Laudator Temporis Acti

The Latin adjective plagosus comes from the noun plaga (blow, strike) and the suffix -osus (full of, abounding in). Plagosus Orbilius ("Whacker" or "Flogger" Orbilius) was Horace's affectionate nickname for his old schoolmaster (Epistles 2.1.70-71).

At a recent family gathering, a relative who teaches in a junior high school mentioned a popular modern technique of discipline. School authorities telephone the parents of the offending students at work and tell them to come pick up their children from school immediately. I said that, if I were a student, I would prefer the instant application of some mild form of corporal punishment by the teacher or principal, without parental involvement.

I didn't have the good fortune to attend parochial school, but a friend who did used to tell how students in Latin class had their knuckles rapped with a ruler if they couldn't recite their conjugations and declensions properly. It was more perfunctory, ceremonial, and embarrassing than painful, he said. But to this day he can rattle off his conjugations and declensions perfectly.

This is a tried and true method of Latin instruction. In Boswell's Life of Johnson, we read:

He began to learn Latin with Mr. Hawkins, usher, or under-master of Lichfield school, 'a man (said he) very skilful in his little way.' With him he continued two years, and then rose to be under the care of Mr. Hunter, the headmaster, who, according to his account, 'was very severe, and wrong-headedly severe. He used (said he) to beat us unmercifully; and he did not distinguish between ignorance and negligence; for he would beat a boy equally for not knowing a thing, as for neglecting to know it. He would ask a boy a question; and if he did not answer it, he would beat him, without considering whether he had an opportunity of knowing how to answer it. For instance, he would call up a boy and ask him Latin for a candlestick, which the boy could not expect to be asked. Now, Sir, if a boy could answer every question, there would be no need of a master to teach him.'

...

Indeed Johnson was very sensible how much he owed to Mr. Hunter. Mr. Langton one day asked him how he had acquired so accurate a knowledge of Latin, in which, I believe, he was exceeded by no man of his time; he said, 'My master whipt me very well. Without that, Sir, I should have done nothing.' He told Mr. Langton, that while Hunter was flogging his boys unmercifully, he used to say, 'And this I do to save you from the gallows.' Johnson, upon all occasions, expressed his approbation of enforcing instruction by means of the rod. 'I would rather (said he) have the rod to be the general terrour to all, to make them learn, than tell a child, if you do thus, or thus, you will be more esteemed than your brothers or sisters. The rod produces an effect which terminates in itself. A child is afraid of being whipped, and gets his task, and there's an end on't; whereas, by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, you lay the foundation of lasting mischief; you make brothers and sisters hate each other.'

Elsewhere (1775, aetat. 66) Boswell quotes Dr. Johnson as saying:

There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.

Nowadays, of course, Johnson's teacher Mr. Hunter would be sued in a New York minute. What's more, in some jurisdictions he might even be guilty of a criminal offense (cf. Minnesota Statute 121A.58).

Throughout much of human history, education and punishment went hand in hand. Robert Baker Girdlestone, Synonyms of the Old Testament (1897; rpt. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), pp. 224-225, lists a dozen Hebrew words related to teaching. Here are two of them (with Hebrew characters omitted):

• In Prov. 31.1, and Ezek. 23.48, Yasar, 'to chasten' is used, a word which answers to the Greek paideuo, by which it is usually rendered, the instruction often involving chastisement.
  
• Lamad (Ass[yrian] lamadu), whence the name Talmud is derived, is frequently used; it signifies to chastise, and hence to teach, and is rendered [in Greek] didasko and manthano.

From the verb yasar is derived the noun musar, which also has the meanings chastisement or correction, as at Proverbs 3.11-12:

My son, despise not the chastening [musar] of the Lord; neither be weary of his correction: For whom the Lord loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth.

Rapped knuckles were not uncommon in Roman primary schools. When Juvenal meant to say, "I'm no dummy, I went to school, I'm educated," he wrote (1.15):

Well then, I too stretched out my hand beneath the cane.

et nos ergo manum ferulae subduximus.

Likewise Ovid (Amores 1.13.17) addresses Dawn as follows:

You cheat boys of their sleep and hand them over to teachers, so that their tender hands undergo cruel whips.

tu pueros somno fraudas tradisque magistris,
  ut subeant tenerae verbera saeva manus.

A teacher wouldn't slap or strike a student with the bare hand, because that might hurt the teacher just as much as the student. Some preferred instruments of punishment in ancient times included:

• Latin ferula, Greek narthex, English cane
  
• Latin scutica or lorum, Greek himas, English strap or lash
  
• Latin flagellum, Greek mastix, English whip made of knotted rope
  

although the flagellum was too painful, a punishment of criminals rather than schoolboys. Horace mentions all three together (Satires, 1.3.119-121).

Saint Augustine seems especially to have felt the pain and injustice of corporal punishment at school. He speaks about it in heartfelt terms in several passages. In his Confessions (1.9.14) he remembered his own schooldays:

If I was lazy at learning, I was beaten. For this custom was approved by our ancestors, and many who lived before us had mapped out these sorrowful paths, over which we were compelled to pass, with additional pain and sorrow to the sons of Adam. But, Lord, we found men praying to you and we learned from them, perceiving (insofar as we were able) that you were someone great, and that even if you couldn't be detected by our senses you could still hear and help us. For as a child I began to pray to you, my help and my refuge, and in calling upon you I broke my tongue's bands, and although I was small I asked you, with emotion that wasn't small, that I not be beaten at school. And when you didn't grant my prayer, which wasn't to be attributed to my folly, my elders laughed at my bruises (a great and serious affliction to me then) and even my parents followed suit, although they wished no harm to befall me.

si segnis in discendo essem, vapulabam. laudabatur enim hoc a maioribus, et multi ante nos vitam istam agentes praestruxerant aerumnosas vias, per quas transire cogebamur multiplicato labore et dolore filiis Adam. invenimus autem, Domine, homines rogantes te et didicimus ab eis, sentientes te, ut poteramus, esse magnum aliquem, qui posses etiam non apparens sensibus nostris exaudire nos et subvenire nobis. nam puer coepi rogare te, auxilium et refugium meum, et in tuam invocationem rumpebam nodos linguae meae et rogabam te parvus non parvo affectu, ne in schola vapularem. et cum me non exaudiebas, quod non erat ad insipientiam mihi, ridebantur a maioribus hominibus usque ab ipsis parentibus, qui mihi accidere mali nihil volebant, plagae meae, magnum tunc et grave malum meum.

In his sermon On Christian Discipline (De Disciplina Christiana 11.12) he asked and answered:

Why were you beaten? Why did you endure such suffering in your childhood? To learn. To learn what? Reading and writing. Why? So that money could be obtained, or so that a position could be gained, and high rank be held.

quare vapulasti? quare tanta mala in pueritia pertulisti? ut disceres. quid disceres? litteras. quare? ut haberetur pecunia aut ut compararetur honor, et teneatur sublimitas dignitatis.

Twice in De Civitate Dei (City of God, tr. Marcus Dodds) Augustine mentions corporal punishment in schools.

21.14:

For ignorance is itself no slight punishment, or want of culture, which it is with justice thought so necessary to escape, that boys are compelled, under pain of severe punishment, to learn trades or letters; and the learning to which they are driven by punishment is itself so much of a punishment to them, that they sometimes prefer the pain that drives them to the pain to which they are driven by it. And who would not shrink from the alternative, and elect to die, if it were proposed to him either to suffer death or to be again an infant?

non enim parva poena est ipsa insipientia vel imperitia, quae usque adeo fugienda merito iudicatur, ut per poenas doloribus plenas pueri cogantur quaeque artificia vel litteras discere; ipsumque discere, ad quod poenis adiguntur, tam poenale est eis, ut nonnumquam ipsas poenas, per quas compelluntur discere, malint ferre quam discere. quis autem non exhorreat et mori eligat, si ei proponatur aut mors perpetienda aut rursus infantia?

22.22.2:

What mean pedagogues, masters, the birch, the strap, the cane, the schooling which Scripture says must be given a child, "beating him on the sides lest he wax stubborn" [Sirach 30:12], and it be hardly possible or not possible at all to subdue him? Why all these punishments, save to overcome ignorance and bridle evil desires -- these evils with which we come into the world? For why is it that we remember with difficulty, and without difficulty forget? learn with difficulty, and without difficulty remain ignorant? are diligent with difficulty, and without difficulty are indolent? Does not this show what vitiated nature inclines and tends to by its own weight, and what succor it needs if it is to be delivered? Inactivity, sloth, laziness, negligence, are vices which shun labor, since labor, though useful, is itself a punishment.

quid paedagogi, quid magistri, quid ferulae, quid lora, quid virgae, quid disciplina illa, qua Scriptura sancta dicit dilecti filii latera esse tundenda, ne crescat indomitus domarique iam durus aut vix possit aut fortasse nec possit? quid agitur his poenis omnibus, nisi ut debelletur imperitia et prava cupiditas infrenetur, cum quibus malis in hoc saeculum venimus? quid est enim, quod cum labore meminimus, sine labore obliviscimur; cum labore discimus, sine labore nescimus; cum labore strenui, sine labore inertes sumus? nonne hinc apparet, in quid velut pondere suo proclivis et prona sit vitiosa natura et quanta ope, ut hinc liberetur, indigeat? desidia, segnitia, pigritia, neglegentia, vitia sunt utique quibus labor fugitur, cum labor ipse, etiam qui est utilis, poena sit.

