just call me lucifer
Some footnotes, as any academic knows, take as long to write as whole chapters. The edition of Ulrichs’ Latin-language newspaper I’m working on has myriad footnotes, and since I’ve had to do some extensive research recently for just one of them, I might as well share it. There will be Lutherans aplenty, Prussians galore, even a glimpse of Napoleon Bonaparte, but at the heart of it, once again, will be an accomplished Latin poem from a source I once, in my foolishness, never imagined, the late nineteenth century.
But let us orientate ourselves.
Pforta, or Schulpforta, is a prestigious, and historically firmly Lutheran, school founded in 1543, during the Reformation, on the site of a former Cistercian monastery. It is located near Naumburg in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, and its geographical position has given it a chequered history extending into recent times. Its eminent former pupils include Nietzsche, Möbius, Wilamowitz and the less famous Bernhard Rogge and Ernst Eck, to both of whom we shall turn shortly.
In 1893 Pforta celebrated its 350th anniversary, holding a series of events at the school on May 24-26th the memory of which was preserved for posterity in Hans Witte, Pförtner Jubeltage (Rostock, 1893), which provides an account of the celebration and gathers together poetry written to mark the event. Included on pp. 33-4 is a Latin poem in alcaics, a Horatian metre, and elsewhere on pp. 14-16 Witte describes the central role that this poem had played in proceedings. On the morning of Thursday, May 25th the chief ceremony had taken place in the school chapel. There were speeches from the great and good, and the gift was marked from former pupils of three stained-glass windows at the eastern end of the chapel, the choir, behind the altar (shown in the photo at the top). This is where the Latin poem came in, a celebration of the new windows delivered by Hofprediger (“Court Chaplain”) Dr. Bernard Rogge, a Lutheran cleric and theologian who had been a pupil of the school from 1843 to 1850, his arrival at the age of 11 or 12 having coincided, coincidentally or not, with the school’s tercentenary 50 years beforehand.
Rogge (1831-1919) recited the poem, but he wasn’t its author. In Pförtner Jubeltage the poem is rather pointedly unattributed, unlike the other poems it records, but it was republished in Das Humanistische Gymnasium 5 (1894), organ of the Deutscher Gymnasialverein (an association of traditional secondary schools), within a larger report (pp. 127-9) on poetic responses to the anniversary at Pforta, in Greek and German too. Here the author of our poem is clearly identified as Ernst Eck (1838-1901), another product of Pforta (1851-57) who was a Professor at the University of Berlin specialising in Roman and German civil law. Pförtner Jubeltage records everyone in attendance at the celebrations of 1893, and Eck was there to hear the delivery of his own poem.
I’m intrigued that Eck didn’t deliver his own composition. The choice of Rogge to do so was clearly purposeful, and we can maybe start to see why. Ordained in 1856, he had made his career as a military chaplain, a profession that in the Prussian army was of higher status than the British equivalent. He was on the staff of a whole division, not just a regiment, and in that role took part in the conflict of 1866 that brought Germany under Prussian control after the latter’s defeat of Austria, and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. A sign of his status is that when the German Empire was proclaimed after the defeat of France, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on January 18, 1871, a moment captured in the image at the bottom, the religious service that preceded the proclamation was led by Rogge, and he delivered a sermon on the occasion that he himself recorded in his later memoir of the Franco-Prussian War. In general he illustrates very well the thorough intertwining of Lutheranism and Prussian militarism, but his role here combined the Lutheranism and Prussian nationalism with a talent for rousing public utterance. He was also a well-published author of works that celebrated Prussia, in effect (I think) a talented propagandist for the regime.
Here’s the poem, with a rough translation (I welcome corrections, as always), and I’ve added some notes below it.
- Alumni and Extranei were the two categories of pupils at Pforta, the former far outnumbering the latter and the latter, who lodged in masters’ houses, paying considerably more for their education at the school.
- The school originated as an abbey, suppressed in 1540 by the Protestant Duke Henry of Saxony. With the proceeds of suppressed foundations (in similar fashion to the foundation of many English grammar schools) Henry’s son Duke Maurice (Moritz) founded Pforta in 1543 along with two other Fürstenschulen, “princely schools”, at Meissen and Merseburg (the latter school later relocated to Grimma) to serve Saxony.
- The curriculum at Pforta was a traditional diet of humanistic liberal arts, with Latin and Greek prominent (including Latin verse composition), always framed by Lutheran Christian worship.
- Teutonia and the later Teutonicus mean “Germany” and “German”, but “Teutonic” is a term that I think tugs Germany toward the Prussian east, if we think of the medieval Teutonic Order and its territory in Prussia. Prussia was the dominant force in the German Empire, the German Emperor or Kaiser also being the king of Prussia, and Pforta had fallen within Prussia ever since this part of the kingdom of Saxony had been given to Prussia at the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars.
- The poem works through a list of professions that a product of Pforta might pursue, as writers/thinkers, government officials, soldiers, or businessmen, styling them all beneficial to the state.
- It is at first sight odd that a decoration of a Christian chapel should be described with the Latin word lucifer, but in his lectures on Isaiah, at 14.12, Luther had insisted that “Lucifer” was not a name of Satan, as the Papacy falsely held, but simply of the Morning Star. This therefore looks like a Lutheran in-joke.
- The central window represented the scene of Jacob’s dream, his vision of a ladder leading to the gate of heaven. An association between Pforta, Latinised as Porta, and the porta caeli, “gate of heaven”, seen by the Patriarch Jacob was well established even before the establishment of the school, and regularly evoked in relation to the school. Genesis 29.17 in the Vulgate reads: pavensque quam terribilis inquit est locus iste non est hic aliud nisi domus Dei et porta caeli; and in the King James: “And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
- The two great figures at the origin of Lutheranism, Martin Luther himself (1483-1546) and the scholarly Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), primary author of the Augsburg Confession, the Lutheran confession of faith. Both were German, and both attached to the University of Wittenberg to the N-E of Naumburg, but the specification of Melanchthon as “German” is I think another touch of humour. Melanchthon was born Philipp Schwartzerdt, his adopted humanist surname a Greek version of “Blackearth”. But he was, the poem insists, despite appearances, a German.
- This is Friedrich Wilhelm III, who was king of Prussia when most of Saxony, including Naumburg, was ceded to Prussia after the Napoleonic Wars. There were significant administrative reforms when Pforta came under Prussian jurisdiction, backed by generous investment in its facilities, and an expansion of its curriculum into maths and the sciences, but to claim the Prussian king as a second founder (and the terms of the poem certainly reflect the message of the window, Maurice and the king balancing each other on either side) is an interesting overstatement of the role of Prussia in its history. The images of the monarchs are not visible on the photograph at the top, but you can see one of them at least, Friedrich Wilhelm I think, here.
- The essence of the Lutheran faith is rather brilliantly encapsulated in a single alcaic line — both the “material principle” or core doctrine of Lutheranism, Article IV of the Augsburg Confession, that faith alone “justifies” a person (makes them righteous in the eyes of God), since our fallen state precludes our earning the forgiveness of our sins in any way by our own efforts; and the “true” virtue, as opposed to traditional, originally pagan, ideas of virtue learned by habituation, that can only follow from that absolute submission to God’s grace.
Pforta has a very pretty setting, by all accounts, but also one that placed it in the way of historical events. It suffered badly in the Thirty Years War, as did much of Germany, and from the campaigns of Frederick the Great in the eighteenth century, while in 1813 Napoleon Bonaparte himself stopped at the gates of the school and enquired about it on his way to the battle of Lützen. The school had already been close enough to the battle of Jena in 1806 that the sounds of battle were audible. Eck could have anticipated that his confidently stated hopes for the school’s future in 1893 were in fact optimistic, but not perhaps the form that the twentieth century gave to its crises.
