Friday, May 19, 2023
A Day of Grand Intellectual Feasting
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Preface to Louis Gernet (1888-1962), The Anthropology of Ancient Greece, tr. John Hamilton and Blaise Nagy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. vii-viii:
This man, who had so many things to transmit and who could have formed so many pupils, passed most of his life as a teacher of Greek prose composition on the Faculté des Lettres d'Alger. He was over sixty-five when he was able to come to the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes to speak about a subject dear to his heart, one about which he alone could speak. We were a handful who followed his seminars, and most of us were non-Hellenists. During these years, each Thursday morning was a festive day for us, a day of grand intellectual feasting. We saw him arrive with rapid and lively pace, this old man still full of youth; he was tall, with a fine face framed by a well-trimmed beard, and it seemed as if the great Poseidon, such as the figure seen in the Museum at Athens, were coming to us. As a sign of his nonconformism, he wore a black, round hat in the style of Blum, and the cravat of Lavalliere. He carried not a single lecture note; only a few references jotted down on a single sheet of paper. Penal law, testament, property, war, legends and cults of heroes, family and marriage, Orphism and religious sects, tragedy—it did not matter what the question was. Whatever it was, Gernet was at home in his subject, because he was at home in ancient Greece. Like an ethnologist who, beginning with the dawn of civilization, sets out to a distant land, he would never abandon his quest, and would understand the people from within and from without, with the twofold perspective of native and foreigner. Louis Gernet had read everything; in all the areas of Hellenism, his knowledge was faultless. This knowledge went far beyond ours, but it never crushed or paralyzed us. There was not a shadow of pedantry in this learned man, who considered erudition only a means, a tool with which to pose the problems correctly and to discover each time answers that were better nuanced than before. We used to debate every subject freely in his presence, and I cannot think of a better eulogy for him than this: none of us ever feared to lose face because of some error or silly mistake. He rescued us from our own mistakes, gave us direction, and informed us. Our shortcomings were mere trifles in his eyes. The research he pursued continually looked far beyond.
Lysias
Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 38.4 (1917) 454-460 (at 457-458):
Lysias is to me a name to conjure with, and I hope I shall be pardoned for recalling the part the son of Kephalos has played in my life—for my living has also been my life, as it is with all real teachers of Greek. Yes—the name itself has interested me, and some years ago, forgetting my favourite quotation 'non omnis aetas, Lyde, ludo convenit', I set up a mock defence of Teichmüller's identification of the Dionysodoros of Plato's Euthydemus with Lysias. Lysias, I said, is evidently the short for Lysanias, the name of his grandfather, and I propounded the equation Λυσανίας = Λυαίος = Διόνυσος—a winged word which was promptly hawked at by a mousing owl of a German reviewer.1 My first acquaintance with Lysias goes back to 1850, when I bought out of my scant allowance a copy of the Berlin ed. of the Attic orators, to find alas! as I went on in my studies that I had been swindled by somebody. A leaf of the Παναθηναϊκός of Isokrates had taken the place of a leaf of the Περὶ παραπρεσβείας of Demosthenes. This is no solitary experience in the case of German editions, and I have occasionally registered a complaint (e.g. A.J.P. VIII 119). The mention of those Berlin days calls up the image of Johannes Franz (Φρασικλῆς) who admitted me to his Schola Graeca and gave me the name Χρυσοβραχίων. He too is a Lysianic reminiscence, for he edited Lysias in the year in which I was born. For years my favourite edition was the pretty pocket-edition by Westermann, which I proceeded to disfigure by marginal and other notes. It perished, to my sorrow, in the flood of water turned upon my library at the time of the Johns Hopkins fire. The scholar to whom I owe my first introduction to Lysias was Rauchenstein, the same who helped me in my first studies of Pindar. It may seem strange to some that the same man should have been an enthusiastic student of two authors so diverse as Lysias and Pindar (A.J.P. XXIV 108), but such a one has never considered the processes of wine-taster and tea-taster. Somewhere in the 'to-hu bo-hu' of my MSS there is a Greek exercise-book, based on Lysias, a safer model than Xenophon. Fifty years ago when a local Sir Oracle said to me that his test of Greek scholarship was a mastery of Pindar and Athenaeus, I ventured to remark that my test was an honest enjoyment of Lysias.
