Laudator Temporis Acti

H.H. Munro (Saki), Reginald's Choir Treat:

Annabel was accounted a beauty and intellectually gifted; she never played tennis, and was reputed to have read Maeterlinck's Life of the Bee. If you abstain from tennis and read Maeterlinck in a small country village, you are of necessity intellectual.

Jeffrey Goldberg, Party Unfaithful: The Republican Implosion, The New Yorker (June 4, 2007):

Earlier this year, he [Tom DeLay] published a memoir called "No Retreat, No Surrender" (his spokeswoman says that he was not stealing from Bruce Springsteen, and that the phrase has been used many times throughout history, including by the Spartans and as the title of a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie), in which he claimed that as a young congressman he would on occasion drink ten to twelve Martinis at a time. In this period, he earned the nickname Hot Tub Tom.

One of my guilty pleasures is watching cheesy martial arts movies, and I confess that I have seen Jean-Claude Van Damme's "No Retreat, No Surrender." Bruce Springsteen is a different matter. I know he's some kind of singer, but if you offered me $1000 to hum "No Retreat, No Surrender" or any other Bruce Springsteen ditty, I would perforce retreat emptyhanded.

What about the Spartans? Did they ever say the equivalent of "No retreat, no surrender?" Apparently in the movie The 300 (which I haven't seen), Leonidas the Spartan says, "Never retreat, never surrender," but Hollywood is not exactly an impeccable source for ancient history.

The Spartans may well have said something like "No retreat, no surrender," although I can't recall offhand ever seeing such a phrase in Greek literature. It is definitely a laconic, if not a Laconic, statement. The Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. laconic, says:

"concise, abrupt," 1589, from Gk. Lakonikos, from Lakon "person from Lakonia," the district around Sparta in southern Greece in ancient times, whose inhabitants were famous for their brevity of speech. When Philip of Macedon threatened them with, "If I enter Laconia, I will raze Sparta to the ground," the Spartans' reply was, "If."

There is an implied prohibition against retreat or surrender in the famous statement of the Spartan mother as she handed her son his shield: ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς, "either it or on it," in other words, "either bring back your shield or be carried back from battle dead on top of your shield." It was the quintessential mark of cowardice in ancient times to drop your shield on the battlefield and run away. The poet Archilochus bragged about doing just this, and there is a story that as a result the Spartans forbade him even to set foot in Sparta, lest he be a corrupting influence.

I'll be on the lookout for "No retreat, no surrender" in my reading from now on. I did check book 7 of Herodotus, a major source for the Battle of Thermopylae (Hot Gates). The closest I could find to any statement about retreating was 7.207 (tr. Aubrey De Sélincourt):

The Persian army was now close to the pass, and the Greeks, suddenly doubting their power to resist, held a conference to consider the advisability of retreat [ἐβουλεύοντο περὶ ἀπαλλαγῆς]. It was proposed by the Peloponnesians generally that the army should fall back upon the Peloponnese and hold the Isthmus; but when the Phocians and Locrians expressed their indignation at this suggestion, Leonidas gave his voice for staying where they were and sending, at the same time, an appeal for reinforcements to the various states of the confederacy, as their numbers were inadequate to cope with the Persians.

Hot Tub Tom has now become Hot Gospeller Tom, according to Jeffrey Goldberg's article:

"God has spoken to me," he said. "I listen to God, and what I've heard is that I'm supposed to devote myself to rebuilding the conservative base of the Republican Party."

Heaven preserve us! Far be it from me to encourage backsliding, but perhaps the United States of America and even the Republican Party might be better off if Tom DeLay would retreat from the political fray and surrender to the pleasures of his hot tub, there to sip a martini (or ten, or twelve).

Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple), Blood & smashed glass:

We are all in thrall to scores, hundreds, thousands perhaps, of mechanisms of whose workings we have no conception. We like to think of ourselves as independent and autonomous, but in fact we are far less independent and autonomous than the villeins of the feudal age. What happens when all the mechanisms and organizations that allow us to lead our lives break down and dissolve?

Aesop 32A Chambry:

A famished fox, when she saw grapes hanging from a vine, wanted to reach them and could not. Going away, she said to herself, "They are unripe grapes."

Varro, On Rustic Topics 1.8 (tr. by "a Virginia farmer"), also mentions foxes and grapes:

The least expensive kind of a vineyard is that which brings wine to the jug without the aid of any sort of prop. There are two of this kind, one in which the earth serves as a bed for the grapes, as in many places in Asia, and where usually the foxes share the crop with man....

Aesop was supposed to be a slave from Phrygia in Asia Minor, and some (including the "Virginia farmer" in a footnote) think the fable of the fox and the grapes reflects Asiatic agricultural practices: the fox, accustomed to grapes growing low on the ground, was frustrated when she first encountered them growing high on a trellis beyond her reach.

However that may be, foxes were the bane of ancient farmers who grew grapes, as the following passages attest.

Aristophanes, Knights 1076-77 (tr. Jeffrey Henderson):

Soldiers are like fox cubs because they eat grapes in the farmlands.

Song of Songs 2.15:

Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.

Theocritus 1.48-49 (describing an embossed cup, tr. A.S.F. Gow):

About him hang two foxes, and one goes to and fro among the vine-rows plundering the ripe grapes.

Theocritus 5.112-13 (tr. A.S.F. Gow):

I hate the foxes with their busy tails that come ever at evening and plunder Micon's vineyard.

Alciphron, 3.22 (Polyalsus to Eustaphylus, tr. anon.):

I set a trap for those confounded foxes, and hung some pieces of meat on the trap. They ravaged my vines, and, not content with picking a few grapes, carried off whole bunches and pulled up the plants.

There is a variety of grape known as the fox grape (Vitis vulpina).

Thoreau (Journal, Sept. 23, 1860) noted the omnivirous fox's diet, which included huckleberries as well as small animals:

I see on the top of the Cliffs to-day the dung of a fox, consisting of fur, with part of the jaw and one of the long rodent teeth of a woodchuck in it, and the rest of it huckleberry seeds with some whole berries. I saw exactly the same beyond Goose Pond a few days ago, on a rock,--except that the tooth (a curved rodent) was much smaller, probably of a mouse. It is evident, then, that the fox eats huckleberries and so contributes very much to the dispersion of this shrub, for there were a number of entire berries in its dung,--in both the last two I chanced to notice. To spread these seeds, Nature employs not only a great many birds but this restless ranger the fox. Like ourselves, he likes two courses, rabbit and huckleberries.

And grapes, if he can reach them.

Henry David Thoreau, Journal (Feb. 3, 1860):

When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, -- as that a sentence must never end with a particle, -- and perceive how implicitly even the learned obey it, I think --

Any fool can make a rule
And every fool will mind it.

According to Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage (Springfield: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2002), p. 609, John Dryden was the fool who made the rule, in his criticism of a line from Ben Jonson's Catiline:

The bodies that those souls were frighted from.

Dryden wrote:

The Preposition in the end of the sentence; a common fault with him, and which I have but lately observ'd in my own writings.

One of the learned who obeyed and promulgated the rule was Hugh Blair in Lecture XII of his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783):

A fifth rule for the strength of Sentences; which is, to avoid concluding them with an adverb, a preposition, or any inconsiderable word. Such conclusions are always enfeebling and degrading....Agreeably to this rule, we should always avoid concluding with any of those particles which mark the case of nouns,--of, to, from, with, by. For instance, it is a great deal better to say, "Avarice is a crime of which wise men are often guilty," than to say, "Avarice is a crime which wise men are often guilty of." This is a phraseology which all correct writers shun, and with reason. For, besides the want of dignity which arises from these monosyllables at the end, the imagination cannot avoid resting, for a little, on the import of the word which closes the Sentence: And, as those prepositions have no import of their own, but only serve to point out the relations of other words, it is disagreeable for the mind to be left pausing on a word, which does not, by itself, produce any idea, nor form any picture in the fancy.

Thoreau's alma mater, Harvard, adopted Blair's Lectures as a textbook in 1788. The biographies of Thoreau available to me (Henry Seidel Canby, Walter Harding, Robert D. Richardson Jr.) don't mention Blair's name in their indices, and so I cannot be certain that the book was still in use during Thoreau's years at Harvard, although I suspect it was.

