Laudator Temporis Acti

Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843), book III (The Modern Worker), chapter 9 (Working Aristocracy):

In brief, all this Mammon-Gospel, of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth; or altogether the shabbiest.

Eduard Mörike (1804-1875), Auf ein altes Bild:

In the summery haze of a verdant landscape,
Beside cool water, reeds and canebrake,
Look, how the innocent little child
Plays irrepressibly on the maiden's lap!
And there in the woodland blissfully,
Alas, grows already the sapling of the cross!

In grüner Landschaft Sommerflor,
Bei kühlem Wasser, Schilf und Rohr,
Schau, wie das Knäblein Sündelos
Frei spielet auf der Jungfrau Schoß!
Und dort im Walde wonnesam,
Ach, grünet schon des Kreuzes Stamm!

Hugo Wolf finished his achingly beautiful musical setting of this poem on April 14, 1888. It's on pp. 76-77 of his Complete Mörike Songs (New York: Dover Publications, 1982). According to Eric Sams, The Songs of Hugo Wolf (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 100, Wolf wrote about his composition in a letter to Edmund Lang:

My last song, which I have just finished, is without doubt the crown of all. I am still in the grip of the enchantment of the mood of this song; everything is still shimmering in green all round me.

I don't know if anyone has ever tried to identify the painting which Mörike described. Maybe there never was such a picture, except in his mind's eye. The power of his poetry is such that he makes us see it, too.

Read some refreshing and original observations on the Republican convention over at The Charlock's Shade.

My pet peeve for this month is the slang use of "I'm like" to introduce a quotation, as in:

I'm like, "Whatever."

To my old-fashioned, fastidious ear, it brands the speaker instantly as a bonehead. How it ever came to mean "I said" is a mystery.

Here is a sonnet by Andrew Lang (1844-1912) about Homer's Odyssey:

As one that for a weary space has lain
Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine
In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,
Where that Aegean isle forgets the main,
And only the low lutes of love complain,
And only shadows of wan lovers pine,
As such an one were glad to know the brine
Salt on his lips, and the large air again, --
So gladly, from the songs of modern speech
Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free
Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers,
And through the music of the languid hours,
They hear like ocean on a western beach
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.

Some might find this sonnet, first published less than a hundred years ago, almost as hard to understand as Homer's Greek itself. We have lost the habit of reading or appreciating or even understanding such poetry, and we are the poorer for it.

Lang's sonnet consists of a single sentence, appropriately cast in the form of a Homeric simile. A simile compares two things or situations -- as is A, so is B. Below are two similes from Homer (tr. Richmond Lattimore).

Iliad 16.482-486 (death of Sarpedon at the hands of Patroclus):

He fell, as when an oak goes down or a white poplar, / or like a towering pine tree which in the mountains the carpenters / have hewn down with their whetted axes to make a ship-timber. / So he lay there felled in front of his horses and chariots / roaring, and clawed with his hands at the bloody dust.

Odyssey 5.488-491 (Odysseus makes a bed of leaves for himself):

As when a man buries a burning log in a black ash heap / in a remote place in the country, where none live near as neighbors, / and saves the seed of fire, having no other place to get a light / from, so Odysseus buried himself in the leaves.

In Lang's sonnet, the first part of the comparison starts with "as" in the first line, the second part with "so" in the ninth line. What are the two situations being compared? Lang is saying that just as Odysseus was glad to escape from the island of Circe, where he was held captive, to the open sea (octet, lines 1-8), so we moderns are glad to escape from our anemic contemporary poetry to the surge and thunder of Homer's Odyssey (sestet, lines 9-14).

Circe was a goddess who entrapped men and turned them into swine. Odysseus avoided that metamorphosis with the aid of a secret herb (moly) given to him by the god Hermes. The "pale of Proserpine" is the region of Proserpine (Persephone in Greek), goddess of the underworld and consort of Hades. Homer tells the story of Odysseus' sojourn on Circe's island and his visit to the underworld to get advice from the dead prophet Tiresias in books 10-12 of the Odyssey.

Lang collaborated on a prose translation of Homer's Odyssey with Samuel Henry Butcher (1850-1910). David Martin Gaunt borrowed the last line of Lang's sonnet for the title of his book Surge and Thunder: Critical Readings in Homer's Odyssey (London, Oxford University Press, 1971).

There is a marked distinction between written and spoken English, and the distinction is no less prominent in Latin. One of the few Latin authors who gives us a good idea what spoken Latin might have been like is the comic playwright Terence, six of whose comedies survive.

