Laudator Temporis Acti

George Santayana, Persons and Places (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944), chapter X (The Latin School):

I was an unprofitable though not unappreciative pupil to Mr. Fiske, because I didn't learn my Greek properly. That was not his fault. If I could have had him for a private tutor I should have become a good Grecian; it would have added immensely to my life and to my philosophy. But I was only one of forty; I was expected to study dryly, mechanically, without the side-lights and the stimulus of non-verbal interest attached to the words .... I didn't study enough. I learned and remembered well what I could learn from Mr. Fiske without studying. He was an exceedingly nervous, shy man; evidently suffered at having to address any one, or having to find words in which to express his feelings. His whole body would become tense, he would stand almost on tiptoe, with two or three fingers in the side pocket of his trousers, and the other two or three moving outside, as if reaching for the next word. These extreme mannerisms occasioned no ridicule; the boys all knew that there was a clear mind and a goodwill behind them; and Mr. Fiske was universally liked and admired. This, although his language was as contorted as his gestures. He always seemed to be translating literally and laboriously from the Greek or the German. When he wished to fix in our minds the meaning of a Greek word he would say, for instance: "χαράδρα, a ravine, from which our word character, the deeply graven result of long-continued habit." Or "καταρρέω, to flow down, whence our word catarrh, copious down-flowings from the upper regions of the head." We didn't laugh, and we remembered.

Who was Mr. Fiske? According to the index of Persons and Places, he was George Alfred Fiske. But Santayana says he later became headmaster, and a history of Boston Latin School on the World Wide Web says:

Arthur Irving Fiske became Head Master in 1902. One of the ablest scholars in Massachusetts, he was loved and respected by his pupils.

Mr. Fiske's remark on χαράδρα (or Santayana's recollection of it) is a little misleading, because χαρακτήρ doesn't come from χαράδρα. Both have a common origin in χαράσσω, to cut into furrows, to furrow, scratch.

Chrysippus, quoted by Athenaeus 1.5e, on Philoxenus (tr. Charles Burton Gulick):

I remember a certain gourmand, who was so far lost to all feelings of shame before his companions, no matter what happened, that in the public baths he accustomed his hand to heat by plunging it into hot water, and gargled his throat with hot water that he might not shrink from hot food. For they used to say that he had actually won the cooks over to serving the dishes very hot, his object being to eat up everything alone [μόνος καταναλίσκῃ], since nobody else was able to follow his example.

See also Athenaeus 1.8e:

Yet the notion of eating alone [τὸ μονοφαγεῖν] was not unknown among the ancients. Antiphanes: "You eat alone [μονοφαγεῖς]! That's a wilful injury to me." Ameipsias: "To the devil with you, solitary eater [μονοφάγε] and housebreaker!"

For more on this subject see:

• Solitary Eating
  
• More on Eating Alone

Roy Rogers was known as the King of the Cowboys, an apt designation because Roy is from French roi = king. Tex Ritter also had an aptronym, because like all cowboys he rode a horse, and Ritter is a German noun meaning rider or knight.

Calvert Watkins, How To Kill a Dragon. Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), chapter 17, deals with Some Indo-European prayers: Cato's lustration of the fields. He calls expressions like visos invisosque (seen and unseen) from that lustration prayer Argument plus Negated Argument, and cites parallels from Umbrian, Vedic, and Hittite (pp. 208-209). A little closer to home is the phrase all things visible and invisible in the Credo of the Mass (Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium.).

Recent essays by Theodore Dalrymple:

• Real Crime, Fake Justice
  
• A Little Social Experiment
  
• Dependency as Independence?
  
• Sorting Out the Selves
  
• The Terrorists Among Us

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Edward Cook at Ralph the Sacred River points out that in ancient times teachers often sat while their students stood. Try that in the modern college classroom! This is a particular application of the general rule that the superior sits and the inferior stands. See Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 2.2.1-10, where the governor of Crete and his father visited the philosopher Taurus. There was one seat, and Taurus asked the father to take it. The father replied that his son should sit by virtue of his rank. Taurus discussed the matter and concluded that in public the father should stand in deference to his son the magistrate, but in private the son should show respect for his father by giving him the seat.

Cf. President Lyndon Johnson and what someone called "his amazing predilection for conducting business while sitting on the toilet doing his business." His aides presumably stood at attention in the fog (or should I say the bog?) and took notes.

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Language Log, C*m sancto spiritu:

Yes, another triumph of the iTunes automatic asterisking program: the innocent Latin preposition "cum" 'with' loses its "u" because of its dirty homograph .... This wonderful fact from Barbara Partee, who downloaded "Carmina Burana" from iTunes and was confronted with "Si puer c*m puellula."

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Curculio has an amusing collection of Worst Classical Typos, including the first word of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus and the last word of Horace's Ars Poetica.

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Linguistic pet peeves:

• "Give it up for," meaning applaud for. What's the antecedent of the pronoun it?
  
• "Best-in-class." What's wrong with plain old "best?"

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Deogolwulf at the Joy of Curmudgeonry gives us "mehr Licht" with a post entitled A Little More Lichtenberg, containing a translation of Lichtenberg's Sudelbücher E170:

That one can convince one’s opponents with printed reasons, I have not believed since the year 1764. It is not for that purpose that I have taken up my pen, but rather merely to annoy them, and to give strength and courage to those on our side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.

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Among the malapropisms in Dicken's Our Mutual Friend are "Alfred David" for "affidavit" and "diseased" for "deceased." I have actually seen "diseased" for "deceased" in a transcription of legal dictation, and examples can also be found in Google, e.g. from an obituary, "The diseased was an old and highly esteemed citizen of this county."

Reuters correspondent Mohammed Abbas, in a sad story entitled In Sudan, pale is beautiful but price is high, writes:

At the crowded Beauty Queen parlor in Sudan's capital Khartoum, beautician Selma Awa says she just cannot understand why so many of her clients want to get their skin lightened.

"One hundred percent of women who come here have it done," she said. "People think it's prettier to look white. In my opinion, dark is prettier. I don't know who they want to look like."

In many countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia lighter-colored skin is considered prettier and paler women are believed to be wealthier, more educated and more desirable.

This attitude has led to a boom in the use of skin-lightening products in Sudan, a vast country torn by war where skin color also has political connotations.

Rasha Moussa, a maid, pulls some skin-whitening cream from her handbag. "I use it on my face to make my face shine. The Sudanese see the light color as better than dark. I think it's a complex that we have," she said.

"People judge you here by your color ... If they see me and someone else with lighter skin wearing the same clothes, they would say she is living a comfortable life and I'm a poor woman," she added.

Millions of women throughout Africa use creams and soaps containing chemicals, like hydroquinone, to lighten the color of their skin. But the creams can cause long-term damage.

Dermatologists say prolonged use of hydroquinone and mercury-based products, also found in some creams, destroys the skin's protective outer layer.

Eventually the skin starts to burn, itch or blister, becomes extremely sensitive to sunlight and then turns even blacker than before.

Prolonged use can damage the nerves or even lead to kidney failure or skin cancer and so prove fatal.

"It's a very bad problem here. It sometimes kills the patient ... It's bad, bad news," said a doctor at a Khartoum hospital. He said the number of women coming to the dermatology department with problems caused by skin-whitening treatments had grown to at least one in four of all dermatology patients.

In earlier posts on umbrellas and pallor, I pointed out that in ancient Greece, a man was supposed to look sun-burned, a woman pale. Not content with cultivating a pale complexion by staying indoors, some women artificially whitened their skin by means of cosmetics made of white lead, known in Greek as ψιμύθιον (psimythion), in Latin as cerussa. English ceruse is derived from Latin cerussa. I used to think English bismuth was derived from Greek psimythion, but apparently it isn't.

We see the use of white lead in a passage from Xenophon's Oeconomicus (10.2, tr. E.C. Marchant):

Thereupon Ischomachus took up his parable. "Well, one day, Socrates, I noticed that her face was made up: she had rubbed in white lead in order to look even whiter than she is, and alkanet juice to heighten the rosy colour of her cheeks; and she was wearing boots with thick soles to increase her height."

In Lysias' speech On the Murder of Eratosthenes, the defendant Euphiletus says he began to suspect that his wife was unfaithful when she started using white lead on her face (14, 17, tr. W.R.M. Lamb):

I asked her why the doors made a noise in the night; she told me that the child's lamp had gone out, and she had lit it again at our neighbour's. I was silent and believed it was so. But it struck me, sirs, that she had powdered her face [ἐψιμυθιῶσθαι], though her brother had died not thirty days before; even so, however, I made no remark on the fact, but left the house in silence.
....
All that had happened came into my mind, and I was filled with suspicion, -- reflecting first how I was shut up in my chamber, and then remembering how on that night the inner and outer doors made a noise, which had never occurred before, and how it struck me that my wife had put on powder.

Two fragments of Greek comedy preserved in book 13 of Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae (tr. C.B. Gulick) indicate that the use of white lead and other cosmetics was frowned upon by the censorious:

Now our married women are not like those described by Eubulus in The Wreath-Sellers: "They are not, Zeus knows, plastered over with layers of white lead, and they have not, like you, their jowls smeared with mulberry juice. And if you go out on a summer's day, two rills of inky water flow from your eyes, and the sweat rolling from your cheeks upon your throat makes a vermilion furrow, while the hairs blown about on your faces look grey, they are so full of white lead."
....
Alexis, in the play entitled Fair Measure, sets forth the elaborate devices of the prostitutes and the artful tricks by which they care for their bodies in these words...."Another woman has eyebrows too light: they paint them with lamp-black. Still another, as it happens, is too dark: she plasters herself over with white lead. One has a complexion too white: she rubs on rouge."