Although corporal punishment was a sad fact of life for most Roman schoolboys, a few authorities raised their voices in opposition to the practice. Prominent among these was Quintilian (1.3.14-17, tr. H. E. Butler):

I disapprove of flogging, although it is the regular custom and meets with the acquiescence of Chrysippus, because in the first place it is a disgraceful form of punishment and fit only for slaves, and is in any case an insult, as you will realise if you imagine its infliction at a later age. Secondly if a boy is so insensible to instruction that reproof is useless, he will, like the worst type of slave, merely become hardened to blows. Finally there will be absolutely no need of such punishment if the master is a thorough disciplinarian. As it is, we try to make amends for the negligence of the boy's paedagogus, not by forcing him to do what is right, but by punishing him for not doing what is right. And though you may compel a child with blows, what are you to do with him when he is a young man no longer amenable to such threats and confronted with tasks of far greater difficulty? Moreover when children are beaten, pain or fear frequently have results of which it is not pleasant to speak and which are likely subsequently to be a source of shame, a shame which unnerves and depresses the mind and leads the child to shun and loathe the light. Further if inadequate care is taken in the choices of respectable governors and instructors, I blush to mention the shameful abuse which scoundrels sometimes make of their right to administer corporal punishment or the opportunity not infrequently offered to others by the fear thus caused in the victims. I will not linger on this subject; it is more than enough if I have made my meaning clear. I will content myself with saying that children are helpless and easily victimised, and that therefore no one should be given unlimited power over them.

caedi vero discentis, quamlibet id receptum sit et Chrysippus non improbet, minime velim, primum quia deforme atque servile est et certe (quod convenit si aetatem mutes) iniuria: deinde quod, si cui tam est mens inliberalis ut obiurgatione non corrigatur, is etiam ad plagas ut pessima quaeque mancipia durabitur: postremo quod ne opus erit quidem hac castigatione si adsiduus studiorum exactor adstiterit. nunc fere neglegentia paedagogorum sic emendari videtur ut pueri non facere quae recta sunt cogantur, sed cur non fecerint puniantur. denique cum parvolum verberibus coegeris, quid iuveni facias, cui nec adhiberi potest hic metus et maiora discenda sunt? adde quod multa vapulantibus dictu deformia et mox verecundiae futura saepe dolore vel metu acciderunt, qui pudor frangit animum et abicit atque ipsius lucis fugam et taedium dictat. iam si minor in eligendis custodum et praeceptorum moribus fuit cura, pudet dicere in quae probra nefandi homines isto caedendi iure abutantur, quam det aliis quoque nonnumquam occasionem hic miserorum metus. non morabor in parte hac: nimium est quod intellegitur. quare hoc dixisse satis est: in aetatem infirmam et iniuriae obnoxiam nemini debet nimium licere.

Robert Fulghum quotes a woman at a Greek wedding who said to him:

If you do not join the dancing, you will feel foolish. If you dance, you will also feel foolish. So, why not dance? And I will tell you a secret: If you do not join the dance, we will know you are a fool. But if you dance, we will think well of you for trying. And if you dance badly to begin and we laugh, what's the sin in that? We all begin there. Come on.

I don't buy the opening premise of that argument, and I prefer Kierkegaard (preface to Philosophical Fragments):

Let no one invite me, for I do not dance.

In an email the Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella, asked about the origin of the proverb "A long beard and a shabby cloak do not a philosopher make." I can't find an English source. The closest I can come is the Latin "Barba non facit philosophum, neque vile gerere pallium" (A beard doesn't make a philosopher, nor does wearing a shabby cloak), cited by Henerik Kocher, who gives the source as Bento Pereira, Florilégio dos modos de falar e adágios da língua portuguesa (Lisboa: Paulo Craesbeeck & Cia, 1655), p. 115. All of Epictetus 4.8 ("To those who hastily assume the guise of philosophers") is relevant, especially 4.8.15 (tr. W.A. Oldfather):

But even those who are styled philosophers pursue their calling with means which are sometimes good and sometimes bad. For example, when they have taken a rough cloak and let their beards grow, they say, "I am a philosopher."

Also relevant is Aulus Gellius 9.2.1-4:

While we were present a certain fellow, dressed in a cloak with long hair and a beard extending all the way to his waist, approached Herodes Atticus, who was a gentlemen of consular rank, well-known for his pleasing character and eloquence in Greek. The fellow asked him for money for food. Then Herodes asked him what his profession was. With a quarrelsome look and tone of voice the fellow said that he was a philosopher and added that he was surprised why Herodes thought the question needed to be asked, since he could see with his own eyes. Herodes said, 'I see a beard and a cloak, but I don't yet see a philosopher.'

ad Herodem Atticum, consularem virum ingenioque amoeno et Graeca facundia celebrem, adiit nobis praesentibus palliatus quispiam et crinitus barbaque prope ad pubem usque porrecta ac petit aes sibi dari eis artous. tum Herodes interrogat, quisnam esset. atque ille vultu sonituque vocis obiurgatorio philosophum sese esse dicit et mirari quoque addit, cur quaerendum putasset, quod videret. 'video' inquit Herodes 'barbam et pallium, philosophum nondum video.'

E.K. Rand, in Founders of the Middle Ages (1928; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1957), posed another puzzle about philosophers and beards. On page 115 he quoted St. Jerome:

If there is any holiness in a beard, nobody is more holy than a goat. (si ulla in barba sanctitas est, nullus sanctior est hirco.)

But in a footnote (21) on page 306 he confessed:

After having had this bon mot of St. Jerome's in my notes for years, I cannot now find it in his writings (nor, what is more, can President A.S. Pease).

Rand went on to cite:

• St. Jerome, Letters 22.28.1: But lest I seem to talk about women only, also avoid those men whom you see carrying chains, who have effeminate hair contrary to the apostle [1 Cor. 11:14], the beard of goats, a black cloak, and bare feet to withstand the cold. (sed ne tantum videar disputare de feminis, viros quoque fuge, quos videris catenatos, quibus feminei contra apostolum crines, hircorum barba, nigrum pallium, et nudi in patientiam frigoris pedes.)
  
• Erasmus, Praise of Folly 11: A beard, the symbol of philosophy, even though it's a symbol shared with goats (barba, insigne sapientiae, etiamsi cum hircis commune).

Google doesn't disclose the source of the mystery quotation from St. Jerome. Academicians at universities have access to expensive tools (e.g. the digital Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, CDs containing all of Patrologia Latina, etc.) unavailable to us poor independent scholars. Maybe one of them could solve Rand's mystery with a few clicks of the mouse.

Since writing about Barbarians and Beards, I've discovered that the article on beards by Alexander Allen in William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (London: John Murray, 1875), pp. 196‑198, is available online. It contains many references I missed.

Over at Hypotyposeis you can read about another scholarly conundrum, the source of the so-called sausage factoid, that is, the claim that:

Both the early Church and the emperor Constantine banned sausages because they were employed -- in both obvious and more creative ways -- in the pagan celebration of Lupercalia.

Stephen C. Carlson tracked the factoid back to Charles Panati, Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (New York: Perennial Library, 1989), p. 396, but no further, since Panati eschewed documentation.

None of these little puzzles has even the slightest practical value. For me, that is an essential part of their attraction.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France:

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.

Carlo Carretto, Letters From the Desert (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1972), pp. 59-60:

If God were attainable with the intelligence, how unjust it would be! It would have made easy the task of the wise and the great of this world, and would have made knowledge of God all but impossible for the little ones, the poor, and the ignorant. But God himself has found the way to be equally accessible to everybody. His revelation comes in love, in that faculty which we can all share.

I've been trying to find this quotation for several weeks, since one Sunday at Mass when I sat near a man who appeared mentally retarded. When the time came for the recitation of the Lord's Prayer, he said it loudly, fervently, and enthusiastically, the few scattered words of it that he could remember. The Psalmist (141:2) said, "Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense." I don't know how God viewed it, but to me that man's prayer had the savor of finest incense.

Duncan Williams, Trousered Apes (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1972), p. 81:

Contemporary ideas need to be weighed not against others of the same period but against those of the past, and it is here that the average, modern student is defenceless. His interests and leisure reading are confined to an alarming extent to contemporary writers and thinkers who, despite their apparent individualism, are all really working in the same direction. It is ironic that the current demand at universities is for more relevance (that is to say, contemporaneity) in the curriculum. If acceded to, this will result in a still larger degree of temporal provincialism and an even more profound ignorance of the history of ideas than now prevails.

Robert Hendrickson, QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 2nd edition (New York: Facts on File, 2004), has this to say about the origin of the word barbarian (p. 53):

Barba means "beard" in Latin, and when the Romans called hirsute foreigners barbarians they were strictly calling them "bearded men," though the word shortly came to mean, rightly or wrongly, "rude, uncivilized people." A barber was, of course, one who cut beards or hair. The barber pole outside barber shops today has its origins in the ancient barber's duties as a surgeon and dentist as well as a hair cutter. It was first the symbol of these professions -- a blood-smeared white rag. However, barbarian may have Greek origins.

This is misleading and incorrect. The derivation of barbarian from Latin barba is totally bogus, a folk etymology. The word barbarian is indubitably (not just possibly) Greek in origin, preceding even Homer (cf. barbarophonos at Iliad 2.867). Anyone who didn't speak Greek sounded like they were saying bar-bar, and by definition any non-Greek was a barbarian. The protest by the Stranger in Plato, Statesman 262c-d (tr. Benjamin Jowett), against this classification only shows how widespread it was:

The error was just as if some one who wanted to divide the human race, were to divide them after the fashion which prevails in this part of the world; here they cut off the Hellenes as one species, and all the other species of mankind, which are innumerable, they include under the single name of 'barbarians,' and because they have one name they are supposed to be of one species also.

The Romans adopted the word barbarus directly from Greek barbaros, and applied it by extension to anyone who was not a Greek or Roman, although every Greek worth his salt probably felt in his heart of hearts that the Romans were barbarians, too, just as today supposedly cultivated Europeans look down their noses at upstart, boorish Americans.

The Romans wore beards during certain historical periods and were clean-shaven in others. In general, they wore beards before the second century B.C. and after the 2nd century A.D. Between those two periods, a smooth chin was the rule, although younger, foppish men sometimes went bearded, and poor men often couldn't afford the two bits for a shave and a haircut.

Varro, On Agriculture 2.11, writes:

To be sure, it is said that barbers first came to Italy from Sicily in the 453rd year after the founding of Rome, as a public inscription at Ardea testifies, and that Publius Titinius Mena imported them. The statues of men of old prove that once upon a time there were no barbers, because those statues usually have long hair and beards.

omnino tonsores in Italiam primum venisse ex Sicilia dicuntur p. R. c. a. CCCCLIII, ut scriptum in publico Ardeae in litteris exstat, eosque adduxisse Publium Titinium Menam. olim tonsores non fuisse adsignificant antiquorum statuae, quod pleraeque habent capillum et barbam magnam.