1 A.J.P. XXXV 364.
Acknowledgments
Benedict Beckeld, Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations (Ithaca: Northern Illinois University Press, an Imprint of Cornell University Press, 2022), pp. ix-x:
My gratitude is also for those oikophobes, far too numerous to list by name, both young and old, who have littered my life's path, especially within the halls of academia but also without. These people—old professors jaded by years of groupthink isolation, semiliterate youngsters unwittingly repeating the already tired prejudices of the narrow time and place in which they were born—have all strongly provoked me with their lofty assumptions, with the innocent sweetness of their most precious convictions, and they have offered me more material than would have been available in even the best of libraries. I thank them all.
A Ghost Word
Ronald Syme, "Names and Identities in Quintilian," in his Roman Papers, V (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 630-638 (at 632, on the rhetor Cartorius Proculus):
Festus cites him for the words 'procastria', 'topper', 'tentippellium'.14For tentippellium read tentipellium, meaning "A device for stretching skins or leather" (Oxford Latin Dictionary).
14 Festus 225; 482; 500 (ed. Lindsay).
Labels: typographical and other errors
Thursday, May 18, 2023
Glory to God
Bacchylides, Victory Odes 3.15-22 (tr. David A. Campbell):
The temples abound in feasts where cattle are sacrificed, the streets abound in hospitality; and gold shines with flashing light from the high elaborate tripods standing in front of the temple where the Delphians tend the great sanctuary of Phoebus by the waters of Castalia. Let God, God be glorified; that is the best of prosperities.Campbell ad loc.:
βρύει μὲν ἱερὰ βουθύτοις ἑορταῖς, 15
βρύουσι φιλοξενίας ἀγυιαί·
λάμπει δ᾽ ὑπὸ μαρμαρυγαῖς ὁ χρυσὸς
ὑψιδαιδάλτων τριπόδων σταθέντων
πάροιθε ναοῦ, τόθι μέγιστον ἄλσος
Φοίβου παρὰ Κασταλίας ῥεέθροις 20
Δελφοὶ διέπουσι. θεόν, θεόν τις
ἀγλαϊζέτω, ὁ γὰρ ἄριστος ὄλβων.
Alive
Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 38.4 (1917) 454-460 (at 455):
Very much alive are these ancients.
Sans End
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, XXIV (tr. Edward FitzGerald):
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!
Sit Down and Shut Up
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 11.4.5 (Appius Claudius speakimg; tr. Earnest Cary):
This is not your turn, Valerius, and it is not fitting for you to speak now. But when these senators who are older and more honoured than you have delivered their opinions, then you also will be called upon and will say what you think proper. For the present be silent and sit down.
οὐχ οὗτος ὁ τόπος, εἶπεν, ὦ Οὐαλέριε, σός, οὐδὲ προσήκει σοι νῦν λέγειν, ἀλλ᾽ ὅταν οἵδε οἱ πρεσβύτεροι καὶ τιμιώτεροί σου γνώμην ἀγορεύσωσι, τότε καὶ σὺ κληθεὶς ἐρεῖς ὅ τι σοι δοκεῖ· νῦν δὲ σιώπα καὶ κάθησο.
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
The Infinite
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständniß des West-östlichen Divans" (tr. Martin Bidney):
Dear Mike,
Herewith another instance perhaps of Goethe's dictum about knowledge of a poet's country:
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, Vol. II (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), p. 830:
Eric [Thomson]
I see that Jonathan Galassi translates siepe here as hedgerow.
Poetry if you would know,
To its country you must go;
If the poet you would know,
To the poet's country go.
Wer das Dichten will verstehen,
muß ins Land der Dichtung gehen;
wer den Dichter will verstehen,
muß in Dichters Lande gehen.
Dear Mike,
Herewith another instance perhaps of Goethe's dictum about knowledge of a poet's country:
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, Vol. II (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), p. 830:
Always dear to me has been this lonely hill,The Italian original:
and this line of trees which, from so much
of the furthest horizon, hides my view.
Yet as I sit and gaze, in my thoughts
I conjure up boundless spaces far beyond it,
and superhuman silences,
and deepest quiet — until my heart
almost grows afraid. And I hear the wind push
Through the trees, I cannot help setting its sound against
that infinite silence; and the eternal envelops me
with the thought of seasons long past
And of all the living present and its sounds.
Then in this immensity my thought goes under,
And sweet is it to me to drown in such a sea.63
63 Leopardi, 'L'infinito', trans Nigel McGilchrist [the author's brother], who comments: 'it is conventional to translate siepe as a hedgerow, which is exactly what it means in current Italian usage. But in older garden-design tracts siepe is often used to mean a "break of trees". Since the land drops sharply below the spot in Recanati where Leopardi is said to have composed the poem, only a line of tall trees rising from further down the slope, rather than a hedgerow, would effectively occlude his view.'
Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle,Luca Morri, I Luoghi leopardiani (Il Colle dell'Infinito):
e questa siepe, che da tanta parte
dell'ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
silenzi, e profondissima quïete
io nel pensier mi fingo; ove per poco
il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
infinito silenzio a questa voce
vo comparando: e mi sovvien l'eterno,
e le morte stagioni, e la presente
e viva, e 'l suon di lei. Così tra questa
immensità s'annega il pensier mio:
e 'l naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.
Il colle, celebrato nell'idillio omonimo, era meta delle passeggiate di Giacomo che vi accedeva direttamente dal giardino di casa, passando attraverso l'orto del convento di Santo Stefano e lì usava soffermarsi per godere lo splendido vastissimo panorama, dal monte al mare.I've never been to Recanati unfortunately but the photograph here gives a hint of the declivity involved. Siepe as a break of tall trees would seem to make more sense too in the context of "odo stormir tra queste piante". Best wishes,
Eric [Thomson]
I see that Jonathan Galassi translates siepe here as hedgerow.
Learning from the Past
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 10.51.3 (tr. Earnest Cary):
For that state is best governed which adapts itself to circumstances, and that man is the best counsellor who expresses his opinion without regard to personal enmity or favour but with a view to the public advantage; and those persons deliberate best concerning the future who take past events as examples of those that are to come.μὴ πρὸς τὴν ἰδίαν ἔχθραν ἢ χάριν reminds me of Tacitus' sine ira et studio.
κράτιστα γὰρ οἰκεῖται πόλις ἡ πρὸς τὰ πράγματα μεθαρμοττομένη, καὶ συμβούλων ἄριστος ὁ μὴ πρὸς τὴν ἰδίαν ἔχθραν ἢ χάριν, ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὸ κοινῇ συμφέρον ἀποδεικνύμενος γνώμην· βουλεύονταί τ᾽ ἄριστα περὶ τῶν μελλόντων οἱ παραδείγματα ποιούμενοι τὰ γεγονότα τῶν ἐσομένων.
The Tar-Pot of English Literature
Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 38.3 (1917) 333-342 (at 334):
There is an old story which in old days I loved to embroider for my intimates, that in a circle of devout Emersonians the hierophant read aloud a sentence in which the seer declared Chaucer to be the 'tar-pot' of English literature. The mystic word was variously interpreted by various members until one skeptical soul demanded to see the text wherein was written not 'tar-pot' but 'tap-root'. The same process goes on everywhere in exegesis.
Affirmative Nescire
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), Sudelbücher A 5 (my translation):
If someone thinks he understands something that he doesn't (the normal procedure of metaphysicians), one can call this positive ignorance.
Wenn man, wie die Metaphysiker oft verfahren, glaubt man verstehe etwas, das man nicht versteht, so kann man dieses nennen affirmative nescire.
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
Unfaithful to Sophocles
Sophocles, Oedipus the King 1011 (tr. Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay):
Cf. Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted in Andrew F. West, ed., Value of the Classics (Princeton: Princetin University Press, 1917), p. 233:
I am afraid, afraidRichard C. Jebb's translation:
Apollo's prediction will come true, all of it,
as god's sunlight grows brighter on a man's face at dawn
when he's in bed, still sleeping,
and reaches into his eyes and wakes him.
ταρβῶν γε μή μοι Φοῖβος ἐξέλθῃ σαφής.