See also Plautus, Mostellaria 258-264 (tr. E.L. Bassett and L.W. Jarcho, rev. Charles T. Murphy), where the courtesan Philematium wants to put on makeup, but is dissuaded by her maid Scapha. Philematium's lover Philolaches is hiding and watching.

PHILETAMIUM: Bring me the powder.
SCAPHA. Powder? What for?
PHILETAMIUM: Why, to put on my cheeks.
SCAPHA. You might as well try to bleach ivory with shoe-polish!
PHILOLACHES (aside): Chalk one up for you, Scapha. Ivory and shoe-polish -- darn good.
PHILETAMIUM: Well, let's have the rouge.
SCAPHA: I will not. You're too smart -- gilding the lily, eh? A young thing like you doesn't need a jot of rouge, lipstick, mascara, or any other war-paint.

PHILEM. cedo cerussam. SC. quid cerussa opust nám? PHILEM. qui malas oblinam.
SC. una operá | ebur atramento candefacere postules.
PHILOL. lepide dictum de atramento atque ebore. eugae! plaudo Scaphae.
PHILEM. tum tu igitur cedo purpurissum. SC. non do. scita es tu quidem.
nova pictura interpolare vis opus lepidissimum?
non istanc aetatem oportet pigmentum ullum attingere,
neque cerussam neque Melinum neque aliam ullam offuciam.

That quintessential grumpy old man, Saint Jerome, fulminates against the use of white lead and other worldly adornments in the following passages from his Letters (tr. W.H. Freemantle).

38.3.2:

The women who ought to scandalize Christians are those who paint their eyes and lips with rouge and cosmetics; whose chalked faces, unnaturally white, are like those of idols; upon whose cheeks every chance tear leaves a furrow; who fail to realize that years make them old; who heap their heads with hair not their own; who smooth their faces, and rub out the wrinkles of age; and who, in the presence of their grandsons, behave like trembling school-girls. A Christian woman should blush to do violence to nature, or to stimulate desire by bestowing care upon the flesh. "They that are in the flesh," the apostle tells us, "cannot please God."

illae Christianos oculos potius scandalizent, quae purpurisso et quibusdam fucis ora oculosque depingunt, quarum facies gypseae et nimio candore deformes idola mentiuntur, quibus si forte inprovidens lacrimarum stilla eruperit, sulco defluit, quas nec numerus annorum potest docere, quod vetulae sunt, quae capillis alienis verticem instruunt et praeteritam iuventutem in rugis anilibus poliunt, quae denique ante nepotum gregem trementes virgunculae conponuntur. erubescat mulier Christiana, si naturae cogit decorem, si carnis curam facit ad concupiscentiam, in qua qui sunt, secundum apostolum Christo placere non possunt.

54.7.1:

In the gospel a harlot wins salvation. How? She is baptized in her tears and wipes the Lord's feet with that same hair with which she had before deceived many. She does not wear a waving headdress or creaking boots, she does not darken her eyes with antimony. Yet in her squalor she is lovelier than ever. What place have rouge and white lead on the face of a Christian woman? The one simulates the natural red of the cheeks and of the lips; the other the whiteness of the face and of the neck. They serve only to inflame young men's passions, to stimulate lust, and to indicate an unchaste mind.

meretrix illa in evangelio baptizata lacrimis suis et crine, quo multos ante deceperat, pedes domini tergente servata est. non habuit crispantes mitras nec stridentes calceolos nec orbes stibio fulginatos, quanto foedior, tanto pulchrior. quid facit in facie Christianae purpurissus et cerussa? quorum alterum ruborem genarum labiorumque mentitur, alterum candorem oris et colli: ignes iuvenum, fomenta libidinum, inpudica mentis indicia.

107.5.1:

Let her very dress and garb remind her to Whom she is promised. Do not pierce her ears or paint her face consecrated to Christ with white lead or rouge. Do not hang gold or pearls about her neck or load her head with jewels, or by reddening her hair make it suggest the fires of gehenna.

ipse habitus et vestitus doceat eam, cui promissa sit. cave, ne aures perfores, ne cerussa et purpurisso consecrata Christo ora depingas, ne collum margaritis et auro premas, ne caput gemmis oneres, ne capillum inrufes et ei aliquid de gehennae ignibus auspiceris.

In one way, I agree with Saint Jerome. I wish women would not wear makeup. But in another way I disagree with him. He seems to think that women are more alluring and enticing and dangerously attractive with makeup. So far as I am concerned, the natural look is more alluring and enticing and attractive. Makeup, jewelry, tattoos, painted nails, etc. all turn me off.

My friend Jim K. sent me a couple of paragraphs from Alain De Botton, Status Anxiety (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), p. 75:

The word "snobbery" came into use for the first time in England during the 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility), or "s.nob," next to the names of ordinary students on examination lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers.

In the word's earliest days, a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by a lack of high status in others, a person who believes in a flawless equation between social rank and human worth. In his Book of Snobs (1848), a pioneering essay on the subject, William Thackeray observed that over the previous twenty-five years, snobs had "spread over England like the railroads. They are now known and recognized throughout an Empire on which the sun never sets".

The derivation from "sine nobilitate" smells like a folk etymology to me. Ernest Weekley, The Romance of Words (1911), chapter XIII (Etymological Fact and Fiction) gives a good rule of thumb:

An etymology that has anything to do with a person or an anecdote is to be regarded with suspicion. For both we want contemporary evidence, and, in the case of an anecdote, we never, to the best of my knowledge, get it.

Here, contemporary evidence would be the survival of an examination list from the 1820s with the notation "s.nob." next to the names of ordinary students. The word snob occurs before 1820. See the Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. snob:

1781, "a shoemaker, a shoemaker's apprentice," of unknown origin. It came to be used in Cambridge University slang c.1796 for "townsman, local merchant," and by 1831 it was being used for "person of the ordinary or lower classes." Meaning "person who vulgarly apes his social superiors" arose 1843, popularized 1848 by William Thackeray's "Book of Snobs." The meaning later broadened to include those who insist on their gentility, in addition to those who merely aspire to it, and by 1911 had its main modern sense of "one who despises those considered inferior in rank, attainment, or taste."

But De Botton is correct in his observation that the word snob, viewed historically, is an auto-antonym, a word with opposite meanings. At one point snob meant a "person of the ordinary or lower classes," but now it means "one who despises those considered inferior in rank, attainment, or taste," with the implication that the snob is or considers himself to be a member of the privileged class.

Books about snobs that I haven't read but would like to are:

• Jasper Griffin, Snobs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982)
  
• Joseph Epstein, Snobbery: The American Version (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002)

Jasper Griffin is a well-known classical scholar.

Here are some earlier posts on auto-antonyms:

• An Auto-Antonym?
  
• Auto-Antonyms
  
• Auto-Antonym

Yes, there is one who makes us all lay down
Our mushroom vanities, our speculations,
Our well-set theories and calculations,
Our workman's jacket or our monarch's crown!
To him alike the country and the town,
Barbaric hordes or civilized nations,
Men of all names and ranks and occupations,
Squire, parson, lawyer, Jones, or Smith, or Brown!
He stops the carter: the uplifted whip
Falls dreamily among the horses' straw;
He stops the helmsman, and the gallant ship
Holdeth to westward by another law;
No one will see him, no one ever saw,
But he sees all and lets not any slip.

George MacDonald (1824-1905), Death

From Deputy James Mee's report of the arrest of Mel Gibson for drunk driving:

Gibson blurted out a barrage of anti-Semitic remarks about "F***g Jews." Gibson yelled out, "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson then asked, "Are you a Jew?"

Homer, Odyssey 14.462-466 (tr. Richmond Lattimore):

Hear me now, Eumaios and all you other companions.
What I say will be a bit of boasting. The mad wine tells me
to do it. Wine sets even a thoughtful man to singing,
or sets him into softly laughing, sets him to dancing.
Sometimes it tosses out a word that was better unspoken.

κέκλυθι νῦν, Εὔμαιε καὶ ἄλλοι πάντες ἑταῖροι,
εὐξάμενός τι ἔπος ἐρέω· οἶνος γὰρ ἀνώγει
ἠλεός, ὅς τ᾽ ἐφέηκε πολύφρονά περ μάλ᾽ ἀεῖσαι
καί θ᾽ ἁπαλὸν γελάσαι, καί τ᾽ ὀρχήσασθαι ἀνῆκε,
καί τι ἔπος προέηκεν ὅ περ τ᾽ ἄρρητον ἄμεινον.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal (November 11, 1842):

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal (June 20, 1831):

A sect or party is an elegant incognito designed to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal (March 1846):

I like man, but not men.

The blog languagehat is sponsoring a contest to rename the unjustly maligned passive voice. With tongue in cheek I suggest the pathic voice, because Greek παθικός (pathikós) is the equivalent of Latin passivus. English pathic means "passive, suffering" as an adjective and "the passive partner in a homosexual act" as a noun. Another grammatical term with a double meaning is the verb conjugate, meaning not only "to inflect a verb" but also "to have sexual relations."