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7.59.211, gives much the same information:

The next agreement between the two races [Greek and Roman] was in the area of barbers, but it came later to the Romans. They came to Italy from Sicily in the 454th year after the City's foundation, brought by Publius Titinius Mena, as Varro says. Before that the Romans were unshaven. Africanus the Younger first started the custom of being shaved daily. The deified Augustus always used razors.

sequens gentium consensus in tonsoribus fuit, sed Romanis tardior. in Italiam ex Sicilia venere post Romam conditam anno CCCCLIIII adducente P. Titinio Mena, ut auctor est Varro; antea intonsi fuere. primus omnium radi cotidie instituit Africanus sequens; divus Augustus cultris semper usus est.

The prolix antiquarian Aulus Gellius gives more background in that chapter of his Attic Nights (3.4) which deals with the fact "that it was the custom for Publius Africanus and other patricians of his day to shave their chin and cheeks before reaching old age:"

In the books which we read concerning the life of Publius Scipio Africanus (adopted son of Paulus), we note that, after he had celebrated a triumph over the Carthaginians and had been censor, when he was charged before the people by the tribune Claudius Asellus (whom Scipio had removed from the ranks of knights when he was censor), he didn't stop shaving his beard or wearing white, and he didn't assume the normal costume of defendants even though he was charged with a crime. But since at that time it is a fact that Scipio the Younger was less than forty years old, we were surprised that the story of the shaved beard had been recorded thus. However we learn that other patricians of that period, of the same age, also were accustomed to shave their beards, and for that reason we see many statues of the ancients fashioned thus, not only of old men but middle-aged ones as well.

Quod P. Africano et aliis tunc viris nobilibus ante aetatem senectam barbam et genas radere mos patrius fuit. In libris, quos de vita P. Scipionis Africani compositos legimus, scriptum esse animadvertimus P. Scipioni, Pauli filio, postquam de Poenis triumphaverat censorque fuerat, diem dictum esse ad populum a Claudio Asello tribuno plebis, cui equum in censura ademerat, eumque, cum esset reus, neque barbam desisse radi neque non candida veste uti neque fuisse cultu solito reorum. Sed cum in eo tempore Scipionem minorem quadraginta annorum fuisse constaret, quod de barba rasa ita scriptum esset, mirabamur. Comperimus autem ceteros quoque in isdem temporibus nobiles viros barbam in eiusmodi aetate rasitavisse, idcircoque plerasque imagines veterum, non admodum senum, sed in medio aetatis, ita factas videmus.

The beardless fashion lasted from the time of Scipio Africanus Minor (2nd century B.C.) to the reign of the emperor Hadrian (2nd century A.D.). During this era, the day when a young Roman first shaved his beard was a day of celebration, but some carried the celebration to extreme lengths. Dio Cassius
(48.34.3, tr. E. Cary) reports:

When Caesar now for the first time shaved off his beard, he held a magnificent entertainment himself besides granting all the other citizens a festival at public expense.

Dio Cassius tells a similar story about Nero (61.19, tr. E. Cary):

Later he instituted a new kind of festival called Juvenalia, or Games of Youth. It was celebrated in honour of his beard, which he now shaved for the first time; the hairs he placed in a small golden globe and offered to Jupiter Capitolinus.

In the Life of Hadrian (26.1) attributed to Aelius Spartianus in the Historia Augusta, we learn why beards became popular once again:

He was tall in stature and elegant in appearance. His hair was curled with a comb. He grew a full beard to cover natural blemishes on his face, and he had a rugged build.

statura fuit procerus, forma comptus, flexo ad pectinem capillo, promissa barba, ut vulnera, quae in facie naturalia erant, tegeret, habitudine robusta.

Philosophers were the exception to this ebb and flow of fashion. They always sported beards. It was almost part of their uniform. Pliny the Younger in his Letters (1.10.6) describes the philosopher Euphrates thus:

Add his stature, handsome face, long hair, full white beard -- although these things are accidental and empty, yet they win much reverence for him.

ad hoc proceritas corporis, decora facies, demissus capillus, ingens et cana barba; quae licet fortuita et inania putentur, illi tamen plurimum venerationis acquirunt.

The philosopher Epictetus was inordinately fond of his beard, if we can judge from the following exchange (1.2.29, tr. W.A. Oldfather):

"Come, then, Epictetus, shave off your beard." If I am a philosopher, I answer, "I will not shave it off." "But I will take off your neck." If that will do you any good, take it off.

Lucian in The Fisherman 31 (tr. Lionel Casson) points out the shallowness of this fad among philosophers for beards:

On the other hand, I noticed many who were not philosophers for the love of it but simply hungered for the public acclaim they could get out of it. In what was obvious and common and easy for anyone to ape -- I mean length of beard, impressiveness of gait, and cut of clothes -- they were a very good facsimile of men of virtue.

What these passages amply demonstrate is that the Romans did not regard a beard as a characteristic of barbarians. They recognized that growing a beard was a matter of taste, in favor during certain periods, out of favor at other times. At all times there were some who, for one reason or another, bucked the trend.

If you still suspect that there must be an etymological connection between barbarians and beards, I suggest you consult Calvert Watkins' Indo-European Roots, published as an appendix to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, under the roots baba and bhardha.

I've noticed that some of my neighbors are keeping their presidential campaign signs inside the front window, rather than out on the lawn, probably because they don't want them removed. I've even heard of bumper stickers being scraped off by those who disagree with the point of view they express.

Human nature being what it is, it shouldn't surprise us that these low, sneaking tactics are thousands of years old. A campaign poster in ancient Pompeii (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 4.3775, tr. Jo-Ann Shelton) said:

His neighbors urge you to elect Lucius Statius Receptus duovir with judicial power. He deserves the position. Aemilius Celer, his neighbor, wrote this. If you spitefully deface this, may you become very ill.

Although I myself never put up lawn signs or attach stickers to my car's bumper, I heartily approve of Aemilius Celer's curse.

Euripides, Alcestis 782-789 (tr. Moses Hadas and John McLean):

All men have to pay the debt of death, and there is not a mortal who knows whether he is going to be alive on the morrow. The outcome of things that depend on fortune cannot be foreseen; they can neither be learnt nor discovered by any art. Hearken to this and learn of me, cheer up, drink, reckon the days yours as you live them; the rest belongs to fortune.

Thoreau, Journals, October 19, 1855:

Talking with Bellew this evening about Fourierism and communities, I said that I suspected any enterprise in which two were engaged together. "But," said he, "it is difficult to make a stick stand unless you slant two or more against it." "Oh, no," answered I, "you may split its lower end into three, or drive it single into the ground, which is the best way; but most men, when they start on a new enterprise, not only figuratively, but really, pull up stakes. When the sticks prop one another, none, or only one, stands erect."

I wonder if Bellew could possibly be Adin Ballou (1803-1890), who founded the Hopedale utopian community in Massachusetts.

Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, chapter 5:

Lord Macaulay has a passage in which he contrasts the pleasures which a man may derive from books with the inconveniences to which he may be put by his acquaintances. "Plato," he says, "is never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays too long. No difference of political opinion can alienate Cicero. No heresy can excite the horror of Bossuet."

The passage from Macaulay is in his essay on Francis Bacon, in Critical and Historical Essays.

Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843), book III (The Modern Worker), chapter 9 (Working Aristocracy):

In brief, all this Mammon-Gospel, of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth; or altogether the shabbiest.

Eduard Mörike (1804-1875), Auf ein altes Bild:

In the summery haze of a verdant landscape,
Beside cool water, reeds and canebrake,
Look, how the innocent little child
Plays irrepressibly on the maiden's lap!
And there in the woodland blissfully,
Alas, grows already the sapling of the cross!

In grüner Landschaft Sommerflor,
Bei kühlem Wasser, Schilf und Rohr,
Schau, wie das Knäblein Sündelos
Frei spielet auf der Jungfrau Schoß!
Und dort im Walde wonnesam,
Ach, grünet schon des Kreuzes Stamm!

Hugo Wolf finished his achingly beautiful musical setting of this poem on April 14, 1888. It's on pp. 76-77 of his Complete Mörike Songs (New York: Dover Publications, 1982). According to Eric Sams, The Songs of Hugo Wolf (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 100, Wolf wrote about his composition in a letter to Edmund Lang:

My last song, which I have just finished, is without doubt the crown of all. I am still in the grip of the enchantment of the mood of this song; everything is still shimmering in green all round me.

I don't know if anyone has ever tried to identify the painting which Mörike described. Maybe there never was such a picture, except in his mind's eye. The power of his poetry is such that he makes us see it, too.

Read some refreshing and original observations on the Republican convention over at The Charlock's Shade.

My pet peeve for this month is the slang use of "I'm like" to introduce a quotation, as in:

I'm like, "Whatever."

To my old-fashioned, fastidious ear, it brands the speaker instantly as a bonehead. How it ever came to mean "I said" is a mystery.

Here is a sonnet by Andrew Lang (1844-1912) about Homer's Odyssey:

As one that for a weary space has lain
Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine
In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,
Where that Aegean isle forgets the main,
And only the low lutes of love complain,
And only shadows of wan lovers pine,
As such an one were glad to know the brine
Salt on his lips, and the large air again, --
So gladly, from the songs of modern speech
Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free
Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers,
And through the music of the languid hours,
They hear like ocean on a western beach
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.

Some might find this sonnet, first published less than a hundred years ago, almost as hard to understand as Homer's Greek itself. We have lost the habit of reading or appreciating or even understanding such poetry, and we are the poorer for it.

Lang's sonnet consists of a single sentence, appropriately cast in the form of a Homeric simile. A simile compares two things or situations -- as is A, so is B. Below are two similes from Homer (tr. Richmond Lattimore).

Iliad 16.482-486 (death of Sarpedon at the hands of Patroclus):

He fell, as when an oak goes down or a white poplar, / or like a towering pine tree which in the mountains the carpenters / have hewn down with their whetted axes to make a ship-timber. / So he lay there felled in front of his horses and chariots / roaring, and clawed with his hands at the bloody dust.

Odyssey 5.488-491 (Odysseus makes a bed of leaves for himself):

As when a man buries a burning log in a black ash heap / in a remote place in the country, where none live near as neighbors, / and saves the seed of fire, having no other place to get a light / from, so Odysseus buried himself in the leaves.

In Lang's sonnet, the first part of the comparison starts with "as" in the first line, the second part with "so" in the ninth line. What are the two situations being compared? Lang is saying that just as Odysseus was glad to escape from the island of Circe, where he was held captive, to the open sea (octet, lines 1-8), so we moderns are glad to escape from our anemic contemporary poetry to the surge and thunder of Homer's Odyssey (sestet, lines 9-14).