John Lesslie Hall, English Usage: Studies in the History and Uses of English Words and Phrases (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1917), § XCIV, pp. 213-217, discusses the history of this taboo in other textbooks. The usually strict H.W. Fowler, Modern English Usage (1926), condemns the rule as a "cherished superstition."

Thoreau alludes to this rule elsewhere in his Journal (Jan. 2, 1859):

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs, -- Mr. Webster, perhaps, not having spoken according to Mr. Kirkham's rule, -- I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially, your truest poetical sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat. The grammarian is often one who can neither cry nor laugh, yet thinks that he can express human emotions. So the posture-masters tell you how you shall walk, -- turning your toes out, perhaps, excessively, -- but so the beautiful walkers are not made.

Attributed to Robert Wilensky:

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, was sometimes represented as a baboon.

Cf. also:

• Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 2.37 (tr. C.D. Yonge): "He who believes this may as well believe that if a great quantity of the one-and-twenty letters, composed either of gold or any other matter, were thrown upon the ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to form the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether fortune could make a single verse of them."
  
• Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond (tr. Donald M. Frame): "If the atoms have, by chance, formed so many sorts of figures, why have they never happened to meet to make a house, or a shoe? Why do we not believe likewise that an infinite number of Greek letters scattered about the place would be capable of forming the web of the Iliad?"

Adrian Morgan, Toads and Toadstools: The Natural History, Mythology & Cultural Oddities of This Strange Association (Berkeley: Celestial Arts, 1995), pp. 11-12:

Puffballs were sometimes called in English puckfists, a term that meant "fairy fart." .... They were also called fistballs, or bullfists, which again referred to farting. Continental Europe has long associated the puffball with anal evacuations: in ancient Rome it was crepitus lupi; in parts of Spain it was pedo de lobo; in France, pet de loup. All of these names mean "fart of the wolf," referring to noisy eruptions. In ancient Greece, the puffball was called lycoperdon, in Spain cuesco de lobo, in France vesse de loup, meaning fart of the wolf--defining here the "silent-but-deadly" variety. Another English title, recorded in 1597 by the herbalist John Gerard, was Woolfes Fistes, again meaning (silent) fart of the wolf, a creature with a longstanding reputation for magic and malevolence.

I transcribed this from Google Book Search (which gives only a limited preview), and I haven't seen the actual book. I don't find lycoperdon in Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon or the combination crepitus lupi in Thesaurus Linguae Latinae s.v. crepitus. Despite Morgan's words "in ancient Greece" and "in ancient Rome," I suspect that lycoperdon and crepitus lupi are both modern coinages, scholarly renderings of a vernacular name (cf. Melanchthon = Schwarzerde and Xylander = Holtzmann). To Morgan's list add Italian vescia di lupo and Portuguese bufa de lobo.

Related post: Noctes Scatologicae: Coprophagy (puffballs are edible).

References for my own use:

• Lorenz Diefenbach, Novum Glossarium Latino-Germanicum Mediae et Infimae Aetatis (Frankfurt: J.D. Sauerländer, 1867), p. 168, s.v. *Fasula
  
• Helmut Genaust, Etymologische Wörterbuch der botanischen Pflanzennamen, 3rd ed. (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1996), p. 105, s.v. Bovista
  

Seneca, On the Shortness of Life 3.4-5 (tr. John W. Basore):

You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals. You will hear many men saying: "After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties." And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? Who will suffer your course to be just as you plan it? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to postpone wholesome plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained!

tamquam semper victuri vivitis, numquam vobis fragilitas vestra succurrit, non observatis quantum iam temporis transierit; velut ex pleno et abundanti perditis, cum interim fortasse ille ipse qui alicui vel homini vel rei donatur dies ultimus sit. omnia tamquam mortales timetis, omnia tamquam immortales concupiscitis. audies plerosque dicentes: "a quinquagesimo anno in otium secedam, sexagesimus me annus ab officiis dimittet." et quem tandem longioris vitae praedem accipis? quis ista sicut disponis ire patietur? non pudet te reliquias vitae tibi reservare et id solum tempus bonae menti destinare quod in nullam rem conferri possit? quam serum est tunc vivere incipere cum desinendum est? quae tam stulta mortalitatis oblivio in quinquagesimum et sexagesimum annum differre sana consilia et inde velle vitam inchoare quo pauci perduxerunt?