Aye, I dread lest Phoebus prove himself true for me.The fault lies with Berg, not Clay. I owe my knowledge of this mess to a review by Bernard Knox.
Cf. Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted in Andrew F. West, ed., Value of the Classics (Princeton: Princetin University Press, 1917), p. 233:
It seems to me that people who think they are enjoying Euripides, for instance, in the charming translations that we know, probably are getting their pleasure from a modern atmosphere that is precisely what is not in the original.
Exulting in a Massacre
Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 38.3 (1917) 333-342 (at 334):
David Irving, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of George Buchanan, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1817), p. 64 (on Muretus):
In the medley of books with which my cage is littered there is a volume bound in pigskin, that wonderful material which is proof against superheated houses and noxious gases,—M.A. Mureti Orationes, Epistolae Hymnique Sacri, Lipsiae, Sumptibus Viduae Gothofredi Grossii MDCLX, acquired in the early days when I had a mania for Latin composition, an art in which Muretus was a past master. I soon tired of Muretus and his elegances. Justus Lipsius was more to my native bad taste. Perhaps I was prejudiced against Muretus because in one of his letters he warned young scholars against the art of dipping in which Andrew Lang was to shew himself such an adept, an art without which there would have been no joy in my own life. If some of my friends think that I have lost myself in Brief Mention, others are of the opinion that I have found myself there. And what else, pray, are Muretus' own 'Variae Lectiones'? Now apropos of the commonplace as to the divergent points of view, which I have been illustrating, one of Muretus' orations came up to my mind. Not long ago I was looking with undisguised horror at the Lusitania medal—horror heightened by the sight of the wonderful model of the boat, when I bethought me of the words in which Muretus extolled what some people still call the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. And this is the way in which the gentle humanist, who was capable of writing affectionate letters, almost deliquescent letters, to his young friends, spoke of that dreadful night: 'Qua nocte stellas equidem ipsas luxisse nitidius arbitror et flumen Sequanae maiores undas volvisse quo citius illa impurorum hominum cadavera evolveret et exoneraret in mare.' And then we are told not to believe in the wholesale butchery of the Peloponnesian War and taught to juggle with the Greek numerals.A translation of this oft-quoted sentence from Muretus is probably superflous, but nevertheless:
On which night I think the stars themselves shone the brighter, and the River Seine rolled greater waves the quicker to remove and unload into the sea those corpses of foul men.The sentence occurs in Muretus' Oration XXII (Post Lanienem Parisiensem, addressed to Pope Gregory XIII), vol. I, p. 229 of the Tauchnitz edition of his Orationes.
David Irving, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of George Buchanan, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1817), p. 64 (on Muretus):
[H]is elaborate encomium on the massacre of St. Bartholomew must be remembered to his eternal infamy. The guilt of those execrable politicians who produced this unparalleled scene of butchery, is hardly to be compared to that of the enlightened scholar who could calmly extol so damnable a deed.Walter Savage Landor, "King James I and Isaac Casaubon," Imaginary Conversations:
Medals were coined by order of Gregory XIII. to commemorate Saint Bartholomew's day: on one side is the pope, on the other is the slaughter. He commanded it also to be painted in the Vatican, where the painting still exists. In popes no atrocity is marvellous or remarkable; but how painful is it to find a scholar like Muretus exulting in a massacre!Gildersleeve was partly Huguenot by extraction, and Huguenots were the victims of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.
A Greek Limerick on C.M. Bowra by Douglas Young
Ward Briggs, "Douglas Young, Hellenist," Studies in Scottish Literature 47.2 (2021) 113-132 (at 116):
Βάβαξ τις ὀνόματι ΒαῦραThanks to Gonzalo Jerez Sánchez for correcting a Greek accent (a typographical error in the article).
ἐπίσταθ' Ἑλληνικὰ παῦρα,
καὶ ταῦτα κακῶς,
ἔγραψε δ' ὅμως
βιβλία πολλὰ καὶ φλαῦρα.8
8 "A certain chatterer named Bowra / knew few things Greek / and those very things badly, / he nonetheless wrote / books both numerous and bad." In 1938, when Bowra was named Warden of Wadham, Young made an author's emendation in the first line to Φύλαξ τις… ("A certain guardian…").
