Laudator Temporis Acti

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 the Circe episode of his Odyssey:

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 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.]

Ovid, Amores 1.5.18-27 (tr. L.P. Wilkinson):

So there she stood all naked to my gaze.
In all her body not one fault there was.
What shoulders and what arms I saw, I held,
What dainty nipples, asking to be felt,
Beneath the shapely breast what belly smooth,
Hips large and beautiful, the thighs of youth!
Why single out? No part but stood the test.
Her naked to my naked form I pressed.
All know the sequel. We relaxed in swoon.
O, oft may Fortune grant me such a noon!

ut stetit ante oculos posito velamine nostros,
    in toto nusquam corpore menda fuit:
quos umeros, quales vidi tetigique lacertos!        20
    forma papillarum quam fuit apta premi!
quam castigato planus sub pectore venter!
    quantum et quale latus! quam iuvenale femur!
singula quid referam? nil non laudabile vidi,
    et nudam pressi corpus ad usque meum.        25
cetera quis nescit? lassi requievimus ambo.
    proveniant medii sic mihi saepe dies.

C.S. Lewis, letter to his father (December 4,1915):

There is also a 'Greek Literature' by Gilbert Murray, the bad verse-translator, which I have read with dire anger, as he degrades Homer from a poet into a 'question' and prefers that snivelling metaphysician Euripides to Aeschylus.

Psalms 21.22:

salva me ex ore Leonis.

1 Peter 5.8:

adversarius vester diabolus tamquam Leo rugiens circuit, quaerens quem devoret.

Thanks to Eric Thomson for the image.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1956), p. 144:

Kirk did not, of course, make me read nothing but Homer. The Two Great Bores (Demosthenes and Cicero) could not be avoided. There were (oh glory!) Lucretius, Catullus, Tacitus, Herodotus. There was Virgil, for whom I still had no true taste. There were Greek and Latin compositions. (It is a strange thing that I have contrived to reach my late fifties without ever reading one word of Caesar.) There were Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus.

Babrius 85 (tr. Laura Gibbs):

During the war of the dogs and the wolves, the dog-assembly chose an Achaean to be their commander. Although he was an expert in the art of war, the commander waited and delayed. With fierce threats, the dogs urged him to advance and to engage in battle but the commander explained, 'Here is the reason why I delay and act with caution! One must always make plans with an eye to the future. All of the enemy whom I have seen are wolves, members of the same breed, whereas some of us are dogs from Crete, some are Molossian hounds, some are Acarnanians, others are Dolopians, while others boast of being from Cyprus or Thrace. Still others come from other places — what need is there to go on at length? We are not even the same colour, as the wolves are: some of us are black, some are grey, some are red with white-spotted chests, and some of us are white all over. How can I lead troops who are so lacking in unity to fight against an enemy who all resemble each other in every possible way?'

Κυσίν ποτ' ἔχθρα καὶ λύκοις συνειστήκει.
κύων δ' Ἀχαιὸς ᾑρέθη κυνῶν δήμῳ
στρατηγὸς εἶναι. καὶ μάχης ἐπιστήμων
ἔμελλεν, ἐβράδυνεν. οἱ δ' ἐπηπείλουν,
εἰ μὴ προάξει, τὴν μάχην τ' ἐνεργήσει.        5
"ἀκούσατ'" εἶπεν "οὗ χάριν διατρίβω,
τί δ' εὐλαβοῦμαι· χρὴ δ' ἀεὶ προβουλεύειν.
τῶν μὲν πολεμίων τὸ γένος ὧν ὁρῶ πάντων
ἕν ἐστιν· ἡμῶν δ' ἦλθον οἱ μὲν ἐκ Κρήτης,
οἱ δ' ἐκ Μολοσσῶν εἰσιν, οἱ δ' Ἀκαρνάνων,        10
ἄλλοι δὲ Δόλοπες, οἱ δὲ Κύπρον ἢ Θρᾴκην
αὐχοῦσιν, ἄλλοι δ' ἄλλοθεν — τί μηκύνω;
τὸ χρῶμα δ' ἡμῖν οὐχ ἕν ἐστιν ὡς τούτοις,
ἀλλ' οἱ μὲν ἡμῶν μέλανες, οἱ δὲ τεφρώδεις,
ἔνιοι δὲ πυρροὶ καὶ διάργεμοι στήθη,        15
ἄλλοι δὲ λευκοί. πῶς ἂν οὖν δυνηθείην
εἰς πόλεμον ἄρχειν" εἶπε "τῶν ἀσυμφώνων
πρὸς τοὺς ὅμοια πάντ' ἔχοντας ἀλλήλοις;"

Related post: A Motley Crew.

C.S. Lewis, letter to his father (July 19? 1915):

However, this I suppose is part of the curse inherited from our first parents: my private opinion is that after the words 'In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread' [Genesis 3:19] another clause has dropped out from the original text, running 'In the exasperation of thy souls shalt thou attend social functions'.

Here is the end of book 2 (lines 430-434) of Homer's Odyssey in Daniel Mendelsohn's new translation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025), followed by the Greek:

Once they had bound fast the tackle on the swift-running, black-hulled ship
They set out two-handled jars that were filled to the brim with wine
And poured libations out to the deathless gods everlasting—
Above all to the daughter of Zeus, she of the bright owl-eyes.
All through the night and into the dawn the ship cut her way.

