Gods, like dogs, will only answer to their names. Living as we do in an age in which numbers (national health numbers, bank account numbers, telephone numbers etc.) identify people more easily than names, it is hard for us to understand the power which more primitive people attribute to names. But a trivial example of the survival of this idea is given by Ronald Knox when he points out how boys at school often try to conceal their Christian names and prefer to be called by a nick-name, because to reveal your Christian name is to give other boys a hold over you.1 The same idea lies behind the Gnat’s advice to Alice to lose her name: ‘For instance, if the governess wanted to call you to your lessons, she would call out “Come here—”, and there she would have to leave off, because there wouldn’t be any name for her to call, and of course you wouldn’t have to go, you know.’
1 Pastoral Sermons, p. 37.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Sunday, September 08, 2024
Gods and Dogs
R.M. Ogilvie, The Romans and Their Gods in the Age of Augustus (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), p. 24: