Laudator Temporis Acti

Thomas Keightley, The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy, 2nd ed. (London: Whittaker and Co., 1848), p. 233 (footnote omitted):

Like many other gods who were originally single, Pan was multiplied in course of time, and we meet with Pans in the plural.

Martin P. Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion, 2nd ed., tr. F.J. Fielden (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1964), pp. 111-113 (footnotes omitted):

Nature is full of these daimones: they are innumerable, for every spring, every tree, every natural object has or at least may have its daimon. Hence crowds of Nature daimones of various kinds arise. Within each homogeneous group the individual disappears in the aggregate; the daimon residing in a particular natural object has an extremely limited circle of worshippers; most have no cult but exist only in belief and imagination. In other domains also similar collective groups of spirits or gods appear, such as 'the gentle gods' (θεοὶ μειλίχιοι), 'the boisterous ones' (Μαιμακτῆρες), the goddesses of childbirth (the Ilithyiae), 'the holy goddesses', the Erinyes (σεμναὶ θεαί), and the 'Rulers' (Ἄνακες), the two sons of Zeus, the Dioskouroi.

And these spirits intervene in human life and fortune. Men turn to them for peace, happiness, and prosperity. Just as the harvest-rite could not embrace the entire crop standing upon the field, but a single sheaf was selected as representing the whole, so the cult cannot address itself to the collective group. The attention is fixed upon some particular one from among the host of similar spirits. If they are localized, the nearest is chosen; then a local god arises. If the localization is not made prominent, the singular is simply put for the plural: Pan is invoked instead of the Panes. It is significant that in so late a document as the record of the secular festival of the Emperor Augustus the Ilithyiae are everywhere named in the plural except in the prayer, where we read 'O thou, Ilithyia!' In a cave dedicated to the cult of the nymphs in Attica, in which various inscriptions were carved in the fifth century B.C., the nymphs are as a rule spoken of in the plural, but one dedication reads: 'Archedemos built to the nymph.'

The needs of man created the gods, and the cult is an expression of his need. A god is a daimon which has acquired importance and a fixed form through the cult. From among the crowd of similar beings the cult chooses one as its object, and this becomes a single god. But the belief in the numerous daimones lives on, and if both the single divinity and the group of daimones are present to the mind together, the latter acquire a leader. Thus we have Pan and the Panes, Silenus and the Sileni, but Silenus was reduced to a semi-comic figure when his retinue was absorbed in that of Dionysos. A great goddess who seems to have arisen in this way is Artemis. She is essentially nothing but the most prominent of the wood- and mountain-nymphs. With these she hunts and dances in mountains and forests and amid green meadows. Like them she rules the animals in wild Nature and fosters their young. Like them she extends her sway to men, helps the mother in her hour of need, and protects the rising generation, but she may also deal sudden death with her arrows. This tendency to exalt one among a number of similar beings to a position of supremacy was so ingrained that it has left an example dating from the time of transition to the Christian faith. The Lycian 'wild gods' are represented as twelve similar figures; to them a thirteenth was added as their ruler, and he was placed in the middle and was somewhat larger in size, but was in other respects just like the rest.

Joseph Hall (1574-1656), Occasionall Meditations, 3rd ed. (London: Printed by M[iles] F[lesher] for Nathaniel Butter, 1633), pp. 59-63 (XXIIII = Vpon sight of a Cocke fight):

How fell these Creatures out? Whence grew this so bloudy combat? Heere was neyther old grudge, nor present injurie. What then is the quarrell? Surely nothing but that which should rather unite, and reconcile them; one common Nature; they are both of one feather. I doe not see eyther of them flye upon Creatures of different kinds; but whiles they have peace with al others, they are at war with themselves; the very sight of each other was sufficient provocation. If this be the offence, why doth not each of them fall out with himselfe, since hee hates, and revenges in another, the being of that same which himselfe is?

Since Mans sin brought Debate into the World, nature is become a great quarreller.

The seeds of discord were scattered in every furrow of the Creation, & came up in a numberlesse variety of antipathies, whereof yet none is more odious, and deplorable, then those which are betwixt creatures of the same kind. What is this but an image of that woeful hostility which is exercised betwixt us reasonables, who are conjoyned in one common humanity, if not Religion?

We fight with, and destroy each other, more then those creatures that want reason to temper their passions; No beast is so cruel to man, as himselfe; where one man is slain by a beast, ten thousand are slaine by man. What is that war which wee study and practise, but the art of killing? What ever Turkes and Pagans may do, O Lord how long shall this brutish fury arme Christians against each other, whiles even divels are not at enmity with themselves, but accord in wickednesse, why do we men so mortally oppose each other in good?

Oh thou, that art the GOD of Peace, compose the unquiet hearts of men to an happy and universal Concord, and at last refresh our Soules with the multitude of Peace.

Related posts:

• Man's Greatest Enemy
• Lupus Est Homo Homini
• Homo Homini Daemon

Anatole France (1844-1924), The Garden of Epicurus, tr. Alfred Allinson (London: John Lane, 1920), p. 51:

Renan surrendered himself with smiling alacrity to the dream of a scientific morality. He reposed an almost unlimited confidence in Science. He believed it would change the world, because it can tunnel mountains. I do not think with him that it can make us gods. To say the truth, I do not very much want it to. I do not feel I have within me the stuff of a divinity, no matter how petty a one. My feebleness is dear to me. I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.

The French, from Le Jardin d'Épicure, 9th ed. (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1895), pp. 56-57:

Renan s'abandonnait volontiers en souriant au rêve d'une morale scientifique. Il avait dans la science une confiance à peu près illimitée. Il croyait qu'elle changerait le monde, parce qu'elle perce les montagnes. Je ne crois pas, comme lui, qu'elle puisse nous diviniser. A vrai dire, je n'en ai guère l'envie. Je ne sens pas en moi l'étoffe d'un dieu, si petit qu'il soit. Ma faiblesse m'est chère. Je tiens à mon imperfection comme à ma raison d'être.

John Keats, letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (February 19, 1818):

I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner—let him on a certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect upon it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it, until it becomes stale—but when will it do so? Never. When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all "the two-and-thirty Palaces." How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious diligent Indolence!

What are "the two-and-thirty Palaces"?

A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels: Consisting Of the most Esteemed Relations, which have been hitherto published in any Language: Comprehending every Thing remarkable in its Kind, in Europe, Asia, Africa and America..., Vol. IV (London: Thomas Astley, 1747), p. 5 (from "A Description of China," Book I, emphasis added):

They reckon three hundred and thirty-one remarkable Bridges, one thousand one hundred and fifty-nine Towers and triumphal Arches, erected to Kings, and eminent Persons; famous Libraries, two-hundred and seventy-two; seven hundred and nine Halls, built in Memory of Ancestors, or worthy Men; Sepulchres, remarkable for their Architecture, six hundred and eighty-eight; thirty-two Palaces of the Regulos; thirteen thousand six hundred and forty-seven Palaces of the Magistrates.

Id., p. 102 (emphasis added):

Among the public Buildings may be reckoned the Halls erected in Honour of Ancestors, the Libraries, and the Palaces of the Princes and Mandarins. Of the first, there are seven hundred and nine, considerable for their Largeness and Beauty. Of the second, two hundred and seventy-two, built at a vast Expence, finely ornamented, and stored with Books. Thirty-two Palaces of the Regulos, built after the Model of the Emperor's at Pe-king, and thirteen thousand six hundred and forty-seven of the Quan.

A regulo is, I assume, a regulus, a petty king. I don't know whether Keats ever read this book.

---

Joel Eidsath writes:

There are 32 points to the traditional wind compass. It's a poetic way of referring to all directions. "Two-and-thirty" is the sonorous KJV way of saying "32."

Keats was apparently inspired by Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, which uses the phrase "all the two and thirty winds," and had just been published in 1817.

Anatole France (1844-1924), The Garden of Epicurus, tr. Alfred Allinson (London: John Lane, 1920), pp. 109-110:

The love of books is really a commendable taste. Bibliophiles are often made fun of, and perhaps, after all, they do lend themselves to raillery. But we should rather envy them, I think, for having successfully filled their lives with an enduring and harmless pleasure. Detractors think to confound them by declaring they never read their books. But one of them had his answer pat: "And you, do you eat off your old china?" What more innocent hobby can a man pursue than sorting away books in a press? True, it is very like the game the children play at when they build sand castles on the seashore. They are mighty busy, but nothing comes of it; whatever they build will be thrown down in a very short time. No doubt it is the same with collections of books and pictures. But it is only the vicissitudes of existence and the shortness of human life that must be blamed. The tide sweeps away the sand castles, the auctioneer disperses the hoarded treasures. And yet, what better can we do than build sand castles at ten years old, and form collections at sixty? Nothing will remain in any case of all our work, and the love of old books is not more foolish than any other love.

The French, from Le Jardin d'Épicure, 9th ed. (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1895), pp. 124-126 (some misprints corrected):

Le goût des livres est vraiment un goût louable. On a raillé les bibliophiles, et peut-être, après tout, prêtent-ils à la raillerie; c'est le cas de tous les amoureux. Mais il faudrait plutôt les envier puisqu'ils ont ornés leur vie d'une longue et paisible volupté. On croit les confondre en disant qu'ils ne lisent point leurs livres. Mais l'un d'eux a répondu sans embarras: «Et vous, mangez-vous dans votre vieille faïence?» Que peut-on faire de plus honnête que de mettre des livres dans une armoire? Cela rappelle beaucoup, à la vérité, la tâche que se donnent les enfants, quand ils font des tas de sable au bord de la mer. Ils travaillent en vain, et tout ce qu'ils élèvent sera bientôt renversé. Sans doute, il en est ainsi des collections de livres et de tableaux. Mais il n'en faut accuser que les vicissitudes de l'existence et la brièveté de la vie. La mer emporte les tas de sable, le commissaire-priseur disperse les collections. Et pourtant on n'a rien de mieux à faire que des tas de sable à dix ans et des collections à soixante. Rien ne restera de tout ce que nous élevons, et l'amour des bibelots n'est pas plus vain que tous les autres amours.