Circe was a goddess who entrapped men and turned them into swine. Odysseus avoided that metamorphosis with the aid of a secret herb (moly) given to him by the god Hermes. The "pale of Proserpine" is the region of Proserpine (Persephone in Greek), goddess of the underworld and consort of Hades. Homer tells the story of Odysseus' sojourn on Circe's island and his visit to the underworld to get advice from the dead prophet Tiresias in books 10-12 of the Odyssey.

Lang collaborated on a prose translation of Homer's Odyssey with Samuel Henry Butcher (1850-1910). David Martin Gaunt borrowed the last line of Lang's sonnet for the title of his book Surge and Thunder: Critical Readings in Homer's Odyssey (London, Oxford University Press, 1971).

There is a marked distinction between written and spoken English, and the distinction is no less prominent in Latin. One of the few Latin authors who gives us a good idea what spoken Latin might have been like is the comic playwright Terence, six of whose comedies survive.

Terence was once at the center of the Latin curriculum. In his Handbook of Latin Literature, H.J. Rose writes:

He was universally known, because used everywhere as school-book, on account of his purity of style and easy simplicity of construction, from the end of the classical era onwards, until modern teachers, presumably in fear for their pupils' morals, substituted for him the much more difficult Latinity of Caesar, one of the most unsuitable authors for a beginner that could be imagined.

What is so unusual about Terence's elegant Latinity is that he was not a native speaker. He was a slave from Africa, as his name (Publius Terentius Afer) indicates. This phenomenon is not without parallel in more recent times. Native English writers realize to their chagrin that they will probably never write in their mother tongue as well as the foreigner Joseph Conrad, born of Polish parents in the Ukraine and christened Josef Teodore Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, wrote in English.

Terence's Latin was so pure that even in his lifetime detractors argued that a slave and a foreigner couldn't possibly have written the plays attributed to him. The noblemen Scipio and Laelius must have written them, they said. Compare those who argue even today that a commoner like Shakespeare could never have written plays that display so intimate a knowledge of court life.

Many expressions from the plays of Terence are familiar, such as:

• I'm a human being; I consider nothing human foreign to me. (homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.) Heauton Timorumenos 77
  
• There are as many opinions as men. (quot homines, tot sententiae.) Phormio 454
  
• A word to the wise is sufficient. (dictum sapienti sat est.) Phormio 541
  
• Now there is no statement that has not been uttered before. (nullumst iam dictum quod non sit dictum prius.) Eunuchus 41
  

Here are a few passages that are less well known, but that give a taste of Terence's style and subject matter.

Eunuchus 59-63:

In love all these problems are present: insults, suspicions, enmities, truces, breaking up, making up again. If you tried to deal with these uncertainties in a reasonable manner, you'd achieve no more than if you determined to go crazy in a logical way.

in amore haec omnia insunt vitia: iniuriae,
suspiciones, inimicitiae, indutiae,
bellum, pax rursum: incerta haec si postules
ratione certa facere, nihilo plus agas
quam si des operam ut cum ratione insanias.

Eunuchus 812-813:

I understand the character of females: they're not in the mood when you are, they in turn are in the mood when you're not.

novi ingenium mulierum / nolunt ubi velis, ubi nolis cupiunt ultro.

Hecyra 198-200:

Goodness gracious, what kind of conspiracy is this! How is it that all women have exactly the same desires and dislikes, and you can't find a single one who's the slightest bit different from the others?

pro deum fidem atque hominum, quod genus est quae haec coniuratiost! / utin omnes mulieres eadem aeque studeant nolintque omnia / neque declinatam quicquam ab aliarum ingenio ullam reperias!

Hecyra 343-344:

For the man who loves someone who dislikes him, in my opinion acts foolishly on two counts. First, he undertakes a fruitless task. Secondly, he's a nuisance to her.

nam qui amat quoi odio ipsust, eum bis facere stulte duco: / laborem inanem ipsus capit et illi molestiam adfert.

Hecyra 662-663:

Do you think you can find any woman who's blameless?

censen te posse reperire ullam mulierem / quae careat culpa?

Phormio 696-697:

There's nothing, Antipho, that can't be put in a bad light by putting an adverse spin on it.

nil est, Antipho, / quin male narrando possit depravarier.

If you read only one play by Terence, I recommend Adelphoe (Brothers), which deals with a surprisingly modern theme -- contrasting views about the proper way to raise a teenager. Is leniency more appropriate, or strictness?

Matthew Arnold, in his poem Isolation (lines 29-30), wrote:

This truth -- to prove and make thine own:
  'Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.'

Nevertheless, there is something sad about the extreme degree of isolation in the case of Jim Sulkers of Winnipeg, who lay dead in his bed for two years before he was discovered.

Shakespeare, King Lear 1.2.116-130:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

Matthew 7:3-5:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Luke 6:41-42 is similar. Mote translates Greek karphos (splinter, twig), and beam translates Greek dokos (log). There are also parallels in ancient Greek and Latin literature. Horace, Satires 1.3.25-27, talks as follows about the inability to see one's own faults:

You're half-blind, your eyes are smeared with lotion, you overlook your own sins. How is it then that in the case of your friends' faults you're as clear-sighted as an eagle or a snake from Epidaurus?

cum tua pervideas oculis mala lippus inunctis,
cur in amicorum vitiis tam cernis acutum
quam aut aquila aut serpens Epidaurius?

In Petronius' Satyricon (57.7), one of Trimalchio's freedmen says to Encolpius:

You see the louse on another, you don't see the tick on yourself.

in alio pedulcum vides, in te ricinum non vides.

This idea can be traced back in another form to one of Aesop's fables (359 Halm, tr. Olivia and Robert Temple):

Once upon a time, when Prometheus created men, he hung from them two carrying-pouches. One of these contained the deficiencies of other people and was hung in front. The other contained our own faults, which he suspended behind us. The result of this was that men could see directly down into the pouch containing other people's failings, but were unable to see their own.

Babrius put the fable into Greek verse (66, tr. Ben Edwin Perry):

Prometheus was a god, but of the first dynasty. He it was, they say, that fashioned man from earth, to be the master of the beasts. On man he hung, the story goes, two wallets filled with the faults of human kind; the one in front contained the faults of other men, the one behind the bearer's own, and this was the larger wallet. That's why, it seems to me, men see the failings of each other very clearly, while unaware of those which are their own.

Note that Babrius, like Matthew, says that our own faults are more numerous or grievous than the faults of others.

Phaedrus (4.10) wrote some Latin verses on the same theme:

Jupiter placed two wallets on us:
the one filled with our own faults he put behind our backs,
the one heavy with others' faults he hung in front.
For this reason we cannot see our own sins;
as soon as others commit a crime, we judge them.

Peras imposuit Iuppiter nobis duas:
propriis repletam vitiis post tergum dedit,
alienis ante pectus suspendit gravem.
hac re videre nostra mala non possumus;
alii simul delinquunt, censores sumus.

The fable is mentioned in passing by other ancient authors:

• Catullus 22.21: But we don't see that part of the bag that's in back of us. (sed non videmus manticae quod in tergo est.)
  
• Horace, Satires 2.3.298-299: Whoever calls me crazy will hear as much in turn and will learn to look at what hangs from the back which he cannot survey (dixerit insanum qui me, totidem audiet atque / respicere ignoto discet pendentia tergo.)
  
• Persius 4.23-24: How no one tries to burrow into himself, no one, but the bag on the back of the fellow in front of us is seen! (ut nemo in sese temptat descendere, nemo, / sed praecedenti spectatur mantica tergo!)

In the second chapter of Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (1998; rpt. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath list the following core values of the ancient Greeks:

1. Science, research, and the acquisition of knowledge itself are to remain apart from both political and religious authority.
   
2. Military power operates under and is checked by civilian control.
   
3. Constitutional and consensual government is a Western idea.
   
4. Religion is separate from and subordinate to political authority.
   
5. Trusting neither the rich nor the poor, the Greeks of the polis have faith in the average citizen (the spiritual forerunner of our faith in the middle class).
   
6. Private property and free economic activity are immune from government coercion and interference.
   
7. The notion of dissent and open criticism of government, religion, and the military is inherent among the polis Greeks.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France:

Supposing, however, that something like moderation were visible in this political sermon, yet politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite. Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind.

A few years ago Rebecca Mead wrote a delighful portrait of Luigi Miraglia, a high school Latin teacher from a small town near Naples. I highly recommend it. It was published in the New Yorker magazine and is available on the Internet. Here is one of Miraglia's bons mots:

If Hercules were living today, one of the labors would be to drive in Naples, and another would be to find a parking spot in Naples.

Sometime in the mid 50s B.C., Catullus penned this scathing epigram (52) on the contemporary political scene:

What's your excuse, Catullus? Why not die right now?
That pimple Nonius occupies the curule chair.
Vatinius swears falsely by his consulship.
What's your excuse, Catullus? Why not die right now?

Quid est, Catulle? quid moraris emori?
sella in curuli struma Nonius sedet,
per consulatum perierat Vatinius:
quid est, Catulle? quid moraris emori?

The medical writer Celsus (5.28.7a) defines the word struma as "a swelling in which underneath some hard parts grow from pus and blood like little acorns" (tumor in quo subter concreta quaedam ex pure et sanguine quasi glandulae oriuntur). In his commentary Kenneth Quinn says that "Nonius is an excrescence on the body politic."

For some reason this summer, when I watch the Democratic and Republican conventions on the telly, this epigram of Catullus springs to mind. Are these two nincompoops really the best our country has to offer as candidates to fill the highest office in the land?

Thoreau never voted in his life. I'm tempted to imitate him in the upcoming presidential election.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France:

You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

Your literary men, and your politicians, and so do the whole clan of the enlightened among us, essentially differ in these points. They have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own. With them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one. As to the new, they are in no sort of fear with regard to the duration of a building run up in haste; because duration is no object to those who think little or nothing has been done before their time, and who place all their hopes in discovery. They conceive, very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous, and therefore they are at inexpiable war with all establishments.

Plutarch, Life of Marius 7 (tr. John Dryden):

Any voluntary partaking with people in their labour is felt as an easing of that labour, as it seems to take away the constraint and necessity of it. It is the most obliging sight in the world to the Roman soldier to see a commander eat the same bread as himself, or lie upon an ordinary bed, or assist the work in the drawing a trench and raising a bulwark. For they do not so much admire those that confer honours and riches upon them, as those that partake of the same labour and danger with themselves; but love them better that will vouchsafe to join in their work, than those that encourage their idleness.

Hugh Blair (1718-1800):

For we may rest assured that whenever we express ourselves ill, there is, besides the mismanagement of language, some mistake in our manner of conceiving the subject. Embarrassed, obscure, and feeble sentences are generally, if not always, the result of embarrassed, obscure, and feeble thought. Thought and language act and react upon each other mutually. Logic and rhetoric have here, as in many other cases, a strict connect; and he that is learning to arrange his sentences with accuracy and order is learning, at the same time, to think with accuracy and order.

Catullus 31.7-10:

What is more blessed than release from cares, when the mind puts aside its burden, and weary from exertion abroad we arrive home and lie down to rest on the bed we have longed for?

o quid solutis est beatius curis,
cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrina
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum
desideratoque adquiescimus lecto?

Keith Burgess-Jackson discusses the phrases in virtue of/by virtue of and in contrast/by contrast, and concludes that either alternative is acceptable in these pairs. I have no quarrel with that conclusion.

But let's look at his reasoning:

A moment ago, I did a Google search for "in contrast." I used quotation marks so as to get the exact expression. I got 3.72 million hits. "By contrast," by contrast, got 1.84 million hits. This shows that both expressions are widely used.

Then I searched for "in virtue of" and "by virtue of." The former garnered 113,000 hits, the latter 1.06 million hits. I suppose someone could claim that this shows that "in virtue of" is incorrect, unidiomatic, or archaic. I would draw the opposite conclusion. It's correct, idiomatic, and current, just not as popular. In virtue of these results, feel free to use "in virtue of."

Consider the solecism "argumentum ad hominum" versus the correct "argumentum ad hominem." The Latin preposition "ad" takes the accusative case. "Hominum" is genitive plural, "hominem" is accusative singular of "homo" (man, person). Therefore "argumentum ad hominem" is correct, "argumentum ad hominum" is not. Mutatis mutandis we could rewrite Burgess-Jackson's second paragraph as follows:

Then I searched for "argumentum ad hominum" and "argumentum ad hominem." The former garnered 499 hits, the latter 5,830 hits. I suppose someone could claim that this shows that "argumentum ad hominum" is incorrect, unidiomatic, or archaic. I would draw the opposite conclusion. It's correct, idiomatic, and current, just not as popular. In virtue of these results, feel free to use "argumentum ad hominum."

You could use similar reasoning to support the use of the ungrammatical "between you and I" (20,200 hits) versus the proper "between you and me" (87,900 hits). Agreement with or against Google is not the arbiter of correct usage, either in English or Latin. As I have pointed out elsewhere, there are more Google hits for the incorrect "ad nauseum" than for the correct "ad nauseam." Google measures popularity, but does not determine correctness. As the legal maxim says, "Testimonia ponderanda sunt, non numeranda" (witnesses should be weighed, not counted).

But perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, Burgess-Jackson was discussing a case where the choice is unclear between two acceptable alternatives, not a case where one phrase is obviously correct, the other incorrect. My rule of thumb, when faced with a doubtful choice between alternatives like "by virtue of" and "in virtue of," is to ask someone who has read widely and who writes well which they would use. Someone, that is, like Keith Burgess-Jackson.

Returning to "ad hominum" and "ad hominem," I'm well aware that you can find expressions like "ad hominum milia decem" (about ten thousand men) in good Latin authors such as Caesar, and that "ad Cereris" (at Ceres', i.e. at Ceres' temple) is idiomatic Latin. The fact remains that "ad" always takes an accusative, expressed or implied.

On a lighter note -- any Latin teacher can tell you about the giggles that erupt in the classroom the first time the vocabulary word "homo" is introduced. The same thing happens in German class with "fahrt."

Jasper Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (1980; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 162:

The gods are at home in the radiant brightness of Olympus, the dead in the eternal darkness; men live between them in a world in which light and darkness succeed each other.

The following quotation comes at second or third hand. John Alexander Smith (1863-1939), Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, gave a lecture sometime before WWI, attended by Harold Macmillan. Macmillan reported Smith's words to Isaiah Berlin, and Isaiah Berlin told them to Ramin Jahanbegloo, who reproduced them in Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Phoenix Press, 1993), p. 29:

All of you, gentlemen, will have different careers -- some of you will be lawyers, some of you will be soldiers, some will be doctors or engineers, some will be government servants, some will be landowners or politicians. Let me tell you at once that nothing I say during these lectures will be of the slightest use to you in any of the fields in which you will attempt to exercise your skills. But one thing I can promise you: if you continue with this course of lectures to the end, you will always be able to know when men are talking rot.

Assault your foes with these choice insults from Gilbert and Sullivan. The first is from Ruddigore, Act II:

Coward, poltroon, shaker, squeamer,
Blockhead, sluggard, dullard, dreamer,
Shirker, shuffler, crawler, creeper,
Sniffler, snuffler, wailer, weeper,
Earthworm, maggot, tadpole, weevil!

The second is from The Grand Duke, Act I:

You booby dense --
You oaf immense,
With no pretence
To common sense!
A stupid muff
Who's made of stuff
Not worth a puff
Of candle-snuff!

A few days ago, blogger Verbum Ipsum wrote:

Apologies to my three readers for the gap in blogging this week.

I'm one of three, since I read his well-written, thought-provoking blog every day.

I write my own blog for an audience of one -- myself.

The Roman comic playwright Plautus coined this triple compound in his Trinummus, line 100:

Your fellow-citizens call you greedy for filthy lucre.

turpilucricupidum te vocant cives tui.

Turpilucricupidus comes from turpis (shameful, filthy, cf. turpitude), lucrum (profit, cf. lucre), cupidus (desirous, greedy, cf. cupidity).

The word is a hapax legomenon ("once said"), that is, a word that doesn't occur elsewhere in Latin literature, although perhaps it should be read in St. Jerome's Vulgate translation of St. Paul's letter to Titus 1:7 (turpilucricupidum instead of turpis lucri cupidum):

For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre.

Oportet enim episcopum sine crimine esse, sicut Dei dispensatorem: non superbum, non iracundum, non vinolentum, non percussorem, non turpis lucri cupidum.

St. Jerome was an avid reader of Plautus, as he confesses in a famous letter to Eustochium (22.30.1, tr. W.H. Fremantle):

Many years ago, when for the kingdom of heaven's sake I had cut myself off from home, parents, sister, relations, and -- harder still -- from the dainty food to which I had been accustomed; and when I was on my way to Jerusalem to wage my warfare, I still could not bring myself to forego the library which I had formed for myself at Rome with great care and toil. And so, miserable man that I was, I would fast only that I might afterwards read Cicero. After many nights spent in vigil, after floods of tears called from my inmost heart, after the recollection of my past sins, I would once more take up Plautus.

The Greek adjective in Titus 1:7 is aischrokerdes, and the corresponding noun is aischrokerdeia, from aischros (shameful) plus kerdos (gain). Probably the same adjective was in the Greek play by Philemon (Thesauros = Treasure) which Plautus adapted in his Trinummus (see line 19).

Demosthenes charges the guardian who cheated him out of his inheritance with aischrokerdeia (Against Aphobus 3.4). The Greek comic poet Diphilus (fr. 99, tr. J.M. Edmonds) says about it:

Avarice is a fatuous thing; the mind
That's given to getting, to all else is blind.

Polybius (6.46.2-3, tr. W.R. Paton) claimed that the inhabitants of Crete were especially afflicted with this vice:

Money is held in such high honour among them that its acquisition is not only regarded as necessary, but as most honourable. So much in fact do sordid gain [aischrokerdeia] and lust for wealth [pleonexia] prevail among them that the Cretans are the only people in the world in whose eyes no gain is disgraceful.

In his Characters, Theophrastus devotes an entire chapter (30) to aischrokerdeia. Here is a translation by R.C. Jebb (revised by J.E. Sandys):

Avarice is excessive desire of base gain.

The Avaricious man is one who, when he entertains, will not set enough bread on the table. He will borrow from a guest staying in his house. When he makes a distribution, he will say that the distributor is entitled to a double share, and thereupon will help himself. When he sells wine, he will sell it watered to his own friend. He will seize the opportunity of taking his boys to the play, when the lessees of the theatre grant free admission. If he travels on the public service, he will leave at home the money allowed to him by the State, and will borrow of his colleagues in the embassy; he will load his servant with more baggage than he can carry, and give him shorter rations than any other master does; he will demand, too, his strict share of the presents, -- and sell it. When he is anointing himself at the bath, he will say to the slave-boy, 'Why, this oil that you have bought is rancid' -- and will use someone else's. He is apt to claim his part of the halfpence found by his servants in the streets, and to cry 'Shares in the luck!' Having sent his cloak to be scoured he will borrow another from an acquaintance, and delay to restore it for several days, until it is demanded back.

These, again, are traits of his. He will weigh out their rations to his household with his own hands, using 'the measure of the frugal king,' with the bottom dinted inward, and carefully brushing the rim. He will buy a thing privately, when a friend seems ready to sell it on reasonable terms, and will dispose of it at a raised price. It is just like him, too, when he is paying a debt of thirty minas, to withhold four drachmas. Then, if his sons, through ill-health, do not attend the school throughout the month, he will make a proportionate deduction from the payment; and all through Anthesterion he will not send them to their lessons because there are so many festivals, and he does not wish to pay the fees. When he is receiving rent from a slave, he will demand in addition the discount charged on the copper money; also, in going through the account of the manager <he will challenge small items>. Entertaining his clansmen, he will beg a dish from the common table for his own servants; and will register the half-radishes left over from the repast, in order that the attendants may not get them. Again, when he travels with acquaintances, he will make use of their servants, but will let his own slave out for hire; nor will he place the proceeds to the common account. It is just like him, too, when a club-dinner is held at his house, to secrete some of the fire-wood, lentils, vinegar, salt, and lamp-oil placed at his disposal. If a friend, or a friend's daughter, is to be married, he will go abroad a little while before, in order to avoid giving a wedding present. And he will borrow from his acquaintances things of a kind that no one would ask back, -- or readily take back, if it were proposed to restore them.