Labor and Sorrow
Psalms 90:10 (KJV):
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
Monday, May 15, 2023
Cleopatra's Complexion
Adrian Goldsworthy, Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), page numbers unknown (from Chapter IX):
The poet Lucan is the only ancient author to make any reference at all to the queen's complexion. It comes in a scene emphasising the ambition of the queen, the decadent luxury of her court and overpowering ambition of Julius Caesar. He depicts Cleopatra wearing a dress of silk, the material brought originally from China having been rewoven to make it finer and semi-translucent. Such a filmy garment is reminiscent of Ptolemy Physcon. In this case Lucan talks of it revealing much of Cleopatra's 'white breasts' (candida pectora). Lucan wrote in Rome some ninety years after the queen's death and it is hard to know whether or not he had seen accurate images of her appearance, let alone her colouring. Much of his poem is highly fanciful. In addition, candida normally means white or fair — and in the case of hair can mean blonde — and this begs the question of white or light in comparison to what? Earlier in the same passage he talks of the variety of slaves attending to the guests, contrasting blondes with ruddy complexions (or just possibly red hair) from northern Europe, with dark slaves with curly hair from Africa. This could perhaps imply that Cleopatra was not like either of these in her own appearance, but that is surely pushing the evidence too far. The whole passage is a slender reed on which to rest confident assertions about Cleopatra's appearance.20
Apart from this, there is not a shred of evidence about Cleopatra's complexion or the colour of her eyes or hair. This is worth stating bluntly, because so many people keep trying to deduce these or claim to have discovered evidence. At the time of writing two separate TV documentaries have presented reconstructions presenting her as relatively dark-skinned and with brown eyes and black hair. This is all conjecture. As we have seen, there is uncertainty about the identity of Cleopatra's mother and grandmother (or indeed grandmothers if her parents were not siblings).21
The Ptolemies were Macedonians, with an admixture of a little Greek and via marriage with the Seleucids a small element of Syrian blood. (There is no evidence to make us question the paternity of any of the line and suggest that they were the product of an illicit liaison between the queen and a man other than her husband. This remains possible, if not very likely, but an uncertain basis for any argument.) The Macedonians were not an homogenous people and seem to have varied considerably in appearance and colouring. Alexander the Great was fair-haired, although it is always difficult to know precisely what this meant. A Roman copy of an earlier mosaic shows him with medium-brown hair. Fair might simply mean not black or very dark brown. On the other hand, several of the early Ptolemies were blond and comparisons of their hair to gold suggest this was more than simply not black-haired.
For most of the Ptolemies, including Auletes, there is no mention of the shade of their hair or the colour of their eyes. It is unclear how common blond hair was in the family. (If Cleopatra's mother was a mistress then we know nothing at all about her appearance or ethnic background, although the probability would always be that she was from the Greek or Macedonian aristocracy.) A painting from Herculaneum in the Bay of Naples, which shows a woman wearing the headband of a Hellenistic queen, has sometimes been identified as Cleopatra. She has dark, distinctly red hair. This is not impossible, but there is actually no very strong reason to believe that the image is supposed to be Cleopatra.22
Absolutely nothing is certain. Cleopatra may have had black, brown, blonde, or even red hair, and her eyes could have been brown, grey, green or blue. Almost any combination of these is possible. Similarly, she may have been very light skinned or had a darker more Mediterranean complexion. Fairer skin is probably marginally more likely given her ancestry. Greek art traditionally represented women and goddesses as very pale, and a fair skin seems to have been part of the ideal of beauty. Roman propaganda never suggested that Cleopatra was dark-skinned, although this may simply mean that she was not exceptionally dark or simply that the colour of her skin was not important to her critics.
20 Lucan, Pharsalia 10.127-143; Candida Sidonio perlucent pectora filo, quod Nilotis acus impressum pectine serum, solvit et extenso laxavit stamina velo, 10.140-142.
21 These were Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer (Lion TV) shown on BBC television in the UK, and an episode on Cleopatra from the series Egypt Unwrapped (Atlantic TV) shown on Channel 5 in the UK.
22 See J. Fletcher, Cleopatra the Great: The Woman Behind the Legend (2008), p. 87, and Walker & Higgs (2001), pp. 314-315, n. 325.