Between the publication of Witte’s Pförtner Jubeltage and R. Konetzny & P. Dorfmüller, Schulpforta 1543-1993. Ein Lesebuch a century later on the 450th anniversary, there had been a lot of history. The Nazi regime turned Pforta into a Napola, a school essentially designed to inculcate Nazi values of racial superiority and military preparedness. The school theoretically preserved its Classical specialisms, but as Helen Roche describes in “‘Wanderer, kommst du nach Pforta…’: the tension between Classical tradition and the demands of a Nazi elite-school education at Schulpforta and Ilfeld, 1934–45,” European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 20.4 (2013), 581-609, study of Greece and Rome was flattened into simple assertions of Aryan racial and cultural supremacy. How the windows fared during this period I do not know. After the war Pforta found itself in the Soviet-controlled part of Germany, and while it finally became co-educational at this point, connections with the Federal Republic were severed and it struggled to maintain its character against the ideological demands of the GDR’s educational policies. It is now, after Reunification, a public boarding school for gifted children serving Saxony-Anhalt, so an equilibrium has been restored.
Our poem is not perhaps as convincing a recreation of Horace’s lyric as James Peddie Steele’s remarkable celebration of an international medical conference and Rome’s first modern hospital, written at a similar time, but it isn’t aiming to emulate the Roman model in the same way, and it achieves clarity, elegance and not a little wit within a challenging poetic form. It offers a poetic counterpart of the colourful new windows to the extent even, Allan Hands suggests to me below, of paralleling the lyric stanzas with window panels. We can note, as I am wont to do, the alertness here to the “alcaic effect”, the special emphasis potentially lent to words at the centre of every third line of a stanza: iussu in the third stanza and caelique in the seventh are well served by their placement, for instance.
Whatever the merits of this Latin poem, in any case, it’s an interesting historical document from the fin de siècle.
“They should be in Irish”
This might be filed under “Latin found in the least expected places”, in this case on the handle of a revolver presented to a recipient of the VC after the Battle of Rorke’s Drift. But I’ve never made any bones about Lugubelinus being a repository for utterly random stuff that happens to grab my attention, so whatever. Meanwhile if Latin placed firmly at the service of imperialist sentiments, and we’re certainly going to see that here, seems in tension with my last blog, I don’t think so–Latin and the Greco-Roman Classics have historically possessed high cultural status, undoubtedly, and they were exploited as such in diverse ways–but I’m not going to pursue that here.
Enough preamble. It is December 17th, 1879, and we are at Trinity College, Dublin, in the Examination Hall. James Henry Reynolds, an army surgeon major, is receiving an honorary degree, having eleven months earlier, from the afternoon of January 22nd to the early morning of the 23rd, played a part in the desperate defence of the mission station at Rorke’s Drift during the Anglo-Zulu War, subsequently winning a Victoria Cross for his actions.
Reynolds (1844-1932) was an Irishman, a Dubliner, and a former student of the Medical School at Trinity, and representations from Trinity had helped to secure the award of his VC. After graduating in 1867 he had joined the Army Medical Department in the following year. He was the longest lived of the eleven recipients of the VC at Rorke’s Drift; and he lost two sons within a year during the Great War. As a Roman Catholic he is an example of a significant demographic within the Victorian British Army, a member of a rising Irish Catholic middle class no longer excluded by Penal Laws. He was played as a medical man of pacifist tendencies, in the latter respect not very accurately, by Patrick Magee in the movie Zulu (1964). His own, self-effacing account of events at Rorke’s Drift can be found here.
At Trinity that December Reynolds was being made an honorary LL.D., a Doctor of Laws, and he was presented for his degree with an extended Latin speech, a tradition that persists to this day at Trinity as well as at Oxford and Cambridge, delivered by the Public Orator of the University of Dublin. This was the versatile T. E. Webb QC, an academic philosopher and practicing lawyer who served as Orator from 1879 until 1887, at which point he became county court judge for Donegal. Webb was the Public Orator of the University of Dublin since, strictly speaking, Trinity is a college of the University of Dublin, though as it happens the only one ever established.
Here below is Webb’s speech, as it sets the tone for the inscribed handgun we’re working towards. It is followed by a translation that accompanies it in the Dublin daily The Freeman’s Journal on Thursday, December 18, 1879 p. 7, cols. 1-3, and which I presume had been provided to the people attending the degree ceremony. Aside from The Freeman’s Journal my source for what follows is a report by an anonymous Trinity academic for The University Magazine, January 1880 issue, pp. 104-106. No speeches of Webb are included in the book pictured at the top: its editor R. Y. Tyrrell (whom we shall meet again) believed them all, in 1909, lost beyond recovery. (It is remarkable how easily we can now find things that thirty years after delivery were despaired of.) The Freeman’s Journal also includes audience reactions, and how can I fail to follow suit? I have also added some explanatory notes of my own:
“Praehonorabilis Pro-Vice-Cancellarie totaque Universitas—
Alumnum Almae Matris praeclarum, purpura nostra, honoris causa, decorandum introduco. Quae regio in terris virtutem eximiam ignorat Jacobi Henrici Reynolds? Quae regio non miratur? (Applause.) Quem absentem, dum laudes eius nuperrime celebrarem, desideravit Academia, hunc reducem, praesentem, filium familias, laetissima salutat. Huic, praecipua inter omnes, Medicorum Schola gratulatur, sibi gaudet (applause). Hic Aesculapii vere filius (applause), qualis in Iliade Machaon, et Medicum et Heroa se ostendit (applause). Quid revocem, quid repetam, noctem illam periculosam, quae diei Alliensi illi successit, ob stragem legionum nostrarum, ob cladem nostratum, infaustae et infami? Inter tenebras incendiis semi-lucentes et luridas, medicus fit miles (applause), et commilitones vulneribus semianimes, inter tenebras, inter incendia, inter hostes infestos, servat. Hunc igitur salutamus—
Servati civis referentem praemia quercum
Nec hic ipse gloriae cumulus ac finis. Victoriae honoribus insignitus rediit. Quod ait Aquinas
Ille crucem pretium sceleris tulit, hic diadema
virtus eius verbis inversis refert. Quidni de eo sic loquar ?
Huic diadema nitet, praetulit ille Crucem.
Talem tantumque virum honoribus nostris cumulemus. Summum dignitatis Academicae gradum consequatur. Nostra succinctus trabea spatietur. Huic, sibi gratulans, gratuletur Academia. Vos plaudite! (Applause.)”
“Right Honourable Pro-Vice-Chancellor and the whole University—
I introduce to you to be adorned with our purple a distinguished alumnus of our Alma Mater. What region in the world does not know the brilliant merits of James Henry Reynolds? What region does not regard them with admiration? (Applause.) When lately I was celebrating his praises in this hall, the University had to regret his absence.1 Now he has returned—now he is present—and she proudly greets him as a son of the house. Above all the medical school welcomes him, and congratulates herself (applause). A true son of Aesculapius (applause), like Machaon in the Iliad, he has shown himself both physician and a hero (applause).2 Why should I recall that night of perils which succeeded a day as fatal as that of the Allia—fatal and ill-omened on account of the massacre of our legions and the slaughter of our sons?3 In a darkness, half lit up with conflagrations, and lurid with smoke, the physician transformed himself into a warrior, and through the darkness and the fires and the serried foes, rescued his fellow-soldiers, half-dead with wounds. Him we welcome—
With oak-leaved crown, which tells of soldiers saved.4
Nor was this the termination of his glory. He returned decked with the honours of the Victoria Cross. Juvenal5 once said—
One gains the cross and one the coronet.6
His glory makes this hold good. If I may play upon the words, I may say of him—
He seeks no coronet; he wears the cross.7
On such a one let us heap our honours. Let him reach the highest grade of academic distinction. Let him walk forth girt with our purple gown. Let the college congratulate him while she congratulates herself and you who are here greet him with applause.” (Applause.)
- Reynolds received his honorary degree at Trinity’s “Winter Commencement” on December 17th, having been due to receive it at the Summer Commencement on June 25th, but being detained at that time on some account in southern Africa. Webb had also spoken about Reynolds in his absence on that earlier occasion, and the speech is reported in The Freeman’s Journal June 26, 1879, p. 3 col. 5. Webb’s speech there is less classicizing, and also, I might say, more overtly colonial in ethos and expression.
- The son of Asclepius/Aesculapius, god of doctors, in Homer’s Iliad, Machaon (along with his brother Podalirius) was both a healer and a fighter–Machaon’s name actually means “warrior”. Thus Machaon treats Menelaus’ arrow wound, 4.192-219, and is himself wounded by an arrow from Paris, in the midst of the fighting, at 11.504-20. Reynolds was a non-combatant medical officer who had attended to the wounded throughout the battle, but had supported the defence directly by delivering ammunition to combatants under fire. The conceit of both-doctor-and-soldier returns, less tidily perhaps, on the handle of the revolver. It’s worth saying that the martial code of the Zulus, for instance the scorn for firearms as the recourse of cowards, is rather more evocative of the heroic ethos in the Iliad, cf. the low status of archers and archery.
- The Battle of the Allia was the archetypal Roman military catastrophe, the defeat of the Romans by the Gauls that allowed the Gallic capture of Rome, traditionally in 390BC. Here it stands for Isandlwana, the (more significant) action earlier on January 22, 1879 when the army of the Zulu Kingdom had destroyed part of a British force invading Zululand in one of the most catastrophic reverses ever suffered by British arms.
- Originally of Laelius, a character in Lucan’s De Bello Civili (1.358), a primus pilus or senior centurion who had won the corona civica, a Roman decoration for saving the life of another citizen in battle, which is here treated as a counterpart of the VC. In Lucan’s dystopian poem Laelius’ heroism is compromised by his blind loyalty to Caesar’s malign ambitions.
- “Aquinas” is “the man of Aquinum”. Before St. Thomas, the satirist Juvenal had identified himself as a native of Aquinum at Satires 3.319.
- Juvenal’s point with this line, 13.105, is that there is no justice: one man commits a crime and his reward is “the cross”, i.e. he is crucified, while another gets crowned for it.
- Webb’s Latin departs slightly from the English, and the latter plays down the sharpness of the original. A literal translation is, “His courage recalls Juvenal’s words ‘That one earned the cross as the reward for crime, and this one a crown’ with the words inverted. What prevents me saying of him ‘For this one a crown gleams, but that one preferred the Cross.'” Webb’s rephrasing of Juvenal, or rather embellishment (he adds a pentameter to Juvenal’s hexameter to make an elegiac couplet), presents “the cross”, the Victoria Cross, as preferable to any crown. The English nonetheless suppresses the awkward word sceleris, “crime”.
But (as anticipated) we’re not quite done with Reynolds’ return to his Alma Mater. The ceremony was by all accounts a pretty riotous occasion, with students who were in attendance bursting into song at various points, shouting irreverent remarks, even throwing firecrackers—one of which burnt a hole in the gown of a newly graduated Doctor of Divinity. At the end of it all Reynolds was chaired out of the building by students to the strains of “Rule Britannia”. But before this, and immediately after the degree ceremony, a presentation was made to him of a revolver, paid for by a collection mainly from students of the Medical School. It had been manufactured by John Rigby & Co. of Dublin, and its ivory handle was inscribed in Latin on either side (and a bit of Greek), one inscription prose, one in verse.
It was when the Registrar of the Medical School, Samuel Haughton, was introducing the presentation of the revolver to the assembled gathering, and describing these Latin inscriptions, that someone shouted out the title of this blog, and in general the combination in these accounts of an intense pride both in Ireland and in the British Empire is intriguing. There is an excellent account here of the irreducible contradictions of Ireland’s involvement in the Anglo-Zulu War, extending from command of the British invading force to impassioned support of the Zulu cause as parallel to Ireland’s, and one would expect Trinity to lean firmly toward the loyalist side. But comments like Haughton’s that Trinity was “the only English institution in Ireland that had been a success” (met by cheers according to The Freeman’s Journal) imply an ambivalence. Aside from the Irish dimension, and the Latin of course, I’m always interested in something the British Empire was very good at, redeeming military catastrophes with compelling stories of plucky resilience. Lady Sale is another illustration of this, and the defence of the Residency at Lucknow. These proceedings in Dublin certainly contribute to the mythologising of Rorke’s Drift, though I wouldn’t dispute for a second that Surgeon-Major James Henry Reynolds VC was plucky.
Here are the two inscriptions, in any case, the first another elegiac couplet by T. J. B. Brady, Professor of Classical Literature at Trinity, which hinges again on Reynolds as a fighting doctor:
Martis habens laeva dextraque Machaonis arma
Eripuit vitas hoste deditque suis.
“With the weapons of Mars in his left hand, and those of Machaon in his right,/ He took the lives of his enemy while he gave life to his own.”
The second inscription, in prose, is for me more interesting. It is by R. Y. Tyrrell, a scholar best known for an edition of Cicero’s letters who would be Webb’s successor-but-one as Public Orator:
Iacobo Henrico Reynolds ob virtutem tantam ad Vada Rorkii Zuluviorum a. d. xi Kal. Feb. MDCCCLXXIX praestitam condiscipuli amicique alii in Coll. SS. Trin. iuxta Dubl. versantes hoc donum tantulum–χάλκεα χρυσείων–reddimus.
“To James Henry Reynolds for the great courage he displayed at Rorke’s Drift in Zululand on January 22nd 1879 we, his fellow-students and other friends at Trinity College, Dublin, present this trifling gift–bronze arms for gold.”
Haughton informed his listeners in the Examination Hall that Tyrrell had agonized over how to express “Rorke’s Drift in Zululand” in Latin. What Tyrrell does with some finesse is play with the moment in Iliad VI where the Greek hero Diomedes and the Trojan ally Glaucus swap their armour as an expression of good will, but the poet comments that Glaucus must have lost his mind, as he was giving Diomedes his own golden armour in return for Diomedes’ bronze, χρύσεα χαλκείων, “gold [arms] for bronze” (6.236). Tyrrell reverses the Greek, “bronze arms for gold [things]”, while keeping it obviously reminiscent of Homer’s original. The base-metal revolver is of little value set against Reynolds’ invaluable courage, in other words–an elegant piece of composition however we (or that heckler) might feel about the wider circumstances. The two words χρύσεα χαλκείων had become proverbial for unequal exchanges in antiquity: Tyrrell will have encountered it as a self-standing proverb, for instance, in Cicero, Letters to Atticus 6.1, where Cicero uses the expression toward the end of the letter (#22), and Tyrrell’s edition (1890), co-edited with L. C. Purser, also of Trinity, would seek to restore them to the text at the beginning of the letter as well (#1).
I’ve wondered if this ivory-handled, Latin-adorned revolver is still in the possession of a descendant of James Henry Reynolds, or maybe has found its way to a regimental museum somewhere. But I return to the thought I started with, that the handle of a revolver is a peculiar place to find Latin inscriptions. Is it so odd, though, in 1879? A revolver at this juncture was characteristically the weapon of an officer, I think–and possibly especially a theoretically non-combatant officer like a military surgeon, a weapon of self-defence. A presentation sword might appear less strange, but by 1879 a revolver perhaps seemed more appropriate than a sword as a prestige military object on which to carve these words from a prestige language.
Latin for losers
We’re often asked these days to think about the role of Classics in Empire, the ways in which the classical educations and general conditioning enjoyed by many colonial officials shaped their perceptions and practice. I’ve written about such things myself, here for instance, and here, and here. But studying Europe in the 19th century, as I’ve been spending a lot of time doing this last year, has alerted me to something like the direct opposite. Step away from the colonial powers of Western Europe, as Mateusz Stróżyński has explained of Polish national self-expression, and the role of Latin in particular can get a bit more complicated.
