Finnish finish
You’ll have to take my word for it, but the text on the side of this building in Tampere, Finland, is in Latin. The building is the Tampereen klassillinen lukio (“Tampere classical upper secondary school”; I’ve stolen the image from its website), the older part bearing the Latin text dating from 1907, and indeed the text was written to mark the completion of these new school premises.
The author of the Latin text was Fridolf Gustafsson, Professor of Latin at the Imperial Alexander University, as the University of Helsinki was known for as long as Finland formed part of the Russian Empire. Gustafsson was one of Carl Heinrich Ulrichs’ most important correspondents during his composition of his Latin newspaper Alaudae, but I’m now doing a little work on Gustafsson as a composer of Latin in his own right.
Here is the poem that is inscribed on the wall of the school. It has eight lines, but actually consists of two elegiac couplets, with each of the four lines divided at the main caesura:
Fennia vos genuit,|| gremio vos intima fovit,
arboris auscultet || murmura quisque suae.
Fenni vos maneatis,|| at hoc animis retinete,
Graecia quid dederit || vobis et Hesperia.
“Finland bred you, cherished you deep in her bosom,/ Let each lend ear to the rustling of his tree./ Finns may you remain, but hold this in your thoughts,/ What Greece gave you, and what Italy.”
There’s something else to say about the metre of this poem, but first some words on its content. Gustafsson was much involved in public life, indeed in 1907 elected an MP for the short-lived Finnish parliament of 1907-1908. National sentiment in Finland was a complicated phenomenon at this point, and while Gustafsson was a man of liberal views and in favour of Finnish self-determination, his emphasis in politics was on the rights of the Swedish-speaking minority (who tended to be the social, cultural and commercial elite), a position which can perhaps seem in retrospect more reactionary than it really was. All that being said, however, this poem is a pretty impeccable exercise in Finnish patriotism. The tree to which each pupil should listen is (I think) the silver birch, Finland’s national tree.
The school was (and is) a classical school. Latin is still taught there today, I’m delighted to say, but Gustafsson’s poem indicates how prominent a role Classics played in its ethos and curriculum 120 years ago.
The metrical issue is that, as has been noted, the verse doesn’t quite scan. The Latin word vobis consists of two long syllables, and to be metrical the second needs to be short. Having twice composed Latin for a permanent memorial, it is the content of one’s most distressing dreams that one’s errors might be immortalised in stone for the foreseeable future. In Gustafsson’s case it is very odd, as he was an active and talented Latin poet, using Classical quantitative forms. I have wondered whether his text might have become garbled in its transmission from Helsinki to Tampere, since a simple transposition of two words, vobis and Graecia would yield an acceptable, if in respects other than the metrical less elegant, pentameter line, vobis quid dederit Graecia et Hesperia. (Platnauer assures me that the elision of -a in that position has good precedents.)
To end, though, another off-cut from my research, more Finnish Latin, but this time for Fridolf Gustafsson rather than by him, verse presented to him on his sixtieth birthday by Finnish teachers of Classics. I offer it as potential inspiration to my former students as I close in with regrettable speed on the same milestone. The translation was composed in airports and on trains around a short talk I gave last weekend at a wonderful event in Castel Madama near Tivoli, in which I combined these thoughts with these. So as always I welcome corrections and better ideas. I must also add that I owe a huge debt in all this research to my Finnish student Aune Tytti Hyttinen.
Aornos by train
I keep telling myself to give up the blog and use my time more productively, but then an image like this comes along.
It was sent me by Luca Olivieri, Director of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan, and it’s a photo of a tunnel entrance he saw on the Peshawar-Rawalpindi railway line when travelling it in the 1980s. Heading from Peshawar toward Pindi, this is apparently the last tunnel before the line crosses the river Indus by the bridge at Attock.
Aornos was the mountain fastness captured by Alexander in 327/6, his last significant military success before crossing the Indus and entering India proper. As I suggested both here and here, Aornos is to be identified with Mt. Ilam in Swat, which is about 60 miles as the crow flies from this tunnel entrance.
So what were they thinking about in 1883?
Well, as I also indicated back when, the location of Aornos has long been a matter of dispute, and even today you’ll find scholars who don’t accept the identification with Ilam. Earlier or other candidates for Aornos tend to have a particular thing in common which Ilam lacks, and that is a location, strongly encouraged by Curtius Rufus 8.11.7, Diodorus 17.85.3 and Strabo 15.1.8, close to the river Indus. Here is an extremely rough-and-ready map of the four most influential proposals for the site of Aornos before Ilam, while Ilam is the dot far off to the west.
The Indus-adjacent dots are the locations proposed, from bottom to top, by Claude-Auguste Court in 1836, a Napoleonic veteran who served Maharajah Ranjit Singh in the Punjab, Alexander Cunningham in 1848, founder of the Archaeological Survey of India, James Abbott in 1854, founder of Abbottabad, and Aurel Stein in 1926, archaeologist and explorer, and they track the right bank of the river from south to north. The Aornos railway tunnel is situated close to General Court’s candidate across the river from Attock, possibly actually right underneath it.
I’ve mentioned a couple of times before the remarkable energy that the British (and other Europeans) in N.-W. India put into identifying the vestiges, real or imagined, of Alexander’s campaigns, and identifying the rock of Aornos was the ultimate prize. This quest was never innocent of a sense of their own presence and purpose in these unfamiliar places, needless to say. It is unexpected, but entirely apt, that we find that preoccupation with Alexander here married to the most familiar example of British efforts to pacify their Indian possessions, the railways.
which built his house upon a rock
Thoughts on something I found rather remarkable during a weekend away; also on encountering in three-dimensional form the argument of the book I happened to be reading. In the photograph is Wesley Hall in Whitby, opened in 1901, and my holiday reading (because I know how to have fun) was Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In Whitby, I know, I know, I should have been reading Dracula.
When first built, Wesley Hall apparently provided the Methodists of Whitby with a space for a Sunday School and other such ancillary activities, but it later became their main place of worship when an adjacent chapel became too ramshackle for that purpose.
A closer view of the building reveals that it is covered in names, on larger ashlar details that decorate the brick facade,
on smaller ashlar details,
and (as initials) on individual bricks,
The names and initials self-evidently record financial contributions toward the construction of the Hall, donations large, medium and small. They decorate the front facade of the building and the right side as one looks at it, at least (I couldn’t see the left side), for a certain distance back from the road. The names are as a result clearly visible, and deliberately so, to anyone passing by the building.
As Weber was simultaneously informing me, this is all very characteristically Methodist, a religious philosophy that has always been comfortable with the acquisition of wealth, in a way similar to other low Protestant traditions (the theme of Weber’s book), so long as that wealth be put to good use. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, held to “the old Puritan doctrine that works are not the cause, but only the means of knowing one’s state of grace, and even this only when they are performed solely for the glory of God” (Weber tr. Parsons, p. 141). By doing good works you assure yourself that you are one of the elect. In the case of Wesley Hall, much of the funding for the building came from Robert Elliott Pannett, a Methodist solicitor who also bequeathed money for the building of an art gallery (now a gallery and town museum) in a park named after him in Whitby. His name features on one of the larger blocks.
Wesley Hall thus, it seems to me, expresses in architectural form in an unusually explicit way its religious principles, a building that advertises the individual acts of generosity that brought it into existence, and blazons for all to see the worthiness in the sight of God of each and every person named on it. The Hall has not housed the Methodists since the 1970s, and now contains a bar and restaurant, but the community who built it, and their faith, is celebrated for as long as it remains standing. I am not a Methodist; I am not even a believer. But I can’t help finding that arresting, and rather beautiful.
Publication
They’re coming thick and fast, comparatively speaking (I refer to this and this…), but none I’m so proud of as this. Thanks above all to Michael Lombardi-Nash for getting me hooked on C19th Latin and on Carl Heinrich Ulrichs, a truly remarkable man. It’ll be published pretty much smack on Ulrichs’s 200th birthday on 28th August 2025, which was not intended but nice all the same.
Serendipity (or summat)
Ulrichs expresses the wish in the very last issue of Alaudae that an educational award ceremony in Rome on October 2, 1894 had not been given the political dimension it was by the politically charged speeches that accompanied it, and furthermore regrets that the event had taken place “on that day.”
The only thing I could associate with “that day”, October 2, was the plebiscite in 1870 that brought Rome and the other Papal States into the new state of Italy and out of Papal control, but that date has no significance today (I checked with my Italian friends), so I’d left it as an outside possibility that this was what Ulrichs had meant.