John Dryden, Aureng-Zebe, IV.i:

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat;
Yet fooled with hope, men favour the deceit;
Trust on, and think tomorrow will repay;
Tomorrow's falser than the former day;
Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Strange cozenage! none would live past years again,
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;
And from the dregs of life think to receive,
What the first sprightly running could not give.
I'm tired with waiting for this Chymick gold,
Which fools us young, and beggars us when old.

Dear Mr. Gilleland,

I like the escutcheon – a roundel with porc statant azure, which leaves dignity intact. The heraldic wallowing of ‘porc couchant’, possibly framed dexter and sinister by knife and fork, is best left to the hardline sybarites. Purists and the bellicose might insist on a boar tusked, unguled and bristled, but ‘honi soit qui mal y pense’.

Your post on ‘The Art of Donald McGill’ inspired me to dig out the original since I have a crumbling and tatty but much prized collection of Horizons (about three-quarters complete). I like to think that some of them at any rate are salt-stained from convoy duty, were rescued at Dunkirk, or parched in the African desert. You are usually impeccable bibliographically but I eventually found the essay (along with a short memoir of Robert Byron) in the September 1941 issue (vol. IV, no. 21) and not February 1942.

I was struck by the close of the essay:

“Like the music halls, they [saucy cartoons] are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue. ...a whole category of humour integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn postcards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers’ windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.”

Prophetic words. Orwell didn’t live to see the “barely legal” become incontrovertibly illegal, when McGill was prosecuted for obscenity in 1951 and his postcards did indeed all but vanish. ‘Hard Rock’ below was used in the case for the, on the face of it, rock-hard prosecution.


Compare this to an etching by another London Scot, James Gillray, 1757-1815 (The Satirical Etchings of James Gillray, ed. Draper Hill, Dover 1976) and you can appreciate Orwell’s point concerning eighteenth century antecedents.


What connects Gillray, McGill and the occasional scatologist Michael Gilleland is of course – nomen omen – Scottish Gaelic ‘gille’ – servant, the word which would be the likely candidate to render Spanish ‘escudero’ - squire in any Gaelic translation of Cervantes. So you could say there was a sort of hard-wired earthiness there (a Panzeatic League) - as there is indeed in the Scottish tradition - locked in creative tension with the elevated.

The critic Kurt Wittig gives some credence to the notion of ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’:

“From the beginning to end, Scots poetry showed a combination of two or more seemingly irreconcilable qualities: of high pathos and everyday realism, of stark tragedy and grim humour, of high seriousness and grotesquerie, of tenderness and sarcasm. ...This emotional and intellectual dualism – the “Caledonian Antisyzygy,” as Gregory Smith called it – may possibly have been reinforced by the schizophrenic tendencies of a nation which came to use one language to express thought, another to express feeling. It may also have been hardened by the stern intellectual discipline of Calvinism; and, as the impact of the Reformation gradually wore off, people may have become increasingly conscious of the latent emotional and moral dualism implicit in the overt contradiction between the Scottish Sabbath and the Scottish Saturday (or Friday) night.”

(The Scottish Tradition in Literature, Oliver & Boyd 1958, pg. 250).

The point I suppose that Orwell makes is that the voyeur eyeing voluptuous figures on the beach, who might laugh at one of McGill’s smutty postcards, may also be the person who gazes the next moment wistfully out to sea, and then opens a novel, a novel, say, that begins:

“The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near to the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea.”

Or:

“The sea lost nothing of the swallowing identity of its great outer mass of waters in the emphatic, individual character of each particular wave. Each wave, as it rolled in upon the high-pebbled beach was an epitome of the whole body of the sea, and carried with it all the vast mysterious quality of the earth’s ancient antagonist.”

Or:

“The sun had not yet risen: The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually, as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.”

Barring distractions, he might read on, or then again he might not.

Kind Regards,

Andrew MacGillivray

---

Mr. MacGillivray's final three quotations come from (1) Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea; (2) John Cowper Powys, Weymouth Sands; and (3) Virginia Woolf, The Waves. Panzeatic League (league of men with paunches) is of course a pun on Hanseatic League.