José Gutiérrez Solana, El Bibliófilo

Anatole France (1844-1924), The Aspirations of Jean Servien, tr. Alfred Allinson (London: John Lane, 1912), p. 79 (chapter XI; ellipsis in original):

"You are all the same. You work and sweat and wear yourselves out to make your sons bachelors of arts, and you think the day after the examination the fine fellows will be posted Ambassadors. For God's sake! no more graduates, if you please! We can't tell what to do with 'em....Graduates indeed! Why, they block the road; they are cabdrivers, they distribute handbills in the streets."

The French, from Les Désirs de Jean Servien (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1882), pp. 79-80:

«Vous êtes tous les mêmes. Vous travaillez, vous suez, vous vous épuisez pour faire de vos fils des bacheliers et vous croyez que le lendemain de l'examen ces gaillards-là seront nommés ambassadeurs. Pour Dieu! ne nous donnez plus de bacheliers. Nous ne savons qu'en faire...Les bacheliers! ils encombrent le pavé; ils sont cochers de fiacre, ils distribuent des prospectus dans les rues.»

Anatole France (1844-1924), The Aspirations of Jean Servien, tr. Alfred Allinson (London: John Lane, 1912), p. 18 (chapter III):

"Here is your son, is it not so? He is like you"—and laying his hand on Jean's head, who clung to his father's coat-tails in wonder at the red waistcoat and the sing-song voice, he asked if the child learned his lessons well, if he was growing up to be a clever man, if he would not soon be beginning Latin.

"That noble language," he added, "whose inimitable monuments have often made me forget my misfortunes.

"Yes, sir, I have often breakfasted on a page of Tacitus and supped on a satire of Juvenal."

The French, from Les Désirs de Jean Servien (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1882), pp. 12-13:

«Voici votre fils, n'est-il pas vrai? Il vous ressemble.»

Et posant la main sur la tête de Jean, qui, pendu à la veste de son père, s'étonnait de ce gilet rouge et de ce parler chantant, il demanda si l'enfant apprenait bien ses leçons, s'il devenait un savant, s'il n'étudierait pas bientôt la langue latine.

—«Cette noble langue, ajouta-t-il, dont les monuments inimitables m'ont fait si souvent oublier mes infortunes.

«Oui, monsieur, j'ai souvent déjeuné d'une page de Tacite et soupé d'une satire de Juvénal.»

Martial 2.53 (tr. Walter C.A. Ker):

Do you wish to become free? You lie, Maximus; you don't wish. But if you do wish, in this way you can become so. You will be free, Maximus, if you refuse to dine abroad, if Veii's grape quells your thirst, if you can laugh at the gold-inlaid dishes of the wretched Cinna, if you can content yourself with a toga such as mine, if your plebeian amours are handfasted at the price of twopence, if you can endure to stoop as you enter your dwelling. If this is your strength of mind, if such its power over itself, you can live more free than a Parthian king.

A verse translation (by Henry Killigrew?), in Select Epigrams of Martial Englished (London: Printed by Edward Jones, for Samuel Lowndes, 1689), p. 40:

Thou but feign'st, Maximus, thou'dst not be Free:
Or if thou wouldst, by these means thou may'st be.
Thou shalt be Free; if thou at Home can'st Dine;
If thou canst quench thy Thirst with common Wine;
If Rich Men thou can'st Miserable deem,
And such a thread-bare Coat, as mine, esteem;
If in a cheap and vulgar Form delight,
A Room, in which thou scarce can'st stand upright.
If thy Desires, to this Lure, thou can'st bring,
Thou may'st live Freer than the Parthian King.

Another verse translation, by A.E. Street:

You would be free? Nay, Maximus, you lie,
But, if't be true, herein lies liberty;
If you refuse henceforth abroad to dine;
And quench your thirst with little Tuscan wine,
If abject Cinna's plate move your contempt,
If you will go, like me, threadbare, unkempt,
Buy humble amours with a thrifty hand,
Live in a cot where you must stoop to stand;
If you are strong, and will these things to be,
No Parthian king will e'er have been so free.

The Latin:

Vis liber fieri? mentiris, Maxime, non vis:
    sed fieri si vis, hac ratione potes.
liber eris, cenare foris si, Maxime, nolis,
    Veientana tuam si domat uva sitim,
si ridere potes miseri chrysendeta Cinnae,        5
    contentus nostra si potes esse toga,
si plebeia Venus gemino tibi iungitur asse,
    si tua non rectus tecta subire potes.
haec tibi si vis est, si mentis tanta potestas,
    liberior Partho vivere rege potes.        10

7 iungitur Heinsius: vincitur codd.

Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013), p. 4:

Most of us have happy memories of watching our mothers in the kitchen, performing feats that sometimes looked very much like sorcery and typically resulted in something tasty to eat. In ancient Greece, the word for "cook," "butcher," and "priest" was the same—mageiros—and the word shares an etymological root with "magic." I would watch, rapt, when my mother conjured her most magical dishes, like the tightly wrapped packages of fried chicken Kiev that, when cut open with a sharp knife, liberated a pool of melted butter and an aromatic gust of herbs. But watching an everyday pan of eggs get scrambled was nearly as riveting a spectacle, as the slimy yellow goop suddenly leapt into the form of savory gold nuggets. Even the most ordinary dish follows a satisfying arc of transformation, magically becoming more than the sum of its ordinary parts.

Does mageiros really share an etymological root with magic?

According to Hans Dohm, Mageiros: Die Rolle des Kochs in der griechisch-römischen Komödie (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1964), pp. 72-74, Greek μάγειρος (mágeiros = cook) is related to μάχαιρα (máchaira = knife). Dohm gives credit for this etymology to Vittore Pisani, "Una parola greca di probabile origine macedone: μάγειρος," Revue internationale des études balkaniques 1 (1934) 255-259 (non vidi).

But cf. Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, III (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974), s.v. μάγειρος, p. 656, who concludes, "Pas d'étymologie établie." Chantraine is also agnostic about μάχαιρα (p. 673): "Mais il n'y a pas d'étymologie: le rapprochement avec μάχομαι n'est pas plausible." Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2009), is unavailable to me (Brill advertises it as "A must-have research tool that should be on every classicist's desk"—it costs only $575).

On the theory of an etymological connection between μάγειρος and μάγος, see Rüdiger Schmitt, "'Méconnaissance' altiranischen Sprachgutes im Griechischen," Glotta 49 (1971) 95-110 (at 107):

Durch nichts begründet ist Hemmerdingers anschließende lapidare Feststellung: „Sur μάγος sont formés des mots qui ont trait à la boucherie ou la cuisine (μαγειρεῖον, etc.).“

The quotation comes from Bertrand Hemmerdinger, "158 noms communs grecs d'origine iranienne, d'Eschyle au grec moderne," Byzantinoslavica 30 (1969) 18-41 (at 19), which I haven't seen. Other than Hemmerdinger, whose theory Schmitt calls unfounded, I'm not aware of any scholar who connects mageiros with magic.

Hat tip: Jim K.

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Thanks very much to Aurelian Isaïcq for transcriptions of Beekes, s.v. μάγειρος:

The word looks non-IE, because of the alternations ει/ī and (if μάχαιρα belongs here) γ/χ. Is it Pre-Greek, deriving from *mak-ar^y-? Aeol. μάγοιρος, mentioned by LSJ s.v., is only attested in Greg. Cor., which is not a trustworthy source.

and s.v. μάχαιρα:

I compare μάγειρος 'cook', and on account of the interchange γ/χ conclude that it is a Pre-Greek word.

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On p. 457 of Pollan's book read "Euripides" for "Euripedes".

Labels: etymology

C.H. Sisson (1914-2003), "Ovid in Pontus," Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998), p. 158:

I am an old man whose death is foreseen,
Bystanders admire my longevity.
I see them eat every word I mean,
Yes, and excrete pity.
Di maris et coeli, what if the air
Is empty enough to receive prayer?
Do I have to pray? Because Pontic cold
Is under my cloak now I am old?
It is under my skin, fashionable tears.
A suitable place to die, or to make amends;
Failure makes enemies as success friends.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), Altavona: Fact and Fiction from My Life in the Highlands (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1882), pp. 207-208:

FL.—Nevertheless, I must confess, my sympathies in such cases instinctively go with the conquered. If I look forth with wonder on the adventurous admirals of Agricola, drawing with the keels, so to speak, of their long ships a boundary line which should make the limits of the Roman empire to the West identical with the limits of the then known world, my heart is at the same time stirred in sisterly pity towards the blue barbarians, painted with woad—the Epidians, Selgovians, and Novantes, destined to receive civilisation, not without the "delinimenta vitiorum," which, as Tacitus says, the corrupt Romans of those days always brought with them. Generally, I must confess that I have a liking for savages; they may be rude and sometimes cruel, but they are at least natural.

CH.—It is this contrast, no doubt, between the artificial vices of an over-refined civilisation and the natural virtues of unsophisticated semi-savages, which furnishes the key-note to the admirable little tract, De moribus Germanorum, with which every schoolboy is familiar. At the same time, I apprehend it is distance at bottom that, in the case of cerulean savages, as of blue mountains, lends enchantment to the view. Catch a dragon-fly, and your close inspection will annihilate all its play of colour. Live with a savage with stone hatchets and bone necklaces for a week or a day, and you will straightway begin to sigh for saloons and sofas, and silver forks at dinner.