A recent post by Maverick Philosopher William Vallicella on altered photographs is entitled A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words? Caveat Videtor! The noun videtor does not occur in Latin. Bill evidently wants videtor to be a noun derived from the verb video and meaning viewer, so that caveat videtor would mean let the viewer beware. A better Latin equivalent for viewer might be spectator. From the standpoint of morphology, videtor could also be 3rd person singular future passive imperative of video, but I don't know if there are any actual examples of this in ancient Latin either. Don't trust Google -- many of its examples of videtor are actually mistakes for videtur.

Why doesn't the noun videtor occur in Latin? We have laudator from laudo, laudare; auditor from audio, audire; etc. In English we call these nouns of agency -- see Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar § 236. In Latin we call them nomina agentis. Are there any nomina agentis ending in -etor derived from second conjugation verbs? If not, why not? From moneo there is monitor, but not monetor. I don't have the reference works needed to answer these questions. Maybe a real grammarian could answer them. Calling Bestiaria Latina, Campus Mawrtius, Curculio, Sauvage Noble, other bloggers, and all you classical scholars who should have blogs but don't -- help!

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Stephen C. Carlson:

I agree that "spectator" is better Latin--certainly better than "videtor." If one searches the English definitions of Lewis and Short, one finds that "inspector" is glossed as "viewer," but that is a late usage.

If one wants a term derived from "video," I suppose that would be "visor." Unfortunately, the L&S entry for the term is "a scout, only in a gloss ap. Tac. A. 16, 2; omitted by Draeg. and Halm."

David Carruth:

These nomina agentis, as you call them, are derived from the fourth principle part (the supine stem). Hence from moneo, monere, monui, monitus, we make monitor - monit- + -or. The default form from video would be - you guessed it - visor (from vis-, the supine stem), which does exist as a word in English, obviously, though I've never seen it used in Latin. Consider raptor, laudator, dictator (from dicto (1)), actor, and others. (I do agree that spectator is the best choice.)

Also, I have a contribution for your list of asyndetic, privative adjectives. Unfortunately, it's not a classical reference.. but maybe you'll enjoy it all the same.

"Consciousness of place came ebbing back to him slowly over a vast tract of time unlit, unfelt, unlived." Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Penguin, 1964: 141.

Michael Salter:

Nouns of agency, to the best of my knowledge, are generally formed simply by replacing the -um ending of the supine with an -or ending, so you'd be looking for verbs with supines in -etum, such as deleo and (de-)cerno. I seem to remembering seeing a noun "deletor" occasionally in CL, but when I googled it the examples seemed to come mainly from Medieval/Ecclesiastical Latin. Ditto for "decretor", which was the other possibility that came to mind. For your friend, I'd suggest "caveant videntes" as being more CL in style...

Angelo Mercado:

A brief reply to Laudator Temporis Acti on the formation of agent nouns in Latin: †videtor is not possible, for -tōr- m. is essentially suffixed to the perfect passive participle stem, formed the same way as the supine (Leumann § 319), so *vīsor (unattested, historically *vid-t-). Compare victor but not †vincitor. So also monitor, †monetor.

Laura Gibbs contributes a list of Latin nouns of agency ending in -or but not -tor, too long to quote here but well worth reading.

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, Book 1, Chapter 5 (Boffin's Bower):

'Hem!' began Wegg, 'This, Mr Boffin and Lady, is the first chapter of the first wollume of the Decline and Fall off--' here he looked hard at the book, and stopped.

'What's the matter, Wegg?'

'Why, it comes into my mind, do you know, sir,' said Wegg with an air of insinuating frankness (having first again looked hard at the book), 'that you made a little mistake this morning, which I had meant to set you right in, only something put it out of my head. I think you said Rooshan Empire, sir?'

'It is Rooshan; ain't it, Wegg?'

'No, sir. Roman. Roman.'

'What's the difference, Wegg?'

'The difference, sir?' Mr Wegg was faltering and in danger of breaking down, when a bright thought flashed upon him. 'The difference, sir? There you place me in a difficulty, Mr Boffin. Suffice it to observe, that the difference is best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs Boffin does not honour us with her company. In Mrs Boffin's presence, sir, we had better drop it.'

Mr Wegg thus came out of his disadvantage with quite a chivalrous air, and not only that, but by dint of repeating with a manly delicacy, 'In Mrs Boffin's presence, sir, we had better drop it!' turned the disadvantage on Boffin, who felt that he had committed himself in a very painful manner.

Then, Mr Wegg, in a dry unflinching way, entered on his task; going straight across country at everything that came before him; taking all the hard words, biographical and geographical; getting rather shaken by Hadrian, Trajan, and the Antonines; stumbling at Polybius (pronounced Polly Beeious, and supposed by Mr Boffin to be a Roman virgin, and by Mrs Boffin to be responsible for that necessity of dropping it); heavily unseated by Titus Antoninus Pius; up again and galloping smoothly with Augustus; finally, getting over the ground well with Commodus: who, under the appellation of Commodious, was held by Mr Boffin to have been quite unworthy of his English origin, and 'not to have acted up to his name' in his government of the Roman people. With the death of this personage, Mr Wegg terminated his first reading; long before which consummation several total eclipses of Mrs Boffin's candle behind her black velvet disc, would have been very alarming, but for being regularly accompanied by a potent smell of burnt pens when her feathers took fire, which acted as a restorative and woke her. Mr Wegg, having read on by rote and attached as few ideas as possible to the text, came out of the encounter fresh; but, Mr Boffin, who had soon laid down his unfinished pipe, and had ever since sat intently staring with his eyes and mind at the confounding enormities of the Romans, was so severely punished that he could hardly wish his literary friend Good-night, and articulate 'Tomorrow.'

'Commodious,' gasped Mr Boffin, staring at the moon, after letting Wegg out at the gate and fastening it: 'Commodious fights in that wild-beast-show, seven hundred and thirty-five times, in one character only! As if that wasn't stunning enough, a hundred lions is turned into the same wild-beast-show all at once! As if that wasn't stunning enough, Commodious, in another character, kills 'em all off in a hundred goes! As if that wasn't stunning enough, Vittle-us (and well named too) eats six millions' worth, English money, in seven months! Wegg takes it easy, but upon-my-soul to a old bird like myself these are scarers. And even now that Commodious is strangled, I don't see a way to our bettering ourselves.' Mr Boffin added as he turned his pensive steps towards the Bower and shook his head, 'I didn't think this morning there was half so many Scarers in Print. But I'm in for it now!'

Austin Dobson, A Pleasant Invective Against Printing:

"Flee fro the PREES, and dwelle with sothfastnesse."--CHAUCER, Balade de Bon Conseil.

The Press is too much with us, small and great:
We are undone of chatter and on dit,
Report, retort, rejoinder, repartee,
Mole-hill and mare's nest, fiction up-to-date,
Babble of booklets, bicker of debate,
Aspect of A., and attitude of B.--
A waste of words that drive us like a sea,
Mere derelict of Ourselves, and helpless freight!

"O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!"
Some region unapproachable of Print,
Where never cablegram could gain access,
And telephones were not, nor any hint
Of tidings new or old, but Man might pipe
His soul to Nature,--careless of the Type!

The first line of the octet echoes the first line of William Wordworth's sonnet:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The Winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not—-Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

The first line of the sestet is a quotation from the beginning of William Cowper's The Task, book 2, which starts thus:

Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more! My ear is pained,
My soul is sick with every day's report
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.

Aristophanes, Peace 335 (tr. Alan H. Sommerstein):

I'm glad, I'm happy, I fart, I laugh.

ἥδομαι γὰρ καὶ γέγηθα καὶ πέπορδα καὶ γελῶ.

This is a line of Greek worth memorizing, for those social situations when it might come in handy. Despite the translation, there is no asyndeton in the Greek, where καί (and) separates the verbs.

Sommerstein ad loc.:

[F]or breaking wind as a sign of contentment and satisfaction cf. Knights 115 (with 103-4), Clouds 9, Wasps 1305, Eccl. 464, Wealth 176.

Maurice Platnauer ad loc.:

On πέπορδα (perfect of πέρδομαι with present sense) Σ^R comments, 'μεταφορὰ ἀπὸ τῶν ὄνων· χαίροντες γὰρ πέρδονται'. His psychology may be faulty, but one treasures the note.

The note from the Ravenna (R) scholia (Σ) may be translated, "A metaphor from donkeys; for when they are joyful, they fart."

Dave Lull brought to my attention a new translation of Isidore's Etymologiae, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville edited by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge, 488pp, £85, ISBN 0521837499), and a review of the translation by Dot Wordsworth in The Spectator (5 August 2006) under the title Shedding light in dark places. The review ends with these interesting paragraphs about the etymology lucus a non lucendo (the word grove, "lucus," comes from not being light, "a non lucendo"):

As for lucus a non lucendo I have heard it attributed to Varro (116-27 BC), though I cannot find it in his surviving work. (It is certainly to be found in the fourth-century commentary on the Aeneid by Servius, one of Isidore’s authorities.) Doubts about its truth appeared early. ‘Are we to admit the derivation of certain words from their opposites, and accept lucus a non lucendo, since a grove is dark with shade?’ asked Quintilian (AD 35-100).

The last laugh is that a present-day scientific etymological dictionary of Latin like Ernout and Meillet does find a connection between lucus, no matter how dark it is, and lucendo. Both come from the Indo-European root leuk- that gives us Old English leah, ‘wood’ or ‘clearing’, as well as Latin lux, lumen and luna. Isidore was brighter than his shady detractors.

I don't have access to Ernout and Meillet, but Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Bern: Francke, 1959), s.v. leuk-, supports the connection between lucus and lucendo:

lūcus, alat. Akk. loucom 'Hain', eigentlich '(Wald-)Lichtung' (vgl. collūcāre 'in einem Wald eine Lichtung vornehmen', interlūcāre 'Bäume auslichten').

I too was unable to find lucus a non lucendo in Varro's De Lingua Latina. Don't be misled by H.E. Butler's translation of Quintilian (1.6.34) into thinking that the phrase occurs there:

But are we also to admit the derivation of certain words from their opposites, and accept lucus a non lucendo, since a grove is dark with shade, ludus in the sense of school as being so called because it is quite the reverse of "play" and Dis, Ditis from diues, because Pluto is far from being rich?

Quintilian's Latin reads:

etiamne a contrariis aliqua sinemus trahi, ut "lucus" quia umbra opacus parum luceat, et "ludus" quia sit longissime a lusu, et "Ditis" quia minime dives?

As Wordsworth points out, the phrase seems to originate with Servius, in his commentary on Vergil's Aeneid (1.22):

et dictae sunt parcae kata antiphrasin, quod nulli parcant, sicut lucus a non lucendo, bellum a nulla re bella.

Here are passages from Isidore's Etymologiae where he refers to the derivation.

1.29.3:

Sunt autem etymologiae nominum aut ex causa datae, ut "reges" a [regendo et] recte agendo, aut ex origine, ut "homo" quia sit ex humo, aut ex contrariis ut a lavando "lutum" dum lutum non sit mundum, et "lucus" quia umbra opacus parum luceat.

1.37.24:

Antiphrasis est sermo e contrario intellegendus, ut "lucus" quia caret lucem per nimiam nemorum umbram; et "manes" id est mites (quum sint inmites) et modesti, cum sint terribiles et inmanes; et "Parcas’ et "Eumenides" Furiae quod nulli parcant vel benefaciant.

14.8.30:

Lucus est locus densis arboribus septus, solo lucem detrahens. Potest et a conlucendo crebris luminibus dici, quae ibi propter religionem gentilium cultumque fiebant.

17.6.7:

Lucus est densitas arborum solo lucem detrahens, tropo antiphrasi, eo quod non luceat; sive a luce, quod in eo lucebant funalia vel cerei propter nemorum tenebras.

To the passages collected here and here, add Columella, De Re Rustica (preface 16, tr. H.B. Ash):

And presently, then, that we may come to our gluttonous feasts in proper fettle, we steam out our daily indigestion in sweat-baths, and by drying out the moisture of our bodies we arouse a thirst; we spend our nights in licentiousness and drunkenness, our days in gaming or sleeping, and account ourselves blessed by fortune in that "we behold neither the rising of the sun nor its setting."

Mox deinde, ut apti veniamus ad ganeas, cotidianam cruditatem Laconicis excoquimus et exusto sudore sitim quaerimus noctesque libidinibus et ebrietatibus, dies ludo vel somno consumimus, ac nosmet ipsos ducimus fortunatos, quod "nec orientem solem videmus nec occidentem."

The quotation is from Cato -- see Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 122.3 (tr. Richard M. Gummere):

There may be Antipodes dwelling in this same city of ours who, in Cato's words, "have never seen the sun rise or set."

Sunt quidam in eadem urbe antipodes qui, ut M. Cato ait, nec orientem umquam solem viderunt nec occidentem.

On the health benefits of vitamin D and sunlight, see the series of posts by Dennis Mangan at Mangan's Miscellany, e.g:

• Sunbathing in the UK
  
• Letters to the Press Democrat: Solar Exposure
  
• Excitement
  
• Vitamin D Paradigms and Paradoxes
  
• Vitamin D Resources

From an article in the Brunswick, Maine Times Record by Bob Kalish on Terry Donald's trash-hauling business:

For him the bottom line on recycling is money.

"Sure, it's a good thing to do, it just makes sense," he says while unloading the brush onto the brushpile. "But for each item to be recycled that's less I have to pay to dump it. So it becomes an economic asset."

Donald tells the story of one of his jobs when he emptied an attic of books. Cartons of them.

"I had thousands I'll bet," he recalls. "Mostly hardcover. Now hardcover books can't be recycled like other papers. So what I did, I tore the covers off each book and recycled the coverless books as paper. The covers were cardboard."

See also the horrible story about the recent destruction of 400,000 Russian books from Kamkin Books in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter X, Part IV:

Another circumstance is related of these invasions, which might deserve our notice, were it not justly to be suspected as the fanciful conceit of a recent sophist. We are told, that in the sack of Athens the Goths had collected all the libraries, and were on the point of setting fire to this funeral pile of Grecian learning, had not one of their chiefs, of more refined policy than his brethren, dissuaded them from the design; by the profound observation, that as long as the Greeks were addicted to the study of books, they would never apply themselves to the exercise of arms. The sagacious counsellor (should the truth of the fact be admitted) reasoned like an ignorant barbarian. In the most polite and powerful nations, genius of every kind has displayed itself about the same period; and the age of science has generally been the age of military virtue and success.

A footnote says "Zonaras, l. xii, p. 635. Such an anecdote was perfectly suited to the taste of Montaigne. He makes use of it in his agreeable Essay on Pedantry, l. i, c. 24." I can't find Zonaras online, but here is Montaigne (tr. Donald Frame):

When the Goths ravaged Greece, what saved all the libraries from being set afire was that one of the invaders spread the opinion that this item might well be left intact to the enemy, to divert them from military exercises and keep them busy in sedentary and idle occupations.

Whatever the motivations of the barbarian Goths, they showed themselves more civilized than the destroyers of books anno Domini 2006.

This supplements an earlier post on solitary eating.

Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 19.10 (tr. Richard M. Gummere):

This saying of Maecenas's might have squared my account with you; but I feel sure, knowing you, that you will get out an injunction against me, and that you will be unwilling to accept payment of my debt in such crude and debased currency. However that may be, I shall draw on the account of Epicurus. He says [fragment 542 Usener]: "You must reflect carefully beforehand with whom you are to eat and drink, rather than what you are to eat and drink. For a dinner of meats without the company of a friend is like the life of a lion or a wolf."

Poteram tecum hac Maecenatis sententia parem facere rationem, sed movebis mihi controversiam, si novi te, nec voles quod debeo in aspero et probo accipere. Ut se res habet, ab Epicuro versura facienda est. 'Ante' inquit 'circumspiciendum est cum quibus edas et bibas quam quid edas et bibas; nam sine amico visceratio leonis ac lupi vita est.'

Lucian, Saturnalia 3.34 (tr. H.W. and F.G. Fowler):

It is surely not so agreeable to gorge yourself alone, like a lion or an old wolf that has deserted the pack, as to have the company of well-bred people who do their best to make things pleasant. In the first place they banish dull silence from your table, and are ready with a good story, a harmless jest, or some other contribution to entertainment; that is the way to please the Gods of wine and love and beauty. And secondly they win you love by spreading abroad next morning your hospitable fame. These are things that would be cheap at a considerable price.

Plutarch, Convivial Questions 7.pr.1 (697 a, tr. T.C., rev. William W. Goodwin):

The Romans, Sossius Senecio, remember a pretty saying of a pleasant man and good companion, who supping alone said that he had eaten today, but not supped; as if a supper always wanted company and agreement to make it palatable and pleasing.

These examples come from John E.B. Mayor's commentary on Juvenal 1.95. Mayor has other references, which I'll try to track down later.

Fr. Gerard Deighan writes, "Your most recent post on the asyndetic privatives provoked me to trawl through the entire NT to search out all occurrences." In Fr. Deighan's list, I have italicized the words in the English translation that correspond to the Greek asyndetic, privative adjectives.

Romans 1.30-31:

Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful.

καταλάλους, θεοστυγεῖς, ὑβριστάς, ὑπερηφάνους, ἀλαζόνας, ἐφευρετὰς κακῶν, γονεῦσιν ἀπειθεῖς, ἀσυνέτους, ἀσυνθέτους, ἀστόργους, ἀνελεήμονας.

1 Timothy 1.17:

Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.

τῷ δὲ βασιλεῖ τῶν αἰώνων, ἀφθάρτῳ, ἀοράτῳ, μόνῳ θεῷ, τιμὴ καὶ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων· ἀμήν.

1 Timothy 3.3:

Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous.

μὴ πάροινον, μὴ πλήκτην, ἀλλὰ ἐπιεικῆ, ἄμαχον, ἀφιλάργυρον.

1 Timothy 6.14:

That thou keep this commandment without spot, unrebukeable, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ.

τηρῆσαί σε τὴν ἐντολὴν ἄσπιλον ἀνεπίλημπτον μέχρι τῆς ἐπιφανείας τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.

2 Timothy 3.2-3:

For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good.

ἔσονται γὰρ οἱ ἄνθρωποι φίλαυτοι, φιλάργυροι, ἀλαζόνες, ὑπερήφανοι, βλάσφημοι, γονεῦσιν ἀπειθεῖς, ἀχάριστοι, ἀνόσιοι, ἄστοργοι, ἄσπονδοι, διάβολοι, ἀκρατεῖς, ἀνήμεροι, ἀφιλάγαθοι.