In what follows I offer some examples of Latin deployed to resist imperial power. I’ve encountered them in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Latin-language newspaper Alaudae (1889-95), and it’s fair to say that, even though it is an explicit aim of Alaudae to promote Latin as a language that can overcome differences and inequalities between the peoples of Europe, he sometimes seems not to appreciate the full implications of what he is describing.
It would certainly have been grist to Ulrichs’ mill if he had appreciated what he was looking at. There’s a powerful moment in Issue 23 of Alaudae, from April 1892, where Ulrichs has reproduced the conclusion of a Latin oration delivered by Arthur Palmer marking the conferment of an honorary degree (from Trinity College Dublin) on Arthur Balfour, Chief Secretary for Ireland and later PM. The first part of the speech had featured in an earlier issue back in March 1891, just a month after the actual ceremony. Ulrichs’ source for the event was the Freeman’s Journal, a leading Dublin newspaper edited by William H Brayden, a regular correspondent of Ulrichs who is later spotted in the Aeolus chapter of Ulysses. Freeman’s Journal deployed its powerful voice in support of Home Rule, a kind of qualified independence for Ireland vigorously opposed by Balfour.
The conclusion of the Journal‘s account follows Balfour out of the gates of Trinity, a bastion of Unionism, and onto the streets of Dublin. Here are Ulrichs’ Latin version and a translation, at the end of which Ulrichs editorialises interestingly. By way of explanation: Charles Stewart Parnell had been the leading proponent of Home Rule, but was in fact at the time of the Journal‘s report already caught up in a scandal that would undermine his dominance of nationalist politics. By the time of Alaudae 23 he was dead at 45. Dublin Castle, meanwhile, just a couple of hundred yards up Dame St. from Trinity College, was the seat of British administration in Ireland:
“With the conclusion of the ceremony, Balfour left the University premises in a carriage to return to Dublin Castle, accompanied by a great throng of students. Seeing this, passers-by stopped and began to shout ‘Long live Parnell’!
We have in front of us the newspaper Freeman’s Journal, dated Dublin, Feb. 11, 1891, which describes these events and presents the whole speech in Latin, without translation.
Thus has Latin served the ruling party. Who knows whether tomorrow it may be destined to serve those who struggle and toil? Why indeed should honours not be conferred in this universal tongue upon those also who earn them in the national cause of the Irish people?”
Why indeed not? Vivat Parnell certainly has a ring to it. For Ulrichs Latin is a language that belongs to no one, and thus can as well celebrate the underdog as the powerful. In two moments at least in Alaudae we can see Latin doing pretty much that, I think, even if Ulrichs doesn’t quite realise it.
The first is some information Ulrichs has received from Istanbul, and the recollection it provokes of two medical students he had met during his residence in Würzburg, thus 1867-70:
“Not even in Constantinople is the Latin language spurned. In a high school in the Greek suburb of Pera, whose headmaster is Ch. Hadjichristou, Esq., it is taught by two masters. And years ago in Würzburg I knew two young men studying medicine there originating from Asia Minor, Greek speakers who had been taught Latin. “I have read,” said one of them, “beta of the Aeneid” (Book 2 of the Virgilian poem). Moreover, I remember they said, “We are Romi”. (Romii, that is, ‘We are Romans’.) They declared themselves to be Romans, not Hellenes, Romans of the eastern branch, descendants of those Romans who fought under the Comneni and the last of the Palaeologi.”
Ulrichs is talking about Greeks within the Ottoman Empire, whose identity was very much bound up with the continuation of the Roman Empire in East until the Ottoman capture of Constantinople/Istanbul in 1453. Maintaining that Roman identity even extended to learning the Latin language and reading Virgil’s epic of the foundation of Rome. What is this if not a minority community resisting the majority imperial culture by recourse to the Latin language?
My second example is from another empire to the north. Ulrichs has received a communication concerning a professor at the Universität Dorpat, a German-language institution in what is now Tartu, Estonia, at this stage well within the borders of the Russian Empire:
“At the Universität Dorpat Prof. Hoerschelmann has been teaching several subjects in Latin since 1892. Others he does still continue to teach in German; but he has decided, from Jan. 1, 1895, to deliver all of them in Latin. (So I was informed by letter on Dec. 9, 1894, in German.)”
In fact neither Wilhelm Hoerschelmann, a professor of Latin and Greek, nor Ulrichs would survive 1895. Ulrichs I think understands Hoerschelmann’s decision to teach in Latin as reflecting a recognition on the professor’s part of Ulrichs’ ideal of Latin as a universal language. But a more likely explanation is that a German-language university like Dorpat, which dispatched Lutheran pastors and well-educated German administrators across the Russian Empire, was at this point in history under pressure to Russify, a policy pursued by the last two Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II (who assumed the throne in November 1894). What does a German-speaking classical philologist do in these circumstances? To avoid teaching in Russian, he adopts a language to which the authorities cannot object (Ulrichs provides evidence elsewhere of the high status Latin could claim in Imperial Russia) and which is neither German nor the demanded alternative. Again, it seems, a beleaguered minority reaches for Latin to defend its identity.
There are other moments in Alaudae comparable to this, among them my favourite passage in the whole run of issues, and almost the first bit I translated, the account of the pharmacists’ ball in Brno (Brünn), now in the Czech Republic but then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where an awkward choice between Czech and German—and the default option was presumably German—was sidestepped by composing the dance card entirely in Latin. It is a beautiful, and in retrospect deeply poignant, anecdote. I wrote about it back here, at the very start of my involvement with Ulrichs.
I owe to Kresho Vuković my familiarity with Lav Subaric, “National identities and the Latin language in Hungary and Croatia: Language conflicts, 1784-1848”, in Th. D’haen, I. Goerlandt & R. D. Sell (eds.), Major versus Minor? – Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World (2015), pp. 53-66. Let me just quote part of Subaric’s summary of his fascinating account of developments within the Austro-Hungarian Empire:
“Confronted with the threat of the imperial politics of Germanization under Joseph II, the elite of the lands of the crown of St. Stephen [roughly Hungary and Croatia], united in their Hungarian identity, reacted by insisting on the use of Latin. After the threat was removed, the emerging Magyar identity saw Latin as a problem and tried to replace it with the national language. Other inhabitants of Hungary and Croatia, faced with the Magyar aspirations, initially held on to Latin, but the Croatian national movement soon saw Latin as a problem and tried to abolish it. Finally, inside Croatia, those who opposed the new national language saw Latin as a safeguard of their political identity.”
I did suggest that the historical role of Latin is complicated. But Subaric’s next observation is hard to dispute: “The dual role of Latin in this series of language conflicts, and especially its role as a defence for the national identity, has faded from collective memory.”
Domitian frag. 1
There’s a peculiar moment early in Martial’s first book of epigrams.
Martial’s first book of epigrams, I should start off by saying, though he himself entitled it Book 1, is not the first book of epigrams Martial wrote, not by any means. Book 1 was probably published in AD 86, and we think that a book of epigrams on the games in the Flavian Amphitheatre (Colosseum), and two books of poetic “gifts” at the Saturnalia, the Xenia and Apophoreta, predated Book 1.
And then there is the very first poem of Book 1: “Here he is! The poet you’re reading, the poet you request,/ Martial, famous the world over/ for his witty little books of epigrams;/ to whom, eager reader, you have given/ while alive and conscious such glory/ as precious few poets get post-cremation” (Hic est quem legis ille, quem requiris,/ toto notus in orbe Martialis/ argutis epigrammaton libellis/ cui, lector studiose, quod dedisti/ uiuenti decus atque sentienti,/ rari post cineres habent poetae.)
How can Martial claim to be so successful and famous at the start of his first book? Well, it can’t just be on the basis of those earlier books we know about, so we have to assume that he had produced a lot of poetry already, and that Book 1 represents some kind of new departure; and further books did follow regularly up until Book 12 in 101/102. The important point, though, is that at the start of Book 1 Martial could already claim celebrity status.
