Larides/Thymber
Some thoughts about Virgil, and they bear no relation whatsoever to Brexit. If anyone feels that a blog about traumatic separation betrays deeper preoccupations, they’re wrong. As for the image of a severed hand desperately trying to get back to the body it belongs to, entirely coincidental. This is pure escapism and my id is locked in the cellar.
We’re in Book 10 of the Aeneid, and Virgil gets graphic in a manner more typical of epic successors like Lucan and Statius. Pallas, the young warrior son of Evander and Aeneas’ protégé, is enjoying his aristeia, an extended display of martial prowess characteristic of epic heroes; less technically, Pallas is on the warpath.
At 10.390-6, he comes upon, and promptly dispatches, a pair of Italian warriors, Larides and Thymber. They are in fact identical twins:
uos etiam, gemini, Rutulis cecidistis in aruis,
Daucia, Laride Thymberque, simillima proles,
indiscreta suis gratusque parentibus error;
at nunc dura dedit uobis discrimina Pallas.
nam tibi, Thymbre, caput Evandrius abstulit ensis;
te decisa suum, Laride, dextera quaerit
semianimesque micant digiti ferrumque retractant.
You also, twin brothers, fell in the Rutulian fields,
Larides and Thymber, offspring of Daucus, most alike,
indistinguishable to your own, a delightful source of confusion to your parents.
But now Pallas gave you harsh marks of difference:
your head, Thymber, Evander’s sword took off,
while you, Larides, your severed hand seeks for as its own,
its dying fingers twitching and clutching at its sword.
The closing image is especially unsettling, if for us slightly suggestive of Hammer House of Horror. There’s nothing tongue-in-cheek about it here, though. The war that Virgil is describing is a legendary counterpart of the Roman civil wars that had finally ended just a decade before Virgil’s writing, and this epic war in Italy has all the brutality and moral incomprehensibility of civil conflict. For me, there’s no book of the Aeneid more extraordinary than Book 10, a profoundly challenging account of conflict between two peoples, Trojans and Italians, who were both the ancestors of the first Roman readers of the poem. Those readers were forced to question the validity of their national hero Aeneas’ claim to settlement in Italy, and to view events as much through the eyes of Aeneas’ implacable enemies as those of Aeneas himself. That ambivalent treatment of the war extends to Pallas, Aeneas’ closest ally, whose character we are encouraged to admire and whose violent death at Turnus’ hands (not long after this passage) we are guided to deplore, but who has a disturbing capacity for shocking bloodshed himself.
Homer had described warrior twins dying simultaneously in battle, in Iliad 5 and 6: in Iliad 5 Aeneas is the killer, so here one effect is to style Pallas a potential Aeneas, if only he might have managed to live long enough. But in neither Homeric passage are the characteristics of twinhood exploited to the extent that they are in the Aeneid.
What are these “characteristics of twinhood”? From the inside, I have no experience. From the outside, identical twins pose problems to us of distinguishability, essentially: they are different people, but the normal means of establishing their different identity are not available to us. This is how Virgil represents Larides and Thymber, two distinct men indistinguishable to their own– in a poignantly contradictory expression, gratusque parentibus error (392), a sweet source of confusion to their parents: confusion should not be a positive experience, of course. But the previous line (391) is a fine piece of composition, too, Daucia, Laride Thymberque, simillima proles, “Larides and Thymber, offspring of Daucus, most alike.” The names of the two brothers are so different, yet pressed so closely together, and surrounded by words describing what they have in common, their fatherhood by Daucus, their preternatural similarity. This impression of their inseparability is achieved as much by the structure of the line, deploying all the resources of an inflected language (allowing words to be placed where their impact is greatest), as by its content.
If that line expresses the strange togetherness of twins, the following (393) is jarringly corrective. “But now Pallas gave you harsh marks of difference”: Pallas brings violent definition to these indistinguishable men, killing them individually, and with Pallas’ intervention the poet is able to distinguish them, too: there’s a sharp contrast between lines 390 and 391, all about the twins’ interchangeability, and the lines that recount their deaths, which carefully separate Thymber (394) and Larides (395-6), and which Virgil renders as distinct as he can, in rhythm, organisation, length. Death has untwinned them.
But if in terms of composition line 391 expressed the unity of twins, 395 is its antithesis. In the deaths of both twins the theme of severance and dislocation is developed beyond their separation from each other: words of rupture, abstulit (“took off”), decisa (“severed”), describe a horrific partitioning of Thymber and Larides themselves. Thymber is decapitated, and Larides’ sword hand is chopped off. The culminating lines, quite as gruesome as any that Virgil penned, describe the efforts of Larides’ severed hand to be reunited with the rest of him. In 395 Virgil once again uses the shape of the line, as well as its sense, to convey disintegration. In English we have to translate it, “while you, Larides, your severed hand seeks for as its own”, but a word-for-word version of te decisa suum, Laride, dextera quaerit would be “you )( severed )( as its own, Larides, your right hand seeks”, the word for severed, decisa, separating te, you, and suum, (as) its own, and itself separated from its noun dextera, hand, mimicking in the word order the distance between hand and owner. The notion of a hand seeking out an entity distinct from itself to which it also belongs is inherently weird, but so here is Virgil’s line composition.
These are just seven lines of Virgilian verse, but within their scope parents’ puzzled joy collapses into the repellent image of a twitching, severed hand, and the harmony of twins into their physical disintegration. The implications of this little episode don’t quite stop there. The salient issue with Larides and Thymber, to my mind at least, is unity and its dissolution, and this is something key to the later books of the Aeneid. Aeneas, it is strongly suggested, will bring unity to Italy, but the problem, or maybe paradox, is that this future unity after Aeneas’ ultimate victory will only be achieved by extreme discord between Trojans and Italians, the warfare that will only end with Aeneas’ impassioned slaughter of Turnus, in revenge for the death of Pallas, in Book 12.
Here Virgil presents us with the ultimate example of togetherness, the bond between twins, then shows it shattered into pieces. The short tale of Thymber and Larides, or is it Larides and Thymber, encapsulates in its own way the loss of peace and coherence that is apparently essential, in Virgil’s mysterious account of the origins of Rome, to Aeneas’ unifying mission in Italy.
Did Alexander wear my hat?
This is a pakool, پکول, or you might hear it called a Chitrali cap, or even just an Afghan cap. At any rate it’s an article of headwear from the Afghan/Pakistan borderlands with which we’re these days pretty familiar. If you visit that part of the world, it’s an obvious souvenir: I purchased this one, like generations of travellers before me, in Chicken St in Kabul in 2008.
More recently I’ve been surprised to discover the pakool at the centre of quite a heated academic debate, pursued in the pages of some very prestigious classical journals. It began with an article in American Journal of Archaeology in 1981, “The Cap that Survived Alexander”, in which Prof. Bonnie Kingsley made the arresting observation that the pakool closely resembles an ancient item of headwear, the kausia (καυσία):
This is a terracotta figure of a “Macedonian boy” (from Athens, about 300BC) in the British Museum: the kausia seemed to have functioned for Macedonians pretty much as the kilt does for Scots, the defining garment of a Macedonian man.
It’s true, too, that this Macedonian boy does look exactly like he’s wearing a pakool. Kingsley didn’t think the similarity was coincidental, and argued that the kausia, along with other characteristically Macedonian items of clothing, originated in the part of the world where the pakool is now worn. There were no clear references to the Macedonian kausia, in texts or artistic representations, before Alexander the Great, she claimed, and so the pakool/kausia must have been adopted by Alexander’s troops as they approached India through what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan in 327-6BC. (There is some reference to the adoption of native dress by the soldiers: Curtius 9.3.10-11, Diodorus 17.94.2).
In 1986 Kingsley’s article received an academic response, and quite a decisive one. In Transactions of the American Philological Association Ernst Fredricksmeyer, an Alexander specialist, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the kausia was just too established a staple of the Macedonian wardrobe for it to have been imported from Central Asia toward the end of Alexander’s campaigns. A nice illustration of the “Macedonianness” of the kausia is an epigram by Antipater of Thessalonica (in Macedonia), addressed to the Roman aristocrat L. Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus in around 11BC (Anth. Pal. 6.335):
Καυσίη, ἡ τὸ πάροιθε Μακηδόσιν εὔκολον ὅπλον,
καὶ σκέπας ἐν νιφετῷ, καὶ κόρυς ἐν πολέμῳ,
ἱδρῶ διψήσασα πιεῖν τεόν, ἄλκιμε Πείσων,
Ἡμαθὶς Αὐσονίους ἦλθον ἐπὶ κροτάφους.
ἀλλὰ φίλος δέξαι με· τάχα κρόκες, αἵ ποτε Πέρσας
τρεψάμεναι, καὶ σοὶ Θρῇκας ὑπαξόμεθα.
I, the kausia, once the Macedonians’ comfortable gear,
both shelter in a snow-storm and a helmet in war,
thirsting to drink your sweat, stout Piso,
have come, a Macedonian, to your Italian brows.
But receive me generously; maybe the wool that once routed
the Persians will help you too to subdue the Thracians.
