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?”
Just a dog
A full-scale dog-blog was always on the cards. I came quite close in this one, when a figure in a photo I’d been shown turned out to be a pioneer of Afghan Hound breeding. But this blog is devoted to a single dog, a fox terrier called Dash who belonged to the archaeologist and explorer Aurel Stein.
Actually Stein owned seven dogs in succession, and every one of them was called Dash. The name was more common at one time than it seems to be now: Queen Victoria’s Dash was a King Charles spaniel. It still seems slightly odd to give every one of a sequence of dogs the very same name, and Stein, whose claim to fame is above all as an investigator of the Buddhist cultures of Central Asia, sometimes toyed with the idea that the latest Dash was a reincarnation of one of its predecessors.
Anyhow, the subject of this blog is Dash II, or “Dash the Great” as Stein liked to refer to his very favourite of them all; he also called him Kardash Beg, “The Honourable Snow Companion”, when he discovered with delight that his new dog had a relish for snow. Pets belonging to Aurel Stein could expect to encounter some pretty gruelling climatic conditions.
Stein acquired Dash the Great in 1904, and the dog accompanied him on his Second Expedition into Central Asia from 1906 to 1908, Stein’s most audacious, most successful, and ultimately most controversial venture into Chinese Turkestan. It was during this expedition that Stein was able to investigate a trove of Buddhist material in the Mogao caves at Dunhuang, removing a large quantity of texts, textiles and paintings. But earlier in the expedition he and his team had made the high-altitude crossing from the very northeastern tip of Afghanistan into Chinese Central Asia, and later he undertook a perilous, and very nearly disastrous, crossing of the Taklamakan desert.
Dash is a regular presence in Stein’s accounts of his expedition, especially the popular Ruins of Desert Cathay (1912), often most visible in moments of particular intensity. As things become very desperate during Stein’s crossing of the Taklamakan desert, his men threatening to mutiny, he is grateful that Dash makes do on “a saucerful [of water] spared from my cup of tea”. As they scale the 16,000-foot Wakhjir pass between Afghanistan and China, the generally irrepressible terrier whimpers with the cold and insists on sheltering beneath Stein’s fur coat. On another occasion he’s roused from sleep in Stein’s tent by the excitement of Stein and Chiang-Ssu-yeh, Stein’s “Chinese secretary and helpmate”, when they find proof that the frontier fortifications they’re investigating date from as early as the first century AD.
Dash chases marmots in the high country, “distinctly provoking for so indefatigable a hunter”, develops a knack of mounting a horse, “jumping up to the stirrup, and thence to the pommel of whoever was offering him a lift”, and gets badly mauled by a pack of semi-feral sheepdogs. When the party finds itself having to cross the Kash river over a ridiculously makeshift bridge, the poor thing is trussed up in a bag and passed along a wire rope along with the rest of the baggage.
The expedition took its toll on Stein. As he crossed back into India in 1908 he suffered frostbite while surveying at high altitude, losing several toes of his right foot after being carried down in agony to Ladakh. When he was eventually fit enough to travel, he describes his departure for Britain at the end of 1908 and enforced separation from Dash, “the last of my faithful travel companions, but, perhaps, the nearest to my heart”: dogs were not allowed on the P. & O. Mail boat. Dash made his own way to Britain on a separate steamer, spent four months in quarantine, and “was joyfully restored to his master under Mr P. S. Allen’s hospitable roof at Oxford.”
P. S. Allen was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and he and his wife Helen were scholars of Erasmus and two of Stein’s oldest and closest friends; their “hospitable roof” was 23 Merton St., where Stein always stayed on his visits to Britain, and where Dash would actually spend the rest of his life. Stein seems to have decided that his “inseparable little companion” had had enough adventure. At any rate, when he returned to India he left Dash behind with the Allens. The comfortable new home of this canine veteran of the sand and snow deserts of the Taklamakan and Pamir Knot is now part of the Eastgate Hotel.
Dash lived with the Allens for another nine years, and while Merton St. was his home, he was clearly left to wander wherever he liked across Oxford. But as the First World War drew to a close, a new and deadly threat to an increasingly decrepit old dog was being introduced to Oxford’s streets, the motorised Omnibus. Percy Allen wrote to Stein to explain what happened:
He took himself out for a walk one aft. Friday, 27 Sept. [1918], & was run over by a motor bus in Park End St—the street which goes down to the station as the continuation of the High & Queen St. The police brought around his collar next morning, & reported that he had been killed instantaneously, & that they had buried him in their usual place. Helen went to the police station to enquire, as soon as we returned home—10 days later—but by that time it was too late to unearth him & bring him to sleep in the garden where he has so often slept before.
It’s a terribly banal end for a dog who’d seen so much, run over by a bus on Park End St. (Although I’ve subsequently walked the distance from 23 Merton St to Park End St, and Dash clearly hadn’t lost his wanderlust.) Soon the regular letters between Stein and the Allens turned back to the urgent issues of the day, the Armistice just a month or so after Dash’s death, and the Spanish Flu. But for as long as Dash is the focus of these letters between old friends, he provokes a touching outpouring of affection between them. Helen Allen reminisced to Stein about Dash’s life in Oxford:
He has been as outstanding amongst dogs, as his master amongst men; such sagacity & such devotion. I can see him in so many different poses: returning on a Cotswold walk after a chase after a hare, to look which way we were gone meanwhile, locating us & then heading straight for our slow plodding figures; looking up full of enquiry when he heard: “Go and meet him, Dash,” & then bounding forward joyously as he caught sight of Percy…
Such faithfulness as he has shown must surely meet a fit reward.
And we send you many thanks for the added happiness you brought into our lives through Dash.
“Surely a Ulysses among dogs,” wrote Percy Allen to Stein:
full of wise counsel & dignity, & greatly attached to his friends. You brought great pleasure into our lives thro’ him: for wh. we thank you, amice noster, as for so much else. Blessings on Dash the Great.
Stein, in response, thanked his friends for their comforting words:
Never before, I feel sure, had a faithful canine companion’s departure been recorded in words more true and deserved. How grateful I feel to [Helen] for having thus softened the pang which this sad news caused me the enclosed letter for her cannot express adequately. I do not command the inexhaustible goodness of soul which is life’s greatest boon in you both, nor that grace of expressive brief words which mature and constant communion with Erasmus have bestowed upon you both. I never cease to give thanks for all the brightness which you two have brought into my existence for the last twenty years—but my gratitude must be equally great for all you have done to help me in facing sad losses and trials.
Well, we all know dogs can be surrogate objects of affection for people who find it difficult to express emotion. Why else are English people so fond of them? In happier times, too, “Dash” had been a vehicle for the Allens’ affectionate pride in their friend’s success, writing a letter to congratulate Stein on the knighthood he received in 1912:
23 Merton St
Bara din 1912
Many congratulations, dear Master. Am wearing my collar of achievement.
If I had known this was coming, I should not have cried on the Wakhjir.
Whip the young one, and keep him in order.
Bow wow
(Have assumed this title) SIR DASH, K.C.I.E.
Still, just a dog.
Tufang
I blogged a while back on the lingering mystique of an Indian ruler who died in 1799 yet has refused to be forgotten. Tipu Sultan achieved that posthumous celebrity above all by developing a uniquely powerful symbolic language to promote his regime, its lasting impact reflected both in the initial rush to secure from Tipu’s capital Seringapatam some of his possessions after its sack by the East India Company–and in the intense interest that the art of Tipu’s Mysore continues to provoke, whether in museums or in auction houses, on the rare occasions pieces of his throne or examples of his weaponry come onto the market.
Well, yesterday a stunning collection of Tipu material was auctioned at Bonhams in London, and the day before, en route to Defining Beauty at the BM, I popped in to have a look. For me, as for Bonhams in their literature, the stand-out item was this musket. What follows will make a lot more sense if you study Bonhams’ photos of it (and Bonhams’ description is much fuller than mine here). To get a sense of how such a musket worked, this is a useful short video.
