Laudator Temporis Acti

Aesop, Fables 380 Perry (tr. Laura Gibbs, with her note):

Xanthus, Aesop's master, said to him, 'Can you tell me why we sometimes look at our own shit after we go to the bathroom?' Aesop replied, 'A long time ago the son of a king indulged in all kinds of luxurious foods. As a result, he spent a lot of time in the bathroom. And once he spent such a long time sitting there that he forgot what he was doing and crapped his own guts out. Ever since, anyone taking a crap bends over to make sure he hasn't done the same thing. But you don't have to worry about that, since you don't have any guts to begin with!'

Note: This fable depends on a distinctly Greek understanding of human anatomy: the 'guts' are actually the seat of intelligence (English 'brains') rather than a sign of courage. By saying that his master has no 'guts', Aesop means that his master is an idiot, not that he is a coward.

Ὁ Ξάνθος αὐτῷ· "δύνασαί μοι εἰπεῖν διὰ ποίαν αἰτίαν, ἐπὰν χέζωμεν, πυκνὰ εἰς τὸ ἀφόδευμα ἑαυτῶν βλέπομεν;" Αἴσωπος· "ὅτι κατὰ τοὺς πάλαι χρόνους βασιλέως υἱὸς ἐγένετο ὅστις διὰ τὴν σπατάλην καὶ τρυφὴν ἐπὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἐκαθέζετο χέζων, ἐπὶ τοσοῦτον δὲ χρόνον, ἄχρις οὗ ἐπιλαθόμενος τὰς ἰδίας φρένας ἔχεσεν. ἀπ’ ἐκείνου δὲ τοῦ χρόνου οἱ ἄνθρωποι χέζοντες ὑποκύπτουσιν φοβούμενοι μὴ καὶ αὐτοὶ τὰς ἰδίας φρένας χέσωσιν· σὺ δὲ μηδὲν ἀγωνία περὶ τούτου· οὐ μὴ γὰρ χέσης σου τὰς φρένας, οὐκ ἔχεις γὰρ."

Labels: noctes scatologicae

C.S. Lewis, letter to his father (October 28, 1922):

I am drumming ahead like anything with my Anglo-Saxon, and it is great fun. One begins it in a Reader constructed on the admirable system of having nearly all the text in one dialect and nearly all the glossary in another. You can imagine what happy hours this gives the young student—for example, you will read a word like 'WADO' in the text: in the glossary this may appear as WEDO, WAEDO, WEODO, WAEDU, or WIEDU. Clever bloke, ain't he? The language in general, gives the impression of parodied English badly spelled. Thus the word 'CWIC' may baffle you till you remember the 'quick and the dead' and suddenly realize that it means 'Alive'. Or again TINGUL for a star, until you think of 'Twinkle, twinkle little star'.

Warning: This post, about my (now deceased) uncle's return home after World War II, will probably interest only my family members.

My brother showed me an old telegram that our uncle (a paratrooper in WWII) sent to our mother. I sent the following email to my uncle about his Odyssey (including the Circe episode):

Here is the text of a telegram which you sent to my mother on March 18, 1946:

ARRIVED 11:15 SATURDAY NIGHT ALSO MET AIRBORNE SLICK CHICK NECKED FROM ALBUQUERQUE TO KANSAS CITY

Sounds like quite a trip...

My uncle responded with the following reminiscences:

I landed in Seattle late Feb., 1946, after a ride on a troopship from Japan. After a train ride to Ft. MacArthur, California, I was discharged from the army on March 9, 1946, 3 months before my 21st birthday. Your Dad was on recruiting duty in L.A. after serving in the Pacific. In Japan I told the army that I lived at your parents' address in L.A. so I could visit them. After I got to Ft. MacArthur, I told them that I lived in Maine.

I visited for a few days and then went to a local air base and tried to get a ride East on an Air Corps plane. (Free). Because I was discharged, it was not possible. I had to buy a ticket on a regular airline. The Army gave me 5 cents a mile travel allowance. I received around $154.00. Believe it or not, the price of an airline ticket to Portland, Maine, was just about the same amount that I received.