The peculiar moment I’m concerned with comes shortly after that opening poem. In 1.4, still in introductory mode at the start of the book (his books tend to run to about a hundred poems), Martial commends his epigrams to the emperor Domitian, asking him to approach them not with the severe expression of a ruler of the world (flattery will get you everywhere) but with the tolerance he would bring to a performance of mime, a notoriously unsophisticated (and often obscene) form of comedy which was nevertheless extremely popular in Rome.
In the next poem, 1.5, the emperor Domitian apparently replies to Martial: Do tibi naumachiam, tu das epigrammata nobis:/ uis, puto, cum libro, Marce, natare tuo (“I give you a sea battle, and you give me epigrams:/ I think you and your book have an ambition to go swimming, Marcus.”)
“Domitian” threatens to throw Martial along with his worthless Book 1 into the water. The sea-battle meanwhile (presumably providing the water in question) was a spectacular show staged by Domitian in the Colosseum for thousands of rapt spectators to which a book of short, funny, often smutty poems can’t begin to compare. But it’s a playful ticking off. “Domitian” uses an intimate form of address to Martial (M. Valerius Martialis), his praenomen (pre-name, first name) Marcus.
I’ve put Domitian in scare quotes there, and that reflects the scholarship. No one, to my knowledge, has suggested that this really was Domitian talking, that the emperor Domitian had composed a response to 1.4. Friedlaender, the great nineteenth-century commentator on Martial, describes Martial putting words in the emperor’s mouth (and never doing the same thing again), and as far as I’m aware Martial scholars have followed him in this.
But I wonder…
Domitian was a populist; every emperor had to be, and you don’t stage a sea battle in the Colosseum if you’re not. That Domitian had a good sense of humour, meanwhile, was definitively established by Ll. Morgan (remember the name) in Classical Quarterly in 1997. We also know he wrote poetry (Suetonius, Life of Domitian 2.2; Quintilian, Inst. Or. 10.1.91-2; Martial 5.5, and others), and he could certainly bash out a two-line elegiac epigram if he needed to. A further thought is whether it’s sensible to pretend to be an emperor who, despite that sense of humour, had a reputation as somewhat unpredictable and kinda ruthless.
Isn’t it actually more likely that Martial shared the poem with Domitian (we have evidence that this happened in poem 101 of the first book, a scribe of Martial whose handwriting was known to Domitian and his brother, and predecessor as emperor, Titus), and Domitian wrote a (slightly plodding) reply? We know that both Titus and Domitian showed favour to Martial, and it wouldn’t be the first or the last time a politician sought to harness the popular appeal of an artist, and I don’t need to embarrass anyone with toe-curling reminders of Cool Britannia. Domitian himself had between AD 83 and 85 put a celeb on his coins, as you can see at the top, the rhino (an impossibly exotic creature) that he had introduced to the Roman audience at the Colosseum. The denomination of coin with the rhino image is the lowest, a quadrans, so had the widest distribution. Domitian did not want the Roman people to forget the rhinoceros.
To Domitian, joining in the fun of Martial’s epigrams brought popularity (though with a slightly different demographic than the rhino coin, perhaps); to Martial it offered a brilliantly disruptive, eye-catching moment as he relaunched his poetic career. As for me, I am presenting you with a quite unprovable hunch, but that’s what blogs are for.
This would, though, be the only surviving poetry of the emperor Domitian, and indeed, modest as it is, a whole poem.
Middle-aged pursuits
As I coast toward 150 posts over 10 years (maybe a point to retire the blog…), this one brings together a few of its recurrent preoccupations, chronograms, Oxford, poetic metre, and it’s all, needless to say, in Latin.
The route to the cafe within the Town Hall in Oxford takes you past a display of the Oxford City Plate, the silverware used in Oxford civic ceremonies. Among the items is one I learned about last week from an unlikely source, the journal Chemistry and Industry in its June 24, 1961 issue, pp. 889-90. It is a piece of late Victoriana, and like a lot of that category of silverware looks like the FA Cup, and is a comparable kind of size. But the “Sheriff’s cup” was gifted to the City by Charles Lancelot Shadwell in 1908, according to the notice alongside it, and “is used to serve wine at Mayor-making ceremonies. The guests pass it around the table so everyone can drink from it.” I doubt the latter tradition persists, and I also have a hunch (see below) it isn’t quite what it was designed for.
On the bell of the “cup”, in any case, are the City of Oxford’s arms, and in the upper register a Latin text, on one side CIVITAS OXONIAE GAVDET IN SCABINO and on the other (currently out of sight) ET CRATERA PORRIGIT VOBIS PLENVM VINO — taken together, “The City of Oxford takes joy in its Sheriff, and offers you a mixing bowl full of wine”. (The word cratera maybe suggests a receptacle from which wine could be drawn, rather than any kind of actual cup.) But anyone to whom the name of Charles L. Shadwell is familiar will not be surprised to see that some of the letters of this inscription are larger than others.
Here it is again with the inflated letters in bold:
CIVITAS OXONIAE GAVDET IN SCABINO || ET CRATERA PORRIGIT VOBIS PLENVM VINO
It is, need I say, a chronogram, a text that additionally encodes a date by including letters that can also serve as numbers totalling up to a significant date. This can’t be done in English, which uses Roman script but not Roman numerals, but can be done in Latin (and Greek, Hebrew, and languages that use Arabic script, on which see this fascinating article, with some beautiful examples, by Mehr Afshan Farooqi).
In this case the letters doubling as numerals, CIVIXIVDICICIIVILVMVI, add up, counting each letter independently, to 1894, the year, his “Schrieval year”, when Shadwell served as Sheriff of Oxford, an entirely ceremonial position as far as I can gather. The cup was evidently something he had made for himself, then gifted to the City in 1908, by which time he was Provost of Oriel College.
But I mentioned metre, and this for me is the most interesting aspect of Shadwell’s cup. Of the chronograms of Shadwell I am aware of, one is a dactylic hexameter and the other, on the facade of the Rhodes Building in Oriel, is not metrical. The example in Kingsdown, Deal, which I have attempted to link to Shadwell, is another hexameter. The Latin on the Oxford City cup is certainly verse, but of a very different kind.
Civitas Oxoniae gaudet in Scabino/ et cratera porrigit vobis plenum vino has a medieval form, trochaic, but ruled by stress and rhyme, not by syllable quantity as in classical poetry. The most familiar example of this Vagantenstrophe or goliardic verse is the twelfth-century Confession of the Archpoet, which you can read more about here, and which begins Estuans intrinsecus ira vehementi / in amaritudine loquar mee menti, “Boiling inwardly with intense anger/ I shall address my mind in bitterness”. This specific poem was very familiar: I’ve come across no less than three Oxford takes on the Confession from the end of the nineteenth century in the last week, though with the poem attributed to Walter Map, as it once tended to be.
But my main interest in poetic metre has always been in the “ethos” of its various forms, what difference it makes to the meaning of poetry if it is couched in hexameters, hendecasyllables–or goliardic. In those other late Victorian goliardic poems, in every case (two by A. D. Godley of Omnibus fame, and the other included in James Williams’ 1901 collection The Oxford Year), the metre accompanies accounts of youthful misbehaviour and general fecklessness true to the character of medieval goliardic poetry.
In the case of the cup, opting for the medieval form suits well enough the function of the item inscribed: the goliardic poet was a heavy drinker, or claimed to be. In the same poem the Archpoet expresses his memorable ambition, meum est propositum in taberna mori/ ut sint vina proxima morientis ori, “It is my purpose to die in a tavern, so that there may be wine right by my mouth as I die”. But I think goliardics speak most of all to Shadwell’s perception of his role as Sheriff of Oxford, his sense of it as a medieval role in a medieval city. The non-classical word scabinus sets the tone. There may well be a social charge too when a University man celebrates his grand house in a classical hexameter and his role in city affairs in scurrilous goliardics: Shadwell was fastidious, self-important and an undoubted snob (there’s an anecdote of his dealings with City officials at the bottom).