Terence was once at the center of the Latin curriculum. In his Handbook of Latin Literature, H.J. Rose writes:

He was universally known, because used everywhere as school-book, on account of his purity of style and easy simplicity of construction, from the end of the classical era onwards, until modern teachers, presumably in fear for their pupils' morals, substituted for him the much more difficult Latinity of Caesar, one of the most unsuitable authors for a beginner that could be imagined.

What is so unusual about Terence's elegant Latinity is that he was not a native speaker. He was a slave from Africa, as his name (Publius Terentius Afer) indicates. This phenomenon is not without parallel in more recent times. Native English writers realize to their chagrin that they will probably never write in their mother tongue as well as the foreigner Joseph Conrad, born of Polish parents in the Ukraine and christened Josef Teodore Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, wrote in English.

Terence's Latin was so pure that even in his lifetime detractors argued that a slave and a foreigner couldn't possibly have written the plays attributed to him. The noblemen Scipio and Laelius must have written them, they said. Compare those who argue even today that a commoner like Shakespeare could never have written plays that display so intimate a knowledge of court life.

Many expressions from the plays of Terence are familiar, such as:

• I'm a human being; I consider nothing human foreign to me. (homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.) Heauton Timorumenos 77
  
• There are as many opinions as men. (quot homines, tot sententiae.) Phormio 454
  
• A word to the wise is sufficient. (dictum sapienti sat est.) Phormio 541
  
• Now there is no statement that has not been uttered before. (nullumst iam dictum quod non sit dictum prius.) Eunuchus 41
  

Here are a few passages that are less well known, but that give a taste of Terence's style and subject matter.

Eunuchus 59-63:

In love all these problems are present: insults, suspicions, enmities, truces, breaking up, making up again. If you tried to deal with these uncertainties in a reasonable manner, you'd achieve no more than if you determined to go crazy in a logical way.

in amore haec omnia insunt vitia: iniuriae,
suspiciones, inimicitiae, indutiae,
bellum, pax rursum: incerta haec si postules
ratione certa facere, nihilo plus agas
quam si des operam ut cum ratione insanias.

Eunuchus 812-813:

I understand the character of females: they're not in the mood when you are, they in turn are in the mood when you're not.

novi ingenium mulierum / nolunt ubi velis, ubi nolis cupiunt ultro.

Hecyra 198-200:

Goodness gracious, what kind of conspiracy is this! How is it that all women have exactly the same desires and dislikes, and you can't find a single one who's the slightest bit different from the others?

pro deum fidem atque hominum, quod genus est quae haec coniuratiost! / utin omnes mulieres eadem aeque studeant nolintque omnia / neque declinatam quicquam ab aliarum ingenio ullam reperias!

Hecyra 343-344:

For the man who loves someone who dislikes him, in my opinion acts foolishly on two counts. First, he undertakes a fruitless task. Secondly, he's a nuisance to her.

nam qui amat quoi odio ipsust, eum bis facere stulte duco: / laborem inanem ipsus capit et illi molestiam adfert.

Hecyra 662-663:

Do you think you can find any woman who's blameless?

censen te posse reperire ullam mulierem / quae careat culpa?

Phormio 696-697:

There's nothing, Antipho, that can't be put in a bad light by putting an adverse spin on it.

nil est, Antipho, / quin male narrando possit depravarier.

If you read only one play by Terence, I recommend Adelphoe (Brothers), which deals with a surprisingly modern theme -- contrasting views about the proper way to raise a teenager. Is leniency more appropriate, or strictness?

Matthew Arnold, in his poem Isolation (lines 29-30), wrote:

This truth -- to prove and make thine own:
  'Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.'

Nevertheless, there is something sad about the extreme degree of isolation in the case of Jim Sulkers of Winnipeg, who lay dead in his bed for two years before he was discovered.

Shakespeare, King Lear 1.2.116-130:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

Matthew 7:3-5:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Luke 6:41-42 is similar. Mote translates Greek karphos (splinter, twig), and beam translates Greek dokos (log). There are also parallels in ancient Greek and Latin literature. Horace, Satires 1.3.25-27, talks as follows about the inability to see one's own faults:

You're half-blind, your eyes are smeared with lotion, you overlook your own sins. How is it then that in the case of your friends' faults you're as clear-sighted as an eagle or a snake from Epidaurus?

cum tua pervideas oculis mala lippus inunctis,
cur in amicorum vitiis tam cernis acutum
quam aut aquila aut serpens Epidaurius?

In Petronius' Satyricon (57.7), one of Trimalchio's freedmen says to Encolpius:

You see the louse on another, you don't see the tick on yourself.

in alio pedulcum vides, in te ricinum non vides.

This idea can be traced back in another form to one of Aesop's fables (359 Halm, tr. Olivia and Robert Temple):

Once upon a time, when Prometheus created men, he hung from them two carrying-pouches. One of these contained the deficiencies of other people and was hung in front. The other contained our own faults, which he suspended behind us. The result of this was that men could see directly down into the pouch containing other people's failings, but were unable to see their own.