Your folks gave me a ride to the Burbank Airport in Los Angeles. My flight left at 11:00 P.M. It went to Albuquerque, NM. (Your 61-year-old telegram copy covers this segment only.) The "chick" referred to was grateful to those of us who had saved the world from oblivion. However, she got off in Kansas City. (No pun intended.)

From Kansas City, my flight went on to Chicago. From Chicago we flew to New York City, then to Boston, then to Portland, Maine.

It was cold and dark. I hitchhiked and walked to the road to Brunswick, then with my limited luggage, I put on my pity-full look and hitched a ride to Brunswick. By this time I was very cold and uncomfortable. I still had on my uniform and did not have to wait too long for a ride. I did not have an overcoat as we didn't need an overcoat in California.

The guy let me off at the corner of Pleasant St. (Rte. 1) and Spring St. in Brunswick. Consequently, I walked the last half mile to 29 Spring St. (I was asked why I hadn't called my father from Portland to ask for a ride. I said that I didn't know how much he'd charge me.)

I walked into my home at 11:15 P.M. The trip took 21 hours using planes, autos, and foot power. I had been gone since Sept., 1944, 18 months. (Eighteen months of still untold unique experiences.)

"I didn't know how much he'd charge me." This is revealing. My grandfather was a penny-pincher — when my mother graduated from high school at age 16 and got a job at a bank, her father started charging her for room and board.

Related post: Memorial Day.

Augustine, Confessions 10.8.15 (tr. R.S. Pine-Coffin):

Yet men go out and gaze in astonishment at high mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad reaches of rivers, the ocean that encircles the world, or the stars in their courses. But they pay no attention to themselves.

et eunt homines mirari alta montium et ingentes fluctus maris et latissimos lapsus fluminum et oceani ambitum et gyros siderum, et relinquunt se ipsos.

James J. O'Donnell ad loc. (vol. 3, p. 180):

Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1965), p. 306 (note omitted):

Mostly, the critics centered their fire on Jefferson Davis, taking the traditional American view that if anything goes wrong the President must be at fault. As a member of the intimate circle surrounding that wan perfectionist, Vice-President Alexander Stephens, who criticized Mr. Davis with a sad but tireless persistence, [Howell] Cobb knew all about that kind of talk; but as the new year began he felt that at least part of the trouble lay with Congress. After a visit to the capital he wrote candidly to Stephens: "What is wanting in Richmond is brains. I did not find the temper and disposition of Congress as bad as I expected, but there is a lamentable want of brains and good sound common sense."

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Babrius 120 (tr. Ben Edwin Perry):

That denizen of the swamps who likes the shade,
the frog, who lives beside the ditches,
once came forth on dry land and bragged to all the creatures:
"I'm a physician, skilled in the use of drugs
such as no one, doubtless, knows, not even Paean
who lives on Olympus, physician to the gods."
"And how," said a fox, "can you cure someone else,
when you can't save yourself from being so deathly pale?"

Ὁ τελμάτων ἔνοικος ὁ σκιῇ χαίρων,
ὁ ζῶν ὀρυκτοῖς βάτραχος παρ' αὐρίποις,
εἰς γῆν παρελθὼν ἔλεγε πᾶσι τοῖς ζώοις·
"ἰατρός εἰμι φαρμάκων ἐπιστήμων,
οἵων ταχ' οὐδεὶς οἶδεν, οὐδ' ὁ Παιήων,
ὃς Ὄλυμπον οἰκεῖ καὶ θεοὺς ἰατρεύει."
"καὶ πῶς" ἀλώπηξ εἶπεν "ἄλλον ἰήσῃ,
ὃς σαυτὸν οὕτω χλωρὸν ὄντα μὴ σώζεις;"

Haim Schwarzbaum, Mishlé Shu'alim (Fox Fables) of Rabbi Berechiah Ha-Nakdan: A Study in Comparative Folklore (1979; rpt. Leiden: Brill, 2025), p. 205 (Fable #34):

A Frog espied some Oxen ploughing near his abode of reeds. In order to get acquainted with them, he started bragging and vaunting of his supreme wisdom and acumen, particularly as far as Leechcraft is concerned. He said: "I am able to cure every disease and sickness and to procure an efficient, adequate specific for the remedy of all sores and ailments. My accurate diagnosis is well-known, and my medical skill has achieved wonders and brought much relief to many a patient."