But Charles L. Shadwell was also responsible for creating some rather beautiful epigraphic Neo-Latin. I think I have now identified examples on stone, wood and silver.
If anyone knows of comparably peculiar Latin inscriptions, with elongated Is and Vs etc. and dating between around 1870 and 1920, I’m on the lookout for further potential Shadwellograms, so do please let me know!
The Oxford Magazine January 29, 1947, 231-2, at 231.
In principio
An intriguing bit of C19th Latin to mark the end of a particularly challenging academic term. I’ve been promising myself the relaxing exercise of writing about something unrelated to anything else, and now I have a moment.
A Latin poem has come to my attention, as once before, from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Latin-language newspaper Alaudae. Ulrichs had been sent a copy of the poem by its author, Franz Sandvoss (pseudonym Xanthippus, 1833-1913, a writer and educator best known for vicious anti-semitism directed at, among others, the memory of Heinrich Heine), and summarises its content alongside a short quotation in Issue 27. The quotation is slightly inaccurate, however, and the summary may also suggest that Sandvoss’s poem was one thing lost by Ulrichs in a fire that destroyed his lodgings at the end of April 1893 (the issue in which Sandvoss’ poem is mentioned is dated May 1893), though Sandvoss’ politics would not not have appealed to Ulrichs if he was familiar with them. A Latin poem providing a snapshot of something, in any case.
For whatever reason, Ulrichs doesn’t record more than a small part of the poem, and it has been quite difficult to locate a copy of something that was presumably only printed in small quantities. Luckily it was reprinted in a fairly obscure journal called Allgemeine homöopathische Zeitung 141 (1900), p. 61, although for some reason the scan of this issue on Internet Archive misses out these pages, while the Hathi Trust doesn’t seem to have issues 140-141 at all. However, the modern version of an interlibrary loan came up trumps, and the Bodleian, bless them, secured me a scan of page 61 within a couple of days.
Here is the poem, to which I offer some very brief annotations at the bottom after a little more contextual matter. I am as always keen to hear better interpretations of any part of it, notes or translation or especially the nineteenth-century science:
The poem is accompanied in the journal by an introduction from “Dr. M.”, under the heading “The First Cell”, of which the following is a rough and ready translation:
“That Prof. Haeckel has really solved the great World Riddle of the genesis of the first cell is not clear to us; this great problem rather seems to us, in spite of Darwin and Haeckel, irresoluble without presuming a creative act. My dear old friend Franz Sandvoss (Xanthippus) in Weimar has expressed this question of the prima cellula very nicely in a humorous and satirical manner in a parody Carmen Saeculare, by sharing which we hope to bring some joy to colleagues lucky enough to have been nourished by the mother’s milk of the humanistic gymnasia.”
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was a German zoologist and biologist, a follower of Darwin, who in 1899 (so shortly before this issue of the journal) had published Die Welträthsel (“The Riddles of the World”), translated into English as The Riddle of the Universe, which was designed to answer the famous exposition by another Darwinian scholar, Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896), of seven World Riddles in an address to the Congress of German Scientists and Physicians in 1872. Both scholars were concerned, among other things, with the mystery of the origin of life, to which the role of the cell was considered fundamental, and although they disagreed violently between themselves, they (along with Darwin) represented to “Dr. M” and Sandvoss the scientific opposition to their own belief in a conscious, providential design in the Universe. (Sandvoss tries to suggest in the poem that Du Bois-Reymond’s understanding of nature is actually more a matter of superstitious belief than the religious view.)
The point of the reference to humanistic gymnasia is the emphasis of traditional subjects, such as Latin, in such German schools, and the concomitant marginality of the sciences. Relatedly, it is a significant decision on Sandvoss’ part to write his poem in Latin. Read Du Bois-Reymond and Haeckel and you find the Classical allusions common to people of their educational training, but there’s the hint also of a culture war around Classics. Haeckel for one bemoans in Die Räthsel the continuing prominence of “the dead learning that has come down from the cloistral schools of the Middle Ages” in children’s education.
Worth noting also is the journal in which Sandvoss’ poem is reprinted. The previous article describes the inauguration and unveiling of a statue of Samuel Hahnemann, pioneer of the pseudoscience of homeopathy, in Washington DC (attended by no less a personage than William McKinley, President of the United States). It is of course not surprising that a homeopathic publication should adopt an immaterialist standpoint.
- The title plays on that of Horace’s Carmen Saeculare, which marked the beginning of a new saeculum in 17 BC; cf. Kipling’s Carmen Circulare, on the dangers of driving.
- Possibly a more explicit reference than intended in the Latin, but students are clearly at issue here and in a poem that is to be sung to the tune of Gaudeamus.
- Protoplasm being the internal content of cells.
- I am not at all sure about this line.
- A play on Pater Omnipotens.
- In his address to the Congress, Du Bois-Reymond had used Latin to indicate the status of the various riddles, ignoramus, “We do not know”, or ignorabimus, “We shall never know”.
- This aggressive conclusion feels like it should be evoking a traditional turn of phrase. Jonathan Katz suggests to me the poem of Matthäus von Collin, Der Zwerg, which was set to music by Franz Schubert.
Post post
This is blogging as stress reduction, which it has been once or twice in the past. But it’s also an exercise in sorting my thoughts out, and illustrates, for what it’s worth, the peculiar difficulties of reading not just nineteenth-century Latin, but nineteenth-century Latin that is consciously promoting the language as equal to the demands of the modern day: the Latin of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ newspaper Alaudae, needless to say. As I’ve mentioned before, Ulrichs was interested in the post in any case, but had a professional interest in its workings while producing and broadcasting his newspaper across the world in the last years of his life, 1889-95.
At the point I’m going to talk about here (in issue 17-18, March 1891), he’s in the process of arguing that the administration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be better done in Latin, thereby removing the unfair advantage enjoyed by German, and by German-speakers within the Empire. Tongue somewhat in cheek, Ulrichs goes on to coin Latin equivalents for common contemporary postal terms, and here in a nutshell is the challenge (and appeal) of understanding and translating Alaudae, since it requires not only understanding Ulrichs’ Latin but also knowing what kind of postal items were in circulation in late nineteenth-century Europe. I can claim some limited expertise in the former.
Back in that earlier blog I mentioned one such postal item that I hadn’t encountered before, the newspaper wrapper, but once I did encounter it, it made a whole lot more sense of a couple of passages in Alaudae (Ulrichs’ Latin for this wrapper is fascia). Insight there had come with this video from the philatelists of Lancaster County, PA. But since then I’ve found a marvellous resource for understanding Victorian postal stationery: a series of six short articles by Colin Baker in the British Philatelic Bulletin issue 32 (1994-5) which are scanned and hosted on the Collect GB Stamps website and available here (1), here (2), here (3), here (4), here (5, including newspaper wrappers) and here (6). These are primarily concerned with developments in the UK, but postal practice was effectively developing in parallel across the nations signed up to the Universal Postal Union, established in 1874, and Baker notes what countries the UK imitated and how slow or fast the Post Office was to adopt innovations from abroad.
On the back of these articles, here is Ulrichs’ text at the relevant point, my translation, and the postal items that I think Ulrichs has in mind, with links to descriptions and illustrations where I have them. WordPress plays havoc with formatting, but it still should be fairly clear what goes with what. My interpretation of Ulrichs’ Latin is embodied in the translation as much as anything, and I welcome corrections.
Ecce, quem in modum fingi possint verba postalia Latina:
Chartula epistolaris duplex. Huic parti adjuncta appendix respondendo destinata est. Appendix responso scribundo. In hoc latere praeter inscriptionem nil poni licet.
Epistola curae praecipuae commendata. Epistola ad certam summam cautione postali munita. Epistola chartas continens aeris vice fungentes.
Mandatum de solvendo postale. (Assignatio postalis.) Appendicula separabilis. Quam resecandi et sibi habendi accipienti jus est.