Titus 3.3:

For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another.

Ἦμεν γάρ ποτε καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀνόητοι, ἀπειθεῖς, πλανώμενοι, δουλεύοντες ἐπιθυμίαις καὶ ἡδοναῖς ποικίλαις, ἐν κακίᾳ καὶ φθόνῳ διάγοντες, στυγητοί, μισοῦντες ἀλλήλους.

Hebrews 7.3:

Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life.

ἀπάτωρ, ἀμήτωρ, ἀγενεαλόγητος, μήτε ἀρχὴν ἡμερῶν μήτε ζωῆς τέλος ἔχων.

Hebrews 7.26:

For such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens.

Τοιοῦτος γὰρ ἡμῖν καὶ ἔπρεπεν ἀρχιερεύς, ὅσιος, ἄκακος, ἀμίαντος, κεχωρισμένος ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτωλῶν, καὶ ὑψηλότερος τῶν οὐρανῶν γενόμενος.

James 3.17:

But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.

ἡ δὲ ἄνωθεν σοφία πρῶτον μὲν ἁγνή ἐστιν, ἔπειτα εἰρηνική, ἐπιεικής, εὐπειθής, μεστὴ ἐλέους καὶ καρπῶν ἀγαθῶν, ἀδιάκριτος, ἀνυπόκριτος.

There is an example of asyndetic, privative adjectives in 1 Timothy 1.17:

Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only [wise] God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.

τῷ δὲ βασιλεῖ τῶν αἰώνων, ἀφθάρτῳ, ἀοράτῳ, μόνῳ θεῷ, τιμὴ καὶ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων· ἀμήν.

I have Fr. Gerard Deighan to thank for the only other New Testament examples in my collection, Hebrews 7.3 (ἀπάτωρ ἀμήτωρ ἀγενεαλόγητος) and 7.26 (ἄκακος ἀμίαντος).

David E. Aune, Revelation 1-5 (Dallas: Word Books, 1997), p. 123, on Rev. 2.7 (ὁ ἔχων οὖς ἀκουσάτω τί τὸ πνεῦμα λέγει ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις = He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches):

Placed at the conclusion of each of the seven proclamations, this formula functions as a proclamation formula, i.e., as an injunction to an audience to pay very close attention to the message that it accompanies. Dibelius coined the term Weckformel, "alertness formula," for the parallels found in the synoptic gospels (Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums, 6th ed., ed. G. Bornkamm [Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1971] 248). This formula has no close verbal parallels in ancient literature with the exception of the parable tradition found in the synoptic Gospels and in some apocryphal gospels.

There are a number of parallels from ancient pagan literature, although they lack the characteristic third person imperative of the Weckformel. See, e.g., Heraclitus fragment 34 Diels (tr. Kathleen Freeman):

Not understanding, although they have heard, they are like the deaf.

ἀξύνετοι ἀκούσαντες κωφοῖσιν ἐοίκασι.

and Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 447-448 (tr. Herbert Weir Smyth):

First of all, though they had eyes to see, they saw to no avail; they had ears, but understood not.

οἳ πρῶτα μὲν βλέποντες ἔβλεπον μάτην,
κλύοντες οὐκ ἤκουον.

According to [Demosthenes] 25.89 (tr. J.H. Vince), the expression was proverbial:

As the saying runs, "seeing, they see not; hearing, do not hear."

τὸ τῆς παροιμίας, ὁρῶντας μὴ ὁρᾶν καὶ ἀκούοντας μὴ ἀκούειν.

For more, see here.

Thoreau, Journals (January 3, 1861):

It is safest to invest in knowledge, for the probability is that you can carry that with you wherever you go.

Thoreau, Journals (October 7, 1860):

Many people have a fooish way of talking about small things, and apologize for themselves or another having attended to a small thing, having neglected their ordinary business and amused or instructed themselves by attending to a small thing; when, if the truth were known, their ordinary business was the small thing, and almost their whole lives were misspent, but they were such fools as not to know it.

Peter Head at Evangelical Textual Criticism takes a humorous look at the computer-generated index of Wayne C. Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition: Evidence of the Influence of Apologetic Interests on the Text of the Canonical Gospels (Text-Critical Studies 5; Atlanta GA: SBL, 2004). I'm reminded of the words of F.R.D. Goodyear, The Annals of Tacitus. Books 1-6 edited with a commentary, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1972), p. 15, n. 1:

There is much in Gerber-Greef with which one may disagree. Naturally so, for it is a scholarly work and full of controversial opinions. I esteem it the more every time I look at the wretched computerized products which now masquerade as lexica and concordances.

---

From the Associated Press:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered government and cultural bodies to use modified Persian words to replace foreign words that have crept into the language, such as "pizzas" which will now be known as "elastic loaves," state media reported Saturday.

---

On the subject of philosophers and beards, here is Thomas More, Epigram 139:

If a long beard makes one wise, what prevents a bearded goat from being able to be a Plato?

Si promissa facit sapientem barba, quid obstat
  barbatus possit quin caper esse Plato?

This is a translation of a poem from the Greek Anthology (11.430, by Lucian):

Εἰ τὸ τρέφειν πώγωνα δοκεῖς σοφίαν περιποιεῖν,
  καὶ τράγος εὐπώγων αἶψ᾽ ὅλος ἐστὶ Πλάτων.

---

In the last post, I quoted G.G. Ramsay's translation of a passage from Juvenal. The translation contained the words "against whose statue more than one kind of nuisance may be committed!" The Latin is "cuius ad effigiem non tantum meiere fas est." Ramsay euphemistically conceals Juvenal's crude language. A more literal translation is "against whose statue it is permitted not only to urinate." Juvenal implies "non tantum meiere fas est, sed etiam cacare," that is, "it is permitted not only to urinate, but also to defecate" on the statue.

Of the two Juvenal editions with commentaries on my bookshelf, E.G. Hardy's school edition omits this line altogether, and J.D. Duff's edition includes the line in the text, but does not comment on it. There is a parallel in Horace, Satires 1.8.37-39, where a statue of the god Priapus swears this oath:

But if I am telling a lie in any respect, may I be fouled on my head with the white turds of crows, and may Julius and frail Pediatia and the thief Voranus come to urinate and defecate on me.

mentior at siquid, merdis caput inquiner albis
corvorum atque in me veniat mictum atque cacatum
Iulius et fragilis Pediatia furque Voranus.

Arthur Palmer's edition with commentary of Horace's satires omits these lines.

There is a likewise a parallel to Priapus' oath in Aristophanes' Wasps, at the end of a prayer to the hero Lycus, where Philocleon promises (393-394, tr. Alan H. Sommerstein):

O take pity now on me who dwell close to thee, and save me, and I vow never to piss or fart beside your wicker fence.

ἐλέησον καὶ σῶσον νυνὶ τὸν σαυτοῦ πλησιόχωρον·
κοὐ μή ποτέ σου παρὰ τὰς κάννας οὐρήσω μηδ᾽ ἀποπάρδω.

This is a parody of the do ut des ("I give so that you may give") type of prayer. What Philocleon gives is a promise not to defile the fence around the hero's shrine, in return for which he wants the hero to pity and save him.

Philocleon is actually making a considerable sacrifice. The beneficial health effects of urinating and breaking wind simultaneously are well known. As the jingle goes,

Mingere cum bumbis,
Res saluberrima est lumbis.

Meio and mingo are synonyms in Latin, both meaning urinate. There is a small town in Iowa named Mingo.

---

G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered:

I believe firmly in the value of all vulgar notions, especially of vulgar jokes. When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea. The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic. They saw something delicate which they could only express by something indelicate. I remember that Mr. Max Beerbohm (who has every merit except democracy) attempted to analyse the jokes at which the mob laughs. He divided them into three sections: jokes about bodily humiliation, jokes about things alien, such as foreigners, and jokes about bad cheese. Mr. Max Beerbohn thought he understood the first two forms; but I am not sure that he did. In order to understand vulgar humour it is not enough to be humorous. One must also be vulgar, as I am.

4 Maccabees 1.25-27:

In pleasure there exists even a malevolent tendency, which is the most complex of all the emotions. In the soul it is boastfulness, covetousness, thirst for honor, rivalry, and malice; in the body, indiscriminate eating, gluttony, and solitary gormandizing.

ἐν τῇ ἡδονῇ δὲ ἔνεστιν καὶ ἡ κακοήθης διάθεσις, πολυτροπωτάτη πάντων οὖσα τῶν παθῶν, καὶ τὰ μὲν ψυχῆς ἀλαζονεία καὶ φιλαργυρία καὶ φιλοδοξία καὶ φιλονεικία καὶ βασκανία, κατὰ δὲ τὸ σῶμα παντοφαγία καὶ λαιμαργία καὶ μονοφαγία.

See also 4 Maccabees 2.7:

Otherwise how could it be that someone who is habitually a solitary gormandizer, a glutton, or even a drunkard can learn a better way, unless reason is clearly lord of the emotions?

