Laudator Temporis Acti

One probably shouldn't judge a book by its table of contents, but it was at this point that I stopped reading.

Dear Mike,

Boardman’s so far slightly doddery and occasionally Rhadamanthine autobiography (published in his crotchety 90s) arrived last week.

John Boardman, A Classical Archaeologist´s Life: The Story So Far (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2020) p. 32:

Cambridge Classics was but a mild extension of school, although I did come to see the value of working hard at translation into English, to improve my English rather than just render the Greek, and got no little pleasure from writing Greek and Latin verse. The Master, A.B. Ramsay ('the Ram'), made us have 'saying lessons' (as he would have done at Eton) each morning, and I got Demosthenes 'First Olynthiac Oration' off by heart, as well as long stretches of Virgil, Cicero and Sophocles. 'What do I want from my boys?' — 'Accuracy, eloquence and deportment, Master'. This did no harm and helped composition since they gave one inbuilt criterion for good prose. A fellow undergraduate at Magdalene was Maurice Pope, later Professor of Classics at Cape Town. He and I could still manage the first few sentences of the Demosthenes in 2004: Anti pollon an, o andres Athenaioi... — the whole took about 20 minutes. In Greece in 1949, in a taverna at Nauplion, I came across a Greek soldier who had also learned the Oration and we exchanged recitals over the dinner table with vastly different pronunciations.

Ramsay’s interrogation was evidently not confined to a single question, according to the reminiscence of a near contemporary, Braham Myer, Magdalene Memories, Issue 35:

Once a week during our first two terms every undergraduate reading Classics had to appear before him and recite a portion of the prescribed classical text — in our case a Demosthenes oration. Every week an extra section was added so that finally one recited the complete work. Strange though this was, the formal preliminaries were even odder — taking the form of an inquisition. To the first question ‘What do I expect of my boys in their saying lessons?’, the required answer was ‘accuracy, eloquence and deportment, Master’ and to the next question ‘And what do I expect of my boys in their work?’, the answer had to be ‘diligence and obedience, Master’. In 1939 we did not protest.

Best wishes,
Eric [Thomson]

The Gospel of Matthew, Volume I (Chapters 1 to 10). Revised Edition. Translated with an Introduction and Interpretation by William Barclay (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975), p. 173 (on φιλεῖν):

It is the word which is used in the famous saying of Meander: "Whom the gods love, dies young."

For Meander read Menander. The famous saying is fragment 4 of his Dis Exapatōn, in Kassel and Austin, Poetae Comici Graeci, vol. VI.1, pp. 61-62:

ὃν οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν ἀποθνῄσκει νέος.

From Eric Thomson:

There's another egregious blunder in the same paragraph in the Insufficiently Revised Version:

I’m sure not every man would be overjoyed to have hot philountes but each to his own.

And here’s the 2001 Revised Version: the <n> restored in Menander and the <t> of Hot removed but still getting it wrong doesn’t seem to matter to them one iota:

Labels: typographical and other errors

Augustine, Sermons 331.5 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 1462; tr. Edmund Hill):

Observe how much the lovers of gold are prepared to suffer. They commit themselves to sea voyages in the roughest winter weather; they are so heated up with avarice, that they don't dread any cold; they are tossed about by the winds, hoisted up and dumped down by the waves; pursued by unimaginable dangers to the point of death.

Amatores auri videte quanta patiantur. Hiemalibus asperitatibus se navigando committunt: sic fervent avaritia, ut nulla formident frigora; iactantur ventis, suspenduntur et deprimuntur fluctibus; ineffabilibus periculis usque ad mortem agitantur.

Diogenes Laertius 6.2.57 (on Diogenes the Cynic; tr. R.D. Hicks):

He went up to Anaximenes the rhetorician, who was fat, and said, "Let us beggars have something of your paunch; it will be a relief to you, and we shall get advantage."

Ἀναξιμένει τῷ ῥήτορι παχεῖ ὄντι προσελθών, "ἐπίδος καὶ ἡμῖν" ἔφη, "τοῖς πτωχοῖς τῆς γαστρός· καὶ γὰρ αὐτὸς κουφισθήσῃ καὶ ἡμᾶς ὠφελήσεις."

This is fragment 506 of Diogenes the Cynic in Gabriele Giannantoni, ed., Socraticorum Reliquiae, Vol. II (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1983), p. 594.

Livy 9.17.3 (tr. B.O. Foster):

It appears that in war the factors of chief importance are the numbers and valour of the soldiers, the abilities of the commanders, and Fortune, which, powerful in all the affairs of men, is especially so in war.

plurimum in bello pollere videntur militum copia et virtus, ingenia imperatorum, fortuna per omnia humana, maxime in res bellicas potens.

in res bellicas codd.: inter res bellicas vel in rebus bellicis Harant: in re bellica Mueller: re bellica Weissenborn

Tenney Frank (1876-1939), "Changing Conceptions of Literary and Philological Research," Journal of the History of Ideas 3.4 (October, 1942) 401-414 (at 413):

In our chosen fields we shall understand our authors better if we read what they read, see what they saw, believe for the moment what they believed, enjoy the art and music of their day, enter into their enthusiasms and hatreds, fight their battles with them, hobnob with their fellows, in a word, be their most intimate associates in all respects.

Terence, Phormio 597 (tr. John Sargeaunt):

For I'm the only thing in my house that I can call my own.

nam ego meorum solus sum meus.

Apollodorus of Carystus, fragment 25 Kassel and Austin, Poetae Comici Graeci, vol. II, p. 498 (tr. John Maxwell Edmonds):

For I'm the only thing I can call my own.

ἐγὼ γάρ εἰμι τῶν <ἐμῶν> ἐμός <μόνος>.

suppl. Guyet

E.M. Cioran (1911-1995), On the Heights of Despair, tr. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 6:

I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

J'ignore totalement pourquoi il faut faire quelque chose ici-bas, pourquoi il nous faut avoir des amis et des aspirations, des espoirs et des rêves. Ne serait-il pas mille fois préférable de se retirer à l'écart du monde, loin de tout ce qui fait son tumulte et ses complications? Nous renoncerions ainsi à la culture et aux ambitions, nous perdrions tout sans rien obtenir en échange. Mais que peut-on obtenir en ce monde?

Horace, Epistles 1.11.7-10 (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

You know what Lebedus is—a town more desolate than Gabii and
Fidenae: yet there would I love to live,
and forgetting my friends and by them forgotten,
gaze from the land on Neptune's distant rage.

scis Lebedus quid sit? Gabiis desertior atque
Fidenis vicus; tamen illic vivere vellem,
oblitus meorum, obliviscendus et illis,
Neptunum procul e terra spectare furentem.

Diogenes Laertius 6.2.54 (on Diogenes the Cynic; tr. R.D. Hicks):

To the question what wine he found pleasant to drink, he replied, "That for which other people pay."

ἐρωτηθεὶς ποῖον οἶνον ἡδέως πίνει, ἔφη, "τὸν ἀλλότριον."

This is fragment 193 of Diogenes the Cynic in Gabriele Giannantoni, ed., Socraticorum Reliquiae, Vol. II (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1983), p. 496.

Augustine, Sermons 306C.1 (tr. Edmund Hill, with his note):

What a splendid wall for wall posters⁴ this Quadratus had presided over!

4. Parietem signinarium. This odd word is not given in Lewis & Short's Latin Dictionary. I am guessing that here it indicates a wall—whitewashed, of course, because it was the White Mass—on which signs, advertisements, can be painted, and graffiti scrawled; it's a novel metaphor for a fervent community of martyrs: a billboard for Christ.

Latin text from Germain Morin, "La Massa candida et le martyr Quadratus d'après deux sermons inédits de S. Augustin," Atti della Pontificia Accademia romana di archeologia (Serie III). Rendiconti, Volume III (1925) 289-312 (at 296, with his note):

Quam magnum parietem signinarium (?)²⁰ regebat iste Quadratus!

²⁰ signinarium] Restitution conjecturale. Le manuscrit a sigmnarium, dont il n'y a rien à faire. Mais l'adjectif signinus est d'usage courant, par ex. «signinum opus» (PLIN. 55, 46, 5): «signini parietes» (PALLAD., 1, 17). On trouve aussi simplement «signinum, signina». La pensée m'est venue qu'Augustin avait pu former de là l'adjectif subsidiaire «signinarius»; le copiste aurait écrit un m au lieu de ni. Mons. Giov. Galbiati, Préfet de l'Ambrosienne, partage en cela ma manière de voir.

Signinarius isn't in Alexander Souter, A Glossary of Later Latin to 600 A.D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), either. Cf. Lewis & Short, p. 1696, s.v. Signia: Signinarius occurs as a proper name (or a profession?) in an African inscription — Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum VIII 1 7462 (CAI IULI SIGNINARI).

John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 2024), p. 302, n. †:

Human flatulence alone generates about three quarters of a billion liters of methane per day, or 30 million cubic feet — enough to meet the daily cooking and heating needs of 140,000 northern city dwellers.

Hat tip: Jim K.

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Horace, Epistles 1.17.37 (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

He who feared he might not win sat still.

sedit qui timuit ne non succederet.

The same (tr. Colin Macleod):

A coward will always stick where he is.

Cf. Blaise Pascal, Pensées 139 Brunschvicg (tr. H.F. Stewart):

When I set myself, as I sometimes do, to consider human unrest in its various forms, and the perils and pains to which men expose themselves at court or in the camp (rich source of quarrels and passions, of bold and often unsuccessful ventures), I have often said that man's unhappiness arises from one thing only, namely that he cannot abide quietly in one room.

Quand je m'y suis mis quelquefois à considérer les diverses agitations des hommes et les périls et les peines où ils s'exposent dans la Cour, dans la guerre, d'où naissent tant de querelles, de passions, d'entreprises hardies et souvent mauvaises, etc., j'ai dit souvent que tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre.