no work of imagination, proceeding from the mere consideration of a certain sum of copy-money, ever did, or ever will, succeed. So the lawyer who pleads, the soldier who fights, the physician who prescribes, the clergyman—if such there be—who preaches, without any zeal for their profession, without any sense of its dignity, and merely on account of their fee, pay, or stipend, degrade themselves to the rank of sordid mechanics.

 

Cultural Appropriation

Athenaeus 6.273d-e (tr. S. Douglas Olson):
Because it is a mark of intelligent men to maintain the ancient practices that allowed them to overcome other nations in war, while simultaneously adopting anything good or useful that their defeated enemies had worth imitating. This is what the Romans did in ancient times: they preserved their traditional practices, while at the same time taking over from the people they conquered any remnant of good behavior they discovered there, leaving them what was worthless, so they would never be able to recover their losses.

συνετῶν γάρ ἐστιν ἀνδρῶν ἐμμένειν τοῖς παλαιοῖς ζηλώμασιν δι᾽ ὧν στρατευόμενοι κατεστρέφοντο τοὺς ἄλλους, λαμβάνοντες ἅμα τοῖς δοριαλώτοις καὶ εἴ τι χρήσιμον καὶ καλὸν ὑπῆρχε παρ᾽ ἐκείνοις εἰς μίμησιν: ὅπερ ἐν τοῖς πάλαι χρόνοις ἐποίουν οἱ Ῥωμαῖοι. διαφυλάττοντες γὰρ ἅμα καὶ τὰ πάτρια μετῆγον παρὰ τῶν χειρωθέντων εἲ τι λείψανον καλῆς ἀσκήσεως εὕρισκον, τὰ ἀχρηστα ἐκείνοις ἐῶντες, ὅπως μηδ᾽ εἰς ἀνάκτησιν ὧν ἀπέβαλον ἐλθεῖν ποτε δυνηθῶσι.
Cf. Sallust, The War with Catiline 51.37-38 (reporting a speech by Caesar; tr. J.C. Rolfe):
Our ancestors, Fathers of the Senate, were never lacking either in wisdom or courage, and yet pride did not keep them from adopting foreign institutions, provided they were honourable. They took their offensive and defensive weapons from the Samnites, the badges of their magistrates for the most part from the Etruscans. In fine, whatever they found suitable among allies or foes, they put in practice at home with the greatest enthusiasm, preferring to imitate rather than envy the successful.

maiores nostri, patres conscripti, neque consili neque audaciae umquam eguere; neque illis superbia obstat, quo minus aliena instituta, si modo proba erant, imitarentur. arma atque tela militaria ab Samnitibus, insignia magistratuum ab Tuscis pleraque sumpserunt. postremo, quod ubique apud socios aut hostis idoneum videbatur, cum summo studio domi exsequebantur: imitari quam invidere bonis malebant.

 

Prayer for Plenty

Horace, Carmen Saeculare 29-32 (tr. C.E. Bennett):
Bountiful in crops and cattle, may Mother Earth deck Ceres with a crown of corn; and may Jove's wholesome rains and breezes give increase to the harvest!

fertilis frugum pecorisque Tellus
spicea donet Cererem corona;        30
nutriant fetus et aquae salubres
    et Iovis aurae.
Paul Shorey and Gordon J. Laing ad loc.:
29. fertilis frugum: so Livy, 5.34.2, Gallia ... frugum hominumque fertilis fuit. Cf. 4.6.39; and, for the blessings invoked, cf. Aesch. Suppl. 689-692; Eumen. 924-926, 938 sqq.; Psalms 94. 13. — tellus: a black sow was offered to Terra Mater on the third night [of the Ludi Saeculares].

30. spicea ... corona: cf. Δηοῖ τῇ σταχυοστεφάνῳ, Anth. Pal. 6.104.8; cf. Tibull. 1.1.15, flava Ceres tibi sit nostro de rure corona | Spicea. (At the Ambarvalia, see Pater, Marius, Chap. I.). Cf. Warton, First of April 'Fancy ... see Ceres grasp her crown of corn | And Plenty load her ample horn'; Hamlet, 5.2, 'As Peace should still her wheaten garland wear.'

31-32. cf. Catull. 62.41, (flos) quem mulcent aurae, firmat sol, educat imber. — Iovis: cf. 1.1.25. n.; Epode 2.29. — fetus: here crops.
Line 29 is quoted on an Italian stamp celebrating the 2000th aniversary of Horace's birth:

Sunday, March 17, 2024

 

Question the World

Augustine, Sermons 141.2 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 776; tr. Edmund Hill):
Question the world, the furniture of the heavens, the brightness and arrangement of the stars, the sun providing for the day, the moon which comforts the night; question the earth bearing its yield of herbs and trees, full of animals, completely furnished in every respect; question the sea, full of so many and such a variety of swimming creatures; question the air, pulsing with so many flying things; question them all, and see if they don't answer you, after a fashion in their own way, "God made us." Serious and great-minded philosophers have inquired into these things, and have come to a knowledge of the artist through the works of art.

Interroga mundum, ornatum caeli, fulgorem dispositionemque siderum, solem diei sufficientem, lunam noctis solatium; interroga terram fructificantem herbis et lignis, animalibus plenam, hominibus exornatam; interroga mare, quantis et qualibus natatilibus plenum; interroga aera, quantis volatilibus viget; interroga omnia, et vide si non sensu suo tamquam tibi respondent: Deus nos fecit. Haec et philosophi nobiles quaesierunt, et ex arte artificem cognoverunt.
Compare Augustine, Confessions 10.6.9 (tr. E.B. Pusey):
I asked the earth, and it answered me, "I am not He;" and whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, "We are not Thy God, seek above us." I asked the moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, "Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God." I asked the heavens, sun, moon, stars, "Nor (say they) are we the God whom thou seekest." And I replied unto all the things which encompass the door of my flesh: "Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me something of Him." And they cried out with a loud voice, "He made us."

interrogavi terram, et dixit, 'non sum.' et quaecumque in eadem sunt, idem confessa sunt. interrogavi mare et abyssos et reptilia animarum vivarum, et responderunt, 'non sumus deus tuus; quaere super nos.' interrogavi auras flabiles, et inquit universus aer cum incolis suis, 'fallitur Anaximenes; non sum deus.' interrogavi caelum, solem, lunam, stellas: 'neque nos sumus deus, quem quaeris,' inquiunt. et dixi omnibus his quae circumstant fores carnis meae, 'dicite mihi de deo meo, quod vos non estis, dicite mihi de illo aliquid,' et exclamaverunt voce magna, 'ipse fecit nos.'

 

My Own Country

Allan Cunningham (1784-1842), "It's Hame, and It's Hame," Poems and Songs, ed. Peter Cunningham (London: John Murray, 1847), pp. 25-26:
It's hame, and it's hame, hame fain wad I be,
An' it's hame, hame, hame, to my ain countree!
When the flower is i' the bud, and the leaf is on the tree,
The lark shall sing me hame in my ain countree;
It's hame, and it's hame, hame fain wad I be,
And it's hame, hame, hame, to my ain countree!

The green leaf o' loyaltie's beginning for to fa',
The bonny white rose it is withering an' a';
But I'll water 't wi' the blude of usurping tyrannie,
An' green it will grow in my ain countree.
It's hame, and it's hame, hame fain wad I be,
An' it's hame, hame, hame, to my ain countree!

There's naught now frae ruin my country can save,
But the keys o' kind heaven to open the grave,
That a' the noble martyrs who died for loyaltie,
May rise again and fight for their ain countree.
It's hame, and it's hame, hame fain wad I be,
An' it's hame, hame, hame, to my ain countree!

The great now are gane, a' who ventured to save,
The new grass is springing on the tap o' their grave;
But the sun thro' the mirk blinks blythe in my ee:
'I'll shine on ye yet in your ain countree.'
It's hame, and it's hame, hame fain wad I be,
An' it's hame, hame, hame, to my ain countree!

Saturday, March 16, 2024

 

Progress?

Roberto Calasso (1941-2021), The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, tr. Tim Parks (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 103:
Every notion of progress is refuted by the existence of the Iliad. The perfection of the first step makes any idea of progressive ascension ridiculous.

 

The Dark Side

Craig Simpson, "British countryside can evoke ‘dark nationalist’ feelings in paintings, warns museum," Telegraph (March 14, 2024):
The Fitzwilliam Museum has suggested that paintings of the British countryside evoke dark “nationalist feelings”.

[....]

A sign for the Nature gallery states: “Landscape paintings were also always entangled with national identity.

“The countryside was seen as a direct link to the past, and therefore a true reflection of the essence of a nation.

“Paintings showing rolling English hills or lush French fields reinforced loyalty and pride towards a homeland.

“The darker side of evoking this nationalist feeling is the implication that only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong.”
Roger Scruton (1944-2020), England and the Need for Nations (London: Civitas, 2006), pp. 15-16:
To put the matter simply: nations are defined not by kinship or religion but by a homeland. National loyalty is founded in the love of place, of the customs and traditions that have been inscribed in the landscape and of the desire to protect these good things through a common law and a common loyalty. The art and literature of the nation is an art and literature of settlement, a celebration of all that attaches the place to the people and the people to the place. This you find in Shakespeare's history plays, in the novels of Austen, Eliot and Hardy, in the music of Elgar and Vaughan-Williams, in the art of Constable and Crome, in the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson. And you find it in the art and literature of every nation that has defined itself as a nation. Listen to Sibelius and an imaginative vision of Finland unfolds before your inner ear; read Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz and old Lithuania welcomes you home; look at the paintings of Corot and Cézanne, and it is France that invites your eye. Russian national literature is about Russia; Manzoni's I promessi sposi is about resurgent Italy; Lorca's poetry about Spain, and so on.
John Constable (1776-1837), Parham's Mill, Gillingham, Dorset (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, accession number 2291):

 

Cure for Dislocation

Cato, On Agriculture 160 (tr. William Davis Hooper, rev. Harrison Boyd Ash):
Any kind of dislocation may be cured by the following charm: Take a green reed four or five feet long and split it down the middle, and let two men hold it to your hips. Begin to chant: "motas uaeta daries dardares astataries dissunapiter" and continue until they meet. Brandish a knife over them, and when the reeds​ meet so that one touches the other, grasp with the hand and cut right and left. If the pieces are applied to the dislocation or the fracture, it will heal. And none the less chant every day, and, in the case of a dislocation, in this manner, if you wish: "huat haut haut istasis tarsis ardannabou dannaustra."

Luxum siquod est, hac cantione sanum fiet. Harundinem prende tibi viridem P. IIII aut quinque longam, mediam diffinde, et duo homines teneant ad coxendices. Incipe cantare: "motas uaeta daries dardares astataries dissunapiter," usque dum coeant. Ferrum insuper iactato. Ubi coierint et altera alteram tetigerint, id manu prehende et dextra sinistra praecide, ad luxum aut ad fracturam alliga, sanum fiet. Et tamen cotidie cantato et luxato vel hoc modo: "huat haut haut istasis tarsis ardannabou dannaustra."
See also H.L. Mencken, "Chiropractic," Baltimore Evening Sun (December 8, 1924), rpt. in his Prejudices, Sixth Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), pp. 217-227.