MAC.—Yes, sentimental worshippers of pure nature, and aesthetical worshippers of the middle ages, are capable of any kind of self-deceit. They live in an atmosphere of elegant lies, and the stuff which they find in some moonshiny novel to feed their weak digestion, is as far removed from healthy nature as the phosphorescence of putrid herring in the dark is from the light of day.

Statue of Pan in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional (Madrid):





Statue of Priapus in the same museum:


Thanks to a friend for sending me these photographs.

John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), Altavona: Fact and Fiction from My Life in the Highlands (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1882), pp. 321-322:

As to what you say about the gloomy aspect and sour Pharisaism of the trans-Grampian religion, it is certainly true, but true at the same time to a considerable extent of Scotland generally. The religion of the so-called Evangelical clergy in the Lowlands is strongly tinged, if not with gloom, certainly with a tone of habitual antagonism to all innocent enjoyment and playful recreation. With these men playing at cards is a deadly sin, and dancing a sort of quick march to hell. For a minister of the gospel to talk on any other subject than God, and hell, and eternity, is to slide into worldly conversation. Living persons should, if possible, always be talking about death. If you read the biographies of some of their most popular spokesmen, you will find that their religious life commences with a profound conviction that the world lies under a curse, that all men are naturally hell-deserving sinners, and that original sin, or moral contamination inherited from our primal progenitor, so far from being a palliation, as it logically must be, is rather to be viewed as an exaggeration of the guilt of any actual sins that a man may commit. In a world so abandoned of God, the only thing a wise man can do is to keep at a distance from it, to look upon all natural pleasures as sinful, and to devote the mind altogether to emotional preparation for a future and higher life, of which the present is only the thorny entrance. Such a religion, like Oriental Buddhism, is in fact a renunciation of humanity and a declaration of war against all temporal and visible enjoyments. It is a temper the very reverse of that which was praised and practised by Socrates and the other wise Greeks. To them religion was rather the art of enjoying the present life according to reason. Hence the notable antipathy which our so-called Evangelical religionists feel to all classical culture. M'Cheyne of Dundee wrote to one of his early friends to "beware of the atmosphere of the classics; it is pernicious, and must be known only as chemists know poisons."<sup>1

1</sup> Memoirs of R. Murray M'Cheyne (Edinburgh, 1875), pp. 22, 29, 39, and 54.

Stendhal (1783-1842), The Life of Henry Brulard, tr. John Sturrock (New York: New York Review Books, 2002), p. 99:

Judge of the effect of Don Quijote in the midst of such awful joylessness! The discovery of that book, read beneath the second lime-tree in the walk beside the sunken parterre where the ground was a foot lower, and where I used to sit, is perhaps the greatest period of my life.

Qu'on juge de l'effet de Don Quichotte au milieu d'une si horrible tristesse! La découverte de ce livre, lu sous le second tilleul de l'allée du côté du parterre dont le terrain s'enfonçait d'un pied, et là je m'asseyais, est peut-être la plus grande époque de ma vie.

Cardinal Bessarion, letter to Lorenzo Valla (1453), tr. Brendan Cook:

We have always counted Quintilian as among the foremost authors of the Latin language. Your statement did not merely confirm this opinion of ours, but actually strengthened it so that we now think him second to none in the art of rhetoric. We have recently had the book transcribed, and for beauty of decoration it surpasses other books as the sun outshines the other stars. But in truth this same book, like nearly all of them, is riddled with error. It is surely a great shame that a man of such noble countenance, so ruddy and flushed with blood, whose whole body has a natural beauty and regal dignity, should also be so feeble of frame and frail of limb. We have accordingly decided to have the book attended to with the greatest possible care, so that it may be worthy of its beauty. We do not lack the doctors to achieve this, but the instruments to effect the cure.

In the name of your humanity and our mutual affection, we therefore ask you to send us those instruments, that is to say your Quintilian, the only correct copy on earth. He will remain with us as our guest until our copy makes a full recovery. Afterward he will be returned to you at once safe and sound, feeling that he has earned no small glory from his journey by having restored such a man from illness to good health. For our part, we shall forever remain in your debt, along with our Quintilian.

The Latin:

Fabium Quintilianum unum ex praecipuis Latinae linguae auctoribus semper putavimus; quam opinionem nostram sententia tua non solum confirmavit, verum etiam ita auxit, ut neminem iam huic in arte rhetorica preponendum existimemus. Fecimus proximis diebus eum librum transcribi, tantum inter ceteros libros pulchritudine ac decore praestantem, quantum sol ceteris sideribus lucidior est. Verum idem, ut alii fere omnes, mendosus est; indigna sane res, ut homo facie tam liberalii, multo sanguine, multo rubore suffusa, cui ingenua totius corporis pulchritudo et regius quidam decor inest, adeo imbecillis viribus, adeo nervis infirmus sit. Quare nos quidem statuimus quam maxima fieri poterit diligentia eum librum curari, quo talis sit qualem pulchritudo eius meretur. Ad hoc vero non medici nobis desunt, sed instrumenta ad medendum.

Petimus igitur abs te per humanitatem tuam, per mutuum amorem nostrum, ea instrumenta, idest Quintilianum tuum, qui solus in orbe terrarum correctus est, ad nos mittas. Tamdiu hospitabitur nobiscum quoad noster recte convaluerit. Postea ad te statim integer revertetur; nec parvam sibi laudem ex hac peregrinatione adeptum putabit, qui talem virum ex valetudinario bene valere fecerit. Nos vero una eum Quintiliano nostro tibi perpetuo devincti erimus.

Cf. the use of the words mendosus, sanus, etc., when discussing the soundness of texts. Here is another example, from the prolegomena of Tischendorf's Evangelium Palatinum Ineditum (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1847), p. ix:

Ex quo tempore operam dedi ut graecum Novi Testamenti textum ad eam revocarem integritatem quae ex summae vetustatis monumentis diligenter excussis hauriri posset, intellexi, insigne ejus rei subsidium in antiquis interpretationibus latinis positum esse. Ut autem non potest qui ipse aegrotat alii medicus esse: ita nec ad corrigenda graeca tuto adhibueris latina, nisi haec ipsa satis sana esse cognoveris.

And who can forget Housman describing the diagnostic acumen of Bentley?

Lucida tela diei: these are the words that come into one's mind when one has halted at some stubborn perplexity of reading or interpretation, has witnessed Scaliger and Gronouius and Huetius fumble at it one after another, and then turns to Bentley and sees Bentley strike his finger on the place and say thou ailest here, and here.

M. Manilii Astronomicon Liber Primus, ed. A.E. Housman (London: Grant Richards, 1903), p. xvi.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), Altavona: Fact and Fiction from My Life in the Highlands (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1882), p. 300:

A genuine Highlander is apt to feel towards English, as your Oxonian does to Latin; however well he knows it, it is not his mother tongue. A man may learn many languages, but he can have only one mother tongue.

This started me thinking about the phrase "mother tongue" and its equivalents, which I don't remember seeing in ancient Greek or Latin. Apparently it first appeared in the 12th century. There's a good article on the subject by Einar Haugen (1906-1994), "The 'mother tongue'," in Robert L. Cooper and Bernard Spolsky, edd., The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought: Essays in Honor of Joshua A. Fishman's Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991), pp. 75-84 (some pages not visible through Google Books).

Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956), at the beginning of his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard E. Trask (1953; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), set forth ten "Guiding Principles," in the form of untranslated quotations from five European languages. I could find existing translations of only the first three principles, so I tried to translate the others myself. Thanks very much to friends who patiently answered questions and made suggestions—any remaining errors and infelicities are my own fault. I've also added a few notes. Curtius put the citations after the quotations; I put them before.

1. Herodotus, I, ch. 8:

πάλαι δὲ τὰ καλὰ ἀνθρώποισι ἐξεύρηται, ἐκ τῶν μανθάνειν δεῖ.

Translated by A.D. Godley:

Men have long ago made wise rules from which one ought to learn.

2. Polybius, XV, 4.11:

πατέρων εὖ κείμενα ἔργα.

Translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert:

The noble traditions of our fathers.

It's a bit difficult to understand this phrase, by itself, as a guiding principle. In the original Greek, the words are the object of the verb διαφυλάξαι (to guard, preserve, uphold). "To preserve the noble traditions of our fathers" would be an appropriate principle.

3. Petronius, ch. 118:

... neque concipere aut edere partum mens potest nisi ingenti flumine litterarum inundata

Translated by Michael Heseltine:

... the mind cannot conceive or bring forth its fruit unless it is steeped in the vast flood of literature

4. Proverb:

Ne tu aliis faciendam trade, factam si quam rem cupis.

If you want something done, don't give it to others to be done.

This proverb isn't in Hans Walther, Proverbia Sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963-1969), or Renzo Tosi, Dictionnaire des sentences latines et grecques, tr. Rebecca Lenoir (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2010). W.M. Lindsay quotes it as an old proverb (proverbii veteris) in the Latin preface to his edition of Isidore's Etymologiae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), p. vi.

Update: see Not an Ancient Latin Proverb.

5. Les Narbonnais:

Guillames dist a ceus qui o lui erent:
"Seignor," fet il, "les bones uevres perent;
Fesom aussi con cil qui bien ovrerent."

William spoke to those who were with him:
"Gentlemen," he said, "good deeds perish*;
Let us, too, act with those who do good deeds."

See Hermann Sucher, ed., Les Narbonnais: Chanson de Geste (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot et C^ie, 1898), p. 26, who prints these lines (numbered 611-613) as follows:

Guillames dist a ceux qui o lui erent:
"Segnor," fet il, "les bones hoevres perent.
Fessom ausi con cil qui bien ovrerent!"