Sunbathing
Meaningless Words
Plautus, Casina 347 (tr. Wolfgang de Melo, with his note):
Related posts:
I wouldn't buy that kind of talk for total tripe.9Rudolf Helm, ed., Fabii Planciadis Fulgentii V.C. Opera (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1908), p. 117 (Expositio Sermonum Antiquorum ad Calcidium 20):
non ego istuc uerbum empsim tittibilicio.
9 According to Fulgentius (serm. ant. 117. 13–16 Helm), tittibilicium refers to dirty threads in weaving. Paul the Deacon (p. 504 Lindsay) thinks that the word has no meaning.
Tittiuilicium dici uoluerunt fila putrida quae de telis cadunt; ut Plautus in Cassina ait: 'Non ego hoc rerbum empsim tittiuilicio', id est re admodum uilissima. Nam et Marcus Cornutus in satyra sic ait: 'Tittiuiles Flacce do tibi'.Wallace M. Lindsay, ed., Sexti Pompei Festi De verborum significatu quae supersunt cum Pauli epitome (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1913), p. 504:
Tittibilicium nullius significationis est, ut apud Graecos βλίτυρι et σκινδαψός. Plautus (Cas. 347) „non ego istud verbum empsi cum tittibilicio.”See Pedro Redondo Reyes, "Nuevas consideraciones sobre las ἄσημοι φωναί: βλίτυρι, σκινδαψός, κνάξ et similia," Myrtia: Revista de Filología Clásica 31 (2016) 291-316.
Related posts:
- Invented Words
- Dhcmrlchtdj
- Dealing with Telemarketers
- Thrippsy Pillivinx
- Tafa-Lafa
- Radaratoo, Radarate
- Gibberish
- Titivillus
A Phrase in Pindar
Pindar, Isthmian Odes 2.6-8 (tr. Richmond Lattimore):
Newer› ‹Older
The Muse in those days was not mercenary nor worked for hire,Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 38.1 (1917) 110-117 (at 110):
nor was the sweetness of Terpsichore's honeyed singing for sale
nor her songs with faces silvered over for their soft utterance.
ἁ Μοῖσα γὰρ οὐ φιλοκερδής πω τότ᾽ ἦν οὐδ᾽ ἐργάτις·
οὐδ᾽ ἐπέρναντο γλυκεῖαι μελιφθόγγου ποτὶ Τερψιχόρας
ἀργυρωθεῖσαι πρόσωπα μαλθακόφωνοι ἀοιδαί.
I have grateful memories of Mr. PATON'S other work and especially of his striking illustration of the famous dictum of Goethe that a knowledge of the poet's country is essential to the understanding of the poet himself. Pindar's ἀργυρωθεῖσαι πρόσωπα μαλθακόφωνοι ἀοιδαί (I. 2, 8) lay hid in night until Mr. PATON published a paper in the Classical Review (June 1888, p. 180) from which it appeared that the personified songs, like Eastern dancers, 'plastered their faces with silver coins'. This paper was followed by J.G. Frazer in the C.R. for Oct. of the same year, p. 261; and in A.J.P. XXX 358 I gave yet another illustration from Hichens's Garden of Allah. Of this evident explanation, Sir John Sandys has nothing better to say than 'Probably'. Eastern dancers, after all, he might urge, are not Greek dancers and Goethe's dictum does not apply with full force. But Southern Italy is Magna Graecia and it is interesting to read in Briggs's 'In the Heart of Italy' that in Lecce 'every guest that danced with the bride gave her a handkerchief or a piece of silver. In the latter case she spat on it and stuck it on her forehead.' Now Lecce is not far from Calimera and Thumb has given us a specimen of the Greek of Calimera, recorded by Morosi and Comparetti. The origin of the custom may be Eastern, the tradition is certainly Greek. An interpretation based on actual vision carries or ought to carry conviction, and I am sorry that Sir John Sandys is not quite convinced.See:
- W.R. Paton, "Pindar, Isthm. II.10," Classical Review 2 (1888) 180
- J.G. Frazer, "Coins Attached to the Face," Classical Review 2 (1888) 261