Thomas More, Utopia, tr. Gilbert Burnet:

They eat and drink out of vessels of earth or glass, which make an agreeable appearance, though formed of brittle materials; while they make their chamber-pots and close-stools of gold and silver, and that not only in their public halls but in their private houses. Of the same metals they likewise make chains and fetters for their slaves, to some of which, as a badge of infamy, they hang an earring of gold, and make others wear a chain or a coronet of the same metal; and thus they take care by all possible means to render gold and silver of no esteem.

Thomas More was probably inspired in one detail by an epigram of Martial (1.37):

You capture your bowels' load in unfortunate gold, Bassus, nor does it shame you. You drink from glass. Therefore it costs you more to crap.

Ventris onus misero, nec te pudet, excipis auro,
  Basse, bibis vitro: carius ergo cacas.

Bassus has his modern imitators.

Herodotus 5.4.2 (tr. George Rawlinson), concerning the Trausi, a Thracian tribe:

When a child is born all its kindred sit round about it in a circle and weep for the woes it will have to undergo now that it is come into the world, making mention of every ill that falls to the lot of humankind; when, on the other hand, a man has died, they bury him with laughter and rejoicings, and say that now he is free from a host of sufferings, and enjoys the completest happiness.

The phrase "dulce est desipere in loco" comes from Horace, Odes 4.12.28, and means "It's pleasant to act crazy on occasion." Herodotus puts these words into the mouth of the Egyptian king Amasis (2.173.3-4, tr. George Rawlinson):

Bowmen bend their bows when they wish to shoot; unbrace them when the shooting is over. Were they kept always strung they would break, and fail the archer in time of need. So it is with men. If they give themselves constantly to serious work, and never indulge awhile in pastime or sport, they lose their senses, and become mad or moody. Knowing this, I divide my life between pastime and business.

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 8.34.82:

There's no lie so outrageous but that someone can be found to swear it's true.

nullum tam impudens mendacium est, ut teste careat.

Interpret that however you wish.

In one of his letters to Atticus (1.16.12) Cicero quotes a saying of Philip of Macedon, who was Alexander the Great's father:

He used to say that all fortresses could be captured into which only a donkey laden with gold could climb.

omnia castella expugnari posse dicebat in quae modo asellus onustus auro posset ascendere.

This could be paraphrased and modified as follows:

Every legislature can be corrupted into which a lobbyist carrying a briefcase full of cash can walk.

Cato, quoted by Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 11.2.6:

Human life is sort of like iron. If you use iron, it wears out. But if you don't use it, rust nevertheless ruins it. Likewise we see men worn out by use. But if you don't use your body, laziness and inactivity exact a worse toll than use.

vita humana prope uti ferrum est; si exerceas, conteritur. si non exerceas, tamen rubigo interfecit. item homines exercendo videmus conteri. si nihil exerceas, inertia atque torpedo plus detrimenti facit quam exercitio.

Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), tr. Willard R. Trask, p. 20:

The substance of ancient culture was never destroyed. The fallow period of decline which extended from 425 to 775 affected only the Frankish kingdom and was later made good. A new period of decline begins in the nineteenth century and reaches the dimensions of catastrophe in the twentieth.

Horace, Satires 2.6.60-62:

O countryside, when will I see you again? When will I be permitted to imbibe sweet forgetfulness of trouble, now amidst books by ancient authors, now with sleep and lazy hours?

o rus, quando ego te adspiciam quandoque licebit
nunc veterum libris, nunc somno et inertibus horis
ducere sollicitae iucunda oblivia vitae?

Pliny, Letters 9.17.4:

Let us forgive others their pleasures, that we might receive forgiveness for our own.

demus igitur alienis oblectationibus veniam, ut nostris impetremus.

St. Augustine, Confessions 10.6.9 (tr. E.B. Pusey):

I asked the earth, and it answered me, "I am not He;" and whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, "We are not Thy God, seek above us." I asked the moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, "Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God." I asked the heavens, sun, moon, stars, "Nor (say they) are we the God whom thou seekest." And I replied unto all the things which encompass the door of my flesh: "Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me something of Him." And they cried out with a loud voice, "He made us."

interrogavi terram, et dixit, 'non sum.' et quaecumque in eadem sunt, idem confessa sunt. interrogavi mare et abyssos et reptilia animarum vivarum, et responderunt, 'non sumus deus tuus; quaere super nos.' interrogavi auras flabiles, et inquit universus aer cum incolis suis, 'fallitur Anaximenes; non sum deus.' interrogavi caelum, solem, lunam, stellas: 'neque nos sumus deus, quem quaeris,' inquiunt. et dixi omnibus his quae circumstant fores carnis meae, 'dicite mihi de deo meo, quod vos non estis, dicite mihi de illo aliquid,' et exclamaverunt voce magna, 'ipse fecit nos.'

On Anaximenes see e.g. Cicero, De Natura Deorum 1.10.26: Anaximenes thought that air is god (Anaximenes aera deum statuit).

I recommend the moving eulogy of Czeslaw Milosz by David Warren. Here's a sample:

Replying to Karl Marx's old saw that religion is the "opium of the people", Milosz once said: "A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death -- the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (Götzen-Dämmerung), What the Germans Lack (Was den Deutschen abgeht), 5 (tr. Walter Kaufmann):

"Higher education" and huge numbers -- that is a contradiction to start with. All higher education belongs only to the exception: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. All great, all beautiful things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum.

"Höhere Erziehung" und Unzahl - das widerspricht sich von vornherein. Jede höhere Erziehung gehört nur der Ausnahme: man muss privilegirt sein, um ein Recht auf ein so hohes Privilegium zu haben. Alle grossen, alle schönen Dinge können nie Gemeingut sein: pulchrum est paucorum hominum.

The Latin quotation means "What is beautiful belongs to a few." Some give the source as Horace, Satires 1.9.44, but this is incorrect, and I can't track down the origin of the phrase.

For more back to school thoughts, see this week's hilarious postings by the crack young staff at The Hatemonger's Quarterly entitled Official Back-to-School Week. So far:

• Drinking Games
• College Orientation

There is no evidence that a torch relay was ever part of the ancient Olympic games. Carl Diem (1882-1962) first introduced it as part of the modern Olympics in the 1936 games in Berlin.

However, the ancient Greeks were fond of both simple torch races and torch relay races. Pausanias (1.30.2, tr. W.H.S. Jones) describes a torch race that was not a relay race:

In the Academy is an altar to Prometheus, and from it they run to the city [Athens] carrying burning torches. The contest is while running to keep the torch still alight; if the torch of the first runner goes out, he has no longer any claim to victory, but the second runner has. If his torch also goes out, then the third man is victor. If all the torches go out, no one is left to be winner.

Plutarch (Life of Solon 1.4, tr. Bernadotte Perrin) gives a further detail about this race:

And it is said that Peisistratus also had a boy lover, Charmus, and that he dedicated the statue of Love [Eros] in the Academy, where the runners in the sacred torch race light their torches.

Herodotus (8.98.2, tr. Aubrey de Selincourt) compares horse-riding Persian mail couriers to Greek torch racers:

The first, at the end of his stage, passes the dispatch to the second, the second to the third, and so on along the line, as in the Greek torch-race [lampadephorie] which is held in honour of Hephaestus.

Obviously this was a torch relay race.

Herodotus also (6.105.1-3) mentions the origin of torch races in honor of the god Pan:

Before they left the city, the Athenian generals sent off a message to Sparta. The messenger was an Athenian named Pheidippides, a trained runner still in the practice of his profession. According to the account he gave the Athenians on his return, Pheidippides met the god Pan on Mount Parthenium, above Tegea. Pan, he said, called him by name and told him to ask the Athenians why they paid him no attention, in spite of his friendliness towards them and the fact that he had been useful to them in the past, and would be so again in the future. The Athenians believed Pheidippides' story, and when their affairs were once more in a prosperous state, they built a shrine to Pan under the Acropolis, and from the time his message was received they have held an annual ceremony, with a torch-race and sacrifices, to court his protection.

At the beginning of the Republic (1.328a, tr. Paul Shorey), Plato describes a torch relay race in honor of the Thracian goddess Bendis, with an added twist. The racers were on horseback:

Do you mean to say, interposed Adimantus, that you haven't heard that there is to be a torchlight race this evening on horseback in honor of the goddess?

On horseback? said I. That is a new idea. Will they carry torches and pass them along to one another as they race with the horses, or how do you mean?

That's the way of it, said Polemarchus, and besides, there is to be a night festival which will be worth seeing.

Plato also uses the metaphor of a torch relay race in Laws 6.776b (tr. A.E. Taylor):

They will pay visits to the old home and receive visits from it, beget children and bring them up, and thus hand the torch of life on from one generation to another and perpetuate that service of God which our laws demand.

Lucretius imitates the same metaphor when he writes (2.79) "like runners they pass on the torch of life" (quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt).

According to Aristophanes, Frogs 1089-1098 (tr. Gilbert Murray), the Athenians also ran torch races in honor of Athena:

Not a doubt of it! Why, I laughed fit to cry
At the Panathenaea, a man to espy,
  Pale, flabby, and fat,
  And bent double at that,
Puffing feebly behind, with a tear in his eye;

Till there in their place, with cord and with brace,
Were the Potters assembled to quicken his pace;
  And down they came, whack!
  On sides, belly, and back,
Till he blew out his torch and just fled from the race!

Aristotle says (Athenian Constitution 57.1) that all of the torch races at Athens were under control of the archon basileus, the king archon. A red-figure krater of 430 B.C. (Harvard University Art Museums 1960.344) shows torch race runners plus the archon basileus.

The modern Olympic torch relay is not a race, but all of the ancient Greek examples just cited were. The agon, or contest, was a central feature of ancient Greek life. Nietzsche's friend Jacob Burckhardt emphasized this in his lectures on Greek cultural history -- see the selections from these lectures published as The Greeks and Greek Civilization, tr. Sheila Stern (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), pp. 160-213 (The Agonal Age).

Shakespeare, Othello 3.3.136-141:

Utter my thoughts? Why, say they are vile and false;
As where's that palace whereinto foul things
Sometimes intrude not? Who has a breast so pure,
But some uncleanly apprehensions
Keep leets and law-days, and in session sit
With meditations lawful?

Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 184:

He [C.S. Lewis] remained lifelong friends with Sister Penelope, and it was to her and her fellow nuns that Perelandra was dedicated in the words 'To some ladies at Wantage'. The translator of the Portuguese edition delighted the sisters by mistranslating this 'To some wanton ladies'.