ἐπεὶ τίνα τις τρόπον μονοφάγος ὢν τὸ ἦθος καὶ γαστρίμαργος ἢ καὶ μέθυσος μεταπαιδεύεται, εἰ μὴ δῆλον ὅτι κύριός ἐστιν τῶν παθῶν ὁ λογισμός;

Solitary gormandizing is μονοφαγία (monophagía), and the solitary gormandizer is μονοφάγος (monophágos). These Greek compounds come from μόνος (mónos) = alone and φαγεῖν (phageîn) = to eat. The superlative μονοφαγίστατος (monophagístatos) occurs in Aristophanes' Wasps (922-923, trial of the dog Labes, tr. Alan H. Sommerstein):

So don't you let him off, because he's also, of all dogs alive, by far the worst man for solitary eating.

μή νυν ἀφῆτέ γ᾽ αὐτόν, ὡς ὄντ᾽ αὖ πολὺ
κυνῶν ἁπάντων ἄνδρα μονοφαγίστατον.

What's wrong with the solitary eater is not so much the mere fact that he dines alone, but that he doesn't share his food with others. Juvenal in his first satire (lines 127-146, tr. G.G. Ramsay) criticizes the rich patron for not sharing his sumptuous meal with his clients:

The day itself is marked out by a fine round of business. First comes the dole; then the courts, and Apollo learned in the law, and those triumphal statues among which some Egyptian Arabarch or other has dared to set up his titles; against whose statue more than one kind of nuisance may be committed! Wearied and hopeless, the old clients leave the door, though the last hope that a man relinquishes is that of a dinner; the poor wretches must buy their cabbage and their fuel. Meanwhile their lordly patron will be devouring the choicest products of wood and sea, lying alone upon an empty couch; yes, at a single meal from their many fine large and antique tables they devour whole fortunes. Ere long no parasites will be left! Who can bear to see luxury so mean? What a huge gullet to have a whole boar—an animal created for conviviality—served up to it! But you will soon pay for it, my friend, when you take off your clothes, and with distended stomach carry your peacock into the bath undigested! Hence a sudden death, and an intestate old age; the new and merry tale runs the round of every dinner-table, and the corpse is carried forth to burial amid the cheers of enraged friends!

ipse dies pulchro distinguitur ordine rerum:
sportula, deinde forum iurisque peritus Apollo
atque triumphales, inter quas ausus habere
nescio quis titulos Aegyptius atque Arabarches,
cuius ad effigiem non tantum meiere fas est.
vestibulis abeunt veteres lassique clientes
votaque deponunt, quamquam longissima cenae
spes homini; caulis miseris atque ignis emendus.
optima silvarum interea pelagique vorabit
rex horum vacuisque toris tantum ipse iacebit.
nam de tot pulchris et latis orbibus et tam
antiquis una comedunt patrimonia mensa.
nullus iam parasitus erit. sed quis ferat istas
luxuriae sordes? quanta est gula quae sibi totos
ponit apros, animal propter convivia natum!
poena tamen praesens, cum tu deponis amictus
turgidus et crudum pavonem in balnea portas.
hinc subitae mortes atque intestata senectus.
it nova nec tristis per cunctas fabula cenas;
ducitur iratis plaudendum funus amicis.

If I'm not mistaken, Leopardi somewhere in his Zibaldone discusses solitary eating, but I can't put my finger on the passage.

From the Wikipedia article on composer Anton Bruckner (1824-1896):

A devout Catholic who loved to drink beer, Bruckner was out of step with his contemporaries.

I recently learned about a new blog with the title Underbelly and the subtitle A Journal of Soft Information. It has some interesting posts on language, e.g.

• The F Word (not what you might think)
  
• Cafoni

I have added it to my browser's Favorites list and will be looking at it often.

People sometimes ask how I insert Greek characters into my blog posts. Others probably skip any blog post with Greek characters. At any rate, here is how I do it.

First, I try to find the Greek text in question somewhere on the World Wide Web, so I don't have to type it in by myself. I usually consult Library of Ancient Texts Online, which despite its title is restricted to ancient Greek texts. When I do find a text, I often copy and paste it into a Microsoft Word file on my personal computer, using the Athena font. In this way I have amassed a collection of texts that I can look at without going on the Internet (always a pain with my slow dialup connection).

If I cannot find the text already on the Internet, I type it in myself with the aid of the Unicode Classical Greek Inputter. If you use this tool, be sure to hit the "Greek Letters" button to see all the characters available. Once text is entered with the aid of this tool, I copy and paste the text into Notepad. I always compose my blog posts offline with the minimalist Notepad editor. I also have my own local copy of the Unicode Classical Greek Inputter, to minimize time spent online.

Finally, I surround the Greek characters with some HTML gobbledygook, to help browsers render them properly. At the start of the Greek characters I place this directive:

<SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: Gentium, Palatino Linotype, Arial Unicode MS">

At the end of the Greek characters, I insert:

</SPAN>

I have checked the appearance of my Greek characters using both Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser and the Mozilla Firefox browser, and they are rendered properly, without any of those annoying little squares. Whether others can read them, I don't know. I find that I cannot read Greek characters on certain other classics blogs with IE. Perhaps there is some IE option I need to set.

At any rate, this works for me, and now I can simply refer to this post whenever anyone asks how to enter Greek characters into a blog. It's a cumbersome procedure, but it's the best I've been able to devise.

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, chapter 13:

It's all very well for you beggars to laugh, but my immortal soul was shrivelled down to the size of a parched pea after a week of that work.

Aristophanes, Wasps 471-472 (tr. Alan H. Sommerstein):

Is there any way we can get into a discussion and an agreement with each other, without fighting and without this shrill screaming?

ἔσθ᾽ ὅπως ἄνευ μάχης καὶ τῆς κατοξείας βοῆς
ἐς λόγους ἔλθοιμεν ἀλλήλοισι καὶ διαλλαγάς;

Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing, chapter 21 (tr. Magnus Magnusson):

He thought Latin a ridiculous and unnecessary invention, particularly the subjunctive; he believed that it was the prince of darkness who had so arranged it that one verb could have different forms by the score in Latin and by the hundred in Greek; and yet he did not hesitate to tackle all these rigmaroles, for the sake of his calling.

Sophocles, fragment 698 (tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones):

But death is the last healer of sickness.

ἀλλ᾽ ἔσθ᾽ ὁ θάνατος λοῖσθος ἰατρὸς νόσων.

For parallels see:

• Death the Healer
  
• Panacea

Charles Baudelaire, Les Chats (tr. Francis Scarfe):

Fervent lovers and austere scholars share the same love, in their riper years, for powerful but gentle cats, the pride of the household, who like themselves are sedentary and sensitive to draughts.

Friends of learning and sensuality, cats ever seek silence and dreadful night; Erebus would have employed them as messengers of gloom, could they lower their pride to slavery.

They assume, when their minds wander, the majestic poses of those colossal sphinxes who stretch their limbs in the realms of solitude, and who seem to be sleeping in an endless dream.

Magical sparks teem in their fertile loins, and particles of gold, like delicate grains of sand, vaguely fleck their mystic pupils with stars.

---

Les amoureux fervents et les savants austères
Aiment également, dans leur mûre saison,
Les chats puissants et doux, orgueil de la maison,
Qui comme eux sont frileux et comme eux sédentaires.

Amis de la science et de la volupté
Ils cherchent le silence et l'horreur des ténèbres;
L'Erèbe les eût pris pour ses coursiers funèbres,
S'ils pouvaient au servage incliner leur fierté.

Ils prennent en songeant les nobles attitudes
Des grands sphinx allongés au fond des solitudes,
Qui semblent s'endormir dans un rêve sans fin;

Leurs reins féconds sont pleins d'étincelles magiques,
Et des parcelles d'or, ainsi qu'un sable fin,
Etoilent vaguement leurs prunelles mystiques.

The striking phrase "trousered apes," as a description of men, comes from C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man (1947). Duncan Williams borrowed it for the title of a book published in 1971.

Perhaps Lewis was influenced by Erasmus, Praise of Folly:

An ape is always an ape, even if it's dressed in purple.

Simia semper est simia, etiam si purpura vestiatur.

However accurate the phrase "trousered apes" might be when applied to modern men, it would not have been an accurate description of the ancient Greeks and Romans, who eschewed trousers as barbarian garb. In a collection of passages from ancient authors on trousers, I once wrote:

The Greeks didn't have a native word for trousers, so they borrowed anaxurides from Persian. The Latin word bracae (sometimes spelled braccae), whence English breeches, may also be a loan word from Gaul.

This isn't completely accurate. I recently came across a native Greek slang term for trousers, θύλακοι [thulakoi], the plural of θύλακος, whose primary meaning is "bag, sack."

The secondary meaning "loose trousers" occurs at Aristophanes, Wasps 1087. The old men of the chorus are relating how they defeated the Persians in battle (tr. Alan H. Sommerstein):

Then we pursued them, harpooning them through their baggy trousers.

εἶτα δ᾽ εἱπόμεσθα θυννάζοντες ἐς τοὺς θυλάκους.

This secondary meaning also occurs at Euripides, Cyclopes 182, in a description of the seduction of Helen by Paris (182-186, tr. E.P. Coleridge):

The sight of a man with embroidered breeches on his legs and a golden chain about his neck so fluttered her, that she left Menelaus, her excellent little husband.

ἣ τοὺς θυλάκους τοὺς ποικίλους
περὶ τοῖν σκελοῖν ἰδοῦσα καὶ τὸν χρύσεον
κλῳὸν φοροῦντα περὶ μέσον τὸν αὐχένα
ἐξεπτοήθη, Μενέλεων, ἀνθρώπιον
λῷστον λιποῦσα.