*Update: Trond Kruke Salberg writes in an email (January 9, 2016):

The verbal form "perent" is 3rd person plural indicative present tense of Old French "paroir" (= Modern French "paraître": to appear, to be or become visible). It has nothing to do with Modern French "périr".

Change the translation above, therefore, to "good deeds are conspicuous."

6. Goethe, Flüchtige Übersicht über die Kunst in Deutschland (1801):

Vielleicht überzeugt man sich bald, dass es keine patriotische Kunst und patriotische Wissenschaft gebe. Beide gehören, wie alles Gute, der ganzen Welt an und können nur durch allgemeine freie Wechselwirkung aller zugleich Lebenden, in steter Rücksicht auf das, was uns vom Vergangenen übrig und bekannt ist, gefordert werden.

Perhaps people will soon be convinced that there is no patriotic art, no patriotic science. Both belong, like all good things, to the entire world and can be furthered only by free and universal cooperation among all now living, with constant reference to what has been handed down and is familiar to us from past generations.

7. Jacob Burckhardt, Werke, XIV, 57 8:

Auch die Zeiten des Verfalls und Untergangs haben ihr heiliges Recht auf unser Mitgefühl.

Even times of decay and destruction have their sacred right to our sympathy.

8. Gustav Gröber, Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, I (1888), 3:

Absichtslose Wahrnehmung, unscheinbare Anfänge gehen dem zielbewussten Suchen, dem allseitigen Erfassen des Gegenstandes voraus. Im sprungweisen Durchmessen des Raumes hascht dann der Suchende nach dem Ziel. Mit einem Schema unfertiger Ansichten über ähnliche Gegenstände scheint er das Ganze erfassen zu konnen, ehe Natur und Teile gekannt sind. Der vorschnellen Meinung folgt die Einsicht des Irrtums, nur langsam der Entschluss, dem Gegenstand in kleinen und kleinsten Schritten nahe zu kommen, Teil und Teilchen zu beschauen und nicht zu ruhen, bis die Überzeugung gewonnen ist, dass sie nur so und nicht anders aufgefasst werden dürfen.

Unintentional observation and unremarkable beginnings precede the purposeful search, the comprehension of the object in all its aspects. Crossing the area in fits and starts the researcher strives to attain his goal. With a pattern of incomplete views of similar objects, he seems able to grasp the whole before its character and parts are known. Rash opinion follows the insight gained through error, and only slowly does one resolve to approach the object in small and even smaller steps, to examine it part and parcel, and not to rest until convinced that things should be understood in just this way and not otherwise.

9. Antoine Meillet, Esquisse d'une histoire de la langue latine (1928):

On aurait souhaité de n'être pas technique. À l'essai, il est apparu que, si l'on voulait épargner au lecteur les détails précis, il ne restait que des généralités vagues, et que toute démonstration manquait.

One would have liked not to be technical. But in the attempt, it seemed that, if one wanted to spare the reader specific details, there remained only vague generalities, and all proof was lacking.

10. José Ortega y Gasset, Obras (1932), 963:

Un libro de ciencia tiene que ser de ciencia; pero también tiene que ser un libro.

A scientific book must be scientific; but it also must be a book.

John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), Altavona: Fact and Fiction from My Life in the Highlands (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1882), p. 47:

FL.—The best thing that could be done for you Germans were to keep you from the sight of a book for at least two months in the year. You pore over old papers, peeping through the fumes of tobacco, till you positively unlearn the natural use of your eyes. How is it that in a company of half-a-dozen Germans three are sure to have spectacles on their noses?

B.—I do not know; but, if we did damage our eyes by too much poring over books, it is no small compensation to think that we have produced such men as Niebuhr and Mommsen, Wolf, Hermann, Boeckh, and Bopp.

FL.—In these names verily you have your reward. You are the high priests of learning, not for yourselves only, but for the whole world.

One German scholar supposedly became blind from poring over old papers, viz. Wilhelm Studemund (1843-1889), who prefixed Catullus' words "Ni te plus oculis meis amarem!" ("Did I not love thee more than my eyes!") to his transcription of the Ambrosian palimpsest of Plautus—T. Macci Plauti Fabularum Reliquiae Ambrosianae: Codicis Rescripti Ambrosiani Apographum (Berlin: Weidmann, 1889). However, Benjamin W. Fortson IV casts doubt on the story in his Language and Rhythm in Plautus: Synchronic and Diachronic Studies (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), p. 11, n. 27:

Contrary to popular wisdom, it is not physiologically possible to go blind in this fashion; more likely, Studemund suffered from macular degeneration.

John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), Altavona: Fact and Fiction from My Life in the Highlands (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1882), p. 24:

CH.—νὴ τὸν κύνα—

MAC.—Did not I tell you that a clergyman, a predestinated Dean, and a probable Bishop of the Anglo-Catholic Church of Christ in Great Britain, should not swear?

CH.—You are quite right; it was a bad habit we learned at College—I mean swearing in Greek; we thought there was no harm in that; besides, the man who uses that asseveration, which you call swearing, was a Saint.

MAC.—Who?

CH.—Socrates.

MAC.—(Singing to the tune of the Litany of the Virgin—Sancta virgo virginum—that used to be sung by the Roman people at vespers in the street corners.)

O Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis,
σοφῶν σοφώτατε, ora pro nobis,
λογίων λογιώτατε, ora pro nobis,
λαλῶν λαλίστατε, ora pro nobis,
σιμῶν σιμώτατε, ora pro nobis!

My translation of the song:

O Saint Socrates, pray for us,
Wisest of the wise, pray for us,
Most learned of the learned, pray for us,
Most talkative of the talkative, pray for us,
Most snub-nosed of the snub-nosed, pray for us!

The oath (νὴ τὸν κύνα) means "by the dog."

Related post: The Company of Saints.

Juvenal 13.23-30 (tr. Susanna Morton Braund):

What day is so auspicious that it doesn't produce cases of theft, betrayal, and fraud, profit gained by every kind of crime, and money acquired by the blade or poison box? Good people are rare. Count them: they are hardly as many as the gates of Thebes or the mouths of the rich Nile. We are living in the ninth age, an era worse than the age of iron. Nature herself can find no name for its wickedness and has no metal to label it.

quae tam fausta dies, ut cesset prodere furtum,
perfidiam, fraudes atque omni ex crimine lucrum
quaesitum et partos gladio vel pyxide nummos?
rari quippe boni: numera, vix sunt totidem quot
Thebarum portae vel divitis ostia Nili.
nona aetas agitur peioraque saecula ferri
temporibus, quorum sceleri non invenit ipsa
nomen et a nullo posuit natura metallo.

23 fausta Markland, festa codd. | furtum Nisbet, furem codd.

See M.J. McGann, "Juvenal's Ninth Age (13, 28ff.)," Hermes 96 (1968) 509-514.

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 22.7.15 (tr. W.H.S. Jones):

Moreover, most people actually laugh at me for carrying on research in these matters, and I am accused of busying myself with trifles.

immo vero plerisque ultro etiam inrisui sumus ista commentantes atque frivoli operis arguimur.

Related post: Orchideenfach.

Erasmus, letter 125 Allen, tr. Francis Morgan Nichols, The Epistles of Erasmus, Vol. I (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901), pp. 240-241:

You want to know what I am doing. I devote myself to my friends, with whom I enjoy the most delightful intercourse. With them I shut myself in some corner, where I avoid the gaping crowd, and either speak to them in sweet whispers or listen to their gentle voices, talking with them as with myself. Can anything be more convenient than this? They never hide their own secrets, while they keep sacred whatever is entrusted to them. They speak when bidden, and when not bidden they hold their tongue. They talk of what you wish, as much as you wish and as long as you wish; do not flatter, feign nothing, keep back nothing, freely tell you of your faults, and take no man's character away. What they say is either amusing or wholesome. In prosperity they moderate, in affliction they console, do not vary with fortune, follow you in all dangers, and last out to the very grave. Nothing can be more candid than their relations with one another. I visit them from time to time, now choosing one companion and now another with perfect impartiality.

With these humble friends I bury myself in seclusion. What wealth or what scepters would I take in exchange for this tranquil life? If there is any obscurity in our metaphor, all that I have said about friends is to be understood of books, whose familiarity makes me a happy man, unlucky only in this, that I do not enjoy this felicity with you. Although there is no need to do so, I shall not cease to exhort you to cling with all your heart to noble studies. Do not admire anything that is vulgar or commonplace, but strive always to read what is highest.

The Latin, from P.S. Allen, Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, Vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), pp. 288-289:

Quid rerum faciam rogas? Amicis operam do, horum consuetudine gratissima memet oblecto. 'Quos tu tandem amicos mihi iactitas,' inquis, 'homuncio leuissime? An quisquam te visum aut auditum velit?' Equidem non diffiteor fortunatorum amicos esse plurimos; at nec pauperibus desunt amici, et quidem istis non paulo tum certiores tum commodiores. Cum his me concludo in angulum aliquem, et turbam ventosam fugiens aut cum illis dulcia quaedam mussito, aut eos aliquid insusurrantes audio, cum his non secus ас mecum loquor. An quicquam his commodius? Arcana ipsi sua celant nunquam, commissa summa cum fide continent: nihil foris quae liberius inter familiares effundere solemus, renunciant: vocati praesto sunt, inuocati non ingerunt sese: iussi loquuntur, iniussi tacent: loquuntur quae voles, quantum voles, quoad voles: nihil assentantur, fingunt nihil, nihil dissimulant: vitia tua tibi libere indicant, nemini obtrectant: aut iucunda dicunt, aut salutaria: secundis in rebus moderantur, consolantur in afflictis, cum fortuna minime variantur: in omnia pericula te sequuntur, ad extremos usque rogos perdurant: nihil ipsis inter se candidius. Committo subinde, nunc hos, nunc illos mihi asciscens, omnibus aequus.