So Fredricksmeyer scotched the idea that the pakool inspired the kausia pretty effectively, but he wasn’t ready to ditch the whole idea of a connection. He agreed that the hats were uncannily similar, and I think as a Classicist and Alexander expert he wanted the similarity to be significant. Kingsley had recorded an encounter in Afghanistan between a Californian and an Afghan (it’s not clear to me whether the Californian is Kingsley herself or someone else): “A Pashto-speaking Afghan living near the Khyber Pass, in giving a rust-colored cap to a young American from California, informed her that his tribal ancestors had received the cap from Alexander!” Kingsley had argued that the opposite was the truth: Alexander and the Macedonians had got their hat from the Afghans. But Fredricksmeyer was happy on this basis simply to reverse the direction of transmission. It was the Macedonians who had introduced the pakool to Afghanistan and Pakistan. In other words, in the pakool-wearing Mujahedin on our TV screens we were looking at a surviving relic of Alexander’s campaigns in the East.
That’s an intoxicating idea for a Classicist. Like a lot of intoxicating ideas, though, not very plausible. The debate between Kingsley and Fredricksmeyer rumbled on for a while (see the bibliography below; Kingsley’s last intervention was published posthumously), with Fredricksmeyer latterly slightly less confident about any connection between the pakool and Alexander the Great. The coup de grâce was administered by Willem Vogelsang of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden (under the not-so-catchy title of “The Pakol, a distinctive but apparently not so very old headgear from the Indo-Iranian borderlands”), who showed that the pakool is actually a simple adaptation of caps with rolled rims worn all over the borderlands of China, India and Central Asia.
It took a sober ethnologist to puncture the romantic ideas of the Classicists. To put that another way, it took a scholar who understood this part of the world on its own terms to correct a perception driven by obviously Western priorities. But this is what for me makes this academic tussle is the 1980’s quite timeless. Classicists, or at least the classically educated, have been indulging similar fantasies about Afghanistan and Pakistan ever since the first Europeans arrived there. When the French mercenary Claude-Auguste Court first set eyes on the valley of Peshawar, he “wondered how the necessity to make a livelihood had given me, a mere French officer, the possibility to go so far away and behold the most beautiful scene of Alexander’s exploits.”** When the British beheld this surviving fragment of a Buddhist monastery, it was again as a sign that Alexander had been there before them:
In this case the British were encouraged by the Afghans, in whose folklore Alexander figured large. The local name for the Pillar of Alexander was the Minar-e Sikandar, but neither that nor the man near the Khyber Pass was the result of folk memories of Alexander’s campaigns, but rather the continuing popularity in Afghanistan of the cluster of tales known for convenience as the Alexander Romance (an astonishingly widespread storytelling phenomenon you can, if you’re so inclined, read more about here). I’m pretty sure that another product of the encounter between Alexander-obsessed Europeans and Afghan folklore is the persistent idea, thoroughly debunked, that the non-Islamic people who survive in Chitral are descendants of Alexander’s soldiers.
Well, at this remove it’s obvious enough, I think, that the Kingsley/Fredricksmeyer exchange says more about the 1980s AD than the fourth century BC. When Kingsley wrote her first article, pakools were all over our newspapers and television screens, worn by people that back then we idolised, the Mujahedin fighting the Soviet-backed government in Kabul after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Since then the associations of the cap have been variable. In the fighting between the Taliban and Northern Alliance before 2001, the pakool was the mark of the northern forces (a black turban identifying the Taliban), but the 1980s had lent the hat a lingering jihadi chic (there are photos of Osama bin Laden wearing one): the Pakistani Taliban favour it, as do some ISIS fighters.
Back in 1981, though, the impulse to link the Mujahedin’s characteristic headwear to Alexander must have been hard to resist. To me that’s as interesting as any other theory, because if Alexander the Great isn’t influencing anyone’s style of hat, he remains the filter through which the West all too often seeks to understand Afghanistan.
B. M. Kingsley, “The cap that survived Alexander”, AJA 85 (1981), 39-46;
— “The ‘Chitrali’, a Macedonian import to the West”, Afghanistan Journal 8 (1981), 90-93;
— “The Kausia Diadematophoros”, AJA 88 (1984), 66-68;
— “Alexander’s ‘kausia’ and Macedonian tradition”, Classical Antiquity 10, (1991), 59-76;
E. A. Fredricksmeyer, “Alexander the Great and the Macedonian kausia”, TAPhA 116 (1986), 215-227;
— “The kausia: Macedonian or Indian?” in I. Worthington (ed.), Ventures into Greek History (Oxford, 1994), 135-158;
W. Vogelsang, “The Pakol, a distinctive but apparently not so very old headgear from the Indo-Iranian borderlands”, Khil’a 2 (2006), 149-156.
(**J.-M. Lafont, “Private business and cultural activities of the French officers of Maharajah Ranjit Singh”, Journal of Sikh Studies 10 (1983), 74-104, at 86)
Lucretius, face to face
Lucretius is the Marmite of Roman literature. For some of my colleagues the De Rerum Natura, “On the Nature of the Universe” (DRN), his attempt to express the complex philosophical creed of Epicurus in poetry, mixes incompatibles: even certain Bodley Medal laureates have been known to diss Lucretius in my presence. Others are more sympathetic, and for some of them it’s the very strangeness of this project that holds a lot of its appeal.
I count myself one of the latter group, predictably, and I’m especially intrigued by Lucretius’ skill in exploiting the resources of poetry to advance his key aim, converting the reader to Epicurus’ philosophy and the contented existence that he insists will follow. In the DRN poetry and philosophy are thoroughly interwoven, inseparable, which means that interpreting the poem requires as good a grip of his philosophical position as his poetic technique. David West’s great little book The Imagery and Poetry of Lucretius is still for me the best introduction to Lucretius’ intricate poetry, and I’d freely admit that I fall far short of competence on the philosophical side myself. When I was co-writing something on Epicureanism and Lucretius recently, I left as much of the seriously technical stuff as I could to my co-author, Barney Taylor, who’s got a surer footing in Epicureanism and Lucretius’ account of it than I’ll ever have.
All I’m going to do in this blog is develop a thought I had while Barney and I were revising our article over the weekend. The focus is Lucretius as philosopher-poet or poet-philosopher, a poet whose poetry is all about convincing us of his philosophical convictions.
The De Rerum Natura is addressed to “Memmius”, generally believed to be C. Memmius L. f., a senior politician in Rome in the 50’s BC. By “addressed to” I mean that Lucretius presents the detailed account of Epicureanism doctrine that he offers in the DRN as a private communication between himself and Memmius: the stated aim of the poem is the conversion of this one individual. That’s the initial set up, at any rate. In practice, across the whole of the poem, although that intimacy is maintained, Memmius is named only occasionally, and a well-established interpretation of Lucretius’ strategy here is that this allows the place in the conversation originally occupied by Memmius to become the reader’s. When Lucretius addresses “you”, in other words, it’s easy for readers to feel that it is with them, individually, that Lucretius is communicating. Certainly the ancients thought that reading the De Rerum Natura was like “discussing the nature of the Universe with Lucretius as if face to face” (cum Lucretio videbuntur velut coram de rerum naturam disputare, Vitruvius 9 praef. 17).
Well, that was once the established view. But in 1993 a very influential article by Phillip Mitsis upset it. Mitsis argued that Lucretius’ style of argument in the poem was too aggressive for it simply to be a case of Memmius standing in for the reader. Rather, he suggests, the reader is being encouraged to see the “you” addressed in the poem, Memmius, as a bit of an dunce, consistently failing to grasp Lucretius’ arguments; according to Mitsis, the reader does not slip into Memmius’ shoes, then, but instead, in the process of watching Memmius get it wrong over and over again, and wishing to avoid sharing Memmius’ slow-wittedness, imperceptibly absorbs the wisdom of Epicurus.
That would certainly be psychologically astute on Lucretius’ part, and everyone agrees that Lucretius has the psychology of teaching pretty much taped, but on a number of grounds I don’t find Mitsis’ theory very convincing. Barney Taylor is actually working on a comprehensive response to his article, which, as I say, is a very influential one, and I wouldn’t attempt to anticipate Barney’s arguments even if I could.
But I am going to suggest one potentially relevant consideration, which occurred to me last weekend when I came across a remark attributed to Epicurus himself (Epicurus fr. 208 Usener). It is from a letter written by Epicurus to a fellow Epicurean, and it’s preserved for us by the Roman philosopher Seneca (Epist. 7.11). It simply says, “I say this not to many people, but just to you: we are, each for the other, an audience large enough” (haec ego non multis, sed tibi: satis enim magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus). But what struck me about it was that the relationship that Epicurus here describes existing between himself and his correspondent, intimate communication between two individuals, is exactly what Lucretius also establishes between himself and Memmius in the DRN.
What Epicurus is describing is I think a kind of ideal for Epicureans, perhaps even the quintessence of an Epicurean life of pleasure and ἀταραξία, freedom from anxiety. The intimate colloquy with a friend answers to a cluster of things that Epicurus believed contributed to the good life. Epicurus’ school was located in the Garden (Κῆπος), a small property belonging to him just outside Athens, a place of retreat from public life which Epicurus shared with friends, and in which their friendship was expressed through communal living, eating, and conversation. Cicero caricatures Epicureans as “carrying on discussions in their own little gardens” (in hortulis suis … dicere, Leg. 1.39), while Epicurus himself, in a letter he wrote as he lay dying to a friend named Idomeneus, describes the intense pain he was in, but insists his suffering is offset by “the joy in my soul at the recollection of our past conversations” (τὸ κατὰ ψυχὴν χαῖρον ἐπὶ τῇ τῶν γεγονότων ἡμῖν διαλογισμῶν μνήμῃ, Diog. Laert. 10.22). As for friendship itself, there was no aspect of social life more highly valued by Epicurus or his followers. In Epicurus’ own words (Sententiae Vaticanae 78), “The man of noble character is chiefly concerned with wisdom and friendship. Of these the former is a mortal good, but the latter is immortal” (ὁ γενναῖος περὶ σοφίαν καὶ φιλίαν μάλιστα γίγνεται, ὧν τὸ μέν ἐστι θνητὸν ἀγαθόν, τὸ δὲ ἀθάνατον).
Epicurus and Lucretius are both replicating this ideal of the intimate conversation as approximately as they can in written form, by a letter (generally understood in Antiquity as conversation by other means), and by a poem that dramatises a similar discussion. And insofar as the De Rerum Natura styles itself a conversation with Memmius, it is a token of friendship, too. Lucretius says so explicitly early in Book 1, explaining his motivation for undertaking the writing of the poem, despite its difficulties (140-41), “your excellence and the pleasure of delightful friendship that I anticipate” (tua … uirtus … et sperata uoluptas/ suauis amicitiae). Friendship is here presented as an abundant source of pleasure, pleasure being the primary good in Epicurean philosophy. I might add, though, that this is a moment when Memmius goes unnamed. Is it in fact friendship with me, the reader, that Lucretius has in mind here? The possibility of an intimacy extending across two millennia, achieved by a poetic text, is one of those things that makes Roman literature kind of thrilling.
But enough of that. The basic dramatic setup of the De Rerum Natura seems designed to express this especially valued Epicurean social practice of friendship. It’s important in this connection that friendship, amicitia, was something highly valued by Romans in general. Lucretius’ task in the DRN is to convert ordinary Romans to a philosophy that promoted a radically different understanding of the world, not an easy task. He tries very hard not to alienate his reader, and to insist on the common ground between Rome and Epicureanism. Amicitia is one such: to Romans there would be little less threatening than a friendly conversation.
Nevertheless, what may seem perfectly Roman is also thoroughly Epicurean. Spend any time “discussing the nature of the Universe with Lucretius as if face to face” and you start to see the world as you should, you start to become an Epicurean; but as part of that process you start to adopt the social practices of Epicureans, the friendly discussions in a space (the De Rerum Natura, a kind of poetic Garden) free of the distractions and anxieties of everyday life. That’s as cunning a piece of psychological manipulation as Mitsis proposes, I think: by the very act of reading the De Rerum Natura, your behaviour is being moulded into an Epicurean shape.
I don’t think any of that represents an unprecedented insight. But I suggested earlier that thinking about one-to-one conversation might also give us a counterargument to Mitsis. What I have in mind is the paramount value that Epicureans attached to friendship, amicitia, φιλία. If Lucretius’ colloquy with Memmius, and with each of us, does indeed embody friendship, Epicurus’ immortal good, could an Epicurean, in a poem dedicated to conveying the life-transforming doctrines of Epicurus, contemplate betraying such a sacred thing? For a betrayal of friendship is surely what Mitsis’ theory amounts to: Lucretius is pretending to be Memmius’ friend, with his deepest interests at heart, but in fact is showing him up as an idiot for the benefit of the rest of us.
I can’t see that for an Epicurean that could be anything but unthinkable.
(P.S. 13.4.2016. In a text I’ve been encouraged to read by James Warren [see the discussion below], Philodemus’ Peri Parrhesias or On Frank Criticism, there is a lot of very interesting material on parrhesia, candid (and typically corrective) speech, as a mark of friendship and an essential component of the relationship between philosopher and pupil, itself figured as an encounter between friends, and on the candid speech that played a key role in Epicurean communities, a kind of group therapy maintaining the psychic and philosophical health of their members. As a corollary, we are informed (fr. 41) that “to act in secret is necessarily most unfriendly, no doubt.”)
When the spade you call a spade’s no spade
My least snappy title by a distance. Apologies, and apologies also for a blog inspired by a pun so obscure that I’ve seen it attributed to two Oxford Classicists separately. Actually it was really inspired by Claire Webster, to whom thanks.
“To call a spado a spado” is a joke that Claire heard Tom Braun, a Classicist at Merton College, make, but I can claim an earlier outing. A former student of my college, Brasenose, recalls attending lectures in the 1950’s on the Roman satirist Juvenal, delivered by J.G. Griffith of Jesus College. Juvenal does not pull his punches, and Griffith, clearly a don of the old school, “felt inhibited” discussing his poetry “when lady students were present.” When the last of the women undergraduates eventually left the group, he remarked with relief, “At last: now I can call a spado a spado.”
Not a very edifying scene to contemplate, and I’ve got a feeling this joke has been told for as long as Juvenal has been taught through the medium of English. Allow me to explain it. A spado in Latin is a eunuch, and though Juvenal in actual fact used the term sparingly (only three times in total), eunuchs were very much the kind of affront to Roman manhood that Juvenal’s spectacularly jaundiced style of satire specialised in attacking. In Satire XIV, for example, he lays into the spado Posides, a freedman of the emperor Claudius, for his extravagant building projects (see here for what might have been one of his villas on the Amalfi Coast), but it’s probably more relevant that when Juvenal launches his satirical project in his scene-setting first poem, explaining that he’s been driven to abusive poetry by the moral corruption he sees all around him in the city of Rome, it is with a “soft spado” taking a wife (cum tener uxorem ducat spado) that he begins (1.22).
The expression “to call a spade a spade” of course means to speak frankly and directly, to tell it like it is. A spade’s spadiness is the perfect analogy because it’s an utterly unexotic piece of equipment, with entirely practical and unglamorous uses. In fact humour can be got from the perceived distance between spades and specialness (“to call a spade a geomorphological modification implement”) or from intensifying the spade’s mundane associations (“to call a spade a bloody shovel”). Calling a spade a spade is a quality or disquality we could easily associate with Juvenal, and J.G. Griffith could apply it to the less roundabout style of discussing Juvenal’s satire he felt able to adopt once all the women had left the room. Hence “to call a spado a spado“.
Ho ho.
Now, I’m not going to devote an entire blog, composed in the precious hours I’ve snatched from my new life as an administrative drone, to explaining a donnish pun. Luckily the original expression “to call a spade a spade” has its own rather interesting history.
Like a lot of colloquial expressions that we assume are just traditional, or maybe biblical, this is anything but. We owe it to the great humanist Erasmus, and the collection of aphorisms, the Adages, which he first published in 1500 but added to for the rest of his life, so that in its final form, in 1536, the Adages reached a total of 4,151 entries, a Herculean achievement as he himself described it. These proverbs were then translated from Erasmus’ Latin into the vernacular languages of Europe, and the result is that our everyday language is peppered with Erasmian maxims: if you ever talk about “a necessary evil”, “rare bird”, “squeezing water from a stone”, “looking a gift horse in the mouth”, “putting the cart before the horse”, you owe that turn of phrase, and heaps of others, to Erasmus.
These proverbs weren’t Erasmus’ own invention. He found most of them in the Greek and Roman literature that, as a Renaissance humanist, he saw as the key to building a civilized society. It helped that he achieved an encyclopedic knowledge of that literature. There really wasn’t much that Erasmus hadn’t read at some time or another. I once traced the common turn of phrase “to lose a battle, but not the war” back to Erasmus’ Adages, but he’d found it in the late-antique dictionary of Nonius Marcellus, which he read and exploited for the penultimate 1533 edition of the Adages. I confess it tickles me that people, in the normal course of conversation, unwittingly repeat the words of classical writers: “a necessary evil” comes from the Greek geographer Strabo, “in the same boat” from a letter of Cicero, “one swallow does not make a summer” from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, “a friend in need is a friend indeed” (a jingle in Latin, too: amicus certus in re incerta cernitur) from a tragedy of Ennius via Cicero, “to lose a battle but not the war” from Juvenal’s great predecessor in Roman satire, Lucilius (for whom Nonius’ De compendiosa doctrina is an important source). It tickles me especially that the expression “to call a spade a spade”, which is all about using simple language, is actually the result of the most learned man of his day’s unparalleled familiarity with the literature of classical antiquity.
We’re all Classicists really, it’s just that some of us don’t know it yet.
“To call a spade a spade” is just one of these 4,151 aphorisms, no. 1205, in fact. But it has an especially interesting history. Erasmus introduced it, in the 1515 edition, as Ficus ficus, ligonem ligonem vocat, “He calls figs figs, and a hoe a hoe.” “It is applied,” he explains, “to the man who explains something as it is, with simple, rustic truthfulness, and does not wrap it up in complex or elaborate expression.” He traces his Latin version of the saying to a Greek original, ta suka suka, ten skaphen skaphen legon (τὰ σῦκα σῦκα, τὴν σκάφην σκάφην λέγων), a line of verse which he attributes to Aristophanes, the most famous writer of Attic Comedy, apparently on the basis of reading John Tzetzes, a twelfth-century Byzantine scholar. The saying itself he found in one of his favourite ancient writers, the Greek satirist Lucian: in Jupiter Rants (Zeus Tragoidos 32), Heracles excuses himself as a “country bumpkin” who, “in the words of the comic poet” calls “the skaphe skaphe” (for reasons that will become clearer, I’ll hold off translating skaphe for the moment); while in How To Write History (41) Lucian lists the qualities of a good historian, “fearless, incorruptible, independent, a lover of frankness and truth, prepared, as the comic poet says, to call ‘figs figs, and the skaphe skaphe‘.” The full expression in How To Write History, figs and all, probably comes from another comic poet (though in a very different style of Comedy), Menander (fr. 717 Koerte). But the source of the version in Jupiter Rants (Aristophanes fr. 927 Kassel-Austin) may indeed be Aristophanes, depending how much faith we place in Tzetzes (traditionally, not awfully much).