An old Ox addressed the boasting Frog as follows: "You brag of your wisdom, medical dexterity and wonderful achievements as a most gifted physician, but why do you look like a withered, half-dead person? Why is your complexion more decayed and wretched than that of any other reptile? Why are you devoid of any blood-red healthy colour? Everybody turns up his nose at your loathsome, repulsive, sickly-green colour!"

Our pseudo-doctor was thus put to the blush. He hid his diminished head and went quickly away in order to conceal himself in the screened reeds and marshes.

Related post: Physician, Heal Thyself.

Homer, Odyssey, tr. Daniel Mendelsohn (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025), p. 57 (from "A Note on the Translation"):

Wherever possible, I have tried to avoid words whose modernity would jolt readers out of the world that is the epic’s setting. In Book 11, for instance, the ghost of Agamemnon describes how he was murdered at the feast given to celebrate his return from Troy, a passage in which he uses the word eranos, often translated as “picnic.” But “picnic” is what my late friend and mentor Bob Gottlieb, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest editors of the twentieth century, called a “stopper”: given the strong associations that “picnic” has for an Anglophone reader, its presence in this passage would stop the reader, raising questions that would interrupt the flow of the reading experience. (Did the Greeks have picnics? What were they like? What kind of food did they eat? Were there blankets and sunscreen? Etc.) The Odyssey is certainly “modern,” in the sense that its themes are always with us; but the body it inhabits, its accoutrements, are very much of its own remote time. When all is said and done, the world of the epic, its heroes and heroines, villains and goddesses and monsters, is very distant from ours; that distance is, to my mind, an essential part of what the Odyssey is, and should be felt in translation. To cast Homer in up-to-the-minute, contemporary English speech might make it feel approachably modern for some readers, especially young ones; but it is worth remembering that Homer never felt “modern,” even in his own time.

"Did the Greeks have picnics?" There is a good example of a picnic in the Odyssey itself (6.96-97, they = Nausicaa and her attendants; tr. Mendelsohn):

Once they had bathed in the water and anointed their skin with rich oil
They took their meal right there along the bank of the river...

αἱ δὲ λοεσσάμεναι καὶ χρισάμεναι λίπ᾽ ἐλαίῳ
δεῖπνον ἔπειθ᾽ εἵλοντο παρ᾽ ὄχθῃσιν ποταμοῖο...

---

Unfortunately I encounter stoppers, of one sort or another, on almost every page of Mendelsohn's translation, e.g.:

• No Accounting for Taste
• A Puzzle

Here is another example, from 5.103-104 = 5.137-138:

But it's utterly impossible for us other gods to thwart
Or void the intention of Zeus, he who bears the aegis.

ἀλλὰ μάλ᾽ οὔ πως ἔστι Διὸς νόον αἰγιόχοιο
οὔτε παρεξελθεῖν ἄλλον θεὸν οὔθ᾽ ἁλιῶσαι.

As I construe the English translation of line 103 (= 137) , "he who bears the aegis" is in apposition to "Zeus," and "Zeus" is the object of the preposition "of." But "he who bears the aegis" is a nominative phrase in English, and how, therefore, can it be the object of a preposition? I would revise the translation as follows:

But it's utterly impossible for us other gods to thwart
Or void the intention of Zeus who bears the aegis.

Cf. Mendelsohn's translation of 6.324:

Harken to me, Atrytône, child of Zeus who bears the aegis...

κλῦθί μευ, αἰγιόχοιο Διὸς τέκος, Ἀτρυτώνη...

C.S. Lewis, letter to his brother (August 7, 1921; "the place" = an inn in Tintagel, Cornwall):

I have not yet exhausted the horrors of the place: I was glad to see a book case in the lounge. All the books were uniformly bound, and I was surprised to see such unlikely titbits as the Ethics of Aristotle and the works of the Persian epic poet Firdausi. I solved the mystery by finding out that they were a uniform series of Lubbock's HUNDRED BEST BOOKS!!! How I abominate such culture for the many, such tastes ready made, such standardization of the brain. To substitute for the infinite wandering of the true reader thro the byways of the country he discovers, a char-a-banc tour.

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. The Alphabetical Collection. Translated, with a forward by Benedicta Ward, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984), pp. 218-219 (Sisoes, #31; misprint corrected):

One day the Saracens came and robbed the old man and his brother. As he was setting off into the desert to find something to eat, the old man found some camel dung and having broken it up, he found some grains of barley in it. He ate a grain and put the other into his hand. His brother came and saw him in the act of eating and said to him, 'Is this charity, to find food and to eat it alone without having called me?' Abba Sisoes said to him, Ί have not wronged you, brother, here is your share which I have kept in my hand.'

Patrologia Graeca, Vol. 65, col. 401 C-D:

Ἦλθόν ποτε Σαρακηνοὶ, καὶ ἐξέδυσαν τὸν γέροντα καὶ τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ. Καὶ ἐξελθόντων αὐτῶν εἰς τὴν ἔρημον ἵνα εὕρωσί τι βρώσιμον, εὖρεν ὁ γέρων βόλβιτα καμήλων, καὶ κλάσας εὗρε κοκκία κριθῶν· ἔτρωγε δὲ ἓν κοκκὶν, καὶ τὸ ἓν εἰς τὴν χεῖρα αὐτοῦ ἐτίθει. Ἐλθὼν δὲ ὁ ἀδελφὸς αὐτοῦ, εὖρεν αὐτὸν ἐσθίοντα, καὶ λέγει αὐτῷ· Αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ ἀγάπη, ὅτι εὗρες βρώσιμον, κὰὶ μόνος ἐσθίεις, καὶ οὐκ ἐφώνησάς με; Λέγει αὐτῷ ὁ ἀββᾶς Σισόης· Οὐκ ἠδίκησά σε, ἀδελφέ· ἰδοὺ τὸ μέρος σου ἐν τῇ χειρί μου ἐτήρησα.

Related post: Noctes Scatologicae: Coprophagy

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Aristophanes in his Wasps used the expression "by Zeus" (μὰ Δί᾽, νὴ Δί᾽, vel sim.) 46 times, at lines:

76, 97,
134, 146, 169, 173, 181, 184, 186, 193,
205, 209, 217, 231, 254, 297, 298, 299,
310, 396,
416, 426, 461, 478,
509, 512,
664, 680,
832, 841,
912, 934, 954, 966, 997,
1126, 1141, 1152,
1231,
1371,
1400, 1404, 1409, 1496,
1506, 1507

In not a single instance did Jeffrey Henderson, in his Loeb Classical Library edition of the play, translate the expression as "by Zeus," instead opting for more colorless renderings ("absolutely," "by god," "certainly," etc.). This is a case of impiety, of not giving Zeus his due.

Zachary P. Biles and S. Douglas Olson on Wasps 76: Related posts:

• By Zeus (in Aristophanes' Lysistrata)
• "By Zeus" in Aristophanes' Wealth

Babrius 126 (tr. Ben Edwin Perry):

A man journeying into the desert
found Truth in person standing all alone.
He said to her: "Why, venerable dame,
have you left the city and now are dwelling in the wilderness?"
To which she, deeply wise, replied forthwith:
"Among the men of old it was only with a few that falsehood found a place,
but now it has spread beyond to all mankind."
[If I may say so, and you care to hear it,
the life of men in the present age is wicked.]

Ὁδοιπορῶν ἄνθρωπος εἰς ἐρημαίην
ἑστῶσαν εὗρε τὴν Ἀληθίην μούνην,
καί φησιν αὐτῇ "διὰ τίν' αἰτίην, γραίη,
τὴν πόλιν ἀφεῖσα τὴν ἐρημίην ναίεις;"
ἡ δ' εὐθὺ πρὸς τάδ' εἶπεν ἡ βαθυγνώμων·        5
"ἐν τοῖς παλαιοῖς παρ' ὀλίγοισιν ἦν ψεῦδος,
νῦν δ' εἰς ἅπαντας ἐξελήλυθ' ἀνθρώπους."
[Εἰ δ' ἔστιν εἰπεῖν καὶ βεβούλησαι κλύειν,
ὁ νῦν βίος πονηρός ἐστιν ἀνθρώπων.]