In 1793/4, when the musket was manufactured in Seringapatam, it was a cutting-edge piece of hardware, but it’s also an incredibly elaborate piece of visual propaganda. I am no kind of expert in firearms, and not much of a fan either, but what I can’t help finding fascinating are the methods used by rulers, and especially rulers whose legitimacy is insecure or in some way seriously disputed, to maintain their authority. That might in their various ways include Kim Il Sung, Elizabeth I or Domitian, and the British in India or Greeks in Bactria, all of them compensating for their insecurity with aggressive self-assertion. It certainly includes Tipu, whose father Haydar Ali had supplanted the longstanding Hindu dynasty that had ruled Mysore.
This being Tipu’s gun, the decoration has a dominant tiger theme. Most obviously, the butt of the musket is carved into the form of a crouching tiger (its stripes inlaid with silver) reminiscent of the famous clockwork Tipu’s Tiger, now in the V&A. But the lock and cocking mechanism are also in the shape of a tiger, and the steel barrel has the same stylized babri or tiger-stripe decoration (again inlaid with silver) all along its length. Tiny silver tigers function both as the safety catch and the foresight.
Tipu’s tigers were richly symbolic, expressive of India and royalty, but also carrying a strong religious force. The tiger had deep roots in non-Islamic India (Tipu’s subjects were overwhelmingly non-Muslim) as a figure of sacred power (cf. K. Brittlebank, Modern Asian Studies 29 (1995), 257-69), but it also connects to Tipu’s particular veneration of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Fourth Caliph: asadullah al-ghalib, “the triumphant lion of God,” an epithet of Ali, was a motto much favoured by Tipu, for example formed into the shape of a tiger’s face as at the head of this blog: many of the firearms in the Bonhams sale bore this motif. Ali wielding his sword Zulfiqar, needless to say, made a good patron for a pious warrior like Tipu.
There’s more than just tiger imagery on this musket, a sun motif, too, and a talismanic square bearing the letters of his father Haydar’s name: though as “Haydar” means “lion”, and lions and tigers were pretty interchangeable in Tipu’s symbolic language, even there we haven’t escaped big cats entirely.
The tiger decoration has more precise points of reference, too. On the butt of the musket a silver panel depicts a tiger overcoming the ghandabherunda, a two-headed bird which was the emblem of the Hindu Wodeyar dynasty overturned by Tipu’s father; while on a silver escutcheon at the top of the butt, and also on the underside of the trigger guard and the side plate, tigers maul European soldiers as with the clockwork Tiger. Either opponent, British or Hindu, may be considered the target of a quatrain of Persian poetry inscribed along the barrel: “The peerless musket of the Khusrow of India/ To which the blazing lightning is second/ Can seal the fate of the enemy/ If his forehead become the target.” Tipu will certainly have imagined this text to be more than decorative in effect: he had great belief in magic and the supernatural.
(A cannon of Tipu Sultan in the same Bonhams sale)
“Liberated” from Seringapatam in 1799, the musket was gifted to Lord Cornwallis, who is best known for losing America but who had had greater success earlier in the British campaigns against Mysore: the gift reflected the debt that East India Company felt to their former commander.
My last blog on Tipu was about the obvious influence Tipu continued to exert on the British celebration of his defeat. Surely the most significant thing about the musket I gazed at for half an hour two days ago is that over two centuries after the death of its owner, and long after the demise of the power that conquered Mysore, it and the other Tipu-related items are still causing a stir in the London art market.
Tipu’s elaborate tufang was estimated before the auction at £100,000-150,000. Its sale price (including the buyer’s premium) was £722,500.
On St George & his day
Dragons, heroes & Zoroastrians over at The Nation!
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.
Aornos, a place of refuge
“If Aornos is Elam, a tale of exceptional military prowess becomes more like a story of the impact of war on civilian populations.”
Some thoughts on the nineteenth-century obsession with finding Aornos, the fortress stormed by Alexander the Great in 327/6 BC, over at The Nation…
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.
Rednose College, Oxford
Testones be gone to Oxforde, god be their speede:
To studie in Brasennose there to proceede.
I’m calling this a Christmas blog, on the basis that it involves red noses, and that’s about as festive as I get. Anyhow, what we have here is an epigram by the Tudor writer John Heywood (1496/7-1578 or later), shared with me by Bea Groves (thank you!), and it joins my growing collection of theoretically amusing epigrams that aren’t necessarily terribly funny (cf. this one by Martial).