This Roman hoe, from the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, is a Roman hoe.
For its impact on our everyday speech, Erasmus’ Adages is one of the most influential books ever written. In relation to no. 1205, the English versions of the Adages that rapidly appeared, for example by Richard Taverner and Nicholas Udall, rendered Erasmus’ ligo as “spade”–hence the aphorism we still use today. But there’s one odd thing we haven’t mentioned about Erasmus’ 1,205th adage: it’s all wrong. The Greek word that Erasmus translated as ligo, “hoe,” and Udall as “spade”, skaphe (σκάφη), means no such thing. A skaphe is not a tool for excavating but something excavated, a dug-out canoe or, in this case, probably a kneading trough or dough bin. Now, “to call a kneading trough a kneading trough” references an appropriately mundane item of kitchen equipment, it is true, but it lacks the snappiness of “calling a spade a spade”. “Spade”, “hoe” or “mattock” σκάφη simply does not mean, and it reminds us that Erasmus’ learning of Greek was always a work in progress, but his blooper was serendipitous if, as I suspect, it ensured the popularity and endurance of the English expression.
There we have it, anyway, the history of a turn of phrase which we may not have imagined had much of a history. On the contrary, when you bluntly call a spade a spade, you are echoing the language of Athenian dramatists from 2,500 years ago, with a twist added quite unwittingly by the leading light of the northern Renaissance.
Sugar & spice & all things nice
I’m currently spending a lot of time thinking about the emperor Domitian. The immediate causes are Sophie Hay (to whom I owe the image above) and Kate Wiles, who have got me writing things, separate things, about him. I am deeply grateful that they have. I’ve come back to Domitian, his regime, ideology, the literary culture of his time, repeatedly in my academic life (nearly 20 years ago I wrote one of my first publications on a work of literature by Domitian himself, on the topic of hair care), and I never stop finding it all fascinating.
This blog has a pretty narrow focus. For Dr Wiles I’m writing something on Domitian’s minister or cupbearer, a slave called Earinus. Earinus was a eunuch as well as a slave, and we would know nothing about him if it weren’t for a flurry of poems in A.D. 94 by Martial and Statius, the leading poets of Domitian’s regime. The poems concern a ceremony back in Earinus’ home city of Pergamon which marked his retirement from service as cupbearer to the Emperor.
Here I’m interested in just one of these poems, Martial 9.11, typical of the rest in its exaggerated praise of its subject. Earinus is presented as an ideal of beauty and attractiveness, and thus worthy of the Emperor he has served. It’s all quite hard to stomach, abject flattery, but also (for me at least) interesting as an illustration of the kind of poetry that appealed to Domitian and his court. Domitian, I assume, is the primary audience of the poem, and what it tells us is not just that Domitian was happy to be the target of sycophancy, albeit in this case indirectly, but also that he enjoyed poetry displaying a pretty extreme degree of erudition.
Three of Martial’s poems on Earinus, 9.11-13, are variations on one trope, the difficulty of fitting Earinus’ name into a poetic line, which obliges Martial to paraphrase it. “Earinus” is a word of four short syllables, though since the last syllable changes with inflexion, the problem is with the first three consecutive short syllables, in technical terms a tribrach. In the process of regretting the difficulty of versifying “Earinus”, which means “springlike”, and compensating for his failure, Martial is of course able to say lots of very complimentary things about him.
Here’s the poem, with a translation much indebted to Shackleton Bailey.
Nomen cum uiolis rosisque natum,
quo pars optima nominatur anni,
Hyblam quod sapit Atticosque flores,
quod nidos olet alitis superbae;
nomen nectare dulcius beato, 5
quo mallet Cybeles puer uocari
et qui pocula temperat Tonanti,
quod si Parrhasia sones in aula,
respondent Veneres Cupidinesque;
nomen nobile, molle, delicatum 10
uersu dicere non rudi uolebam:
sed tu syllaba contumax rebellas.
dicunt Eiarinon tamen poetae,
sed Graeci quibus est nihil negatum
et quos Ἆρες Ἄρες decet sonare: 15
nobis non licet esse tam disertis
qui Musas colimus seueriores.
Name born with the violets and roses,
by which is named the best part of the year,
which savours of Hybla and Attic flowers
and has the fragrance of the haughty bird’s nest;
name sweeter than blessed nectar,
by which Cybele’s boy would prefer to be called
and the boy who mixes the wine cups for the Thunderer,
to which, if you voice it in the Parrhasian palace,
Venuses and Cupids answer:
that noble , soft and charming name
I wished to put in polished verse.
But you, obstinate syllable, resist.
And yet poets say Eiarinos,
but they are Greeks, to whom nothing is denied
and who think it proper to chant “Ares, Ares.”
I, who cultivate more austere Muses,
cannot be so glib.
An all-too rapid gloss of the rest of the poem before I concentrate on what most interests me, something nice and metrical (an old interest of mine) at lines 10-11:
Precluded from using Earinus’ name directly (as we eventually discover), Martial traces its derivation from spring (2), and associates it with springtime things like flowers (1), sweet-tasting springtime things like honey (the best honey came from Attica, especially Mt Hymettos, the second-best from Mt Hybla, Sicily; thyme-flavoured honey from Hymettos was the crème de la crème), and sweet-smelling springtime* things like the nest in which the phoenix died (4), reputedly constructed out of the bark-derived spices cassia and cinnamon (a strange and rather lovely piece of folklore).
Earinus, I think we can conclude, is sweet. Nectar is sweet, too, and as the drink of the gods, turns the poem towards the divine. Now the unnameable name is one coveted by two beautiful mythological boys, Attis (6) and Ganymede (7). Those two figures suggest other aspects of Earinus: Attis was a eunuch; Ganymede the archetypal cupbearer. Both were the beloved of gods, Cybele and Zeus, respectively, and it is Earinus’ sex appeal at issue in 8-9, to be witnessed in Domitian’s magnificent palace on the Palatine (“Parrhasian” = Arcadian, after Evander, an Arcadian former resident of the Palatine hill; the photo at the top is the ramp that led to the palace). Martial and Statius strongly and consistently imply that Earinus was Domitian’s lover, and cupbearers, young slave boys, undoubtedly laboured under that expectation in antiquity. Ganymede, the ultimate cupbearer, was the lover of Zeus. I don’t really believe this was the relationship between Earinus and Domitian, but that’s not relevant here.
At 10-11 we get to the heart of things: this wonderfully evocative name won’t fit into the rigid systems of short and long syllables that was ancient Greco-Roman verse. The problem is the short “E” that starts Earinus’ name (12): if only Martial had the license allowed Greek poets to lengthen syllables so as to make them fit the metre (13), as even Homer had notoriously done in a formula of address to the god Ares at Iliad 5.31 and 455, where the repetition of the god’s name fits the metre by having a long “a” in the first example, and short in the second (15).
The poem ends ironically, contrasting Martial’s greater compositional discipline with these examples of Greek license. Epigram, the genre that Martial writes, can never seriously be called austere, especially when he has just cited the most solemn style of poetry antiquity knew in the shape of Homer’s Iliad. The irony is sharpened by a Catullan tone that Martial cultivates throughout this poem, in verbal reminiscence of Catullus, and in the metre he chooses for the poem, hendecasyllables, a form intimately associated with Catullus, and capable of embodying whatever Catullus was felt to represent, youth, love, sex appeal.
An extremely cursory account of the poem there: Henriksén’s excellent commentary on Martial 9 has lots more detail, and pursues some other interesting avenues. But it’s worth contemplating for a second the intense sophistication of this poem for Earinus, unusually elaborate and erudite for Martial. The style of the poem is designed to convey in its own richness the qualities of the person it honours, and if that starts to make it sound like a gift to Earinus, like all gifts embodying somehow the character of the recipient, that may be a useful way of thinking about it. I respond to this poem as I do to a Fabergé egg, with a combination of admiration and repulsion, and that may be because both are creations that need to match the value of the high-status people to whom they are presented, the Tsarina in the case of the eggs, the emperor’s cupbearer for Martial.
A final example of the preciousness of this poem, and it brings us back to metre. As mentioned, it is composed in hendecasyllables, and in 10-11 Martial has generally been understood as saying that the name Earinus, with its three opening short syllables, cannot be fitted into any poetic metre; in 15 he mentions Homer’s trick to make Ἆρες Ἄρες fit his hexameters. The problem with this reading is that, while it is certainly true that the hendecasyllable cannot accommodate three consecutive short syllables, and true also of the elegiac couplets in which all Martial’s other poems on Earinus are couched, it isn’t true of all metres, and not even true of all Martial’s metres.