Pliny the Younger, Letter 7.9.1-3 (to Fuscus Salinator, tr. Betty Radice):

You ask me what course of study I think you should follow during your present prolonged holiday. The most useful thing, which is always being suggested, is to translate Greek into Latin and Latin into Greek. This kind of exercise develops in one a precision and richness of vocabulary, a wide range of metaphor, and power of exposition, and, moreover, imitation of the best models leads to a like aptitude for original composition. At the same time, any point which might have been overlooked by a reader cannot escape the eye of a translator. All this cultivates perception and critical sense.

Quaeris quemadmodum in secessu, quo iam diu frueris, putem te studere oportere. utile in primis, et multi praecipiunt, vel ex Graeco in Latinum vel ex Latino vertere in Graecum. quo genere exercitationis proprietas splendorque verborum, copia figurarum, vis explicandi, praeterea imitatione optimorum similia inveniendi facultas paratur; simul quae legentem fefellissent, transferentem fugere non possunt. intellegentia ex hoc et iudicium acquiritur.

This week's theme for A.Word.A.Day is words borrowed from Spanish. Yesterday's word was

ramada (ruh-MAH-duh) noun

  An open shelter roofed with branches.

[From Spanish, from rama (branch), from Vulgar Latin rama, from Latin ramus (branch). The word "ramify" branches out from the same root "ramus".]

In my ignorance, I first thought that English bower might be a sort of calque for Spanish ramada (or vice versa), but etymologically bower has nothing to do with bough, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. bower:

O.E. bur "room, hut, dwelling," from P.Gmc. *buraz (cf. Ger. bauer "birdcage"), from base *bu- "to dwell." Modern spelling developed after 1350. Sense of "leafy arbor" (place closed in by trees) is first attested 1523. Hence, too, Australia's bower-bird (1847). New York City's Bowery (1787) was originally a homestead farm (Du. bowerij); used attributively for its squalor since 1840.

Cousin to the ramada is the pergola, which The American Heritage Dictionary defines as

An arbor or passageway with a roof of trelliswork on which climbing plants are trained to grow.

Pergola is originally an Italian word, itself derived from Latin pergula, one of whose meanings (Lewis and Short 5) is "vine-arbor." Horace refers to a vine-arbor in Ode 1.38 (tr. John Addington Symonds):

Boy, I dislike this Persian frippery,
These linden-twisted chaplets please not me.
Pray take no pains to find for me where grows
  The latest lingering rose.

Twine not the myrtle spray with studious care,
Plain myrtle leaves we both may fitly wear, --
Thou as my page, I, as I sip my wine
  Beneath my thick-leaved vine.

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

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

Nisbet and Hubbard translate arta vite as "my shady pergola." In their note they say:

Such bowers of vines were and remain popular in Mediterranean lands; cf. Gow on Theocr. 15.119, copa 8 'triclia umbrosis frigida harundinibus', Plin. nat. 14.11 'una vitis Romae in Liviae porticibus subdiales inambulationes umbrosis pergulis opacat', Colum. 11..32, Plin. epist. 5.6.36 with Sherwin-White's note, D.-S. 4.392f.

The phrase from the copa cited by Nisbet and Hubbard (triclia umbrosis frigida harundinibus = bower cool with shady reeds) contains the word triclia, sometimes spelled trichlia. Some authorities derive English trellis from Latin trichlia.

The Jewish festival of Sukkot (huts or booths) intrigues me. I've never seen a sukkah, but apparently the roof is supposed to be thatched with fronds or branches (schach) that provide more shade than sun, yet through which you can see the stars at night.

Garrison Keillor, The Pleasures of Perfect Cadence:

Somehow Thoreau missed out on the pleasure of being in tempo. He never drilled with the Concord militia, and if he ever attended dances, he didn't mention it in his journal. And when he matriculated at Harvard in 1833, there was no marching band where he could've played his flute and learned how thrilling it is when 50 or 60 people hit the cadence, the bass drum going BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM and the snares setting up a back beat and the saxophones swinging back and forth and all the shoes going slapslapslapslap up the street — this is electrifying to the whole town and the populace lines the curbs to watch the parade go by. Rhythm, Henry — shared rhythm — is a powerful thing, compared to which your personal drummer who goes BOOMBOOMboinkBOOMboinkBOOMBOOM is a puny thing. So get over yourself, O Great One. Get with the program.