Besides anaxurides and thulakoi, there is a loan word for trousers listed in Liddell-Scott-Jones, s.v. σαράβαρα [sarabara], defined as:

loose trousers worn by Scythians, Antiph.201; also = Aramaic sarbālîn, LXX, Thd.Da.3.27 (cf. 21). (Prob. Persian shalvâr or shulvâr (braccae).)

Some recent writings by Theodore Dalrymple:

• PC Among the Docs
• Subsidized Stupidity
• Power to the Pedophiles

From Fred Reed, A Modest Proposal To Abolish Universities:

The truth is that universities positively discourage learning. Think about it. Suppose you want to learn Twain. A fruitful approach might be to read Twain. The man wrote to be read, not analyzed tediously and inaccurately by begowned twits. It might help to read a life of Twain. All of this the student could do, happily, even joyously, sitting under a tree of an afternoon. This, I promise, is what Twain had in mind.

But no. The student must go to a class in American Literature, and be asked by some pompous drone, "Now, what is Twain trying to tell us in paragraph four?" This presumes that Twain knew less well than the professor what he was trying to say, and that he couldn't say it by himself. No. Not being much of a writer, the poor man needs the help of a semiliterate drab who couldn't sell a pancake recipe to Boy's Life. As bad, the approach suggests that the student is too dim to see the obvious or think for himself. He can't read a book without a middleman. He probably ends by hating Twain.

Fred Reed is a bit over the top, as usual. But there is a germ of truth in what he says. The whole essay is worth reading.

Greek Anthology 11.62 (Palladas, tr. W.R. Paton):

Death is a debt due by all men and no mortal knows if he will be alive to-morrow. Take this well to heart, O man, and make thee merry, since thou possessest wine that is oblivion of death. Take joy too in Aphrodite whilst thou leadest this fleeting life, and give up all else to the control of Fortune.

Πᾶσι θανεῖν μερόπεσσιν ὀφείλεται, οὐδέ τις ἐστὶν
  αὔριον εἰ ζήσει θνητὸς ἐπιστάμενος.
τοῦτο σαφῶς, ἄνθρωπε, μαθὼν εὔφραινε σεαυτόν,
  λήθην τοῦ θανάτου τὸν Βρόμιον κατέχων.
τέρπεο καὶ Παφίῃ, τὸν ἐφημέριον βίον ἕλκων·
  τἄλλα δὲ πάντα Τύχῃ πράγματα δὸς διέπειν.

Paton's translation somewhat obscures Palladas' Holy Trinity in the last three lines:

1. Bromius (aka Bacchus, the god of wine);
   
2. the Paphian (Aphrodite, the goddess of love); and
   
3. Tyche (the goddess Fortune).

Here is J. W. Mackail's translation of the same poem:

All human must pay the debt of death, nor is there any mortal who knows whether he shall be alive to-morrow; learning this clearly, O man, make thee merry, keeping the wine-god close by thee for oblivion of death, and take thy pleasure with the Paphian while thou drawest thy ephemeral life; but all else give to Fortune's control.

Here are a couple of passages from Ralph McInerny, Slattery: A Soft-Boiled Detective (Waterville, Maine: Five Star, 2004), which might interest students of the classics.

Pp. 34-35:

"I've been reading Seneca."
"What do you think?"
"Smug, self-satisfied, self-congratulatory."
She nodded in apparent agreement. I had glanced at a page or two in the Penguin edition and launched these airy judgments on nothing more.

P. 175:

"We will be rich as creases." An odd phrase, one I must look up one day, to see what it means.

McInerny is of course playing with the phrase "rich as Croesus." When I read that passage, I knew I would able to find examples of "rich as creases" on Google. Sure enough, here is one, from a transcript of an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio show:

A number of very powerful techniques and facilities and forms of software exist out there that can make a very small group very powerful in this large global world in which we live and you don't have to be as rich as creases to make <a> difference.

McInerny's mysteries are full of puns and word play. Some of his characters have aptronyms. In Slattery I noticed Auvarie and Seaman (marriage counselors) and Poppe (an exophthalmic eye doctor).

Aristophanes, Wasps 392 (in a prayer to the hero Lycus, tr. Alan H. Sommerstein):

You are the only Hero who has chosen to take his seat near a crying man.

κἀβουλήθης μόνος ἡρώων παρὰ τὸν κλάοντα καθῆσθαι.

Douglas M. MacDowell ad loc.:

μόνος is common in prayers; a god is praised especially for those qualities or functions which no other god has. Cf. Peace 590, Birds 1546, Th. 1141, Ek. 12.

Here the quality peculiar to Lycus is his willingness to put up with whining. Sommerstein ad loc.:

In general it was improper to approach a god or hero with weeping or wailing; Apollo was particularly averse to manifestations of grief in his presence (cf. Aesch. Ag. 1072-9; Eur. Supp. 971-6), but other gods too might be held to object to them.

Examples of μόνος or solus in prayers are ubiquitous. Two Latin examples come immediately to mind.

The first is the prayer to Venus at the beginning of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (1.30-31, tr. H.A.J. Munro):

For thou alone canst bless mankind with calm peace.

Nam tu sola potes tranquilla pace iuvare / mortalis.

The second is the last part of the Gloria in the Mass:

For thou alone art holy. Thou alone art the Lord. Thou alone art most high, Jesus Christ. With the Holy Ghost, in the glory of God the Father. Amen.

Quoniam tu solus Sanctus. Tu solus Dominus. Tu solus Altissimus, Jesu Christe. Cum Sancto Spiritu, in gloria Dei Patris. Amen.

Horace, Ode 1.38, paraphrased by Charles Larcom Graves (1856-1944):

Oriental flowers, my Cyril,
  (Save of language), I detest:
Cull for me no costly orchid
  To adorn my blameless breast.
Nor essay to deck my raiment
  With the blushing English rose,
For its brutal Saxon odour
  Aggravates my Scottish nose.

Me as Minister the fragrance
  Of the leek doth most arride,
With the shamrock and the thistle
  In a triple posy tied;
So, beneath my grand umbrella
  Fixed firmly on College Green
Let us deviate from duty
  In a deluge of poteen.

The leek is a symbol of Wales, the shamrock of Ireland, and the thistle of Scotland, all three opposed here to the English rose. The archaic arride means "please, gratify" (Webster's 1913); College Green is a public square (or rather triangle) in Dublin; and poteen is Irish whiskey. Charles Larcom Graves was the brother of Alfred Perceval Graves and uncle of poet and mythologist Robert Graves.

I have serious doubts about "Me as Minister" in the second stanza, because Cyril is the servant, and the Latin original has "te ministrum." I copied the poem by hand a few years ago (I think from Graves' Hawarden Horace), and I reproduce it now from my possibly faulty handwritten copy. Perhaps "Me as Minister" should be "Thee as Minister." My copy also has a note -- The Spectator, 71:872, Dec. 16, 1893.

Here is the Latin original of Horace's ode, with a closer English translation:

Persicos odi, puer, apparatus;
displicent nexae philyra coronae;
mitte sectari rosa quo locorum
  sera moretur.

Simplici myrto nihil adlabores
sedulus curo; neque te ministrum
dedecet myrtus neque me sub arta
  vite bibentem.

Boy, I dislike Persian finery; garlands sewn with bast displease me; don't try to find out in what spot the late-blooming rose lingers.

I don't want you busily embellishing plain myrtle; myrtle isn't unsuitable, either for you as you serve or for me as I drink beneath the trellised vine.

Last year I posted three translations of a medieval Irish poem about a scholar and his cat. I just happened upon a fourth translation of the same poem, from Alfred Perceval Graves' A Celtic Psaltery:

Pangar, my white cat, and I
  Silent ply our special crafts;
Hunting mice his one pursuit,
   Mine to shoot keen spirit shafts.

Rest, I love, all fame beyond,
  In the bond of some rare book;
Yet white Pangar from his play
  Casts, my way, no jealous look.

Thus alone within one cell
  Safe we dwell -- not dull the tale --
Since his ever favourite sport
  Each to court will never fail.

Now a mouse, to swell his spoils,
  In his toils he spears with skill;
Now a meaning deeply thought
  I have caught with startled thrill.

Now his green full-shining gaze
  Darts its rays against the wall;
Now my feebler glances mark
  Through the dark bright knowledge fall.

Leaping up with joyful purr,
  In mouse fur his sharp claw sticks,
Problems difficult and dear,
  With my spear I, too, transfix.

Crossing not each other's will,
  Diverse still, yet still allied,
Following each his own lone ends,
  Constant friends we here abide.

Pangar, master of his art,
  Plays his part in pranksome youth;
While in age sedate I clear
  Shadows from the sphere of Truth.

Greek Anthology 11.395 (Nicarchus, tr. W.R. Paton):

A fart which cannot find an outlet kills many a man; a fart also saves, sending forth its lisping music. Therefore if a fart saves, and on the other hand kills, a fart has the same power as kings.

Πορδὴ ἀποκτέννει πολλοὺς ἀδιέξοδος οὖσα·
  πορδὴ καὶ σώζει τραυλὸν ἱεῖσα µέλος.
οὐκοῦν εἰ σώζει, καὶ ἀποκτέννει πάλι πορδή,
  τοῖς βασιλεῦσιν ἴσην πορδὴ ἔχει δύναµιν.