Babrius put the fable into Greek verse (66, tr. Ben Edwin Perry):

Prometheus was a god, but of the first dynasty. He it was, they say, that fashioned man from earth, to be the master of the beasts. On man he hung, the story goes, two wallets filled with the faults of human kind; the one in front contained the faults of other men, the one behind the bearer's own, and this was the larger wallet. That's why, it seems to me, men see the failings of each other very clearly, while unaware of those which are their own.

Note that Babrius, like Matthew, says that our own faults are more numerous or grievous than the faults of others.

Phaedrus (4.10) wrote some Latin verses on the same theme:

Jupiter placed two wallets on us:
the one filled with our own faults he put behind our backs,
the one heavy with others' faults he hung in front.
For this reason we cannot see our own sins;
as soon as others commit a crime, we judge them.

Peras imposuit Iuppiter nobis duas:
propriis repletam vitiis post tergum dedit,
alienis ante pectus suspendit gravem.
hac re videre nostra mala non possumus;
alii simul delinquunt, censores sumus.

The fable is mentioned in passing by other ancient authors:

• Catullus 22.21: But we don't see that part of the bag that's in back of us. (sed non videmus manticae quod in tergo est.)
  
• Horace, Satires 2.3.298-299: Whoever calls me crazy will hear as much in turn and will learn to look at what hangs from the back which he cannot survey (dixerit insanum qui me, totidem audiet atque / respicere ignoto discet pendentia tergo.)
  
• Persius 4.23-24: How no one tries to burrow into himself, no one, but the bag on the back of the fellow in front of us is seen! (ut nemo in sese temptat descendere, nemo, / sed praecedenti spectatur mantica tergo!)

In the second chapter of Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (1998; rpt. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath list the following core values of the ancient Greeks:

1. Science, research, and the acquisition of knowledge itself are to remain apart from both political and religious authority.
   
2. Military power operates under and is checked by civilian control.
   
3. Constitutional and consensual government is a Western idea.
   
4. Religion is separate from and subordinate to political authority.
   
5. Trusting neither the rich nor the poor, the Greeks of the polis have faith in the average citizen (the spiritual forerunner of our faith in the middle class).
   
6. Private property and free economic activity are immune from government coercion and interference.
   
7. The notion of dissent and open criticism of government, religion, and the military is inherent among the polis Greeks.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France:

Supposing, however, that something like moderation were visible in this political sermon, yet politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite. Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind.

A few years ago Rebecca Mead wrote a delighful portrait of Luigi Miraglia, a high school Latin teacher from a small town near Naples. I highly recommend it. It was published in the New Yorker magazine and is available on the Internet. Here is one of Miraglia's bons mots:

If Hercules were living today, one of the labors would be to drive in Naples, and another would be to find a parking spot in Naples.

Sometime in the mid 50s B.C., Catullus penned this scathing epigram (52) on the contemporary political scene:

What's your excuse, Catullus? Why not die right now?
That pimple Nonius occupies the curule chair.
Vatinius swears falsely by his consulship.
What's your excuse, Catullus? Why not die right now?

Quid est, Catulle? quid moraris emori?
sella in curuli struma Nonius sedet,
per consulatum perierat Vatinius:
quid est, Catulle? quid moraris emori?

The medical writer Celsus (5.28.7a) defines the word struma as "a swelling in which underneath some hard parts grow from pus and blood like little acorns" (tumor in quo subter concreta quaedam ex pure et sanguine quasi glandulae oriuntur). In his commentary Kenneth Quinn says that "Nonius is an excrescence on the body politic."

For some reason this summer, when I watch the Democratic and Republican conventions on the telly, this epigram of Catullus springs to mind. Are these two nincompoops really the best our country has to offer as candidates to fill the highest office in the land?

Thoreau never voted in his life. I'm tempted to imitate him in the upcoming presidential election.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France:

You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

Your literary men, and your politicians, and so do the whole clan of the enlightened among us, essentially differ in these points. They have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own. With them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one. As to the new, they are in no sort of fear with regard to the duration of a building run up in haste; because duration is no object to those who think little or nothing has been done before their time, and who place all their hopes in discovery. They conceive, very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous, and therefore they are at inexpiable war with all establishments.

Plutarch, Life of Marius 7 (tr. John Dryden):

Any voluntary partaking with people in their labour is felt as an easing of that labour, as it seems to take away the constraint and necessity of it. It is the most obliging sight in the world to the Roman soldier to see a commander eat the same bread as himself, or lie upon an ordinary bed, or assist the work in the drawing a trench and raising a bulwark. For they do not so much admire those that confer honours and riches upon them, as those that partake of the same labour and danger with themselves; but love them better that will vouchsafe to join in their work, than those that encourage their idleness.