Thoreau may have marched to his own drumbeat, but he was perfectly capable of singing and dancing in time to someone else's piano accompaniment and so participating in "shared rhythm," as the following passage demonstrates, from F.B. Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years, vol. 2 (Boston: Richard G. Badger, The Gorham Press, 1909), pp. 397-398:

The Ricketsons said, when asked about the visit of Thoreau, Alcott, and Channing at their New Bedford house (Brooklawn) in April, 1857, that Thoreau sang and danced there to the accompaniment of Mrs. Ricketson's piano....As Mrs. R. struck up a lively Scotch air ("The Campbells are Comin'"), Thoreau felt moved to try a dance, and did so,—keeping time to the music perfectly, but executing some steps more like Indian dances than the usual ballroom figures. Anna was so amused at the sight, which she saw through the window, that she ran and called her father and Channing, who came and looked on,—Alcott sitting on the sofa, meanwhile, and watching the dance. Thoreau continued the performance for five or ten minutes; it was earnest and spontaneous, but not particularly graceful.

During this visit of 1857 Thoreau sang his two favorite pieces,—Moore's "Row, Brothers, Row," and Dibdin's "Tom Bowling,"—both of which, no doubt, reminded him of his brother John. Mrs. Ricketson accompanied him on the piano, and presently Anna procured for him the music of "Tom Bowling," which he had before sung by rote, with spirit and in good time, but not quite in tune, perhaps.

Note the descriptions "keeping time to the music perfectly" and "in good time."

Seneca, On the Shortness of Life 3.3 (tr. John W. Basore):

Look back in memory and consider when you ever had a fixed plan, how few days have passed as you had intended, when you were ever at your own disposal, when your face ever wore its natural expression, when your mind was ever unperturbed, what work you have achieved in so long a life, how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!

Repete memoria tecum quando certus consilii fueris, quotus quisque dies ut destinaveras recesserit, quando tibi usus tui fuerit, quando in statu suo vultus, quando animus intrepidus, quid tibi in tam longo aevo facti operis sit, quam multi vitam tuam diripuerint te non sentiente quid perderes, quantum vanus dolor, stulta laetitia, avida cupiditas, blanda conversatio abstulerit, quam exiguum tibi de tuo relictum sit: intelleges te immaturum mori.

Richard John Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (London: Blackie and Son Limited, 1924; rpt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), p. viii:

Let a man once acquire the power to read Homer as he reads Spenser or Milton, and he will have a possession which he would change for no other, an unfailing source of solace and of the purest pleasure. Homer is like Shakespeare in this, that he cannot be exhausted, that the more he is read the more there is found, and that while the effects are more and more felt, the means by which they are got remain more and more mysterious.

George Orwell, "The Art of Donald McGill," Horizon (February 1942 September 1941):

[T]wo principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in nearly every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with 'voluptuous' figures. He it is who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth. Whether you allow yourself to be influenced by him is a different question. But it is simply a lie to say that he is not part of you, just as it is a lie to say that Don Quixote is not part of you either, though most of what is said and written consists of one lie or the other, usually the first.

Here are some recent essays by Theodore Dalrymple:

• Pope Rosie? Pray for Us
  
• A Drinker of Infinity
  
• Engineering Souls

Eric Thomson sent me a witty and erudite email, in which he commented on a couple of my blog posts.

Anent my paunch, he wrote:

A motto for your escutcheon: 'Omo de panza omo de sostanza'.

In English this means, "A man with a paunch is a man of substance." The rhyming motto is some dialect of Italian. Panza also occurs in Spanish. Hence the apt name of Don Quixote's pot-bellied squire Sancho Panza. The ultimate source of both paunch and panza is the rare Latin word pantex. Here is the entry in Lewis & Short's Latin Dictionary:

pantex, ĭcis, and usu. plur., pantĭces, um, m.,

I. the paunch, the bowels (syn.: venter, ilia): eo vos vostrosque pantices madefacitis, quom ego sim hic siccus, Plaut. Ps. 1, 2, 50: et aestuantes docte solvis pantices, i.e. sausages, Verg. Cat. 5, 31; Mart. 6, 64, 28.--In sing., Auct. Priap. 83, 19 dub.