In chartula duplici conglutinabili recentissimae inventionis: Chartula epistolaris clausa. Quam ut aperias, secundum foraminum seriem avelle marginem.
En, res facillima.
Witness how postal words may be fashioned in Latin:
‘Two-fold letter card.’ ‘The attachment joined to this part is intended for a reply.’ ‘Attachment for writing a reply.’ ‘On this side nothing beside an address may be put.’
‘Letter entrusted to special care.’ ‘Letter protected by postal insurance to a set sum.’ ‘Letter containing sheets serving in place of cash [cheques].’
‘Postal order for payment. (Postal assignment.)’ ‘Detachable counterfoil, which the recipient has the right to cut off and keep.’
On the sealable two-fold card recently invented: ‘Closed letter card. To open, tear the edge along the line of perforations.’
There, nothing easier!
Reply Card: development of the simple postcard (one side for the message & one for the address) with two cards folded together, one detachable for the reply. Description & image pp. 80-81 here.
Various forms of registered post, which included compensation for loss or damage calculated according to a table of fees: see here.
Still today a reasonably familiar item, but shouldn’t the counterfoil be for the sender, mittenti, not the recipient, accipienti?
A development of the first item known as a Letter Card and designed for messages requiring privacy, a sealable double card: pp. 208-209 here, confirming that in 1891 it was indeed a recent invention.
To err
A joke in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Alaudae. Probably not worth a blog (though what is these days?), but it’s a good one, I think: donnish and thus my favourite kind.
In Issue 22 of Alaudae (from January 1892) Ulrichs has got hold of an American publication called The University Magazine, a rather waspy exercise focussed on the elite US institutions of higher education. He spends a bit of time in this and subsequent issues sharing, in Latin of course, a description of the physical monuments of the College of New Jersey, Collegium Neo-Caesariense in Latin, shortly to be renamed Princeton University in 1896, but he also refers to some of the other articles in the issue.
One he mentions is an odd little narrative, “Ione: A Tale of Old Mycenae”. It’s hard to summarise, but the story basically comes down to Aristocles, the husband of the divinely beautiful Ione, being tempted by the gods, Aphrodite in particular, by way of a test of his professed devotion to his wife. It features some exceptionally affected dialogue, for instance:
“‘My Aristocles, thou doth distrust me. Dost thou wonder that for thee my beauty is divine? Love is blind only because, forsooth, it doth o’erlook all blemishes in its ideal! Whatso’er doth move a man is divine for him. Dost thou forget that Love is very godfulness?’ ‘I mistrust thee not,’ he answered,” etc. etc.
I’m delighted to report that the author of “Ione”, James E. Homans, seems to have made his living after graduating from Harvard writing the last word in practical guides to everyday stuff: ABC of the Telephone: A Practical and Useful Treatise for Students and Workers in Telephony (1901); Self-propelled Vehicles : A Practical Treatise on the Theory, Construction, Operation, Care and Management of All Forms of Automobiles (1902); New American Encyclopedia of Social and Commercial Information: A Practical and Educational Compendium Suited to the Needs of Everyday Life (1905); and Homans’ First Principles of Electricity (1916).
But Ulrichs has his own way of puncturing this overheated prose. By manipulating Ione’s name into the genitive case, and retaining its Greek inflection in his Latin text, and by doing the standard thing back then of writing a consonantal i as a j, well, it becomes narratio ficta, sumta ex antiquis Mycenis, sub titulo puellae Jones, “A tale of old Mycenae with the title, the Jones girl.”
Ulrichs Bodleianae d. d.
As some of you will have gathered, I’m spending much of my time at the moment editing translations of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Latin newspaper Alaudae, which he published with considerable, perhaps surprising, success, from 1889 until his death in 1895.
Somewhat late in the day it occurred to me to investigate what my local Bodleian Library possessed in the way of original Alaudae material. I had an idea it held original copies of Ulrichs’ Latin newspaper, but I only got round to calling them up from the stack two days ago. What I found, bearing in mind I’ve been working through the 33 issues of Alaudae since September, was rather special.
First the disappointing news, though. The Bod doesn’t seem to have a full run of issues, 1-33, but rather 1-15 and then 25. As we’ll see, what the Bodleian has depends on what Ulrichs thought to send it.
Issues 1-15 are bound together in the Bodleian copy, with Issue 25 loose and tucked in the same volume. Glued in the front of the volume is a postcard (front and back in the photos below) with a handwritten note from Ulrichs in Aquila, the Italian town (now L’Aquila) where he spent his final years, and where he composed all those issues of Alaudae:
“Dear Sir!
You have had the kindness (the 20 May) to thank me for having sent my little journal périodique Latin Alaudae I & II. With the present lines I would ask, the Bodleian library might accept an abonnement gratuit of Alaudae and, in consequence, accord me the honour to send, in quality of donum auctoris, also the following numbers.
Yours very sincerely,
Carlo Arrigo Ulrichs
Aquila degli Abruzzi
Italia
31 May 1889.”
Most of the readers of Alaudae were paying subscribers: the terms of subscription (in Latin, like everything else) precede every issue. What Ulrichs is offering the Bodleian here is a free subscription, a gift of the author, and he is committing himself, if the offer is acceptable, to sending “the following numbers”, which I take to mean all the issues to come.
I shan’t show all my workings, as that might get a bit dull, but from a combination of postmarks, accession notes added by Bodleian librarians, and in particular Ulrichs’ own elegant autograph inscriptions on some numbers, it emerges that Ulrichs fulfilled his generous offer up to a point, sending issues periodically in batches. Thus a postmark and half of a five-cent stamp (and all of King Umberto I’s substantial moustache) at the end of 2, plus the fragment of what I think is a newspaper wrapper (there’s another fragment of a newspaper wrapper attached to Ulrichs’ note; more on wrappers below), testify to Ulrichs’ posting of Issues 1-2 as mentioned on the postcard. (King Umberto was a bit of a philistine, incidentally. But Queen Margherita subscribed to Alaudae, as well as allegedly lending her name to a pizza.)
At the end of Issue 4 we find the same postmark, AQUILA (ABRUZZI), and in the newspaper itself, in Issue 3, there is a personal communication (Ulrichs likes to include such communications to subscribers & sim. at the end of his issues) to “E. B. Nich.” at the “Library of the University of Oxford”: Verba tua benevola accepi. Ecce hic, quod obtuleram, “I have received your kind words. Find here what I had offered.” Ulrichs seems to refer back here to his own note and its offer quoted above, while “Nich.” is Edward Nicholson, Bodley’s Librarian at the time, who has evidently replied to Ulrichs’ postcard. At the end of Issue 6 there’s another address and postmark, and accession notes by the library indicating that 7-8 arrived along with 5-6 (in Issue 10 Ulrichs records the Bodleian’s thanks acceptis lib[ellis] 5-8, “for the receipt of Issues 5-8”); at the start of 9 a very elegant address including Nicholson’s name (image at the top) accompanies issues 9-13; and again at the start of 14 (below) there is an indication that 14-15 are being sent, though accession notes indicate that 14-15 were sent before 9-13. Finally, 25 (also below), not bound with the rest, was apparently sent individually.
Were the other issues ever sent by Ulrichs? The accession of these issues was so meticulous at the Bodleian end (judging by the accession dates) that I doubt it. I can also understand why he might not have done. Ulrichs struck up productive relationships with readers in Spain, the US, Britain, Finland, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire, and much of his content is generated from material shared or sent by these contacts. There’s no evidence that I’ve yet encountered of anything similar with Nicholson or the Bodleian, so perhaps no strong reason for Ulrichs to keep the library in mind, more’s the pity.
One thing I have to develop in the next few months is a greater understanding than I can currently claim of postal habits at the end of the nineteenth century. (I seek the Bozi Mohacek of circa 1892 self-sealable pre-paid postcards.) I already know much more than I once did about newspaper wrappers, the means by which newspapers reached their intended destination, thanks to this video, and I was more delighted than I would ever have expected to be to find traces of such wrappers among these Bodleian issues.