Friday, March 15, 2024

 

Smug

David Kovacs, The Heroic Muse: Studies in the Hippolytus and Hecuba of Euripides (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 24, with note on p. 125:
Consider the implications of the words "smug" and "self-satisfied." Their presuppositions are thoroughly Christian. We have no right to be satisfied with ourselves, Christian moralists tell us, since we are fallen and sinful creatures. Such meritorious actions as we perform are deeply flawed, as we see when we examine our motivations. And even if we possess genuine virtues, to think about them with satisfaction is to incur the sin of pride. Merely to state these presuppositions is to show how un-Greek they are. What Greek in classical literature ever expresses hesitancy about taking pleasure in good qualities he actually possesses or feels obliged to meditate on his shortcomings? This is not a question that admits very easily of a detailed philological study, and the rhetorical question above is an appeal to intuition. But how many words would it take to translate "smug" into classical Greek? Could it even be done?4

4 S.C. Woodhouse, An English-Greek Dictionary (London 1910), gives for 'self-complacent' χαῦνος, which means 'foolish', 'mistaken about one's merits' (cf. Aristotle EN 1123b8), a rather different idea. Nor will σεμνός translate 'smug', as one reader suggested.

 

A Miracle

Pherecrates, fragment 113 Kassel and Austin, lines 32-3 (Poetae Comici Graeci, vol. VII, p. 159; tr. S. Douglas Olson):
And whenever someone ate or drank any of this food,
twice as much of it was immediately there again.

καὶ τῶνδ᾽ ἑκάστοτ᾽ εἰ φάγοι τις ἢ πίοι,
διπλάσι᾽ ἐγίγνετ᾽ εὐθὺς ἐξ ἀρχῆς πάλιν.
Matthew 14:19-21 (KJV):
[19] And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude.

[20] And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full.

[21] And they that had eaten were about five thousand men, beside women and children.

[19] καὶ κελεύσας τοὺς ὄχλους ἀνακλιθῆναι ἐπὶ τοῦ χόρτου, λαβὼν τοὺς πέντε ἄρτους καὶ τοὺς δύο ἰχθύας, ἀναβλέψας εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν εὐλόγησεν καὶ κλάσας ἔδωκεν τοῖς μαθηταῖς τοὺς ἄρτους οἱ δὲ μαθηταὶ τοῖς ὄχλοις.

[20] καὶ ἔφαγον πάντες καὶ ἐχορτάσθησαν, καὶ ἦραν τὸ περισσεῦον τῶν κλασμάτων δώδεκα κοφίνους πλήρεις.

[21] οἱ δὲ ἐσθίοντες ἦσαν ἄνδρες ὡσεὶ πεντακισχίλιοι χωρὶς γυναικῶν καὶ παιδίων.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

 

Flattery

Diodorus of Sinope, fragment 2 Kassel and Austin, lines 35-40 (Poetae Comici Graeci, vol. V, pp. 28-29; tr. S. Douglas Olson):
When someone burps in their direction
after he eats radishes or rotten sheatfish,
they insist he's had violets and roses for lunch.
And if the host is lying on a couch with one of them
and lets a fart, the other guy leans over to sniff it and begs to be told:
"Where do you get that incense from?"

                                    οἷς ἐπειδὰν προσερύγῃ
ῥαφανῖδας καὶ σαπρὸν σίλουρον καταφαγών,
ἴα καὶ ῥόδα φασὶν αὐτὸν ἠριστηκέναι.
ἐπὰν δ' ἀποπάρδῃ μετά τινος κατακείμενος
τούτων, προσάγων τὴν ῥῖνα δεῖθ' αὑτῷ φράσαι·
"πόθεν τὸ θυμίαμα τοῦτο λαμβάνεις;"
The same, tr. Charles Burton Gulick:
When a patron, after eating radishes or a stale sheat-fish, belches in their faces, the flatterers say that he must have lunched on violets and roses. And when the patron breaks wind as he lies next to one of these fellows, the latter applies his nose and begs him to tell him, "Where do you buy that incense?"
Cf. the euphemistic translation of C.D. Yonge:
So that if any one should eat a radish,
Or stinking shad, they'd take their oaths at once
That he had eaten lilies, roses, violets;
And that if any odious smell should rise,
They'd ask where you did get such lovely scents.