Cum his amiculis, optime N., sepultus delitesco. Quas ego tandem opes aut quae sceptra cum hac desidia commutauero? Verum ne nostra te fallat metaphora, quicquid de amiculis hactenus sum locutus, de libris dictum intelligas, quorum familiaritas me plane beatum effecit, hoc solo infortunatum quod non tecum mihi haec felicitas contigerit. Te, quanquam nihil opus, hortari non desinam vt toto animo praeclara studia complectaris, ne quid plebeium, ne quid mediocre mireris; ad summa semper enitere.

Thomas Wijck (1616–1677), A Scholar in His Study

From an email:

Years ago, I read a wonderful anecdote describing a book collector or learned person from, probably, the Renaissance era. In the anecdote, the collector is described as having one bookcase filled with Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, among others. At the top of this bookcase was engraved the word "Amo."

He also had a second bookcase, containing only Aeschylus. This bookcase was labeled "Timeo."

It always seemed like I read the story in Victor Hugo's book on Shakespeare, but I recently thumbed through my copy and I think now that is wrong.

Does this story ring any bells, by any chance? I'd enjoy figuring out where I came across it!

I'm not familiar with this story. Perhaps some reader of this blog can help.

---

Ian Jackson gets the prize. He identified the source as Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864), p. 101 (Book IV, Chapter I):

A man whom we do not know how to class in his own century, so little does he belong to it, being at the same time so much behind it and so much in advance of it, the Marquis de Mirabeau, that queer customer as a philanthropist, but a very rare thinker after all, had a library, in the two corners of which he had had carved a dog and a she-goat, in remembrance of Socrates, who swore by the dog, and of Zeno, who swore by the goat. His library presented this peculiarity: on one side he had Hesiod, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Pindar, Theocritus, Anacreon, Theophrastus, Demosthenes, Plutarch, Cicero, Titus Livius, Seneca, Persius, Lucan, Terence, Horace, Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus, Virgil, and underneath could be read, engraved in letters of gold, "AMO;" on the other side, he had Aeschylus alone, and underneath, this word—"TIMEO."

Kenneth White, "Recalling Ovid," Open World: The Collected Poems 1960-2000 (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2003), p. 359:

Another Sarmatian winter setting in
goats blethering in what passes for a garden
rain falling when it isn't poisoned arrows
(how many summers since I smelled a Roman rose!)
eyes bleary, frosty weather on my chin        5

why bother writing yet another book?
well, it keeps my mind off stupid folk
the scratching of my stylus on the page
is music to my ears and cools my rage
I know now I'll be here until I croak        10

so, here's a man will listen to the snow
and let the hours come, long and slow
such distance and such silence, all I wish
salt fish is now my favourite dish
I was a famous Roman poet, long ago.        15

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Pseudo-Diogenes, letter 44, to Metrocles, in Diogenes the Cynic, Sayings and Anecdotes with Other Popular Moralists. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Robin Hard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 162, with notes on p. 254:

It is not only bread and water, and a bed of straw, and a rough cloak, that teach temperance and hardiness, but also, if I may use the expression, the shepherd's hand.* If only I had been able to make that known to Paris, who was once a cattle-herd.* So you should adopt that practice too, wherever you are hurrying to, since it accords with our way of life. As for intemperate intercourse with women, which takes up so much free time, you may bid that farewell. For one who is hastening along the short cut to happiness, dalliance with women brings no benefit; and for many ordinary men too, such activity brings its penalty likewise. But you for your part will take your place among those who have learned from Pan* to make use of your hand; and do not draw back even if some call you a dog, or something still worse, for having adopted this way of life.

the shepherd's hand: referring to masturbation, as a practice specially associated with shepherds because they live a solitary life while pasturing their sheep.

Paris ... once a cattle-herd: the Trojan prince was exposed at birth because his mother had a sinister dream foretelling that he would bring disaster to his homeland, but he was rescued by a herdsman, and herded cattle outside the city during his earlier years; he later provoked the Trojan War, and no end of suffering, by abducting the beautiful Helen, hence the wish expressed here.

learned from Pan: the text is corrupt here, but this proposed reading makes excellent sense, the rustic deity Pan being the patron-god of shepherds. In Dio Chrysostom, Speech 6.17-20, Diogenes recounts a little myth in which it is claimed that Hermes taught the practice of masturbation to Pan during the time of his hopeless passion for Echo, and Pan then passed it on to goatherds.

Hard in his bibliography (p. xxxv) lists two modern editions of Pseudo-Diogenes' letters: A.J. Malherbe, The Cynic Epistles (Missoula, 1977) and E. Müseler, Die Kynikerbriefe, 2 vols. (Paderborn, 1994). I think Hard is translating from Müseler's edition, although he doesn't explicitly say so. Neither edition is available to me, although I can see the apparatus for this letter from Müseler's edition via Google Books' "snippet view." The only Greek text I have access to is in Epistolographi Graeci, ed. Rudolph Hercher (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1873), p. 256:

Οὐ μόνον ἄρτος καὶ ὕδωρ καὶ στιβὰς καὶ τρίβων σωφροσύνην καὶ καρτερίαν διδάσκουσιν, ἀλλ' εἰ χρὴ οὕτως φάναι, καὶ ποιμενικὴ χείρ. ὤφελον καὶ τὸν πρὶν ἐκεῖνον βουκόλον ὄντα ἐξεπίστασθαι. ἐπιμέλου οὖν καὶ ταύτης ἔνθα ἂν ἐπείγῃς· ἔστι γὰρ ἐκ τῆς συντάξεως τοῦ ἡμετέρου βίου. τὰς δὲ πρὸς τὰς γυναῖκας ἀκρατεῖς ἐντεύξεις πολλῆς δεομένας σχολῆς ἔα πολλὰ χαίρειν· οὐ γὰρ σχολή τι μόνον πτωχὸν αἰτεῖν κατὰ Πλάτωνα, ἀλλὰ τῷ ἐπ' εὐδαιμονίαν σύντομον ἐπειγομένῳ ἡ πρὸς γυναῖκας ἔντευξις ὄνησιν φέρει ἀνθρώπων δ' ἰδιωτῶν πολλῶν, οἷς ὁμοίως διὰ ταύτην τὴν πρᾶξιν ζημία, περιμαθήσεις παρὰ τοῖς μεμαθηκόσιν ἐκ παντὸς ἐργάσασθαι. σὺ μὴ ἐπιστρέφου, μηδ' εἴ σε διὰ τὸν τοιοῦτον βίον κύνα τινὲς ἢ ἄλλο τι ἀποκαλῶσι χεῖρον.

Here is the apparatus from Müseler's edition:


The Schafstaedt who emended παντὸς to Πανὸς is Heinrich Schafstaedt, De Diogenis Epistulis (diss. Göttingen, 1892), p. 39. Wilamowitz supervised Schafstaedt's dissertation, and his correction of πρὶν to Πάριν also appears on the same page.

Hercher doesn't give a complete Latin translation of this letter, presumably because of its scabrous subject matter.

Related post: A Gift of the Gods.

Terence, Adelphoe 855-861 (Demea speaking; tr. John Sargeaunt):

However well a man may have calculated his scheme of life, still circumstances, years, experience, always introduce a new element and teach new lessons. You find that you don't know what you thought you did know, and what you thought of primary importance that in practice you reject. That's what has happened to me. The hard life, which up to now I have lived, now that my race is almost run I renounce. And why? Hard facts have taught me that a man can have no better qualities than mildness and complaisance.

numquam ita quisquam bene subducta ratione ad vitam fuit
quin res, aetas, usus semper aliquid apportet novi,
aliquid moneat, ut illa quae te scisse credas nescias,
et quae tibi putaris prima, in experiundo ut repudies.
quod nunc mi evenit. nam ego vitam duram quam vixi usque adhuc
prope iam excurso spatio omitto. id quam ob rem? re ipsa repperi
facilitate nil esse homini melius neque clementia.

Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 1.21 (on Scopelian; tr. Wilmer Cave Wright, with her note):

During the daytime he did not work much, but he was the most sleepless of men, and hence he used to say: "O Night, thy share of wisdom is greater than that of the other gods!"² and he made her the collaborator in his studies. Indeed it is said that he used to work continuously from evening until dawn.

² Menander, frag. 199 Meineke; Scopelian adapted the line by substituting wisdom for love.

τὸν μεθ᾽ ἡμέραν καιρὸν ἧττον ἐσπούδαζεν, ἀυπνότατος δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων γενόμενος "ὦ νύξ," ἔλεγε "σὺ γὰρ δὴ πλεῖστον σοφίας μετέχεις μέρος θεῶν," ξυνεργὸν δὲ αὐτὴν ἐποιεῖτο τῶν ἑαυτοῦ φροντισμάτων. λέγεται γοῦν καὶ ἐς ὄρθρον ἀποτεῖναι σπουδάζων ἀπὸ ἑσπέρας.

Stendhal (1783-1842), The Life of Henry Brulard, tr. John Sturrock (New York: New York Review Books, 2002), p. 92:

We were toiling away translating Virgil then when I discovered in my father's library a translation of Virgil in four handsomely bound octavo volumes by that scoundrel the abbé Desfontaines, I think it was. I found the volume corresponding to the Georgics and to Book Two which we were massacring (in reality we knew no Latin at all). I hid this blessed volume in the privy, in a cupboard where we used to store the feathers from the capons eaten in the house, and there we would go two or three times during our painful version, to consult that of Desfontaines.