I've taken Eric's advice and designed the following escutcheon:
Epicuri de grege porcum, in the words of Horace (Epist. 1.4.16) -- a pig from Epicurus' herd.

[Update: E.J. Moncada suggests laudator temporis acti me porculo = praiser of time past when I was a piglet, recalling Horace, Ars Poetica 173-4 laudator temporis acti se puero = praiser of time past when he was a boy.]

Eric also humorously suggested an alternative origin for the word sciolist:

We can derive sciolist by aptonymic syncope from the species of charlatan known as the sociologist.

Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, 2nd edition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), p. 33 (2.7.1.1), explains syncope as follows:

The loss (deletion) of a vowel from the interior of a word (not initially or finally) is called syncope (from Greek sunkopé 'a cutting away', sun- 'with' + kopé 'cut, beat'); such deleted vowels are said to be 'syncopated'. Syncope is a frequently used term.

  (1) The change in many varieties of English which omits the medial vowel of words such as fam(i)ly and mem(o)ry illustrates syncope.

  (2) Starting in Vulgar Latin and continuing in the Western Romance languages, the unstressed vowels other than a were lost in the interior of words three syllables long or longer, as in pópulu- 'people' (pópulu- > poplV-), reflected by French peuple 'people' and Spanish pueblo 'people, town' (English people is borrowed from French); fābulare 'to talk' became hablar 'to speak' in Spanish (fābulare > fablar(e) > hablar /ablar/).

While syncope is normally reserved for loss of vowels, some people sometimes speak of 'syncopated' consonants. It is more common in the case of consonants just to speak of loss or deletion.

If some of the medial letters of sociologist drop out by syncope, we're left with sciolist, which some would say is an fitting description (aptonym or aptronym) of a sociologist.

Reading Xenophon's Anabasis, I was struck by the expression "looking towards someone's table" at 7.2.33 (tr. Carleton L. Brownson):

When I became a young man, however, I could not endure to live with my eyes turned toward another's table [εἰς ἀλλοτρίαν τράπεζαν ἀποβλέπων]; so I sat myself down on the same seat with Medocus as a suppliant and besought him to give me as many men as he could, in order that I might inflict whatever harm I could upon those who drove us out, and might live without turning my eyes toward his table [εἰς τὴν ἐκείνου τράπεζαν ἀποβλέπων].

I don't have a commentary, but according to John T. White's school edition of Anabasis book 7 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1882), in the vocabulary s.v. ἀποβλέπω, "the metaphor is taken from a dog looking for food from his master's table, thus conveying the notion of dependence."

Liddell & Scott define ἀπομαγδαλία as "the crumb or inside of the loaf, on which the Greeks wiped their hands at dinner, and then threw it to the dogs: hence, dog's meat, Ar.Eq.415, Alciphr.3.44, Plu.Lyc.12."

The expression "table dogs" (κύνες τραπεζῆες) occurs in Homer (Iliad 22.69 and 23.173, Odyssey 17.309). Cf. German Tischhund.

In the Gospels, we find:

• Matthew 15.27: And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table.
  
• Mark 7.28: And she answered and said unto him, Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs.

Cf. also Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 1.19 (tr. F.C. Conybeare):

It was a lazy fellow and malignant who tried to pick holes in him, and remarked that he recorded well enough a lot of things, for example, the opinions and ideas of his hero, but that in collecting such trifles as these he reminded him of dogs who pick up and eat the fragments which fall from a feast. Damis replied thus: "If banquets there be of gods, and gods take food, surely they must have attendants whose business it is that not even the parcels of ambrosia that fall to the ground should be lost."

At Phaedrus 4.19.1-4 the dogs complained to Jove about their fare:

Once upon a time, the dogs sent ambassadors to Jove, to beg him to make the conditions of their life better and to rescue them from the insults of men, because men gave the dogs bread sprinkled with bran.

Canes legatos olim misere ad Iovem
meliora vitae tempora oratum suae,
ut sese eriperet hominum contumeliis,
furfuribus sibi consparsum quod panem darent.