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Clever Brains

Peter Green, From Ikaria to the Stars: Classical Mythification, Ancient and Modern (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004),p. 221:
Clever brains are far from indifferent to the lust for power: they enjoy bossing the world for its own good, and have no shortage of blueprints from which to work. Further, the habit of thinking exclusively in abstract terms (as revolutionaries and authoritarians throughout history have demonstrated in horrifying detail) anesthetizes one’s mind against the raw realities of life and death. No accident that both Robespierre and Lenin killed human beings like flies in pursuit of theoretical ideals.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

 

Unflesh

Augustine, Sermons 140.6 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 775; tr. Edmund Hill, with his note):
The gospel of John puts our minds through their paces, planes them smooth and defleshes17 them, to make sure we think about God in a spiritual, not a fleshly, material kind of way.

17. Excarnat, possibly a word he invented himself. It is not given in Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary.

Exercet mentes Evangelium Ioannis, limat et excarnat, ut de Deo non carnaliter, sed spiritaliter sapiamus.
He didn't invent the word. See Thesaurus Linguae Latinae s.v. excarno (5,2:1203):
See also Alexander Souter, A Glossary of Later Latin to 600 A.D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 133:
excarno, deprive of flesh (SS. Ezech. 24. 4 cod. Wirc.); weaken (ZENO 1. 12. 8); cut off goose-flesh (CHIRON 575); rid of fleshly characteristics (AVG. c. Arrian. 14. 9, serm. 140. 6).

 

Some Aphorisms of Ritschl

Basil L. Gildersleeve, "Friedrich Ritschl," American Journal of Philology 5.3 (1884) 339-355 (at 349-350):
Some of the aphorisms, mere memoranda that have been found among his early papers, show that the young critic had clear notions of his work. So he exacts "preliminary knowledge," he would not have the student rush into textual criticism without training in language, without full acquaintance with the theme. "The opinions of the predecessors must be known." Hundreds of emendations are put forward anew, and that not by mean men and ignorant novices, but by the lights of our profession: not from wilful dishonesty, but simply in a spirit of vanity and laziness. "No prejudices." "Fix clearly in your eye what you are after." "Don't be satisfied with half notions, squinting thoughts. Penetrate into the heart of the matter with your interpretation." "Don't glide over what you don't understand." "Don't admit to yourself that there is more than one right." "Distinguish sharply between the possible and the impossible." "Cultivate the feeling of truth." (Bentley being the model held up.) "Never grow weary in trying to find ways." "Don't try to explain everything." "Don't go into criticism until you exhaust hermeneutics." "Hold the mean between audacity and timidity."

All self-evident, you say, but none the less necessary. These rules are violated at every turn to-day.

 

Fulsome

https://www.guernicamag.com/from-the-edges-of-a-broken-world/:
Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.
Isaac Asimov, quoted in William and Mary Morris, Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1975), p. 298 (s.v. fulsome):
One of my favorite criteria of illiteracy.
S.I. Hayakawa, quoted id., p. 299:
Horrors!
Orville Prescott, quoted id., p. 299:
Vile.
Long live prescriptivism.

 

Impossibility of Hybrids

Lucretius 5.916-924 (tr. Martin Ferguson Smith, with partial critical apparatus from Marcus Deufert's Teubner edition):
The fact is that, although there were manifold seeds of things in the ground at the time when the earth first produced animal life, this is no proof that beasts of mixed breed, combining limbs of different animals, could have been created. For the things that even now shoot in profusion from the earth—the various kinds of grasses and crops and exuberant trees—cannot, despite their abundance, be created intermixed: each proceeds in its own manner, and all preserve their distinguishing characteristics in conformity with an immutable law of nature.

nam quod multa fuere in terris semina rerum
tempore quo primum tellus animalia fudit,
nil tamen est signi mixtas potuisse creari
inter se pecudes compactaque membra animantum,
propterea quia quae de terris nunc quoque abundant        920
herbarum genera ac fruges arbustaque laeta
non tamen inter se possunt complexa creari,
sed res quaeque suo ritu procedit et omnes
foedere naturae certo discrimina servant.