Nous traduisions donc Virgile à grand-peine lorsque je découvris dans la bibliothèque de mon père une traduction de Virgile en quatre volumes in 8° fort bien reliés par ce coquin d'abbé Desfontaines, je crois. Je trouvai le volume correspondant aux Géorgiques et au second livre que nous écorchions (réellement nous ne savions pas du tout le latin). Je cachai ce bienheureux volume aux lieux d'aisance dans une armoire où l'on déposait les plumes des chapons consommés à la maison, et là, deux ou trois fois pendant notre pénible version, nous allions consulter celle de Desfontaines.

Wilmer Cave Wright (1868-1951) translated late Greek texts (Julian, Philostratus, Eunapius) for the Loeb Classical Library. She did not translate Seneca the Elder. Michael Winterbottom (1934-) did. My copy (a gift from a friend) was "First published 1974 / Reprinted 2003".

Homer, Odyssey 10.572-573 (tr. Richmond Lattimore):

                              Whose eyes can follow the movement
of a god passing from place to place, unless the god wishes?

                         τίς ἂν θεὸν οὐκ ἐθέλοντα
ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ἴδοιτ᾽ ἢ ἔνθ᾽ ἢ ἔνθα κιόντα;

Related posts:

• To Believe as They Believed
• How Would You Recognize a God?
• A Private Epiphany
• Epiphanies
  
• More on Epiphanies

Pseudo-Vergil, Culex 79-97 (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

Who in a happier age could be more blest [80] than he who, dwelling afar, with pure soul and feelings well tested knows not the greed of wealth, and fears not grim wars or the fatal conflicts of a mighty fleet, nor yet, if so he may but adorn the gods' holy temples with gleaming spoils, or high uplifted may surpass the limits of wealth, [85] wilfully risks his life, confronting savage foes? He reverences a god shaped by pruning-knife, not by artist's skill; he reverences the groves; for him the grasses of the field, mottled with flowers, yield Panchaean incense; his are sweet repose and unsullied pleasure, [90] free, with simple cares. This is his goal, toward this he directs every sense; this is the thought lurking within his heart, that, content with any fare, he may be rich in repose, and in pleasant sleep may enchain his weary frame. O flocks, O Pans, O vales of [95] Hamadryads, delightful in your springs, in whose humble worship the shepherds, vying each for himself with the bard of Ascra, spend with tranquil hearts a care-free life.

The Latin, with my selective apparatus:

quis magis optato queat esse beatior aevo,
quam qui mente procul pura sensuque probando        80
non avidas agnovit opes nec tristia bella
nec funesta timet validae certamina classis
nec, spoliis dum sancta deum fulgentibus ornet
templa vel evectus finem transcendat habendi,
adversum saevis ultro caput hostibus offert?        85
illi falce deus colitur, non arte politus,
ille colit lucos, illi Panchaia tura
floribus agrestes herbae variantibus addunt;
illi dulcis adest requies et pura voluptas,
libera, simplicibus curis; huc imminet, omnis        90
derigit huc sensus, haec cura est subdita cordi,
quolibet ut requie victu contentus abundet,
iucundoque liget languentia corpora somno.
o pecudes, o Panes et o gratissima Tempe
fontis Hamadryadum, quarum non divite cultu        95
aemulus Ascraeo pastor sibi quisque poetae
securam placido traducit pectore vitam!

80 procul codd.: potens Heinsius
84 vel Bembo: nec codd.
95 fontis codd.: frondis Heinsius, hortus Leo, frigus Housman, saltus Allen

I haven't seen Anthony A. Barrett, "The Praise of Country Life in the Culex," La Parola del Passato 25 (1970) 323-327.

Related posts:

• Merry It Is and Quiet
• The Shepherd
• This Lowly Quiet Life

James Thomson (1700-1748), "Winter," lines 322-338, from The Seasons:

Ah! little think the gay licentious proud,
Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround;
They who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth,
And wanton, often cruel, riot waste;
Ah! little think they, while they dance along,
How many feel, this very moment, death,
And all the sad variety of pain.
How many sink in the devouring flood,
Or more devouring flame. How many bleed,
By shameful variance betwixt man and man.
How many pine in want, and dungeon glooms;
Shut from the common air, and common use
Of their own limbs. How many drink the cup
Of baleful grief, or eat the bitter bread
Of misery. Sore pierced by wintry winds,
How many shrink into the sordid hut
Of cheerless poverty.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), The Gay Science, Book IV, § 321 (tr. Walter Kaufmann):

Let us stop thinking so much about punishing, reproaching, and improving others!

Lasst uns nicht mehr so viel an Strafen, Tadeln und Bessern denken!

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Daybreak, Book III, § 195 (tr. R.J. Hollingdale):

And the classics! Did we learn anything of that which these same ancients taught their young people? Did we learn to speak or write as they did? Did we practise unceasingly the fencing-art of conversation, dialectics? Did we learn to move as beautifully and proudly as they did, to wrestle, to throw, to box as they did? Did we learn anything of the asceticism practised by all Greek philosophers? Were we trained in a single one of the antique virtues and in the manner in which the ancients practised it?

Und Classicität! Lernten wir Etwas von dem, worin gerade die Alten ihre Jugend erzogen? Lernten wir sprechen wie sie, schreiben wie sie? übten wir uns unablässig in der Fechtkunst des Gesprächs, in der Dialektik? Lernten wir uns schön und stolz bewegen wie sie, ringen, werfen, faustkämpfen wie sie? Lernten wir Etwas von der praktischen Asketik aller griechischen Philosophen? Wurden wir in einer einzigen antiken Tugend geübt und in der Weise, wie die Alten sie übten?

Id.:

Nothing grows clearer to me year by year than that the nature of the Greeks and of antiquity, however simple and universally familiar it may seem to lie before us, is very hard to understand, indeed is hardly accessible at all, and that the facility with which the ancients are usually spoken of is either a piece of frivolity or an inherited arrogance born of thoughtlessness. We are deceived by a similarity of words and concepts: but behind them there always lies concealed a sensation which has to be foreign, incomprehensible or painful to modern sensibility.

Nichts wird mir von Jahr zu Jahr deutlicher, als dass alles griechische und antike Wesen, so schlicht und weltbekannt es vor uns zu liegen scheint, sehr schwer verständlich, ja, kaum zugänglich ist, und dass die übliche Leichtigkeit, mit der von den Alten geredet wird, entweder eine Leichtfertigkeit oder ein alter erblicher Dünkel der Gedankenlosigkeit ist. Die ähnlichen Worte und Begriffe täuschen uns: aber hinter ihnen liegt immer eine Empfindung versteckt, welche dem modernen Empfinden fremd, unverständlich oder peinlich sein müsste.

Ovid, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters. Translated with an Introduction, Notes and Glossary by Peter Green, with a New Foreword (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. x (from the translator's Foreword):

The notion that Ovid was never relegated to Tomis at all, but—in a very real sense an exul ludens—spent his latter years in Rome toying with ever more elaborate exilic topoi (presumably as an excuse for not finishing the Fasti and not revising the Metamorphoses, unless we take Ovid's cessation of work on these cherished projects as part of the fantasy), remains fundamentally bizarre. Just how bizarre can be appreciated when we try to envisage the Realien of such a project and the reaction to it of friends and critics. Ovid's real exile may not have provoked (surviving) contemporary comment, but so ludicrous a piece of monotonous and obsessional playacting (not to mention the abandonment of the two great works on which the poet had set his heart) most certainly would have done so. In the Black Sea Letters (4.3.51-54) Ovid wrote:

If anyone had told me, 'You'll end up by the Euxine
scared of being hit with a shaft from some native's bow,'
my reply would have been,'Take a purge, your brain needs clearing:
try hellebore, you're in a really bad way.'

Just so. I suspect that, confronted by the exile-in-Rome theory, his rejoinder would have been even more scathing, not least to Bingham's recent suggestion that because Ovid's place of relegation was significantly harsher than any other such location known from the first century CE, therefore it must have been fictional. This flight from reality may be, in essence, a recourse for those scholars of this age who, having systematically removed literature further and further from contact with the real world, found the poet's Black Sea banishment, with his agonized reaction to it, an intrusive and ongoing embarrassment, best relegated to the safe toyshop of fantasy.

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), The Faerie Queene, Book VI, Canto IX, Stanzas 24-25:

The time was once, in my first prime of yeares,
  When pride of youth forth pricked my desire,
  That I disdain'd amongst mine equall peares
  To follow sheepe, and shepheards base attire:
  For further fortune then I would inquire.
  And leauing home, to roiall court I sought;
  Where I did sell my selfe for yearely hire,
  And in the Princes gardin daily wrought:
There I beheld such vainenesse, as I neuer thought.

With sight whereof soone cloyd, and long deluded
  With idle hopes, which them doe entertaine,
  After I had ten yeares my selfe excluded
  From natiue home, and spent my youth in vaine,
  I gan my follies to my selfe to plaine,
  And this sweet peace, whose lacke did then appeare.
  Tho backe returning to my sheepe againe,
  I from thenceforth haue learn'd to loue more deare
This lowly quiet life, which I inherite here.

Jonathan Richardson, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton's Paradise Lost (London: James, John, and Paul Knapton, 1734), pp. cxliv-cxlv:

[A] Reader of Milton must be Always upon Duty; he is Surrounded with Sense, it rises in every Line, every Word is to the Purpose; There are no Lazy Intervals, All has been Consider'd, and Demands, and Merits Observation. Even in the Best Writers you Sometimes find Words and Sentences which hang on so Loosely you may Blow 'em off; Milton's are all Substance and Weight; Fewer would not have Serv'd the Turn, and more would have been Superfluous.