The vast majority of Martial’s epigrams are written in three metres, elegiac couplets, hendecasyllables, and choliambics (also known as limping iambics, or scazons). Choliambics were a metre with a strongly defined character, invented by the Greek poet Hipponax as a vehicle for his poetry of abuse. By Martial’s time the metre was less specialized in its application, and Martial himself uses it for poems which couldn’t count as abusive. But it is the nature of metrical meaning that the deeper associations of a metre are there to be activated if it suits an author to do so. So when Pliny the Younger, a contemporary and acquaintance of Martial, wanted Suetonius to get a move on and publish something, possibly the De Viris Illustribus, he threatened, in jocular fashion, to use choliambic verses “to torture those books of yours out of you with abuse” (Ep. 5.10).
Here in Martial’s poem, line 11, uersu dicere non rudi uolebam, can be read as “I wanted to say [your name] in polished metre,” i.e. with “polished” (non rudi) as a strictly ornamental epithet of uersu, “metre”. But the emphasis could also be on non rudi, “I wanted to say [your name] in a metre that was polished,” i.e. rather than in an alternative metre, one that wasn’t polished. Furthermore, “Earinus” cannot go into two of Martial’s three favourite metres, but it does, tribrach and all, fit very nicely in a choliambic line.
The choliambic could very easily count as an unpolished metre. It was understood as a version of a conventional iambic line, the metre most famously of the dialogue in Greek tragedy, which was hobbled, and stumbled, at the end of line. Non rudi is literally “not rough”: the choliambic was as rough as metre gets (according to the ancient critic Demetrius it is “unrhythmical”, as if not really poetry at all, Eloc. 301), and rough in its traditional application, too. Martial is not saying that he was unable to name Earinus in any verse form, then, but that there was no respectable verse form that would accommodate it; by implication, that Earinus was far too exquisite a creature to hang about in choliambics.
The final way in which Martial’s poem expresses the ineffable beauty of Earinus, then, is that his name is too precious to be spoken of in a disreputable metrical form. And the final layer of sophistication in this gift to Earinus, the final poetic gem, is to flatter Earinus’ (and Domitian’s) intelligence by engaging them in a very sophisticated play on metrical convention.
______________________________________________
*According to Pliny the Elder, citing Manilius, the regeneration of the phoenix takes place “around noon on the day when the sun enters the sign of Aries”, i.e. March 21.
Sex & the Eternal City
(Image courtesy of Sophie Hay)
Regular readers of this blog, all two of you, will confirm that I like it to keep it clean. There’s no gratuitous smut. There won’t be any gratuitous smut here, either. But I’ve been researching a first-century-B.C. Roman called C. Memmius, and he’s a rum cove. My main concern is with his philosophical beliefs, how committed he was to Epicureanism (deeply committed, I want to prove), and from the evidence he comes across as an odd mixture, on the one hand a politician thoroughly immured in the graft and malpractice of late-republican Rome (to the extent that he was eventually exiled for electoral corruption), but with flashes of something like high principle compatible with a philosophical outlook, occasionally, too.
However, another thing that it’s hard to ignore in accounts of Memmius’ behaviour, and this is at first sight less compatible with enlightened philosophical detachment, is his voracious sexual appetite.
The ancients seemed to enjoy telling anecdotes about Memmius’ erotic adventures. In 60 B.C. Cicero shared news of a scandal with Atticus (Ad Atticum 1.18.3): the annual festival of Iuuentas, Youth, which was possibly when young Roman men celebrated their coming of age, was presided over by members of the Lucullus family. But it had been suspended because “Memmius had initiated M. Lucullus’ wife in some rights of his own,” as Cicero waggishly puts it, leading to the divorce of Lucullus and his wife, which apparently disqualified Lucullus from staging the festival. But Cicero has more gossip to share. “Menelaus took this hard and filed for divorce. But while that shepherd of Ida in olden times had only injured Menelaus, our modern Paris had as little respect for Agamemnon as for Menelaus.” Memmius is Paris, stealing Menelaus/Lucullus’ wife; but there were two Lucullus brothers, M. Lucullus and the elder (and more successful) L. Lucullus (= Agamemnon). Cicero’s implication is that Memmius had had his wicked way with the wives of both of them.
He was less successful with Pompey the Great’s wife, though not for want of trying. Curtius Nicias was a Greek scholar who, like many Greek intellectuals, depended on the patronage of powerful Romans, and he received it, we’re told, from both Memmius and Pompey. In the latter case this may have had a lot to do with an expertise Nicias had in the works of C. Lucilius, the poet who effectively invented verse satire. Lucilius had also been Pompey’s great-uncle, and since his satires could be felt by Romans to encapsulate some of their most cherished values, he was a useful association for an ambitious politician like Pompey to advertise. Memmius also had literary and scholarly interests, but he had other uses for Nicias, too. Pompey’s patronage gave Nicias access to Pompey’s house, and Memmius somehow persuaded him to carry a billet doux to Pompey’s new wife Cornelia, 20 years old but already the widow of P. Licinius Crassus, son of Crassus the triumvir, killed by the Parthians at Carrhae. Unfortunately for Memmius, Cornelia immediately informed Pompey. It was unfortunate for Nicias too, since naturally enough he was barred from ever entering Pompey’s house from that day forward (Suet. Gramm. 14).
But the loose sexual mores of the Roman elite could cut both ways. We enter seriously farcical territory with Valerius Maximus’ story (6.1.13) of what Memmius did to the man who cuckolded him. Memmius had married Fausta, daughter of Sulla the dictator (and ward of L. Lucullus, whose permission Memmius must have asked to marry her!), when Fausta was around 15 years old and Memmius a decade older, a pretty typical Roman arrangement (though Pompey was thirty years older than Cornelia). Fausta had a reputation for infidelities of her own, although if we always need to be sceptical of claims of sexual misbehaviour in our ancient sources, women with powerful connections like Fausta (or Clodia, the target of Cicero’s misogynistic attack in the Pro Caelio) were particularly likely to attract outrageous claims about their sexual morality. The story, at any rate, is that Memmius discovered Fausta in flagrante delicto with one L. Octavius and “pummelled him with hams (pernis contudit)”. The interpretation and indeed the Latin text is controversial here, but no one has come up with a better solution, so a bludgeoning with cured legs of pork is as likely as anything.
Memmius and Fausta divorced around this time, after about 17 years of marriage, and this may have been the catalyst (it certainly wouldn’t been Memmius’ serial infidelities that did it, given Rome’s firm double standards), but marriages, divorces, infidelities and sex at Rome in general were more often than not a pursuit of politics by other means, and the connection to Sulla that Fausta represented had perhaps become a liability at that point of Memmius’ political career. It certainly looks like no coincidence that at the time he was trying to seduce Cornelia Memmius was facing conviction under a law passed by Pompey, her husband, and was trying to avoid exile by turning state’s evidence and prosecuting L. Metellus Scipio, her father. His affairs with the wives of the Luculli also followed a long political feud between Memmius and the Lucullus brothers, his former allies, pursued by Memmius (according to Plutarch, Cato 29.3) “more to gratify Pompey than out of private enmity”, so that didn’t work.
On another occasion, when Memmius claimed (and provided names of witnesses to back his claim) that Julius Caesar had played the part of cupbearer to Nicomedes king of Bithynia, in other words had been Nicomedes’ passive sexual partner (cf. Ganymede, the archetypal cupbearer), it was one way of countering Caesar’s overwhelming influence in the 50s B.C. In Roman political culture, a perception of sexual potency equated pretty easily to political authority, and we could read all of Memmius’ sexual activity and sexualised rhetoric as methods of asserting his greater claims as a man and a politician. Mind you, it’s hardly surprising he had so little support when he found himself faced with exile.
C. Memmius features in two of Catullus’ poems, and they happen to include some of the most obscene language in Catullus’ whole collection (which is saying something). Catullus had served on Memmius’ staff when he governed Bithynia and Pontus, in modern Turkey, in 57 B.C. In poems 10 and 28 he describes Memmius’ mistreatment of his staff in luridly sexual terms, in both cases metaphorically attributing to Memmius, whom he catchily and untranslatably christens the irrumator praetor, a sexual act that I shall leave you to investigate for yourselves. This is actually one of those fleeting hints of principle one finds in Memmius’ record: what Catullus appears to be objecting to is Memmius’ refusal to allow his staff, Catullus included, to fill their boots at the expense of the people of Bithynia and Pontus. Memmius seems to have been unusually respectful of the culture of Rome’s Greek subjects. But is the extreme obscenity of Catullus’ language, especially in 28, which implies an overcharged male assertiveness on Memmius’ part, also picking up on his boss’s notorious sex drive?
Well, returning to where I started, this all seems quite hard to square with Epicureanism, which for all its modern associations was an exacting philosophy. Lucretius’ great Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura, which he addresses to a Memmius who is generally assumed to be the Memmius we’re talking about, delivers a brutally disillusioned indictment of romantic passion in his fourth book. But perhaps that’s the key. What Lucretius objects to is not so much sex itself, but the distress that sex can cause, essentially when sex becomes complicated by emotion. To put that another way, Epicureans approved of sex, but not of love: “Nor does he who avoids love lack the fruit of Venus,/ but rather he takes the rewards which come without penalty” (DRN 4.1073-4). An austere creed, as I say. Memmius also wrote erotic poetry, but I’m not sure he’d count as a love poet. His poetry was notoriously explicit, according to Ovid, Tristia 2.433. I think we can assume that Memmius didn’t readily allow romance to enter his numerous sexual liaisons.
Philosophical is one word for that. Or perhaps C. Memmius was just a
John Dryden to an unidentified person
A hardcore Latin-grammar blog, this one, leavened with some Jacobites. You have been warned.
Stephen Bernard, author of this excellent publication, is now producing an edition of the surviving letters of the poet John Dryden (1631-1700), and he’s asked me to help him make sense of what is known as Letter 7, a letter (now in the Beinecke Library at Yale University) written by Dryden to an unidentified correspondent. Latin grammar is my job, and Jacobites one of my longterm fascinations, and since one certainly and the other possibly feature in the story of this letter, I was hooked.
The subject of the letter is the celebrated translation of Lucretius’ masterpiece of philosophical poetry De Rerum Natura by Thomas Creech (1659-1700), first published in 1682, and specifically Creech’s version of lines 225-6 of the first book of the DRN. (At this point Lucretius is making his initial argument for atomism, that all matter consists fundamentally of tiny, indestructible particles.) It seems that someone had questioned whether Creech’s lines made any grammatical sense, and someone else had defended Creech; at which point Dryden was asked to adjudicate. In the letter he presents a series of arguments to the effect that Creech’s couplet could be nudged into making sense. Then, rather more convincingly, Dryden turns to the original text of Lucretius, translates it himself, and explains how Creech had misrepresented, if not positively misconstrued, the original Latin. For me the letter raises interesting questions about Dryden’s Latin, since his discussion of grammatical points seems more than a bit dubious. It’s always possible I’m failing to understand his point, though, and that should be borne in mind.
Here’s the letter in full:
“The two verses concerning which the dispute is raisd, are these;
Besides, if o’re whatever yeares prevaile
Shou’d wholly perish, & its matter faile,
The question ariseing from them is whether any true grammaticall construction, can be made of them? The objection is, that there is no nominative case appearing, to the word, Perish: or that can be understood to belong to it. I have considerd the verses, & find the Author of them to have notoriously bungled: that he has plac’d the words as confus’dly, as if he had studied to do so. This notwithstanding, the very words without adding or diminishing, in theire proper sence, (or at least what the author meanes[)], may run thus.– Besides, if whatever yeares prevaile over, shou’d wholly perish, & its matter faile,–
I pronounce therefore as impartially as I can upon the whole, that there is a Nominative case; and that figurative, so as Terence & Virgil amongst others use it. That is; The whole clause precedent is the nominative case to perish. My reason is this; & I thinke it obvious; let the question be asked, what it is that shoud wholly perish? or that perishes? The answer will be, that which yeares prevaile over. If you will not admit a clause to be in construction a nominative case; the word (thing) illud, or quodcunque, is to be understood; either of which words, in the femi[ni]ne gender, agree with (res) so that he meanes, whatever thing time prevailes over shou’d wholly perish & its matter faile.
Lucretius his Latine runs thus:
Praetereà, quae cunque vetustate amovet aetas,
Si penitus perimit, consumens materiem omnem,
Unde Animale genus, generatim in lumina vitae
Redducit Venus? &c.*
which ought to have been translated thus:
Besides, what ever time removes from view,
If he destroys the stock of matter too,
From whence can kindly propagation spring
Of every creature, & of every thing?
I translated it (whatever) purposely; to show that (thing) is to be understood; which as the words are here plac’d is so very perspicuous, that the Nominative case cannot be doubted.
The word, perish, usd by Mr Creech is a verb neuter; where Lucretius puts (perimit) which is active: a licence, which in translating a philosophicall Poet, ought not to be taken, for some reasons, which I have not room to give. But, to comfort the looser, I am apt to believe, that the cross-graind, confusd verse put him so much out of patience, that he wou’d not suspect it of any sense.
Sir,
The company having done me so great an honour, as to make me their judge, I desire from you the favour, of presenting my acknowledgments to them; & should be proud to heare from you, whether they rest satisfied in my opinion, who am, Sir Your Most Humble Servant
John Dryden.”
The problem that “the company” have identified with Creech’s lines is that there doesn’t appear to be any subject (the “Nominative case”, as Dryden describes it) for the verb “should perish”: it’s unclear what “shou’d wholly perish”, in other words. Dryden starts by acknowledging that Creech’s expression is poor, but then argues that if the words are less “confus’dly” organised (rearranged as “Besides, if whatever yeares prevaile over, should wholly perish, and its matter faile”), the construction makes sense and is also grammatical. In the next paragraph he expresses what seems to be the same point in more grammatical terms. The whole clause “Whatever years prevail over” is the subject of perish, he proposes, or else (an alternative version of the same idea) a word or phrase is unspoken but understood which stands for the previous clause and acts as the subject of the verb.
It’s actually quite hard to reconstruct Dryden’s thinking in this third paragraph, and part of the problem, I suspect, is that his mind is starting to wander from Creech’s translation to Lucretius’ original, which he goes on to quote and translate in the following paragraph. What makes me suspect this is that Dryden is making arguments he doesn’t need to make if his only aim is to rescue the grammatical status of Creech’s English (“whatever yeares prevaile over, should wholly perish, and its matter faile” makes perfect sense), but which he does need to make if he wants to establish that Creech’s English bears some relation to the grammar and meaning of Lucretius’ Latin. The fundamental problem there is that “whatever” in the Latin is quaecumque, which is a plural form (“whatever things”), and thus cannot be coordinated with the verb perimit, “perishes/should perish” (in Creech’s translation, but see below), because that is a singular form. Hence, I think, Dryden is tying himself into knots making “whatever years prevail over” a (singular) clause that is the subject of “should perish”, and then suggesting that, rather than treating the whole clause as a (singular) subject, one might understand a word/phrase like illud or illa res, “that thing”, recapitulating the preceding clause and acting as the subject of perimit. Quodcumque couldn’t work the same way as illud in such a construction anyhow, but Dryden seems to want to introduce quaecumque res, “whatever thing”, as if it might explain Lucretius’s quaecumque, or maybe Creech’s rendering of quaecumque. I’m struggling here, I admit, but I’m struggling because I can’t really make sense of Dryden’s grammatical argument, and I find myself wondering, heresy though it may be, that Dryden himself is struggling, too. None of the arguments he advances in this third paragraph can convince me that Dryden’s formal understanding of Latin grammar wasn’t, on this evidence, rather wobbly. There’s every chance I’m missing something, however, so please tell me if you think so.
In that paragraph Dryden may be heading for a γ=, but he’s on much safer ground in the next paragraph when he abandons Creech’s translation and offers his own. The major difference between his own translation and Creech’s is that, despite the fact that Creech was an Oxford academic, Dryden renders the Latin much more faithfully. As he explains in the penultimate paragraph, Creech took perimit to be an intransitive verb, a verb that has no object (this is what Dryden means by “neuter”, neither active or passive): “perish.” But perimit is in fact an active verb, “destroys”, and although Dryden politely treats Creech’s translation as a “licence” rather than an error, we may have our suspicions. In Dryden’s version (and I think this is the point of the prepenultimate paragraph, I translated it … cannot be doubted), the elusive subject of perimit is quite clear, if interestingly gendered: “he” in the second line is “time”. That, I think, is fine, but I’m still bothered by what seems to me a grammatical dog’s breakfast in the third paragraph.
Let’s just step back and wonder what occasioned the request to Dryden to adjudicate this dispute. Stephen Bernard thinks the letter may be to Anthony Stephens, an Oxford bookseller who published Creech’s translation of Lucretius, pointing out that Creech’s translation of this couplet changes between the first and third editions of this (phenomenally successful) publication in 1682: as if Stephens has consulted Dryden about Creech’s version, and then Creech had adapted his translation in response. Stephen knows everything about this period of English publishing history and is much more likely to be right (since I know absolutely nothing), but what makes me a bit sceptical is that although Creech’s translation changes, it doesn’t change in a way, I think, that someone who has read Dryden’s critique would change it. The new version is, “If all things over which long years prevail,/ Did wholly perish, and their matter fail,” which makes explicit the plural form in the Latin which may or may not have been bothering Dryden, but it continues to use the “neutral” verb “perish”, “a licence, which in translating a philosophicall Poet, ought not to be taken,” as Dryden had bluntly stated.
I’m not sure how strong a counter-argument that is, but another reason to wonder about a connection to Anthony Stephens is what for me is the most exciting thing about this letter, another letter that survived alongside it, dating to May 7, 1811, and written by Edmond Malone, apparently to the husband of a Mrs Smith who owned the Dryden letter as part of her “collection of autographs”: Malone had borrowed the letter, and in return supplemented Mrs Smith’s collection with one of Alexander Pope’s receipts for his “translation of Homer”, although he expresses regret that he couldn’t find any example of Shakespeare’s handwriting for her. (In this respect Malone and Mrs Smith were kindred spirits: Malone’s enthusiasm for autographs was such that he even cut out examples from historical manuscripts.) What Malone’s letter also does, however, is describe his conclusions about the addressee of Dryden’s letter.
From what he had heard from the Smiths about where the letter originated, Malone has been able to “ascertain, almost without a chance of error”, that Dryden had addressed his letter to Edward Radcliffe (though Malone calls him Francis), later the second Earl of Derwentwater, a person from whom Dryden might reasonably have hoped for support and patronage. Radcliffe was an interesting figure, a Catholic and a Jacobite; indeed one of his sons, James, was executed after the Jacobite rising of 1715, and another, Charles, after the 1745 Rebellion. Edward himself married an illegitimate daughter of James II, Mary Tudor, and all of this placed the Radcliffes very close to the royal family displaced by the Revolution of 1688: the letter is perhaps most likely to date to the family’s period of greatest influence during the reign of James II (1685-8), around which time Dryden also converted to Catholicism. The key evidence on which Malone bases this identification is the provenance of the letter. The seat of the Radcliffes was at Dilston Hall in Northumberland, and Malone informs us that it was at Dilston, “in a box containing papers of the Derwentwater family” (or possibly he means, in a box containing papers of the Derwentwater family from Dilston, but the difference is not significant), that the letter had been found.
(Edmond Malone, by his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds)
Now Malone doesn’t help things by confusing Edward Radcliffe’s name with that of his father Francis, but if the detail about the box at Dilston is to be believed, it’s strong evidence of a connection with one of the Radcliffes, at least. What strengthens the case is the identity of our informant, Edmond Malone. I’m still only part way through Peter Martin’s biography of Malone, but the LRB review nicely summarises the achievements of this trailblazing literary biographer: “In the hands of this apparently diffident Irishman, the practice of literary history changed for ever: as far as the privileging of meticulous textual scholarship and painstaking archival research is concerned, Malone wrote the book.” Malone’s long hours in the archives ultimately ruined his eyesight, but he was instrumental in exposing the Chatterton forgeries, for example, and was the the first to establish a working chronology of the works of Shakespeare. Malone’s commitment to factual accuracy could even be felt to be excessive. Peter Martin describes his Life ofDryden, which introduced his edition of Dryden’s prose works (1800), as “the most thoroughly researched literary biography written up to that time” (p. 232), and he was satirised for a meticulousness of detail that tended to swamp his narrative. “The Life of A,” wrote George Hardinge in his parody The Essence ofMalone (1800), “should be the lives of B, C, D, &c. to the end of the alphabet.” But if it made for turgid reading, Malone’s determined recovery of the facts of Dryden’s (and Shakespeare’s) lives has ensured his status as a pioneer of scholarly method. If Malone says “with certainty” that the letter is addressed to Radcliffe, it’s a view worth considering.
Well, what I think this letter is about is a wager among upper-class men close to the Court. A dispute about a couple of lines from Creech’s famous translation arises, and it is proposed to resolve it by asking the Poet Laureate John Dryden to adjudicate: hence Dryden’s reference to a “looser” (of the wager) in the penultimate paragraph; and to his own impartiality in that difficult third paragraph; “company” in the final paragraph simply means the gathering of people present when the wager was struck and (presumably) the letter to Dryden was written.
That’s my theory, but let’s end by returning to the key question that this letter poses for a Classicist: was Dryden’s Latin a bit iffy? Since my whole being revolts at the thought, here is my final stab at an explanation, with thanks to Paul Davis for encouraging me to think less about the accuracy of what Dryden says in such private writing, and more about how he wanted to present himself. It’s a natural surmise that it was Radcliffe who believed that Creech’s couplet made sense and another member of the company (the loser referred to in the third person) who doubted it. Radcliffe was an important man, and Dryden had no wish to upset him, and hence the awkwardness of the letter, as Dryden tries everything he can to justify adjudicating that Creech’s inaccurate and internally nonsensical couplet does indeed make sense, as Radcliffe had wagered. From his familiarity with Dryden’s handwriting, Stephen could tell me that Dryden’s hand in this letter is unusually careful (such a wonderful observation to be able to make after the lapse of three hundred years!). Perhaps he is trying to impress the recipient of the letter; perhaps that is wild speculation. But it is surely true that “the looser” in this wager was robbed blind: Creech’s couplet was a stinker in all kinds of ways, but even on its own terms MAKES NO SENSE. Dryden’s adjudication was a travesty.
But maybe Dryden’s focus was less on grammar and more on forging or maintaining a potentially very fruitful relationship.
*My translation:
“Besides, whatever things time by lapse of years removes,
If it utterly destroys them, consuming all their material,
From whence is the race of animals, class by class,
restored by Venus to the light of life?”
A snooty word for “snooty”
Horace is best known for his lyric poetry, the four books of Odes. In these poems especially he is a word artist who can make even Virgil seem ordinary, and that is hard for me to say.
An example follows.
In the first poem of the third book of his Odes, not for the first or last time, he chides people who believe that material comfort is the answer to their problems. An illustration is a rich man building a fancy villa by the sea (3.1.32-40):
Contracta pisces aequora sentiunt
iactis in altum molibus: huc frequens
caementa demittit redemptor
cum famulis dominusque terrae
fastidiosus: sed Timor et Minae
scandunt eodem quo dominus, neque
decedit aerata triremi et
post equitem sedet atra Cura.
Fish feel the shrinking of the water as massive piers
are dropped into the deep. Here come crowding
the owner who has wearied of dry land
and the contractor with his slaves throwing in
the building rubble. But Fear and Foreboding
climb as high as the master. Black Care
stays aboard the bronze-plated trireme,
and sits behind the Knight.
No matter how visibly successful you are, says Horace, whether commanding a ship, parading through Rome as a Knight, or building a villa that extends out into the sea, you can never escape the troubles that attend all humanity, high, low and in between.
Horace in the Odes is working on a very small canvass, the miniature metrical schemes he’s borrowed from archaic Greek poets such as Sappho and (here) Alcaeus. His response was to develop a style of poetic expression that a character in Petronius’ Satyricon calls curiosa felicitas (118), “meticulous appositeness”, a precision in word selection, word placement, and word combination. For Quintilian he is uerbis felicissime audax (Inst. 10.1.96). In both cases these critics are using an appropriately concise, Horatian turn of phrase to capture the character of his poetry, but this might be translated “daring in his diction to great effect”. At its most brilliant, Horace’s lyric poetry identifies the mot juste, situates that mot juste perfectly, and combines it with another mot juste to intensify poetic felicity to the maximum degree.
An excellent instance of just this is the three-word expression that in the Latin bridges these two stanzas, dominusque terrae// fastidiosus (“and the owner who has wearied of dry land”).
These tiny lyric stanzas work rather like individual lines in more expansive metres, in the sense that the stanza is felt to be a sense unit, and that carries with it an expectation that the end of the stanza will coincide with a sense break (even though it often doesn’t). Here there’s a very marked disruption of the integrity of the stanza, a single expression strung out between two, and the very least that does is defer and enhance our appreciation of the complete meaning of the expression, giving special impact to the first word in the second stanza, fastidiosus.
Which we shall contemplate for a spell, for it is the mot juste, perfectly placed, and perfectly combined. Roughly, this word means “bored”: it governs terrae, “of dry land”, and it describes the dominus, the owner of the property, its proprietor: thus “the master bored of dry land”.
But that isn’t to begin to do fastidiosus justice. Fastidium is an aversion to something, and fastidiosus is an adjective formed from the noun plus an -osus suffix which carries the sense of “full of, prone to”–thus uinosus is “addicted to wine”, curiosus is “full of care”, “meticulous”, and Catullus’ description of Spain, cuniculosus (37.18), is “crawling with rabbits”. To be fastidiosus is thus to be full of this aversion, to be something like squeamish, though I refer you to Robert Kaster in Transactions of the American Philological Association 2001 for a proper discussion of fastidium, a Roman emotion that is extremely interesting when analysed. But for now, and all these examples come from Kaster, you might feel fastidium if, like Pliny the Elder, you were contemplating having to eat a lizard (Historia Naturalis 30.90) or at the very mention of bedbugs (29.61); or you might prove yourself a very inadequate Roman indeed if you betrayed the fundamental principles of amicitia, “friendship”, by being in aequos et pares fastidiosus, (something like) “contemptuous of your equals” (Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.52).
Fastidiosus is a rich word of disapproval in its own right, then. But that’s just one step in the choice, combination and placement of a word. Here the owner of this extravagant villa is terrae fastidiosus, “contemptuous of the land”. The rich man building his house out into the sea is wrong-headed in the same way as a Roman being a snob about his fellow Romans, but to an extreme degree. This man is so disconnected from reality and good sense that he can’t stomach something as basic to everyday human existence as dry land. Terrae fastidiosus is a paradox capturing a profoundly unhealthy state of mind.
That’s the mot juste and combination of mots justes covered, then. But what about placement?
This is where the stanza break comes in. By separating the word for “dry land” and the word for “bored/contemptuous of/disgusted by” between the two stanzas Horace is also visually illustrating on the poetry page this man’s unhealthy thinking, and enacting his disdain in our reading about it. What’s perfect about the placement of fastidiosus is that it makes the word itself look contemptuous of terrae, like it wants nothing to do with it. Fastidium is all about keeping your distance from something unappealing: Cicero talks of us being caused by fastidium to back away (abalienemur, de Orat. 3.98).
What do we do between stanzas of a poem we’re reading? We pause momentarily, take a breath: the result is that fastidiosus is separated, unnaturally, from the rest of its expression, and Horace has placed some supercilious space, analogous also to the seaward extension of the rich man’s villa, between fastidiosus and “the dry land” of the previous stanza.
Curiosa felicitas.
Virgil, hardly trying
I am trapped in admin hell, and can’t see the end of it. It’s really not my forte and all rather depressing, but not getting a second to blog is almost the most frustrating thing of all. So here’s a quick Virgil blog, because that always makes me feel better. As it happens, it’s Virgil on people trapped in hell and imagining they’re somewhere else.
One thing I try to impress on my students as early as I can is that, in one respect at least, Virgil’s poetry is thrilling not in spite of but by virtue of being spectacularly derivative. What I’m talking about is the regularity with which commentaries on the Aeneid point to parallels with Homer. Virgil is forever imitating his Greek predecessor, in language, image, plot, you name it. The poem as a whole presents itself unapologetically as a Roman version of the Homeric poems. Where, my students reasonably ask, is the creative genius in that?
Well, the beginning of an answer is provided by Virgil himself, who faced criticism for being too slavishly indebted to Homer in his own day. The ancient life of Virgil by Donatus records a detail from a book defending Virgil from his critics by Q. Asconius Pedianus, better known for some precious commentaries on five speeches of Cicero.
Asconius Pedianus, in a book which he wrote Against the Detractors of Vergil, sets forth a very few of the charges against him, and those for the most part dealing with history and with the accusation that he took most of his material from Homer; but he says that Vergil used to meet this latter accusation with these words: “Why don’t my critics also attempt the same thefts? They will realise that it is easier to steal Hercules’ club from him than a line from Homer.”
Homer’s reputation in Virgil’s day is hard to overestimate. He was generally considered simply the greatest poet there had ever been. The historian Velleius, a contemporary of Asconius, writes that Homer alone deserved the name of poet: there was no one before Homer for him to imitate, he continues, and no one after Homer capable of imitating him. So what Virgil is saying here is that even simply translating Homer straight into Latin would be an achievement, indeed an act of recklessness. How would you feel about trying to steal this man’s club?
Now of course Virgil is only ironically acknowledging the force of this criticism. He wasn’t in the habit of stealing lines from Homer in any straightforward way, and his engagement with the Homeric texts was complex and creative. The ancient notion of literary creativity, in many ways a much more reasoned one than our post-Romantic idea, was innovation within an established set of traditional rules, which generated a productive interplay of respect and rivalry between the poet and the model. The difference with the Aeneid is in the status of Virgil’s major model. Virgil was setting out to create from Homeric material a Roman epic that would surpass its model, and the very project was bold to the point of lunacy: everyone knew Homer was beyond anyone’s capacity to rival him.
What I’m going to suggest here, though, is that even when Virgil might reasonably be accused of purloining a line from Homer, it’s a brilliantly creative act, without question as audacious as mugging Hercules.
We’re in Book 6 of the Aeneid, and our hero Aeneas is passing through the Underworld in the company of the Sibyl of Cumae. In the “most far-flung fields, set apart for the glorious in war” he comes upon the shades of some old comrades in the Trojan army. Virgil’s realisation of an Underworld full of animate dead, like yet fundamentally unlike the truly living, is superb in all kinds of ways, but a recurrent touch is to suggest that the dead are themselves only half-aware they have died. At the end of this passage Virgil shows us Idaeus “still holding the chariot, still holding the arms,” pathetically reenacting his role in life as Priam’s herald, squire and charioteer. But what Virgil also does, and this is so typical of him, is to encourage us also, as we read, to mistake the dead for the living (6.481-5):
hic multum fleti ad superos belloque caduci
Dardanidae, quos ille omnis longo ordine cernens
ingemuit, Glaucumque Medontaque Thersilochumque,
tris Antenoridas Cererique sacrum Polyboeten,
Idaeumque etiam currus, etiam arma tenentem.Here [he was met by] the Trojans, much lamented in the Upper World and fallen in war, and he groaned as he saw them all in a long line, Glaucus and Medon and Thersilochus, the three sons of Antenor and Polyboetes the priest of Ceres, and Idaeus still holding the chariot, still holding the arms.
The words I’ve underlined, Glaucumque Medontaque Thersilochumque, “Glaucus and Medon and Thersilochus,” are a very close imitation of Homer indeed. At Iliad 17.216 Homer has Glaukon te Medonta te Thersilokhon te (Γλαῦκόν τε Μέδοντά τε Θερσίλοχόν τε). In fact the Latin and Greek languages could hardly get any closer than Virgil brings them here, retaining the Greek case ending for Medon’s name, and matching Homer’s staccato te/τε (“and”) with que. The Latin words stand out from their context rhythmically, too, a weak caesura and a polysyllabic line ending which feels palpably Homeric. In other words Virgil is insisting that we recognise these words as a foreign intrusion in his Latin poem.
Slavish imitation? Definitely. He hasn’t made any effort to adapt this Homeric detail; on the contrary he’s advertising how uninventive his imitation is. But the payoff is the kind it takes a genius to engineer. What Virgil achieves by it is a sudden, intense evocation of the original context of this expression in the Iliad. Let’s consider what Glaucus and Medon and Thersilochus are up to at line 216 of Iliad 17.
They’re alive, of course: in the Iliad the city of Troy hasn’t fallen yet (Thersilokhos dies at Achilles’ hands in the slaughter of Book 21). But there’s more than that. We’re at a turning point in the war at Troy: Patroclus has perished, and Hector, leader of the Trojans, has donned the armour of Achilles himself, stripped from Patroclus’ body. It’s an ominous moment, Hector demanding comparison with Achilles when he’s really as ill-suited to Achilles’ arms as Patroclus had been. For the Trojans, though, this is a moment of hope: Hector has slain the Achaean champion, they’re in the ascendant again. That’s where a line lifted seemingly unaltered from the Homeric text transports us from the dingy Underworld of Aeneid 6, back to when Glaukos and Medon and Thersilokhos were not just alive but in their pomp, brash and confident.
In the Aeneid these Trojan heroes are dead, as we instantly recollect. The momentary evocation of the lives they’d lived as Aeneas views their indistinct shades is impossibly poignant, I think. And Virgil achieves it by doing exactly what his critics condemned him for, blatantly, shamelessly nicking Homer’s material.
Surprised by C.S. Lewis (with a broadsword)
A bit of passion for your subject is no bad thing in a teacher, and I’ve been known to be pretty adamant about the quality of the literature I’m teaching, particularly if it’s Horace or Virgil. But C.S. Lewis took advocacy of the poetry he was teaching to another level again, on the evidence I’m about to present.
Assiduous readers of this blog know that C.S. and I have history: a dubious story about him and the inspiration for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is repeated under my window ad nauseam by tour guides. But a happier connection is Lewis’ enthusiasm for one of my favourite poems, Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, the story (from the Persian poet Ferdowsi, but reinvented by Arnold as a mini Homeric epic) of the single combat between the warriors Rustum and Sohrab: eventually Rustum slays Sohrab, unaware that Sohrab is his son. I knew that Lewis was fond of the poem because in his autobiography Surprised by Joy he described falling under the spell of Arnold’s evocative scene-setting as a twelve-year-old boy: “what enchanted me was the artist in Pekin with his ivory forehead and pale hands, the cypress in the queen’s garden, the backward glance at Rustum’s youth, the pedlars from Khabul, the hushed Chorasmian waste” (p. 53).
The anecdote that follows is new to me, though. It’s from Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings (p. 214), and I owe it to the immensely well-read John Stoker. (I owe the reference to Surprised by Joy to the equally well-read Gail Trimble, I should add.) Carpenter is describing Lewis’ confrontational style of teaching, which divided opinion among his undergraduates (“A few lapped it up, but some very nearly ran away”):
‘If you think that way about Keats you needn’t come here again!’ Lewis once roared down the stairs to a departing pupil. And on another occasion when an Australian student professed that he could never read Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, and refused to admit its good qualities even after Lewis had chanted a hundred lines of it at him, Lewis declared, ‘The sword must settle it!’ and reached for a broadsword and a rapier which (according to J.A.W. Bennett, who was there) were inexplicably in the corner of the room. They fenced – Lewis of course choosing the broadsword – and, said Bennett, ‘Lewis actually drew blood – a slight nick.’
Those were the days. I’ve a shrewd idea what the HR Manager would say today if I tried to settle a disagreement about the power of Horatian word placement with a duel. I do actually inflict Sohrab and Rustum on my own students quite regularly, on the pretext that it’s a nice encapsulation of Greco-Roman epic style, but I try to resist the impulse to reenact the story with authentic weaponry when I do so.
Anyhow, here’s a chunk of Sohrab and Rustum that Lewis loved and I love, Rustum wistfully recalling his youthful affair with Sohrab’s mother, and Arnold capturing nostalgia perfectly. If anyone doesn’t love it, of course, I’m afraid I’ll have to see you outside:
as, at dawn,
The shepherd from his mountain-lodge descries
A far, bright city, smitten by the sun,
Through many rolling clouds—so Rustum saw
His youth; saw Sohrab’s mother, in her bloom;
And that old king, her father, who loved well
His wandering guest, and gave him his fair child
With joy; and all the pleasant life they led,
They three, in that long-distant summer-time—
The castle, and the dewy woods, and hunt
And hound, and morn on those delightful hills
In Ader-baijan.