But while proofing and indexing last week I happened on a scan in Google Books of the Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia for October to December 1894, and from it it was clear, something that Ulrichs had omitted to say, that the mayor of Rome, in introducing the educational event, had made an explicit connection in nationalistic terms between the recognition of the academic merit of the young and the plebiscite 24 years earlier.
So I’d been on the right track after all, and Ulrichs deserves credit for baulking at the overt intrusion of nationalism into education. But then Ulrichs, a Hanoverian exile from the German Empire, was sensitive to such things.
All well and good, but worth a blog? Probably not, and my real reason for writing won’t make it so either. But when looking back at the pdf I’d downloaded for the reference I needed to write a footnote, I noticed the provenance of the scan on Google Books, a copy of the Gazzetta Ufficiale for October-December 1894 given to the library of Princeton University by “M. T. Pyne”, Moses Taylor Pyne, a dubious character in many ways, but a major financial benefactor of Princeton and influence on its development.
I registered the name Pyne because he’s in the index to Ulrichs’ newspaper I’m composing alongside the proof reading. He’s there because Ulrichs had received a letter from Pyne complimenting Ulrichs on an account in Alaudae of folkloric traditions at Princeton.
It’s a small world, I suppose, or maybe it was in 1894.
βιβλίων thecarius
A post to mark what is hopefully the final stage of bringing Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ newspaper Alaudae–Latin text, English translation and explanatory notes–to publication. Some final proofing remains, and the rather daunting prospect of composing an index, but we are so very nearly there, and coming in on time as the 200th anniversary of Ulrichs’ birth approaches on 28th August 2025.
It’s maybe not inappropriate at this stage of the process to have a post about books and libraries, so here is one of Ulrichs’ poems from Alaudae (p. 136-7, in the double issue 17-18), a comical account of an inadequately heated library. A text of the poem from the newspaper is followed by an English translation, and then I’ll provide some explanations and context which may give a final glimpse of a theme of my blogs over the last four years or so, what a buzz it can be to edit material like this.
The library in question is the Provincial Library in Aquila, to which we could safely have assumed that the impoverished author of Alaudae, who lived in this Apennine town from 1883 until his death in 1895, would have had recourse for some of his material. There is some positive evidence to that effect, however. In Issue 3 of his newspaper, in relation to an ancient inscription he has been discussing, Ulrichs cites its publication in Volume IX of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Bearing in mind that Niccolò Persichetti, Ulrichs’ later patron, said of Ulrichs in his eulogy at his funeral that “he had neither capital nor inheritance, nor even a collection of books, though he carried a library in his head. The books he did have were limited to some dictionaries and some works that had been given to him…”, his access to CIL would be surprising were it not for the kind of remarkably specific information one can gather from Google Books: that the library in Aquila had recently sold duplicate copies of books and used the proceeds to purchase, among other things, Mommsen’s Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. I assume it’s still there.
Research on the nineteenth century is very different from research on the first, as I may have mentioned once or twice before, and the big difference is this kind of granular evidence. The characteristic mental state of the Classicist, or maybe of this particular Classicist, is the evidence-light hunch. In the nineteenth century hunches very quickly become either confident assertions or embarrassing misconceptions.
But let’s talk about this poem. It is a light-hearted piece of work, and has a metre to match, a couplet of iambic trimeters and dimeters which is most familiar from Horace’s Epodes (which are imitating Archilochus’ metrical practice), but which is here, as Ulrichs indicates, a bit more loosely realised than Horace and more like Phaedrus’ iambics, most obviously in where long syllables are allowed. Less rigid realisations of metres, broadly speaking, indicate less serious poetic exercises, and that is a clear enough dynamic in this case.
Some explanations of details before I get to the nub of things. The Vestal Virgins guarded the flame in the temple of Vesta on the persistence of which Rome’s ongoing existence depended, a bit like the Barbary macaques on the Rock of Gibraltar. Baku, meanwhile, now in Azerbaijan, boasts a famous Ateshgah, a Zoroastrian fire temple. And in the second-last line we encounter something called “tmesis”, a divided word. The Latin verb for “averts” is averruncat, but Ulrichs has broken it up with a -que, “and.” He is illustrating, of course, the librarian’s last-minute wipe of the drip from his streaming nose.
Finally, though, my title. The Greek word at the top of the third column is βιβλίων, bibliōn, “of books” (cf. the Bible), and Ulrichs is here playfully the title of the “librarian”, in Latin bibliothecarius, in Italian bibliotecario, in Greek βιβλιοθηκάριος, bibliothecarios. It’s my title because the main business of this blog is the identity of the bibliotecario of the Provincial Library in Aquila, and thus the target of Ulrichs’ poem.
At this point in the editing of this text, pennies are dropping so loudly for me regarding various anonymous contacts of Ulrichs that they’re audible nextdoor. For instance, the unnamed individual keen on collecting newspapers from all around the world in Issue 13 is surely Oscar von Forckenbeck, founder in 1886 of the Zeitungsmuseum in Aachen. He is described as a “Belga” by Ulrichs, but this Prussian had established his museum in Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle, which is in the classical space of the Belgae tribe but also, if one is mischievously disputing Prussian territorial rights (and Ulrichs is always up for that), could be considered Belgian. Meanwhile a Spaniard from Adahuesca in Aragon, a regular correspondent to the newspaper whom Ulrichs refers to as “V. T. C.” or “Victor T.” or “Dr. V. T.” is, I’m very certain, Víctor Torrente Cosín (or Cossín), a doctor and Latinist with an interest in anthropology—a profile which corresponds nicely with what we hear from him in Alaudae. Meanwhile, a tragic story, the ship that Ulrichs calls “Albis”, and which he tells us, on his very last page, had foundered, taking copies of Alaudae bound for the United States down with it, was the SS Elbe (“Albis” being the Latin for the river Elbe, as I belatedly clocked).
I’d love to have more time for what we in Classics call prosopography, chasing up the fascinating people across Europe and the world subscribed to Ulrichs’ newspaper, but we need to crack on and publish the thing, so I shall restrict myself here to one. Before I do, though, an observation, which is Ulrichs’ superlative capacity to make friends with his readers, comparable in my experience only to Ulrichs’ favourite author, Horace. Read this newspaper, as I hope you will when it’s published, and you’ll understand why people like Forckenbeck, Torrente Cosín and William Brayden were so keen to make and retain Ulrichs’ acquaintance. These friends of the newspaper he never met. With more immediate friends, I can add, Ulrichs is appealingly willing to take the mickey. Almost immediately after this poem another composition celebrates the award of an Austro-Hungarian knighthood to his old friend August Tewes (1831-1913), a professor of Law in Graz. After that, though, Ulrichs has fun pondering all the knights there were across Europe who hadn’t a clue how actually to ride a horse. We see something similar, an affectionate ribbing, in the library poem.
The librarian of the Provincial Library in Ulrichs’ time was Prof. Enrico Casti. He then is the man with the drippy nose. I think also we spot his name, “Casti”, in the reference to the Vestal Virgins toward the top of the second column. To me, though, Casti is most familiar as the author of the inscription on Ulrichs’ tombstone, the surest sign of friendship. The Latin text on the stone ends, “HIS DEVOTED FRIENDS,/ GATHERING THEIR OWN DONATIONS AND THOSE OF ADMIRERS EVEN BEYOND THE ALPS,/ PLACED A MEMORIAL FOR A FRIEND OUTSTANDING AND GREATLY MISSED/ TO ENSURE THAT VIRTUE BE NOT ENTIRELY A PLAYTHING OF FORTUNE.”
Traduttore, traditore?
“I salute you, bountiful goddess, noble/generous goddess,| O our glory, O Venetian Queen!| In stormy, deadly whirlwind | You ruled secure; a thousand doughty | Bodies you laid low in bitter fight. | Through you I was not wretched, through you I do not groan; | I live in peace through you. Rule, O blessed one, | Rule in favourable/prosperous fortune, in high pomp, | In august splendour, in golden situation. | Serene, peaceful, pious, | And generous; save, love, and preserve.”
An address to the Venetian Republic, attributed here to Mattia Butturini, from Salò on Lake Garda, at the time within Venetian territory. The poem has enjoyed a certain celebrity as a curiosity, if one searches Google Books, since it is a text that has been written to be read both as Latin and as Italian. (Corrections to my version will consequently be welcomed with even greater enthusiasm than usual!) I wouldn’t make extravagant claims for its poetic quality, which doesn’t seem to me to survive the requirement to be intelligible in both languages. But like the “intercalary” verses on London tombstones a few blogs ago, I think this is more than a simple curiosity. Butturini’s biography may offer the best clue.