A correspondent passes on the following anecdote:

As a young man I suffered from chronic flatulence and often gave accidental and embarrassing demonstrations of my affliction in class. This happened several times in Prof. Saupin's Latin Poetry Class. After the last such occasion, he took me aside and, satisfied that I had little or no control over the disruptive ventosities, told me that a sure-fire cure was to read one or two Horatian Odes every morning after getting up. "They are," he said, "the perfect carminatives." To my great delight I found he was right.

To appreciate the joke, you need to know that

• A carminative is a "substance, esp. an aromatic, which tends to expel wind from the alimentary canal, or to relieve colic, griping, or flatulence" (Webster's Dictionary, 1913); and
  
• The title of Horace's Odes in Latin is Carmina.

Here is another story about Horace and the alimentary canal, from a letter of Lord Chesterfield to his son (Letter XXI, 11 December 1747 Old Style):

I know a gentleman, who was so good a manager of his time, that he would not even lose that small portion of it, which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets, in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, carried them with him to that necessary place, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained; and I recommend you to follow his example. It is better than only doing what you cannot help doing at those moments; and it will make any book, which you shall read in that manner, very present in your mind.

Servius on Vergil, Aeneid 11.500:

For there were four things among the Romans that were related to showing respect: to dismount from your horse, to bare your head, to move out of the way, and to stand up. Even the heralds who preceded magistrates were said to shout these instructions.

quattuor namque erant apud Romanos quae ad honorificentiam pertinebant: equo desilire, caput aperire, via decedere, adsurgere. hoc etiam praecones praeeuntes magistratus clamare dicebantur.

Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 2.2 (tr. J.C. Rolfe), discusses two of these marks of respect (standing up and dismounting):

What rules of courtesy should be observed by fathers and sons in taking their places at table, keeping their seats, and similar matters at home and elsewhere, when the sons are magistrates and the fathers private citizens; and a discourse of the philosopher Taurus on the subject, with an illustration taken from Roman history.

[1] The governor of the province of Crete, a man of senatorial rank, had come to Athens for the purpose of visiting and becoming acquainted with the philosopher Taurus, and in company with this same governor was his father. [2] Taurus, having just dismissed his pupils, was sitting before the door of his room, and we stood by his side conversing with him. [3] In came the governor of the province and with him his father. [4] Taurus arose quietly, and after salutations had been exchanged, sat down again. [5] Presently the single chair that was at hand was brought and placed near them, while others were being fetched. Taurus invited the governor's father to be seated; [6] to which he replied: [7] "Rather let this man take the seat, since he is a magistrate of the Roman people." "Without prejudicing the case," said Taurus, "do you meanwhile sit down, while we look into the matter and inquire whether it is more proper for you, who are the father, to sit, or your son, who is a magistrate." [8] And when the father had seated himself, and another chair had been placed near by for his son also, Taurus discussed the question with what, by the gods! was a most excellent valuation of honours and duties.

[9] The substance of the discussions was this: In public places, functions and acts the rights of fathers, compared with the authority of sons who are magistrates, give way somewhat and are eclipsed: but when they are sitting together unofficially in the intimacy of home life, or walking about, or even reclining at a dinner party of intimate friends, then the official distinctions between a son who is a magistrate and a father who is a private citizen are at an end, while those that are natural and inherent come into play. [10] "Now, your visit to me," said he, "our present conversation, and this discussion of duties are private actions. Therefore enjoy the same priority of honours at my house which it is proper for you to enjoy in your own home as the older man."

[11] These remarks and others to the same purport were made by Taurus at once seriously and pleasantly. [12] Moreover, it has seemed not out of place to add what I have read in Claudius about the etiquette of father and son under such circumstances. [13] I therefore quote Quadrigarius' actual words, transcribed from the sixth book of his Annals: "The consuls then elected were Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus for the second time and Quintus Fabius Maximus, son of the Maximus who had been consul the year before. The father, at the time proconsul, mounted upon a horse met his son the consul, and because he was his father, would not dismount, nor did the lictors, who knew that the men lived in the most perfect harmony, presume to order him to do so. As the father drew near, the consul said: 'What next?' The lictor in attendance quickly understood and ordered Maximus the proconsul to dismount. Fabius obeyed the order and warmly commended his son for asserting the authority which he had as the gift of the people."