923 sed res Goebel (1857) 26 (res sic iam Lambinus), comparans 2, 718–722 (cf. quoque 916; 1, 184–187) : sed si Ω : sed stirps Bockemüller : sed uis Lachmann
Monica R. Gale ad loc.:
As L. explains in book 2, the fertility of the earth is due to the abundance of different kinds of 'seeds' ( or particles) contained within it; but there are nevertheless limits on what it can produce, because not all types of atoms are susceptible of combination with all others (2.589-99, 700-29). This rule should apply to the distant past as to the present; and therefore the argument that hybrids might have come into existence because 'there were many seeds of things in the ground' falls.
See the list of parallels in Gordon Lindsay Campbell, Lucretius on Creation and Evolution: A Commentary on De Rerum Natura, Book Five, Lines 772-1104 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 334:
Anaximander DK12 A30; ?Pythagoras DK58 C6; Empedocles DK31 B57, B59, B61, B62, B71; Anaxagoras DK59 A; (Diog. Laert. 2.9; Hippol. Ref. 1.8.12); Archelaus DK60 A4; Pl. Prt. 320c ff.; Genesis 1:21 and 2:19.

 

Two Types of People

Homer, Odyssey 8.572-576 (tr. A.T. Murray):
But come, now, tell me this and declare it truly: whither thou hast wandered and to what countries of men thou hast come; tell me of the people and of their well-built cities, both of those who are cruel and wild and unjust, and of those who love strangers and fear the gods in their thoughts.

ἀλλ᾽ ἄγε μοι τόδε εἰπὲ καὶ ἀτρεκέως κατάλεξον,
ὅππῃ ἀπεπλάγχθης τε καὶ ἅς τινας ἵκεο χώρας
ἀνθρώπων, αὐτούς τε πόλιάς τ᾽ ἐὺ ναιετοώσας,
ἠμὲν ὅσοι χαλεποί τε καὶ ἄγριοι οὐδὲ δίκαιοι,        575
οἵ τε φιλόξεινοι, καί σφιν νόος ἐστὶ θεουδής.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

 

Better One Than Two

A.E. Housman, "Bailey's Lucretius," Classical Review 14.7 (October, 1900) 367-368 (at 368):
Mr Bailey says in his preface that he has been sparing of original conjectures because he does not wish to inflict new wounds upon the text. This estimate of his own talent in that department is certainly modest and seemingly correct. He prints only one emendation, and it is intust. Better one than two.
Bailey printed the conjecture at 4.961, but he had been anticipated. See G.B.A. Fletcher, "Lucretiana," Latomus 27.4 (October-December, 1968) 884-893 (at 891):
Ernout, Diels, Martin and Buechner attribute to Bailey, who attributes it to himself, Everett's conjecture intust made in Harv. Stud. in Class. Philology, 7, 1896, p. 32.
See also Marcus Deufert, Kritischer Kommentar zu Lukrezens De rerum natura (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 265-266.

 

More Craziness from Google Books

Google Books confuses (and misspells and misdates) John Newbold Hough's Princeton dissertation, The Composition of the "Pseudolus" of Plautus (Lancaster: Lancaster Press, Inc., 1931), with A. Foucher de Careil, Leibniz et Pierre-le-Grand (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1874).

By the way, there seems to be no entry for John Newbold Hough (1906-2000) in the Database of Classical Scholars, although the presentation of that database on the World Wide Web makes it extremely difficult to use (at least for me with the Brave web browser). Hough doesn't deserve oblivion. He taught at the University of Colorado, published many articles (mostly as John N. Hough), and was active in classical circles.

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