His Silence has the Same Effect, not only that he leaves Work for the Imagination when he has Entertain'd it, and Furnish'd it with Noble Materials; but he Expresses himself So Concisely, Employs Words so Sparingly, that whoever will Possess His Ideas must Dig for them, and Oftentimes pretty far below the Surface. If This is call’d Obscurity let it be remembered 'tis Such a One as is Complaisant to the Reader, not Mistrusting his Ability, Care, Diligence, or the Candidness of his Temper; not That Vicious Obscurity which proceeds from a Muddled Inaccurate Head, not Accustomed to Clear, Well Separated and Regularly Order'd Ideas, or from want of Words and Method and Skill to Convey them to Another, from whence Always Arises Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and a Sort of a MoonLight Prospect over a Landscape at Best not Beautiful; whereas if a Good Writer is not Understood 'tis because his Reader is Unacquainted with, or Incapable of the Subject, or will not Submit to do the Duty of a Reader, which is to Attend Carefully to what he Reads.

I owe the reference to Stanley Eugene Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 54.


Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723), Old Scholar

August von Platen (1796-1835), "Ghazal XXV" (tr. Leonard Forster):

One man's pain, one man's wounds are of no importance,
the healthy pays no heed to what torments the sick,
and if this life, that man keeps on inheriting from man, were not short,
there would be nothing more lamentable in the whole wide world.
Nature reproduces herself uniformly, but her death may take a thousand shapes,
the world does not inquire about my goal or your last hour;
and the man who does not willingly submit to this iron fate, which threatens him,
only worries himself into his grave in helpless anger, and in fate's maw he feels nothing;
everyone knows this, but each man likes to forget it every day,
so let me say nothing more of it.
Forget that the world deceives you and that the desire for it only engenders more desire,
let nothing elude your love or escape your knowledge.
Let each man hope that time will give him what it has never given anyone,
for each man tries to be a universal whole, and every man is at bottom nothing at all.

The German:

Es liegt an eines Menschen Schmerz, an eines Menschen Wunde nichts,
Es kehrt an das, was Kranke quält, sich ewig der Gesunde nichts!
Und wäre nicht das Leben kurz, das stets der Mensch vom Menschen erbt,
So gäb's Beklagenswerteres auf diesem weiten Runde nichts!
Einförmig stellt Natur sich her, doch tausendförmig ist ihr Tod,
Es fragt die Welt nach meinem Ziel, nach deiner letzten Stunde nichts;
Und wer sich willig nicht ergiebt dem ehrnen Lose, das ihm dräut,
Der zürnt ins Grab sich rettungslos und fühlt in dessen Schlunde nichts;
Dies wissen Alle, doch vergißt es Jeder gerne jeden Tag,
So komme denn, in diesem Sinn, hinfort aus meinem Munde nichts!
Vergeßt, daß euch die Welt betrügt, und daß ihr Wunsch nur Wünsche zeugt,
Laßt eurer Liebe nichts entgehn, entschlüpfen eurer Kunde nichts!
Es hoffe Jeder, daß die Zeit ihm gebe, was sie Keinem gab,
Denn Jeder sucht ein All zu sein und Jeder ist im Grunde nichts.

More than half of the lines end with the same word—nichts.

I understand the fifth line to mean that we all come into the world the same way, but that there are a thousand different ways to leave it. For another expression of this idea, see Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 7.1.9 (quoting Cestius Pius, tr. Michael Winterbottom):

This is mankind's wretched lot, that we have one way to be born—but many to die: the noose, the sword, a precipice, poison, ship-wreck and a thousand other deaths lie in wait for this wretched life.

haec est condicio miserrima humani generis, quod nascimur uno modo, multis morimur: laqueus, gladius, praeceps locus, venenum, naufragium, mille aliae mortes insidiantur huic miserrimae vitae.

C.E.M. Joad (1891-1953), The Untutored Townsman's Invasion of the Country (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1946), pp. 49-50:

And to my mind, the best time for walking is the winter. Many townsmen know little of the joys of winter walking, and only venture into the country in weather that is fine and warm. Winter, they think, is cold and wet. Cold it may be, and why not, pray? For my part, I like the cold, which brisks me up so that I can keep up with anybody on a cold day. But wet it most certainly is not, at least, not especially wet. It rains far more, I am convinced, in July and August than ever it does in December and January.

In the winter I can go across country. There is no undergrowth in the woods; there are no crops in the fields and no bracken on the slopes. One walks free and unencumbered and, broadly speaking, one walks where one likes.

And how much more one sees! In August the country is muffled under a blanket of dull green. The blanket spoils its shape and blurs its contours. (It is sad to think that August, which is the dullest month of the year, is the only month in which most people see the country.) The winds of winter have stripped the blanket away and laid bare the bones and naked structure of the countryside. And how lovely that structure is! I would give all the tender greens of young spring, all the gorgeous colours of the autumn woods' decay, for the bare boughs of an oak with its tracery of little twigs silhouetted against the dark red of an afternoon sky in December. The sun has just set and over against it, glimpsed through the infinitely lovely pattern work of the twigs, there is an evening star. There is a tang in the air; the earth rings hard under the feet; there will be a frost to-night. So home to a coal fire, with lamplight and curtains drawn; the kettle boiling on the hob, and crumpets for tea. What has summer to offer comparable to these winter delights?

Crates, quoted by Diogenes Laertius 6.86 = Greek Anthology 7.326 (tr. Robin Hard):

This I own, what I have learned and thought, and the Muses'
Solemn precepts, but all my riches are gone like empty smoke.

ταῦτ' ἔχω ὅσσ' ἔμαθον καὶ ἐφρόντισα καὶ μετὰ Μουσῶν
σέμν' ἐδάην· τὰ δὲ πολλὰ καὶ ὄλβια τῦφος ἔμαρψεν.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, letter to Thomas Love Peacock (July 17, 1816):

You must shelter my roofless Penates, dedicate some new temple to them, and perform the functions of a priest in my absence. They are innocent deities, and their worship neither sanguinary nor absurd.

Leave Mammon and Jehovah to those who delight in wickedness and slavery—their altars are stained with blood or polluted with gold, the price of blood. But the shrines of the Penates are good wood fires, or window frames intertwined with creeping plants; their hymns are the purring of kittens, the hissing of kettles; the long talks over the past and dead, the laugh of children, the warm wind of summer filling the quiet house, and the pelting storm of winter struggling in vain for entrance.

Charles C. Calhoun, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), p. 140:

He got the idea from a scrap of a New York newspaper that bore the state seal, a rising sun with the motto "Excelsior," a word of dubious Latinity as used in his poem, translated as "higher."

Mortimer Collins, Thoughts in My Garden, Vol. I (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1880), pp. 132-133 (August 24, 1871):

The other day I had the pleasure of discussing with an American gentleman the quality of Longfellow's poem 'Excelsior.' I maintained that, beyond the inherent absurdity of any young person's trying to climb the Matterhorn late at night, without guides, and with a banner in his hand instead of an alpenstock, the Latin refrain of the poem could only mean that the youth in question grew taller as he went farther up. Longfellow ought to have written 'Excelsius,' if he meant higher up—as there seems reason to suppose. My American was quite aggrieved, and remarked that the word had been accepted in the United States—that ships were christened 'Excelsior'—that ladies' schools were called 'Excelsior Seminary,' and the like—that there was at least one 'Excelsior Terrace' in every town in the great Republic. 'That,' he said, 'is sound fame'—and I have no doubt Mr. Hepworth Dixon would agree with him. 'But,' I retorted, 'it is unsound grammar.' 'What do we Americans want of Latin grammar?' he asked, indignantly. 'Nothing at all,' was my reply; 'nobody asked you to use Latin, but if you will do it, you might use it accurately.'

D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse (1930; rpt. New York: New York Review Books, 2003), p. 189:

A bitter controversy has raged round the young man's cry of "Excelsior!" One school of philologists holds that he meant to cry "Excelsius!" the comparative of the adverb excelsè, but that what with the late hour and the severe Alpine cold and (as Miss Beatrice Lillie would say) what with this and what with that, he confused it with the comparative of the adjective or past participle excelsus. Arrayed in opposition is a school which insists that the banner with a strange device and the young man's odd behaviour altogether were deliberately designed by Longfellow, the seer, to foreshadow the more striking developments of American Publicity, and that "Excelsior!" therefore is to be regarded as perfectly good Big Business Latin.

Longfellow, letter to Vincenzo Cesati (February 5, 1874):

I have had the pleasure of receiving your card with your friendly criticism on the word "Excelsior."

In reply I would say by way of explanation that the device on the banner is not to be interpreted "ascende superius" but "scopus meus excelsior est."

This will make evident why I say "Excelsior" and not "Excelsius."

Longfellow, letter to Allen Page Moor (April 14, 1876):

What you say of the word "Excelsior" is doubtless right from your point of view, but not from mine. You take it for granted that I meant St. Luke's "Amice, ascende superius." No, that is not my meaning, but rather "Scopus meus excelsior est"; and with this interpretation of the broken phrase, the adjective is right, and not the adverb. And I prefer this interpretation to the other, because Excelsior is a much more sonorous ending to the stanza than Excelsius would be.

Longfellow, letter to Curtis Guild (April 18, 1876):

I know that critics say the word should be excelsius, and they are right if they understand the broken phrase in the scriptural sense of Amice, ascende superius. I do not so fill up the sentence but with some such words as Scopus meus excelsior est. Then the adjective is right and not the adverb.

And this interpretation I prefer, because excelsior is a better word for my purpose than excelsius, having a more sonorous termination.