δησάμενοι δ᾽ ἄρα ὅπλα θοὴν ἀνὰ νῆα μέλαιναν
στήσαντο κρητῆρας ἐπιστεφέας οἴνοιο,
λεῖβον δ᾽ ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖς αἰειγενέτῃσιν,
ἐκ πάντων δὲ μάλιστα Διὸς γλαυκώπιδι κούρῃ.
παννυχίη μέν ῥ᾽ ἥ γε καὶ ἠῶ πεῖρε κέλευθον.

As I construe the English in line 433, "she of the bright owl-eyes" is in apposition to "the daughter of Zeus" (i.e. Athena), and "the daughter of Zeus" is the object of the preposition "to". But "she of the bright owl-eyes" is a nominative phrase, and how, therefore, can it be the object of a preposition? That, to me, is the puzzle. Probably I'm just too obtuse to understand. After all, Mendelsohn's grasp of English and Greek is obviously superior to mine, and what looks to me like a grammatical error must have some explanation. I just can't see it.

---

Hi, Mike,

For the heck of it I fed the passage you quoted into Claude to see what it would say. I can't vouch for whether it is right about epithets being frozen in the nominative, but it has a certain plausibility. I'm kind of impressed with how much it can do with so little. But, as you know, it also can just make stuff up.

Kevin [Muse]

My prompt:

In this translation from the Odyssey, "she" appears to be a grammatical error. Can you analyze?: Once they had bound fast the tackle on the swift-running, black-hulled ship They set out two-handled jars that were filled to the brim with wine And poured libations out to the deathless gods everlasting— Above all to the daughter of Zeus, she of the bright owl-eyes. All through the night and into the dawn the ship cut her way.

Claude's Answer:

Let me check which translation this is from, since identifying the translator will help pin down whether this is a deliberate stylistic choice.This is a great catch, and I think I can resolve it. First, confirmation of context: this is from Homer's Odyssey Book 2 (the departure scene when Telemachus's ship sets sail for Pylos) — I found a parallel rendering of the same lines elsewhere confirming this passage and its content.

Is "she" actually an error?

No — but it's worth walking through exactly why it looks like one, because your instinct about case-agreement is grammatically sound in principle.

The sentence structure is:

"...poured libations out to the deathless gods everlasting— / Above all to the daughter of Zeus, she of the bright owl-eyes."

"The daughter of Zeus" is the object of the preposition "to." In strict English grammar, an appositive should match the case of the noun it re-identifies. Since English nouns don't visibly decline for case but pronouns do, if you swapped in a pronoun for "the daughter of Zeus" directly, you'd get the objective form: "to her." So by that logic, the appositive tag ought to be "her of the bright owl-eyes," not "she of the bright owl-eyes" — which is exactly the mismatch you spotted.

Why translators do it anyway

This "[pronoun] of the [quality]" construction functions as a fixed epithet-formula in English poetic translation, not as an ordinary grammatical appositive subject to normal case rules. It's the same pattern as archaic/Biblical English like "O ye of little faith," or poetic tags like "he of the silver tongue" — these are conventionally frozen in the nominative regardless of their syntactic position in the sentence, because they're functioning more like a title or standing epithet ("Bright-Owl-Eyed One") than like a normal descriptive clause.

Why this happens specifically in Homer translation

The deeper reason is that Homer's Greek is an inflected language — the original epithet here (a form of glaukōpis, "gray/bright/owl-eyed," describing Athena) is properly declined to match the case of "daughter" in the Greek sentence (both would appear in the dative, since the phrase is the object of "to"). Greek has no case-mismatch problem at all, because the adjective bends with the noun.

English adjectives don't decline, so when a translator wants to render that same standing epithet as a phrase rather than a simple adjective ("bright-owl-eyed daughter of Zeus"), they sometimes convert it into a nominalized tag ("she of the bright owl-eyes") for rhythm or emphasis — and that conversion drags in a pronoun that does carry visible case marking in English, where the original adjective didn't. The "error" you're sensing is really a seam left behind by translating a case-inflected epithet into a language where only pronouns still show case.

So: not a slip, but a deliberate (if grammatically loose by strict prescriptive standards) stylistic device — an artifact of representing a Homeric formulaic epithet in English, following a convention with real precedent elsewhere in English poetic diction.

---

This explanation doesn't convince me. "O ye of little faith" is vocative, easily parsed according to the rules of English grammar.

Mimnermus, fragment 1, line 1 (tr. Douglas E. Gerber):

What life is there, what pleasure without golden Aphrodite?

τίς δὲ βίος, τί δὲ τερπνὸν ἄτερ χρυσέης Ἀφροδίτης;

Horace, Epistles 1.6.65-66 (tr. Colin Macleod):

If, as Mimnermus holds, without love and play
there's no enjoyment, live for love and play.

si, Mimnermus uti censet, sine amore iocisque
nil est iucundum, vivas in amore iocisque.

"Show Us Your Shelf: Library Special," Antigone (June, 2026), including Elon Musk's bookshelf.

George Bancroft, letter to Francis Lieber (October 29, 1862), quoted by Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1965), p. 25 (our President = Abraham Lincoln):

How can we reach our President with advice? He is ignorant, self-willed, and is surrounded by men some of whom are almost as ignorant as himself. So we have the dilemma put to us, What to do, when his power must continue two years longer and when the existence of our country may be endangered before he can be replaced by a man of sense. How hard, in order to save the country, to sustain a man who is incompetent.