Hugh Blair (1718-1800):

For we may rest assured that whenever we express ourselves ill, there is, besides the mismanagement of language, some mistake in our manner of conceiving the subject. Embarrassed, obscure, and feeble sentences are generally, if not always, the result of embarrassed, obscure, and feeble thought. Thought and language act and react upon each other mutually. Logic and rhetoric have here, as in many other cases, a strict connect; and he that is learning to arrange his sentences with accuracy and order is learning, at the same time, to think with accuracy and order.

Catullus 31.7-10:

What is more blessed than release from cares, when the mind puts aside its burden, and weary from exertion abroad we arrive home and lie down to rest on the bed we have longed for?

o quid solutis est beatius curis,
cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrina
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum
desideratoque adquiescimus lecto?

Keith Burgess-Jackson discusses the phrases in virtue of/by virtue of and in contrast/by contrast, and concludes that either alternative is acceptable in these pairs. I have no quarrel with that conclusion.

But let's look at his reasoning:

A moment ago, I did a Google search for "in contrast." I used quotation marks so as to get the exact expression. I got 3.72 million hits. "By contrast," by contrast, got 1.84 million hits. This shows that both expressions are widely used.

Then I searched for "in virtue of" and "by virtue of." The former garnered 113,000 hits, the latter 1.06 million hits. I suppose someone could claim that this shows that "in virtue of" is incorrect, unidiomatic, or archaic. I would draw the opposite conclusion. It's correct, idiomatic, and current, just not as popular. In virtue of these results, feel free to use "in virtue of."

Consider the solecism "argumentum ad hominum" versus the correct "argumentum ad hominem." The Latin preposition "ad" takes the accusative case. "Hominum" is genitive plural, "hominem" is accusative singular of "homo" (man, person). Therefore "argumentum ad hominem" is correct, "argumentum ad hominum" is not. Mutatis mutandis we could rewrite Burgess-Jackson's second paragraph as follows:

Then I searched for "argumentum ad hominum" and "argumentum ad hominem." The former garnered 499 hits, the latter 5,830 hits. I suppose someone could claim that this shows that "argumentum ad hominum" is incorrect, unidiomatic, or archaic. I would draw the opposite conclusion. It's correct, idiomatic, and current, just not as popular. In virtue of these results, feel free to use "argumentum ad hominum."

You could use similar reasoning to support the use of the ungrammatical "between you and I" (20,200 hits) versus the proper "between you and me" (87,900 hits). Agreement with or against Google is not the arbiter of correct usage, either in English or Latin. As I have pointed out elsewhere, there are more Google hits for the incorrect "ad nauseum" than for the correct "ad nauseam." Google measures popularity, but does not determine correctness. As the legal maxim says, "Testimonia ponderanda sunt, non numeranda" (witnesses should be weighed, not counted).

But perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, Burgess-Jackson was discussing a case where the choice is unclear between two acceptable alternatives, not a case where one phrase is obviously correct, the other incorrect. My rule of thumb, when faced with a doubtful choice between alternatives like "by virtue of" and "in virtue of," is to ask someone who has read widely and who writes well which they would use. Someone, that is, like Keith Burgess-Jackson.

Returning to "ad hominum" and "ad hominem," I'm well aware that you can find expressions like "ad hominum milia decem" (about ten thousand men) in good Latin authors such as Caesar, and that "ad Cereris" (at Ceres', i.e. at Ceres' temple) is idiomatic Latin. The fact remains that "ad" always takes an accusative, expressed or implied.

On a lighter note -- any Latin teacher can tell you about the giggles that erupt in the classroom the first time the vocabulary word "homo" is introduced. The same thing happens in German class with "fahrt."

Jasper Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (1980; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 162:

The gods are at home in the radiant brightness of Olympus, the dead in the eternal darkness; men live between them in a world in which light and darkness succeed each other.

The following quotation comes at second or third hand. John Alexander Smith (1863-1939), Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, gave a lecture sometime before WWI, attended by Harold Macmillan. Macmillan reported Smith's words to Isaiah Berlin, and Isaiah Berlin told them to Ramin Jahanbegloo, who reproduced them in Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Phoenix Press, 1993), p. 29:

All of you, gentlemen, will have different careers -- some of you will be lawyers, some of you will be soldiers, some will be doctors or engineers, some will be government servants, some will be landowners or politicians. Let me tell you at once that nothing I say during these lectures will be of the slightest use to you in any of the fields in which you will attempt to exercise your skills. But one thing I can promise you: if you continue with this course of lectures to the end, you will always be able to know when men are talking rot.