Cicero, Brutus 58:

For nowadays certain orators bark rather than speak. (latrant enim iam quidam oratores, non loquuntur.)

This is true in our day especially of some politicians (e.g. Senator Edward Kennedy), sportscasters, and preachers in certain denominations.

Tennyson, sonnet entitled Poets and Their Bibliographies:

Old poets foster'd under friendlier skies,
Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say,
At dawn, and lavish all the golden day
To make them wealthier in his readers' eyes;
And you, old popular Horace, you the wise
Adviser of the nine-years-ponder'd lay,
And you, that wear a wreath of sweeter bay,
Catullus, whose dead songster never dies;
If, glancing downward on the kindly sphere
That once had roll'd you round and round the sun,
You see your Art still shrined in human shelves,
You should be jubilant that you flourish'd here
Before the Love of Letters, overdone,
Had swampt the sacred poets with themselves.

Suetonius in his life of Vergil (22, tr. J.C. Rolfe) describes the poet's method of composition thus:

When he was writing the Georgics, it is said to have been his custom to dictate each day a large number of verses which he had composed in the morning, and then to spend the rest of the day in reducing them to a very small number, wittily remarking that he fashioned his poem after the manner of a she-bear, and gradually licked it into shape.

Suetonius also says (op. cit. 25) that it took Vergil 7 years to complete his Georgics. Since the Georgics contain 2188 lines, Vergil's rate of composition for this poem works out to less than a line per day.

In his Ars Poetica (386-390, tr. H. Rushton Fairclough), Horace "the wise adviser of the nine-years-ponder'd lay" wrote:

Yet if ever you do write anything, let it enter the ears of some critical Maecius, and your father's and my own; then put your parchment in the closet and keep it back till the ninth year. What you have not published you can destroy; the word once sent forth can never come back.

The "dead songster" who "never dies" is a reference to the third poem in Catullus' collection, a dirge for his mistress' dead pet sparrow (tr. F.W. Cornish):

Mourn, ye Graces and Loves, and all you whom the Graces love. My lady's sparrow is dead, the sparrow my lady's pet, whom she loved more than her very eyes; for honey-sweet he was, and knew his mistress as well as a girl knows her own mother. Nor would he stir from her lap, but hopping now here, now there, would still chirp to his mistress alone. Now he goes along the dark road, thither whence they say no one returns. But curse upon you, cursed shades of Orcus, which devour all pretty things! My pretty sparrow, you have taken away. Ah, cruel! Ah, poor little bird! All because of you my lady's darling eyes are heavy and red with weeping.

The dead songster never dies because Catullus has conferred immortality on it through his verses.

W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938):

I have always wondered at the passion many people have to meet the celebrated. The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.

Ordinarily I don't put much stock in the pseudo-science of psychology. But in identifying Celebrity Worship Syndrome perhaps the psychologists are on to something.

Historia Augusta is the name given by Isaac Casaubon to a pseudonymous compilation of biographies of Roman emperors who reigned from 117 to 284 A.D. Marguerite Yourcenar in her essay "Faces of History in the Historia Augusta" writes:

The evils by which a civilization dies are more specific, more complex, more deliberate, sometimes, more difficult to discover or to define. But we have learned to recognize that gigantism which is merely the morbid mimetism of growth, that waste which makes a pretense of wealth in states already bankrupt, that plethora so quickly replaced by dearth at the first crisis, those entertainments for the people provided from the upper levels of the hierarchy, that atmosphere of inertia and panic, of authoritarianism and of anarchy, those pompous reaffirmations of a great past amid present mediocrity and immediate disorder, those reforms which are merely palliatives and those outbursts of virtue which are manifested only by purges, those unacknowledged men of genius lost in the crowd of unscrupulous gangsters, of violent lunatics, of honest men who are inept and wise men who are helpless. The modern reader is at home in the Historia Augusta.

Taking as his starting point this quotation from Marguerite Yourcenar, Michael Doliner finds evidence of most of these ills (gigantism, waste, panic, authoritarianism, mediocrity, purges, gangsters, etc.) in the George W. Bush presidency, in a recent article entitled Historia Bush.

Humanist scholars were fond of inventing classical appellations for themselves. Thus Luther's friend Philipp Schwarzerd (1497-1560) called himself Melanchthon, since German schwarz (black) is Greek melas (genitive melanos, cf. English melanin, melancholy) and German Erde (earth) is Greek chthon. Adapting this custom we could perhaps devise the following Latin moniker for George Walker Bush -- Agricola Ambulator Arbuscula. Triple A instead of Dubya, for the president whose fondness for inventing nicknames for others is well known. George comes from the Greek georgos (farmer), whose Latin equivalent is agricola. Walker in Latin is ambulator (cf. English perambulate), and a Latin word for shrub or bush is arbuscula.

I can't find offhand a Latin adjective meaning shrub-like, but arbusculanus seems like it might do the trick (cf. Africanus from Africa). Then, instead of the hybrid Latin/English title Historia Bush, we could rename Doliner's article Historia Arbusculana.

If you omit his middle name or use his middle initial rather than his middle name, classical scholar Revilo Pendleton Oliver (1910-1994) has a palindromic name (Revilo Oliver, Revilo P. Oliver), one that reads the same backwards as forwards.

Oliver, who taught for many years at the University of Illinois, did some solid work in classics, e.g.

• "The First Medicean MS of Tacitus and the Titulature of Ancient Books," Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 82 (1951)
• Niccolo Perotti's Version of the Enchiridion of Epictetus (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954)
• "The Second Medicean Ms. and the Text of Tacitus," Illinois Classical Studies 1 (1976)
  

Unfortunately, his enduring legacy is not likely to be his classical scholarship, but the racist, anti-Semitic essays that he penned in his later years. I won't dignify them by linking to them.

In a discussion of 1 Peter 3:7, Greg Krehbiel affectionately calls Saint Peter 'old Pete.' This reminds me of a story told by G.K. Chesterton:

A bishop is said to have complained of a Non-conformist saying Paul instead of Saint Paul; and to have added, "He might at least have called him Mr. Paul."

Unfortunately I've lost the source of this Chestertonian quotation.

In his essay on "The Odes of Horace" in Classical Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1926), J.W. Mackail compares Horace to Malherbe, Tennyson, and Gray, and then says (pp. 148-149):

But none of these poets, or of others, has given to the world, as Horace has, a secular Psalter for daily and yearly and age-long use.

As with the Psalter itself, the Odes have in them repetitions, inequalities, faults of matter and manner. Some of their contents seem unworthy of their place; mannered, uninspired, questionable in their use and actual present value. Some we may think (but we had better think twice and thrice) we could do well without. We have to make allowances in both for religious or literary conventions; for Jewish narrowness and vindictiveness, for Roman coarseness. But both volumes have been taken to the heart of the world, and have become part of ourselves. It is interesting to remark that both have this note of intimacy, that the Psalms and the Odes, or at least the most familiar among them, are habitually referred to, not by their titles (for they have none), nor by their number in the series, but simply by their opening words. We do not usually speak of the 95th or 114th, the 127th or 130th Psalms, if we wish to be understood, but of the Venite, the In exitu Israel, the Nisi Dominus, the De Profundis. And so with Horace one speaks familiarly of the Integer vitae, the Aequam memento, the Eheu fugaces, the Otium divos. This secular Psalter, like its religious analogue, has to be supplemented, enlarged, re-interpreted, possibly even cut, for actual use, for application to our own daily life. But both, in their enormously different ways, are central and fundamental; permanent lights on life and aids to living.

At my web site devoted to some of the Odes of Horace, you will find synopses, original texts, more or less literal translations, notes, and a collection of paraphrases, parodies, imitations, and translations of Horatian odes by English writers. It's my own version of the secular Psalter.

One ancient Greek approximation for the Schwarzeneggerian insult 'girlie man' is 'androgynos,' whence our English adjective 'androgynous.' In Greek it is a compound, formed from 'aner' (genitive 'andros,' meaning 'man') plus 'gyne' (meaning 'woman').

Herodotus (4.67.2) uses the word to describe a class of Scythian soothsayers:

The effeminate (androgynoi) Enarees say that Aphrodite granted prophecy to them.

In the famous speech attributed to Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium we read (189e, tr. Benjamin Jowett):

In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word 'Androgynous' is only preserved as a term of reproach.

An alternative title for Eupolis' comedy Astrateutoi (Draft Dodgers) was Androgynoi (Girlie Men). The word is also found in the works of the Greek comic playwright Menander. In his Aspis (The Shield, lines 241-244), two slaves have the following altercation:

What's your nationality?
Phrygian.
Nothing good. A girlie man (androgynos). We Thracians alone are real men, a masculine bunch.

Likewise in Menander's Samia (The Woman from Samos, line 66), one slave insults another with the vocative 'androgyne.'

English is richer than Greek in synonyms for 'girlie man' ('nancy boy,' 'pantywaist,' 'wuss,' etc.). But one Greek synonym is 'hermaphroditos' (cf. English 'hermaphrodite') from the mythological son of Hermes and Aphrodite, whose name was Hermaphroditus. In Metamorphoses 4.285-388, Ovid tells how he became half man, half woman when the amorous nymph Salmacis refused to release him from her embrace. The passage is too long to quote in full, but the following excerpt well illustrates Ovid's playful love of paradox (lines 378-379):

They are not two, yet their appearance is twofold, so that neither female nor male could it be called, and they seem neither of the two yet both. (nec duo sunt et forma duplex, nec femina dici / nec puer ut possit, neutrumque et utrumque videntur.)

There are some superb photographs of ancient coins at HobbyBlog, together with much useful background information on these miniature works of art. It is possible to acquire some ancient coins for very little expense. Over the years I have purchased a few coins from Guy Clark, a reputable and fair dealer. In his Bargain Boxes he sells Greek and Roman coins for as little as five dollars each. Holding one of these coins in your hand brings the ancient world to life in a way that books do not.

Matthew 13:3-8:

Behold, a sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.