To the poem in a second, but Heywood first: a pioneering English-language playwright and poet/epigrammatist, and a well-connected and successful man, although his Catholic faith became more and more of a liability the older he got, and he died in impoverished exile in the Low Countries. He was married to a niece of Sir Thomas More, which hints both at the advantages he enjoyed and the obstacles he faced; and his grandson was John Donne. Not the least of Heywood’s achievements was his popularization, through his poetry, of proverbial turns of expression. We still find ourselves saying (something like) “An ill winde that bloweth no man to good”, “a dog hath a day”, “Rome was not built in one day,” “eate your cake and have your cake”, to name just a few of Heywood’s proverbs, though it’s a cause of deep regret to me that we seem to have lost “Hungry dogges will eate durty puddings” and “to bring haddock to paddock”. Heywood owed a lot of these proverbs to Erasmus, whose collection of thousands of Latin and Greek sayings, the Adages, was one of the most influential pieces of writing ever composed. Anyone interested in the evidence for that claim, see here.
Now, our poem is just a common-or-garden epigram, not a proverb, and it’s actually concerned with an issue very specific to Tudor England, the debasement of the coinage. We might conclude also that it illustrates Heywood’s limited poetic talents, and how poorly humour travels across centuries, but I leave that judgment to my readers.
A teston is a coin, a shilling, minted by Henry VIII, and as this blog explains the financial pressures Henry faced had led to a drastic watering down of the silver content of a coin whose bullion value was supposed to be equal to its face value. I’m pretty certain the economic consequences of the so-called “Great Debasement” weren’t as straightforward as that blog suggests, and it’s actually an interesting question how much the general user of coinage knows about any reduction in precious metal content. When the same thing happened in third-century AD Rome, there’s an appealing theory that no one was much bothered about it until the reforming emperor Aurelian made the mistake of being upfront and honest about the debasement. That was the point at which confidence crashed and inflation took off, whereas up until then, so the thinking goes, most people had faith in the faces on the coinage: if its value was backed by the authority of the emperor, that was enough to maintain most people’s confidence in the currency.
It’s an intriguing situation if so, since it would be a case of “commodity money”, money worth what it’s worth by virtue of the precious metal it contains, functioning as “fiat money”, possessing value essentially because the government says so.
There’s evidence that the same might have been true of Henry’s debased shillings, and that they managed to retain their face value even as their bullion content plummeted, but the truth of what had happened to the silver coinage clearly did over time become widely known. An unfortunate consequence for Henry was a mocking nickname he received, “Old Coppernose”. On raised parts of the coin image, such as the tip of the king’s nose, the silver wash designed to maintain the appearance of an authentically silver coin would be rubbed off, exposing its essentially copper composition.
Here is an image of a debased teston which I’ve borrowed from the Royal Mint blog:
The joke of Heywood’s epigram is to relate these “coppernose” testons to a college at Oxford University, mine as it happens, called Brasenose or Brazen Nose. We don’t know how the college got its name (one theory traces it to an old word for brewery), but we’re very proud of it and our symbol is a nose. The debased coins, Heywood says, have upped sticks and gone to get a degree at an educational establishment that suits their character, Brazen nose College.
I’m pretty confident that isn’t funny. But it’s interesting that Heywood is implying that debasement is a past practice, now entirely abandoned: the debased testons are leaving the economic scene for Oxford, seems to be his point. This poem and the one that follows it on the same theme come from Heywood’s publication A fourth hundred of Epygrams, from 1560 (epigrams 63 and 64). By this time Elizabeth is on the throne and ostentatiously marking the new age by restoring the bullion content of the coinage: I do wonder how many people were really aware of the debasement until Elizabeth made a big noise about correcting it.
So the poem seems to be a bit of schmoozing directed at Elizabeth from a poet who had got on perhaps a little too well with Queen Mary. But it wasn’t much help in the long run: enforcement of Elizabeth’s religious settlement at the start of her reign made the position of Catholics like Heywood very difficult indeed, and in 1564 he left the country for good, with precious few shillings to his name.