Born in 1752, Butturini was educated in Salò and at the University of Padua, and served as the representative of Salò in the city of Venice, remaining in the city thereafter, enjoying the society of artists and intellectuals, and gaining a reputation as a poet in Latin, Ancient Greek and Italian. But in 1797, as French and Austrian forces, the former under Napoleon Bonaparte, tussled for control of northern Italy, and the French fomented revolution within Venice, the last Doge, Ludovico Manin, formally abolished the Republic and resigned. Rapacious French control yielded to Austrian at the beginning of 1798, but Venetian independence was at an end after more than a thousand years. When the Austrians took over, Butturini left Venice for his hometown of Salò, where he practiced law, subsequently holding professorial chairs in Greek at Pavia, Law in Bologna, and Greek again at Pavia (under French, then Austrian control), until his death in 1817.
Butturini’s Latin/Italian poem clearly dates to the last days of the Venetian Republic. The form of the poem perhaps tells us a little more about its message. Its metre is not classical but Italian, the lines after the first, at any rate, conforming to the rules of the endecasillabo, the principal metre of Italian poetry. Strictly speaking, then, Butturini has written an Italian poem that can also be read as Latin. I think it’s easy enough to see the power of identifying the Italian with the Latin language and associating both with Venice, a state that made much of its being the successor to classical Rome,* all in the context of the imminent suppression of an ancient Republic by powers from beyond the Alps.
*For the idea, see D. S. Chambers, The imperial age of Venice, 1380-1580 (1970).
[Something odd happened to this blog when first posted, so I’ve reposted it.]
Pitt-Rivers
I have entered the world of the strange while attempting to provide a colleague with an accurate transcription and translation, which I had been led to believe he was seeking, of a Latin MS.
For the record, since I put in the effort amid a very, very busy week indeed, here is (what I would guess is) a rough draft of part of an honorary-degree oration delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford for Gen. Pitt-Rivers, a photo by Prof. Dan Hicks followed by my transcription and translation. The author is presumably the Revd. William Merry, Public Orator of Oxford University from 1880 until 1910, since the date of the ceremony at which Pitt-Rivers’ honorary degree was conferred was June 30, 1886. In 1884 Augustus Pitt-Rivers had gifted to the University a collection of anthropological artefacts which formed the core of the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford.
That the text is a draft, and only a partial one, is illustrated, I think, by the abruptness of the opening and the lack of continuity after peractis, a line underneath the latter word suggesting to me a continuation elsewhere. Here we have, in other words, part of the middle of the speech and its end, or some version of them. But I could well be wrong about any of this, and about other details of the transcription and translation, and I welcome corrections to both. It remains the case that when you have a chunk of Latin to transcribe and translate and work in a university with the largest Classics department in the World, there’s an obvious resource to hand.
Especially tricky moments include the first line, which would be clearer from whatever went before — something must have. And there is a word that looks a lot, in the author’s scrawl, like ortum, but may be artium. Missilis, gen. pl. missilium, must mean “rifle”, given Pitt-Rivers’ historical area of expertise, and I think that the words before peractis are qua re. The rest of my transcription is I believe sound. Ut admittatur etc. at the end is short for the standard formula for admission to a degree with which such an oration ends, in this case ut admittatur honoris causa ad gradum Doctoris in Iure Civili, “to be admitted to the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law.”
Feliciter ab hoc viro Musarum cum Martis studiis com-/mixta scitote, cui olim, quum optima missilium genera/ in exercitus nostri usum, huic officio praefectus, eligebat, venit/ in mentem consilium omne telorum genus undique/ conquirendi, scilicet ut hoc modo rei militaris artium [OR ortum] primordia/ progressus oculis submissa patefierent: qua re peractis/ additisque aliis priscorum temporum reliquiis, quae/ quo sint pacto artes excultae doceant, eum coacervavit/ rerum thesaurum quo nuper libens Academiam nostram/ ditavit. Hunc ergo grato oportet suscipiamus animo/ benefactorum recentissimum, hunc Vobis/praesento imperatorem egregium/ Pitt Rivers, Societatis Regiae socium, ut admittatur/ etc.
“Be informed of things happily produced from the combination of the study of the Muses with that of Mars by this man, to whom once, when he was choosing the best types of rifle for the use of our army, having been given charge of this task, the thought occurred of collecting every type of weapon from everywhere, evidently in order that in this way the beginnings of the development of the arts (OR the beginnings and developments of the arts; OR the origin, early days and developments) of warfare, presented to view, would be plain to see: therefore when … had been completed … and when other survivals of ancient times had been added such as would demonstrate how the arts have been refined, he gathered together the treasury of objects with which recently he has generously enriched our University. This most recent of our benefactors it behoves us to receive with gratitude. I present him to you, the excellent General Pitt-Rivers, Fellow of the Royal Society, to be admitted to etc.”
For other degree ceremonies featured on Lugubelinus, see here, here and especially here.
Images of Mum
This is an image of the Duke of Wellington, not my mother, in case anyone was in any doubt. But I happened to see it the day before my mother’s funeral a few weeks ago, and the latter event was naturally at the forefront of my mind. The depiction of Arthur Wellesley at 84 years, in the room in which he died in 1852, struck a chord with me. I think the point of the picture, its piquancy, lies in a great man made small with age. I suspect anyone with a very aged relative (my mother was 94) will recognise how the horizons narrow, the world becomes a room, the room a chair or a bed, and even the chair or bed can start to look too big, too big even for the Duke of Wellington.
I have my memories of my mother at the end of her life, and Wellington in his armchair puts me in mind of them. They aren’t the images, very tiny in an armchair, that I want to be left with, but there isn’t much one can do about how one remembers somebody. However, what makes this a cheerful blog, contrary (I know) to all appearances thus far, is that another image of my mother has come along that is so arresting and unexpected — and so her, somehow — that it has done a lot to supplant the ones I’m less keen on.
I walked away from my mother’s house on the day of her funeral with two albums of photographs that I’d never set eyes on before, with a vague commitment to other members of the family that I’d digitize the contents. They cover a period from 1941 or so until my grandfather’s death in 1952, during which time my mother (born 1930) was at school and then at Liverpool University. We see in the albums, all neatly identified with captions, her elder brothers and sister, her father, and her father’s unofficial wife Alice, who was my mother’s real mother, her biological mother having become tragically addicted to painkillers and alcohol.
Oh, and images of the family dog Sam:
Suddenly, though, amid snaps at home or the seaside, I turned a page to see four obviously professional photographs of a dramatic performance. The caption is charmingly pompous:
“ALCESTIS”
DONE AT “VARNDEAN” SUMMER 1948
All the main actors are named under their image: “PAMELA FEARNHEAD” (Admetus), “JUNE JOHNSTON” (Alcestis), “PAT WICKS” (Thanatos), “MARIE JOAN GARTLETT” (Apollo), “DOROTHY BROOMFIELD” (Pheres), while “ME”, my mother, unmistakable despite the lionskin, took the role of Heracles.
It’s proving a bit of a mystery how my mother, at age 17, found herself playing Heracles in a production of Euripides in Brighton. Varndean was a girls’ grammar school in 1948, converted in 1975 into a coeducational comprehensive. My mother had been at a school in Southend, Essex, which was evacuated at the beginning of the War to Sidbury in Devon, neither of them anywhere near Brighton. We are wondering if she moved to Varndean to take her Highers, but the archivist at Varndean, Judith Johnson, hasn’t yet managed to find any reference to her, and there are other suggestions she was still at school in Sidbury at the end of 1948. The camera doesn’t lie, however, and Judith has found a report on the production in the school magazine, illustrated by one of the same photographs as my mother had put in her album. There is praise for “the robust cheerfulness of Heracles,” which is pretty spot-on as a characterization of the actor, too.
There is, as I’ve said, no way of controlling what memories of a loved one stick with you. But an image of Mum as Heracles from nearly 80 years ago has taken up residence in my head, and that’s absolutely fine.
Rara avis
I’m going to claim this as a Christmas blog on the basis that it features the word Magi. But moving quickly on before a pedant corrects that to “Epiphany blog,” I’m really sharing my attempts to contextualize another intriguing late-nineteenth-century Latin poem.
In this poem a patient is thanking his doctor after successful treatment:
“CONOLLY’S THANKS TO SWAN: Swan, a rare bird among doctors, and a remarkable man,/ has the nous to hit the nail on the head with Conolly./ Sick for so many, many years, Conolly was heading straight for the Underworld/ downcast, disease rampant throughout his bones./ From his weary head to his weary heels he was suffering,/ his weary body and weary brain together were in agony./ The whip-wielding Furies left the depths of Tartarus/ and ruined an undeserving heart with bitterness and fear./ Out shot Swan—no other such bird more dear/ to the goddess Health has sailed the watery springs—/ out shot Swan the bringer of cinchona; out shot/ draughts to be taken at their proper hour, out shot pills./ Out shot Swan, and deep peace possessed my brain,/ overcome, my body obeyed the Sorcerer’s order./ Out shot Swan, and straightaway the Fury returned/ to her old home, and Pain and Suffering to their Stygian lair./ Long life to you, Swan! May the divine Health you have given me,/ brilliant man, be yours for all your prosperous days.”
The patient in this case is Edward Conolly (1844-1897), and this poem is included in a posthumous collection of Conolly’s Latin poetry, Nugae Latinae, edited by the Rev. Thomas Leslie Papillon, who had perhaps been Conolly’s tutor at Merton College, Oxford, and published in 1908. A brief introduction to the anthology by Papillon and a note he appends to this poem reveal more about its rather melancholy circumstances.
“As a child he was small in frame and delicate, and of a highly nervous temperament. His aptitude for learning, and especially for the classics, was marked from early years, and was well developed at Cheltenham College and Oxford, where he was ‘Jackson Scholar’ at Merton, 1864-7. He became a member of the Inner Temple, and lived for some years in London. But his health, never robust, gradually weakened; at last atrophy of the spine set in, and for the last sixteen years of his life he was an invalid, unable even to stand without support. His mind, however, never weakened; and many are the testimonies that could be given–a few are subjoined–to his intellectual powers. He spent the last fifteen winters of his life on the Riviera and died at Cannes on February 9, 1897, aged 52.” (Nugae p. 6)
A note under the poem (Nugae p. 62) reads: “‘Canuleius,’ i. e. Conolly; ‘Cycnus,’ Dr Swan, from whose treatment he had received benefit.”
The relief provided by Dr. Swan’s treatment was evidently and unfortunately temporary. But this finely crafted poem is a good illustration of the distraction from his poor health that Papillon suggests Conolly found in composing Latin verse. A poem celebrating a man called Swan opens wittily with a version of Juvenal’s influential statement of the rarity of a good wife, rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cycno, “A rare bird in the world, much like a black swan.” And it continues in that less-than-wholly-serious vein, while communicating very clearly how much Conolly had been suffering.
A question that inevitably occurred to me about the poem was the identity of the “Dr. Swan” to whom Conolly credits his recovery. The date of the poem is irrecoverable, which doesn’t help. I can find very few Dr. Swans in the second half of the nineteenth century either in London or Cannes, and I’m wondering if one who is quite prominent elsewhere might be the object of Conolly’s praise. What follows is strictly speculative, and I’d be delighted if anyone could find a more likely Dr. Swan for me.
Dr. Samuel Swan of New York (1815-1893) was a practitioner of homeopathy of some celebrity, his remedies available by mail-order. Three things, none of them remotely decisive either individually or as a group, incline me to wonder if this is the Swan of Conolly’s poem.
One is the term cinchoniger, “bearer of cinchona.” Cinchona bark is the source of quinine, a long-standing treatment for malaria, and is where homeopathy began, since the originator of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, conceived his theory similia similibus curentur, “Let like be cured by like,” after consuming cinchona bark and experiencing feverish symptoms as an apparent consequence. The second is attention to pills, trochi, and to doses taken at particular times, which perhaps corresponds to homeopathic practice in its methods of delivery.
Entirely flimsy, as I say, and the third is no better. It is that word Magus which Conolly uses of Swan. This is probably just what you say of a doctor who has “magically” restored you to health. But there is a very esoteric character to homeopathy, allied (it has to be said) with a very poor control of Latin, which I can illustrate from the accounts in Swan’s own catalogue of some of the materials from which treatments were derived:
“Fel Gryllus Americana: Brazilian Cricket. Suppression of urine with or without pain. A boy who had chills and fever swallowed a live cricket, and never had a chill afterward.”
“Lachryma Filia: Tears of a young girl in great grief and suffering.”
“Malandrinum: Grease from a horse’s hoof.”
“Seriaca Barlowii: From a silk handkerchief eaten by a cow, and taken from the stomach in a hard ball. During the three years she never had a calf.”
Magus does seem the mot juste for a medical practitioner who presents his art this way. Meanwhile homeopathy, to most of us (and to many of Dr. Swan’s contemporaries) a byword for charlatanry, could presumably have seemed more plausible before the big medical breakthroughs of the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and to a man who had evidently been failed by the conventional treatment of the day.
No, I’m not convinced either. Happy Christmas, in any case.