Seneca, Epistulae Morales 73.15-16:

The gods are not disdainful, not ill-disposed: they let us in and extend a hand to those striving upwards. You're surprised that man advances towards the gods? God comes to men, nay rather, what is more intimate, he comes into men: no mind is good without God. Divine seeds have been sown in human bodies. If a good farmer receives the seeds, they spring forth similar to their origin and rise up like unto those from which they were born. But if a bad farmer receives the seeds, not unlike an unfertile and swampy piece of ground he kills them and creates from them weeds instead of fruits.

non sunt dii fastidiosi, non invidi: admittunt et ascendentibus manum porrigunt. miraris hominem ad deos ire? deus ad homines venit, immo quod est propius, in homines venit: nulla sine deo mens bona est. semina in corporibus humanis divina dispersa sunt, quae si bonus cultor excipit, similia origini prodeunt et paria iis ex quibus orta sunt surgunt: si malus, non aliter quam humus sterilis ac palustris necat ac deinde creat purgamenta pro frugibus.

Mark 1:4, as rendered by John Henson, Good As New: A Radical Retelling of the Scriptures (New Alresford, Hampshire: O Books, 2004), a new translation recommended by the Archbishop of Canterbury:

John, nicknamed 'The Dipper,' was 'The Voice.' He was in the desert, inviting people to be dipped, to show they were determined to change their ways and wanted to be forgiven.

The same in the King James version:

John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.

Charles Lamb, Letters (January 28, 1798, to Coleridge):

Any society, almost, when I am in affliction, is sorely painful to me. I seem to breathe more freely, to think more collectedly, to feel more properly and calmly, when alone.

The theme of Juvenal's fourteenth satire is the importance of parental example in raising a child. The poet wisely advises 'nil dictu foedum visuque haec limina tangat' (line 44, 'let nothing disgusting to say or see enter your house'). In order to obey this injunction literally today, one would be forced to smash the television set and radio to bits.

Bill Vallicella has an interesting discussion of 1 Timothy 6:10: "For the love of money is the root of all evil" (radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas). In answer to his question, the Greek word translated by 'cupiditas' is 'philargyria'. Richard Chenevix Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament (1880; rpt. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), discusses 'philargyria' and its synonym 'pleonexia' on pp. 81-84. The component parts of the compound noun 'philargyria' survive in English words starting with 'philo' (such as 'philosophy' = love of wisdom) and in the French word 'argent' (money).

Keith Burgess-Jackson rails against baseball caps worn backwards. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this custom has a long pedigree. The first stanza of "The Preacher's Boy" by American poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916) contains a description of a preacher's wayward son that includes the phrase "his cap-rim turned behind" (line 7). See The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., 1941), p. 284.

There will be little or no blogging here for the next couple of weeks. I'm going to hug some trees in the Maine woods:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline)

Geitner Simmons reports on complaints by students at a state university:

The students claimed they were entitled to challenge the professor because they were paying for the course, hence they supposedly had standing to direct how it should be taught. Specifically, the students complained that they ought to be allowed to take multiple-choice tests rather than essay exams. Many of them also refused to study a series of maps on which the instructor had marked various items that would later be the focus of a test; too boring, they said.

Keith Burgess-Jackson's essay You Are Not My Customer is a devastating critique of this mistaken notion that students are customers and like customers are "always right".

None of this is new, of course. In his account of the martyrdom of St. Cassian of Imola, Prudentius wrote (Peristephanon 9.27-28, tr. E.K. Rand):

For teachers ever are a bitter pill
To college youth, nor any serious course
Is ever sweet to infants.

doctor amarus enim discenti semper ephebo
  nec dulcis ulli disciplina infantiae est.

Cassian was stabbed to death by the pens of his pupils.

Other ancient worthies met the same fate. One of these was the priest Marcus of Arethusa, whose death was described by Gregory Nazianzen in his first invective against the emperor Julian = Oration 4.89 (tr. C.W. King):

He was tossed in the air from one set of school-boys to another, who caught that noble body on the points of their writing-styles, and made a game out of a tragedy.

Evagrius Scholasticus, in his Ecclesiastical History 3.10 (tr. E. Walford), wrote:

Next to Peter, Stephen succeeds to the see of Antioch, whom the sons of the Antiochenes dispatched with reeds sharpened like lances, as is recorded by John the Rhetorician.

Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend, tr. William Caxton) told a similar story about St. Felix:

Felix was surnamed Inpincis, and is said of the place where he resteth, or of the pointelles of greffes. A greffe is properly called a pointel to write in tables of wax, by which he suffered death. And some say that he was a schoolmaster and taught children, and was to them much rigorous. After he was known of the paynims, and because he confessed plainly that he was christian and believed in Jesu Christ he was delivered to be tormented into the hands of the children his scholars, whom he had taught and learned, which scholars slew him with their pointelles, pricks, and greffes.

An illustration from Cod. Pal. germ. 144 shows the gruesome death of St. Felix.

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), book 8, chapter 13:

For men of true learning, and almost universal knowledge, always compassionate the ignorance of others; but fellows who excel in some little, low, contemptible art, are always certain to despise those who are unacquainted with that art.

A character in Plautus' Stichus (687) says, "Whoever will come, let him come with his own wine" (quisquis veniet veniat cum vino suo), a classy way of saying BYOB (bring your own bottle) on your next party invitation.

In ancient Greek, a potluck was an 'eranos', and the individual contributions were 'symbolai'. The guest who arrived without a contribution was said to be 'asymbolos' (Latin 'immunis').

Here is a poem from the Greek Anthology (11.35, tr. W.R. Paton) by Philodemus giving orders to his slave for a potluck:

Artemidorus gave us a cabbage, Aristarchus caviare, Athenagoras little onions, Philodemus a small liver, and Apollophanes two pounds of pork, and there were three pounds still left over from yesterday. Go and buy us an egg and garlands and sandals and scent, and I wish them to be here at four o'clock sharp.

Dante calls some of the buildings in Hell mosques (meschite, Inferno 8.70). No less hellish and diabolical are those contemporary mosques in which you can hear sermons advocating the annihilation of the Jews. See for example Steven Stalinsky, Palestinian Authority Sermons 2000-2003.

Andrew C. Bulhak's Postmodernism Generator is a clever piece of software that automatically produces essays with a postmodernist flavor. If you're on the page and you want a new one, just hit your browser's refresh button. The essays are amusing to read, and each includes the disclaimer "The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator." I suspect, however, that if you were a student in some university English departments, you could turn in one of the Postmodernism Generator's essays and receive an A+.

Martial, 5.58:

You say you'll live tomorrow, Postumus, always tomorrow: tell me, Postumus, when does that tomorrow of yours arrive? How far away that tomorrow of yours is! Where is it? Or whence is it to be sought? Is it hiding among the Parthians and Armenians? That tomorrow of yours is already as old as Priam or Nestor. That tomorrow of yours, tell me, for how much could it be purchased? You'll live tomorrow? It's too late to live even today, Postumus: the wise man is the one who lived yesterday.

Cras te victurum, cras dicis, Postume, semper:
  dic mihi, cras istud, Postume, quando venit?
Quam longe cras istud! ubi est? aut unde petendum?
  Numquid apud Parthos Armeniosque latet?
Iam cras istud habet Priami vel Nestoris annos.
  Cras istud quanti, dic mihi, possit emi?
Cras vives? Hodie iam vivere, Postume, serum est:
  ille sapit quisquis, Postume, vixit heri.

Arthur Darby Nock (1902-1963), quoted by W.M. Calder III, Men in Their Books: Studies in the Modern History of Classical Scholarship (Hildesheim: Olms, 1998), pp. 234, 284:

Religion is that active attitude of man towards those factors, real or imaginary, in his environment or makeup, which he of himself cannot fully comprehend or control, and what he does, says and thinks in virtue of that active attitude.

St. Augustine, Letters, 143.2 (to Marcellinus):

Hence I confess that I try to be one of those who write in order to make progress, and who make progress by writing. If therefore I've said anything somewhat rash or stupid, which deserves blame not only by others who are able to detect it but also by myself (since I at least ought to see my mistake afterwards, if I'm making progress), that is no cause for surprise or sorrow. Rather it is cause for pardon and congratulation, not because a mistake has been made but because it has been renounced. For that man loves himself in an excessively bad way who wishes others to be mistaken too, in order that his own mistake might remain undiscovered.

Ego proinde fateor me ex eorum numero esse conari, qui proficiendo scribunt, et scribendo proficiunt. Unde si aliquid vel incautius, vel indoctius a me positum est, quod non solum ab aliis qui videre id possunt, merito reprehendatur, verum etiam a meipso, quia et ego saltem postea videre debeo, si proficio; nec mirandum est, nec dolendum: sed potius ignoscendum atque gratulandum; non quia erratum est, sed quia improbatum. Nam nimis perverse seipsum amat qui et alios vult errare, ut error suus lateat.

St. Augustine's last work was his Retractationes (Reconsiderations), a catalogue of errors and inaccuracies which he thought he had made in his other works. In the history of ideas there haven't been many other thinkers with the intellectual honesty to follow his example.

Thoreau, Journals, August 7, 1853:

How trivial and uninteresting and wearisome and unsatisfactory are all employments for which men will pay you money! The ways by which you may get money all lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle. If the laborer gets no more than the money his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. Those services which the world will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.

Seneca, Epistulae Morales 28.1-2:

Do you think you're the only one this has happened to? Do you wonder at it as though it's something surprising, that despite your long trip and change of scenery you didn't shake off your sadness and heaviness of mind? You need to change your soul, not the sky overhead. Although you cross the wide sea, although (as our Vergil says) "lands and cities disappear into the distance," your faults will accompany you wherever you go. To someone who was whining about this very thing Socrates said, "Why does it surprise you that your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? The same cause that drove you to travel still oppresses you." How do strange lands help? And acquaintance with cities and tourist spots? This restlessness of yours has been in vain. You ask why your flight doesn't help you? You're fleeing in company with yourself. Your soul's burden must be cast off: until this happens, no other spot will please you.

Hoc tibi soli putas accidisse et admiraris quasi rem novam quod peregrinatione tam longa et tot locorum varietatibus non discussisti tristitiam gravitatemque mentis? Animum debes mutare, non caelum. Licet vastum traieceris mare, licet, ut ait Vergilius noster, 'terraeque urbesque recedant', sequentur te quocumque perveneris vitia. Hoc idem querenti cuidam Socrates ait, 'quid miraris nihil tibi peregrinationes prodesse, cum te circumferas? premit te eadem causa quae expulit'. Quid terrarum iuvare novitas potest? quid cognitio urbium aut locorum? in irritum cedit ista iactatio. Quaeris quare te fuga ista non adiuvet? tecum fugis. Onus animi deponendum est: non ante tibi ullus placebit locus.