Ulrichs has a special interest in matters postal, having written in the past about the postal service in his native Hanover, and being faced with a pressing need to despatch to the four winds a Latin newspaper on which, he calculated, the sun never set, so remarkably far-flung was its readership. This generates some exceedingly tricky passages as he translates contemporary postal realities into Latin, but also some excellent content. He recounts, for instance, the peregrinations of some Romanian newspapers sent him from Constanța, Ovid’s place of exile (he contrasts the existence of a statue of Ovid in Constanța with the lack of any such statue, in his day, in Ovid’s hometown of Sulmona, not far from Aquila, the regrettable neglect of Latin in contemporary Italy being a regular theme in Alaudae). The Romanian newspapers had been bound in two newspaper wrappers, with the address to “Aquila” written across both. When the wrappers became separated, and “Aqui” from “la”, the parcel went to Acqui (Terme), which is a very long way from Aquila.
We also hear of the wrapper for issue 17-18 (a single issue) arriving in Lima, New York without the newspaper, and then of the postcard sent to Ulrichs by the subscriber in Lima reaching Aquila via Bombay, having somehow been misdirected to the Indian Mail. That card had taken 68 days to get from New York State to Aquila, but in general the speed of the post from Aquila to Oxford at this time, and also the efficiency with which the Bodleian accessioned the material it received, if I’m interpreting correctly what I’m looking at, was impressive.
Ulrichs’ Latin addresses in full:
6: Alaudarum auctor: Carlo Arrigo Ulrichs, “The author of Alaudae, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs”;
9: Viris clarissimis bibliothecae universitariae Bodlejanae curatoribus, ad manus Viri Clarissimi Eduardi Nicholson, bibliothecarii, “To the most esteemed gentlemen, the curators of the Bodleian University Library, for the attention of the most esteemed gentleman Edward Nicholson, Librarian”;
14: Bibliothecae Bodlejanae universitatis Oxfordiensis; Misit D(ono) D(edit) D(edicavit) hasce duas Alaudas Alaudarum moderator, auctor, “To the Bodleian University Library of Oxford”; “These two issues of Alaudae have been sent, given and dedicated as a gift by the editor and author of Alaudae”;
25: Misit Alaudarum auctor, “Sent by the author of Alaudae“.
Do I need to add that encountering Ulrichs’ handwriting, both informal and calligraphic, and recognising in it that glorious eccentricity and charm that emerges from every issue of Alaudae; tracing in detail his dealings with Nicholson and the Bodleian; and gaining some sense at least of how he managed to broadcast his Latin newspaper from a tiny garret in Aquila to Mexico City, Madras and a remarkable number of places in between, is simply the kind of thing I became an academic to do?
Prussian ’ggression; ducal dubieties
In January/February 1891 Karl Heinrich Ulrichs included a short, impassioned and enigmatic paragraph in his Latin-language newspaper Alaudae. It illustrates nicely both the challenge and the interest of editing Alaudae, since Ulrichs is making allusions that he was probably confident his contemporary readers would recognise, but which are more than a little opaque in 2023.
I give the text below, but to summarize it, Ulrichs first makes reference to a defeated leader in a civil war whose possessions had been expropriated at his defeat, but who has nevertheless more recently been permitted to receive an inheritance, and this outcome is then contrasted with the circumstances of another leader, also dispossessed, whose surviving son has little hope of recovering what is properly his.
Here is the passage in question, in English and the original Latin:
“A general, defeated in civil war, was once forcibly stripped of what was his by the victors. The same man not long ago took possession, with no objection, of an inheritance that had been legally bequeathed to him. Another leader, again forcibly stripped of what was his, has a surviving son. To this son also an inheritance has been legally bequeathed. When will that be restored to him, an inheritance that in defiance of justice and right a more powerful man has had the effrontery to steal, that man to whom so many among those people were wont to swear loyalty come hell or high water? When? Has reverence for what is right among you just turned into an old-womanish superstition? Are you not flushed with shame still to be striking TO EACH THEIR OWN?”
Dux quondam, victus bello civili, eo quod suum erat a victoribus vi spoliatus est. Idem nuper, contradicente nemine, potitus est devolutae ad se legitime hereditatis. Alii principi, suo eādem vi spoliato, superstes est filius. Ad hunc quoque legitime devoluta est hereditas. Quando huic ea restituetur, hereditas quam contra jus contra fas ausus est intercipere potentior, iste in cuius verba apud illos solebant per fas et nefas jurare tot animi? Quando? Num apud vos verecundia eius quod fas est abiit in superstitiones aniles? Nonne rubore suffundimini adhuc feriundo SUUM CUIQUE?
I understand the second half, I think. Ulrichs was born in the Kingdom of Hanover, which subsequently, in 1866, had been defeated and annexed by Prussia, and Ulrichs regularly expresses his outrage at this turn of events. The word I’ve translated “leader”, princeps, can also be “prince”, and suggests Ernst August, erstwhile Crown Prince of Hanover, the son of the king of Hanover deposed by the Prussians who never relinquished his claim to the crown of Hanover. The “stronger man” is surely Bismarck, whose brainchild the German Empire was that emerged from Prussian expansion, but who had resigned his position as Chancellor just a year before Ulrichs was writing.
Finally, the motto that the “those people” should be ashamed to be “striking” (the natural sense of ferio), suum cuique (one which I gather was sufficiently tainted by Nazi use to be avoided these days) is found on some Prussian coins of an earlier date, I think, and on the badges of Prussian guardsmen, but at any rate as the motto of the Order of the Black Eagle, the highest distinction in the Kingdom of Prussia, clearly identifies Ulrichs’ target as the Prussians even if I’m still pondering the precise implication of feriundo.
[24.09.2023: My esteemed colleague Neil McLynn has clarified that feriundo for me. He’s surely right that the thing being “struck” is, precisely, the Order of the Black Eagle, which while rarely awarded could amount to a powerful exercise in Prussian public relations when it was. The most recent recipient had been Prince George, the future George V, during a trip to Berlin with his father the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII). He was formally invested with the order on March 22, 1890.]
The first half is trickier. I’m assuming, and this could be a basic mistake, that a civil war well enough known in Europe in 1891, which is significantly far in the past (quondam) but of which the aftermath is still contested (nuper), is likely to be the American Civil War. My best guess is that in the dux who was deprived of his possessions after the war, but managed without contest to receive an inheritance, Ulrichs is making a rather loose reference to the court case United States v. Lee in 1882, in which George Washington Custis Lee, son of Mary Anna Custis Lee and Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate forces in the Civil War, sued for the return of his mother’s Arlington estate, which had effectively been confiscated by the US government in the course of the war in 1864, and subsequently — an inspired gesture — largely turned into the Arlington National Cemetery.
In 1882, however, the Supreme Court ruled in Custis Lee’s favour, and while he never returned to Arlington, he received generous compensation from the government — recovered his inheritance, in other words. Custis Lee was himself quite prominent in the Confederate army, but if it is this case that Ulrichs is referring to, I think there’s some conflation in Ulrichs’ mind of the famous Robert E. Lee and the lesser-known Custis Lee.
So on the one hand we have a civil war and a recent high-profile case; on the other, if it is indeed the Lee suit at issue, a vagueness, at least, in the definition of the parties, as well as an inaccurate assertion that the claim to the inheritance was uncontested. I’m inclined to think this can be explained by Ulrichs’ passionate concern for the claims of Ernst August, which leads him in the process of condemning Prussian injustice to flatten and simplify a half-remembered recent controversy in the United States. But that doesn’t entirely satisfy me.
So if anyone has a better candidate for that dux dispossessed in civil war, I am all ears. I should say that it’s just the kind of thing that Ulrichs will himself decide to clarify in three issues’ time, in which case I’ll let you know.