The Latin word for goal used by Longfellow in his explanation, scopus, is rare (borrowed from Greek σκοπός). More usual words are meta, finis, or terminus.

Michael Jacobs (1952-2014), The Factory of Light: Tales from My Andalucian Village (London: John Murray, 2003), p. 126:

Two knells for a woman, three for a man, five for a nun, and six for a priest — that was the code from earlier centuries.

Richard Fortey, Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 150-151:

A new species has to have a new second name—the specific name. Long years of tradition (shortly to be brought to an end) have set up rules about the classical form of species name. It has to be derived from the Greek or Latin root of the appropriate word, so, for example, a beautiful species could be christened pulcher, or even pulcherrima if it was very beautiful indeed (from the Latin). It could not be verypretti, or jolliattractivi (from the vernacular). Rosa pulcherrima would be quite in order. Rosa pulcherrimus would not, because the endings of the genus and species are supposed to agree in gender—it is a matter of euphonious sound, if nothing else. I have always rather liked this adherence to classical roots, if only because it serves to link me with the pioneer taxonomists of the eighteenth century, who wrote in Latin and probably thought in it. This much I share with the great John Ray and the incomparable Carolus Linnaeus (or Karl von Linné, to delatinize him). We are all linked through the great endeavour of classifying the natural world; across more than two hundred years we share the same passion for ordering our knowledge. I actually rather relish trawling through heavy old dictionaries compiled by learned classicists (I have Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary in front of me as I write) to look up the word for, say, “blushing,” or “warty,” to attach it to a species, and I love to read the quotes from Ovid that justify the usage. This adherence to a past classical culture is a bond, not a bondage.

Arsenius, Violetum, ed. Christian Walz (Stuttgart: Loeflund, 1832), p. 209 (ascribed to Diogenes; my translation):

He said that wealth was Fortune's vomit.

Ὁ αὐτὸς εἶπε τὸν πλοῦτον τύχης ἔμετον εἶναι.

Stobaeus 4.31.89, in Ioannis Stobaei Anthologium, Vol. V: Anthologii Libri Quarti Partem Alteram...Continens, ed. Otto Hense (Berlin: Weidmann, 1912), p. 766 (ascribed to Monimus; my translation):

He said that wealth was Fortune's vomit.

Τὸν πλοῦτον εἶπε Τύχης ἔμετον εἶναι.

Gnomologium Vaticanum e Codice Vaticano Graeco 743, ed. Leo Sternbach (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1963), p. 86, no. 216 (ascribed to Demosthenes; my translation):

He said that the wealthy and uneducated man was Fortune's vomit.

Ὁ αὐτὸς τὸν πλούσιον καὶ ἀπαίδευτον ἔφη Τύχης ἔμετον εἶναι.

I owe the references to Diogenes the Cynic, Sayings and Anecdotes with Other Popular Moralists. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Robin Hard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Thanks to Ian Jackson for checking the quotation from the Gnomologium Vaticanum.

George Gissing (1857-1903), "A Son of the Soil," Human Odds and Ends: Stories and Sketches, new ed. (London: A.H. Bullen, 1901), pp. 296-302 (at 297-298):

At school he had learnt—well, what had he learnt? In the main, to spell out police news and to scrawl obscene words. His education, in the real sense, he owed to a powerful but unacknowledged instructor, the Spirit of the Age. Hence his discontent with everything about him, his thorough dishonesty, his blurred, gaslight vision of a remote world. Certain well-meaning persons had given him 'religious teaching,' that is to say, had laboriously brought him to the repetition of phrases he did not understand, to which he attached no particular significance whatever. He could not name the flowers by the wayside; no one had ever thought of teaching him that. He did not know—he did not hear—the bird that sang to him at his work; no one had ever spoken to him of such trifles. He was aware, by consequences, that the sun rose and set; but never had he consciously looked at its setting or its rising; for all that Jonas thought about it, the sky might have lowered in a perpetual leadenness. He had no conception of geography—save that somewhere vaguely to the east lay a huge town called London. Of the men who had lived and wrought before him in this fruitful English county he knew no more than of the Assyrians. Field and farmyard, hedgerow and highway, were hateful in his eyes, to be described only by a foul epithet. Old enough to do a man's work, he had nothing of a man's pride in it; no sense of a man's duties and lawful claims; no impulse of manhood save the fleshly.

Greek Anthology 9.808.11 (by Cyrus the Consul, describing things visible from the house of Maximinus):

δένδρεα, δώματα, νῆας, ἅλα, πτόλιν, ἠέρα, γαῖαν.

W.R. Paton in his translation adds a conjunction, thus obscuring the asyndeton:

trees, houses, ships, sea, city, sky, and earth.

Related posts:

• Some Lines in Lucretius
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters in Sidonius
• Verse-Filling Asyndeton
• Verse-Filling Asyndeton: Some Greek Examples

Horace, Odes and Epodes. Edited and Translated by Niall Rudd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004 = Loeb Classical Library, 33), p. 152 (Odes 3.4.9-13):

me fabulosae Vulture in Apulo
nutricis extra limina pergulae⁴
    ludo fatigatumque somno
        fronde nova puerum palumbes
texere...

⁴ limina pergulae Baehrens] limen Apuliae

Rudd's translation on p. 153:

On pathless Vulture,¹² beyond the threshold of my nurse's cottage, when as a child I was worn out with play and sleep, the legendary wood pigeons covered me with fresh leaves.

¹² Mt Vulture, 15 km west of Venusia, looms over the area.

"On pathless Vulture" is not a translation of "Vulture in Apulo," so Rudd must be translating not the paradosis (Apulo = Apulian), but someone's conjecture. What is the conjecture? We need a word metrically equivalent to Apulo that means "pathless," and avio fits the bill.

This much was obvious without opening another book. A quick Google search revealed that avio for Apulo was proposed by Otto Keller, "Zu Horaz," Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 32 (1877) 327. Either Rudd's text or his translation needs to be changed, so they match.

Related posts:

• Pretium Facit Litura
• Horace, Epodes 16.61-62

Richmond Lattimore, "Memory of a Scholar (W.A.O. 1880-1945)," Classical Journal 57.6 (March, 1962) 271-272:

I set this down. Magister, can it be?
How shall I shape the wind that once was you?
Fancies seduce the memories in me.
This must be true, though nothing else were true.
I dared not praise you when you were alive.
Not I. You would have blown me off my feet
with stormy courtesy, the roar of wit
hiding the old Greek dread of godlike praise
for living men. But how shall verse contrive
your presence? Wave, my wand. So I recall
a Wilamowitz seen as Buffalo Bill,
Boeckh on a bicycle, and with it all
a better bibliographer by far
than any of your German idols. Now I see
the calligraphic hand, the blacksmith's bust,
the Civil War commander's brusque imperial,
the cavalry moustache, the chin upthrust,
the big bold pipe, the bolder black cigar,
the paleographer's fastidious eye.
You my professor, you before my face
unrolled the script of scholars, put in place
Traube and Vahlen, Leo, Reitzenstein,
and set the stars for all our lives to steer them by.
Your force was schooled to skills, the leonine
turned lapidary; syntax and the line
at fault and needing surgery brought to bear
the steely grammar shaped in pain and care.
You mounted on minutiae to aspire
with Plato up the staircase of ideas
and ranged, a ruler, all his cloudy sky
and came down to his deep cave with light and heat
in worlds where men see dust and you saw fire,
to blow your edicts from your chair at ease,
Jupiter of the seminar benign
with poets nuns and Baptists sitting at your feet.
It was the river. Far away and late
I heard the story of the overturned canoe,
your call, "go help the others," and the great heart stayed
in death. Think of that country that we knew
so well, land of black woods and trailing vines
and inland muddy streams that held your fate,
the Pollywogs, the flooded Danville mines,
Sangamon and Vermilion and Salt Fork,
our professorial playground. How we played
beside the crawfish-catfish-haunted Lethe stream
through overall-and-gallus groves of Academe.
Sulphured for chiggers, through the green opaque
fills of the scoops we swam, and dried in air,
played softball in cow-pastures, fried our steak,
stood by the fire and rocked the night with corny song
and shone the moon with outlaw rye and legal beer.
And now you are gone out of a world gone wrong.
Spirit in storm. You can not catch and keep it near.
Verse will not hold you fixed. The river took
you, and your spirit on the plains
will shout with the old laughter over all my pains
to put a man alive inside a book.
End from an epitaph you turned me to:
the tribute to a Roman Spanish charioteer:
Now pour the wine. Your friends and flowers are here.
Never forget. For there was none like you.

W.A.O. was William Abbott Oldfather, who drowned while canoeing. The "tribute to a Roman Spanish charioteer" can be found in Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum II.4315, translated by Lattimore in his Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), pp. 273-274:

Some of us of the Venetan team who were admirers of Fuscus and loved him have consecrated an altar to him from our own funds, so that all may know the monument and this token of love. Your fame was complete, and you deserved honor for your racing. You strove against many, and though a poor man, feared none. When you were hated you always held your peace like a strong man. You lived fairly, but being mortal, you were fated to die. If you are human, seek for such a man. Stay, traveler, and read; and if you remember, if you knew the man as he was (for all fear fortune) say this only: Fuscus has the epitaphs due to death, he has his tomb. The stone covers his bones, it is well with him. Good-bye, Fortune. We have shed tears for this good man; now the wine, and we pray that you may lie in peace. No one was like you.

George Gissing (1857-1903), "A Profitable Weakness," Human Odds and Ends: Stories and Sketches, new ed. (London: A.H. Bullen, 1901), pp. 231-237 (at 232):

Indolence had a great part in his temperament; a book, a sunny corner, and entire tranquillity, formed his ideal of supportable existence.