Paton euphemistically (or onomatopoetically) prints f--t, not fart.

Thomas More's Latin epigram 21 is a translation of Nicarchus' poem:

Te crepitus perdit, nimium si ventre retentes.
  Te propere emissus servat item crepitus.
Si crepitus servare potest et perdere, numquid
  Terrificis crepitus regibus aequa potest?

Sophocles, fragment 259:

For there is a certain pleasure also in words, whenever they cause forgetfulness of present evils.

ἔνεστι γάρ τις καὶ λόγοισιν ἡδονή,
λήθην ὅταν ποιῶσι τῶν ὄντων κακῶν.

These are excerpts from Norman Douglas, Siren Land (1911; rev. 1923).

Chapter II (Uplands of Sorrento):

Duty has become the Moloch of modern life.
....
An old Hebrew, who taught the pleasures of a virtuous life after exhausting those of a voluptuous one, said: Go to the ant; he forgot to remember that the ant sleeps for half the year. Man alone is a perennial drudge. Yet many of us would do well to mediterraneanise ourselves for a season, to quicken those ethic roots from which has sprung so much of what is best in our natures. To dream in Siren land, pursuing the moods and memories as they shift in labyrinthine mazes, like shadows on a woodland path in June; to stroll among the hills and fill the mind with new images upon which to browse at leisure, casting off outworn weeds of thought with the painless ease of a serpent and un-perplexing, incidentally, some of those "questions of the day" of which the daily papers nevertheless know nothing -- this is an antidote for many ills. There is repose in Siren land; there is none of that delirious massing-together in which certain mortals, unable to stand alone, can lean up against one another and so gain, for a moment, a precarious condition of equipoise.

Chapter III (The Siren Islets):

In these days, when life is so complicated as to lose all homogeneity and unity of purpose, when our fine edges are worn off by never-ending trivialities and meannesses, I often think that planting trees and reclaiming the waste places of earth are among the few occupations that still commend themselves to gentler natures -- pleasure and instruction for oneself, health and profit to posterity.

Chapter VII (The Cove Of Crapolla):

The name Crapolla has been derived from "akron Apollinis," as though a temple of Apollo had stood here. But this is pure Cicerone-etymology -- the origin of the word is the same as that of Capri, and in old deeds it is actually called Capreola. What Capri means is not quite certain; it is neither Greek nor Phoenician; there are places with similar names all over Italy and half a dozen Capri's and Caprile's within a few miles of here. Quaranta deduces it from a Tyrrhenian root signifying rocky or stony. Why not? When, nearly two centuries ago, Greek etymology could no longer explain all local names and traditions, the enlightened took refuge in Semiticism, and thus there grew up the ponderous Shem-Ham-and-Japheth literature of Martorelli and his disciples, which we have outgrown in its turn. Nowadays, the conveniently obscure Tyrrhenian language helps to solve old difficulties. But it makes new ones.

Chapter XI (On Leisure):

Everything which distinguishes man from animals is the result of leisure.
....
[T]he whole Iliad is nothing but a vendetta.

Chapter XIII (The Headland of Minerva):

Vengeance is mine, said the Jewish god who liked to keep all the good things for himself.

Postscript:

It must have been these decoying arts which induced Servius to think that "according to the truth" the Sirens were ladies of questionable reputation. This is going too far. You ungentlemanly old fellow, what maggot has got into your grammarian's brain?

In the final quotation, Douglas refers to Servius' commentary on Vergil's Aeneid 5.684:

In myth, the Sirens numbered three, and were part maidens, part birds, the daughters of the river Achelous and the muse Calliope. One of them made music with her voice, the second with the flute, and the third with the lyre. At first they dwelled near Pelorus, later on the Capri islands, and they enticed those who were enchanted by their song into shipwrecks. In truth, they were prostitutes. Because they enticed those who passed by into poverty, they were imagined to bring shipwrecks on them. By disdaining them, Ulysses caused them to die.

Sirenes secundum fabulam tres, parte virgines fuerunt, parte volucres, Acheloi fluminis et Calliopes musae filiae. harum una voce, altera tibiis, alia lyra canebat: et primo iuxta Pelorum, post in Capreis insulis habitaverunt, quae inlectos suo cantu in naufragia deducebant. secundum veritatem meretrices fuerunt, quae transeuntes quoniam deducebant ad egestatem, his fictae sunt inferre naufragia. has Vlixes contemnendo deduxit ad mortem.

William Cowper, Letter to John Newton (Jan. 13, 1785):

I too have taken leave of the old year, and parted with it just when you did, but with very different sentiments and feelings upon the occasion. I looked back upon all the passages and occurrences of it, as a traveller looks back upon a wilderness through which he has passed with weariness, and sorrow of heart, reaping no other fruit, of his labour, than the poor consolation that, dreary as the desert was, he has left it all behind him. The traveller would find even this comfort considerably lessened, if, as soon as he had passed one wilderness, another of equal length, and equally desolate, should expect him. In this particular, his experience and mine would exactly tally. I should rejoice, indeed, that the old year is over and gone, if I had not every reason to prophesy a new one similar to it.

The new year is already old in my account. I am not, indeed, sufficiently second-sighted to be able to boast by anticipation an acquaintance with the events of it yet unborn, but rest convinced that, be they what they may, not one of them comes a messenger of good to me. If even death itself should be of the number, he is no friend of mine. It is an alleviation of the woes even of an unenlightened man, that he can wish for death, and indulge a hope, at least, that in death he shall find deliverance. But, loaded as my life is with despair, I have no such comfort as would result from a supposed probability of better things to come, were it once ended. For, more unhappy than the traveller with whom I set out, pass through what difficulties I may, through whatever dangers and afflictions, I am not a whit nearer the home, unless a dungeon may be called so.

This is no very agreeable theme; but in so great a dearth of subjects to write upon, and especially impressed as I am at this moment with a sense of my own condition, I could choose no other. The weather is an exact emblem of my mind in its present state. A thick fog envelopes everything, and at the same time it freezes intensely. You will tell me that this cold gloom will be succeeded by a cheerful spring, and endeavour to encourage me to hope for a spiritual change resembling it; -- but it will be lost labour. Nature revives again; but a soul once slain lives no more.

Among the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2006 Results are a couple of examples with a classical tinge. First prize in the historical fiction category went to Christopher Backeberg for this paragraph:

While Hector and the heroes of Troy trembled behind the ramparts as cowboys below the walls raced up and down the beach, six-guns blazing and cries of "yee-hah!" filling the air, other cowboys across the sea were laboring gamely but in vain to throw a palisade around Wichita, Kansas, thereby adding veracity to the old homily of history that it is easier to cow a fortified city than to fortify a cow city.

A dishonorable mention in the same category went to Hubert Kennedy, who contributed this:

If Gilbert had known then what he knew now, he would have seen that the dilemma facing him--to do a good deed for the wrong reason or to do a bad deed for the right reason--had long ago been shown to be two sides of the same coin by the philosopher known as Theragora of Crete even though he was not from Crete at all, but from Malta, which of course was not called Malta when Theragora was there.

Dorothy King alerts us to the existence of an online store where one can buy underwear embroidered with Latin proverbs. For next year's product line, they should consider adding that famous Latin paraenetic proverb Semper ubi sub ubi (Always wear underwear).

Ralph McInerny has had a distinguished career as a philosophy professor, specializing in St. Thomas Aquinas. From 1978 to 1985 he was director of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

McInerny is also a prolific author of murder mysteries. One of them, Irish Coffee (2003), contains an acrostic poem about Isidore of Seville. The poem is available on the Internet here. According to the Internet version, the first line of the poem is "Isidore of Seville loved etymology," a reference to Isidore's work Etymologiae.

But in a hardcover copy of Irish Coffee I got from the library, the first line of the poem (on p. 56) is "Isadore of Seville loved etymology." In fact, every time Isidore of Seville is mentioned in the book, his name is spelled Isadore.

The preferred spelling Isidore better reflects the etymology of the name, which means gift of Isis (cf. Theodore, gift of God). Greek δῶρον (doron) means gift.

In another mystery, Irish Gilt, McInerny wrote the following bit of dialogue:

"Does knowing the meaning of Latin words make one a pedant?"
"Only when one parades his knowledge."

Ouch.

Charles Baudelaire, Les Hiboux, from Fleurs du mal (tr. Francis Scarfe):

In the shelter of the black yews, the owls stand in a row like alien gods, their red eyes darting. They are meditating.

They will stand there motionless until the melancholy hour when, pushing down the slanting sun, the shadows settle into place.

Their attitude teaches wise men that in this world of ours all tumult and movement are to be feared, for man, intoxicated by every fleeting shadow, is always punished by his desire to roam.

---

Sous les ifs noirs qui les abritent
Les hiboux se tiennent rangés
Ainsi que des dieux étrangers
Dardant leur oeil rouge. Ils méditent.

Sans remuer ils se tiendront
Jusqu'à l'heure mélancolique
Où, poussant le soleil oblique,
Les ténèbres s'établiront.

Leur attitude au sage enseigne
Qu'il faut en ce monde qu'il craigne
Le tumulte et le mouvement;

L'homme ivre d'une ombre qui passe
Porte toujours le châtiment
D'avoir voulu changer de place.

For more English translations of this poem, see here.