Prussian ’ggression; ducal dubieties
In January/February 1891 Karl Heinrich Ulrichs included a short, impassioned and enigmatic paragraph in his Latin-language newspaper Alaudae. It illustrates nicely both the challenge and the interest of editing Alaudae, since Ulrichs is making allusions that he was probably confident his contemporary readers would recognise, but which are more than a little opaque in 2023.
I give the text below, but to summarize it, Ulrichs first makes reference to a defeated leader in a civil war whose possessions had been expropriated at his defeat, but who has nevertheless more recently been permitted to receive an inheritance, and this outcome is then contrasted with the circumstances of another leader, also dispossessed, whose surviving son has little hope of recovering what is properly his.
Here is the passage in question, in English and the original Latin:
“A general, defeated in civil war, was once forcibly stripped of what was his by the victors. The same man not long ago took possession, with no objection, of an inheritance that had been legally bequeathed to him. Another leader, again forcibly stripped of what was his, has a surviving son. To this son also an inheritance has been legally bequeathed. When will that be restored to him, an inheritance that in defiance of justice and right a more powerful man has had the effrontery to steal, that man to whom so many among those people were wont to swear loyalty come hell or high water? When? Has reverence for what is right among you just turned into an old-womanish superstition? Are you not flushed with shame still to be striking TO EACH THEIR OWN?”
Dux quondam, victus bello civili, eo quod suum erat a victoribus vi spoliatus est. Idem nuper, contradicente nemine, potitus est devolutae ad se legitime hereditatis. Alii principi, suo eādem vi spoliato, superstes est filius. Ad hunc quoque legitime devoluta est hereditas. Quando huic ea restituetur, hereditas quam contra jus contra fas ausus est intercipere potentior, iste in cuius verba apud illos solebant per fas et nefas jurare tot animi? Quando? Num apud vos verecundia eius quod fas est abiit in superstitiones aniles? Nonne rubore suffundimini adhuc feriundo SUUM CUIQUE?
I understand the second half, I think. Ulrichs was born in the Kingdom of Hanover, which subsequently, in 1866, had been defeated and annexed by Prussia, and Ulrichs regularly expresses his outrage at this turn of events. The word I’ve translated “leader”, princeps, can also be “prince”, and suggests Ernst August, erstwhile Crown Prince of Hanover, the son of the king of Hanover deposed by the Prussians who never relinquished his claim to the crown of Hanover. The “stronger man” is surely Bismarck, whose brainchild the German Empire was that emerged from Prussian expansion, but who had resigned his position as Chancellor just a year before Ulrichs was writing.
Finally, the motto that the “those people” should be ashamed to be “striking” (the natural sense of ferio), suum cuique (one which I gather was sufficiently tainted by Nazi use to be avoided these days) is found on some Prussian coins of an earlier date, I think, and on the badges of Prussian guardsmen, but at any rate as the motto of the Order of the Black Eagle, the highest distinction in the Kingdom of Prussia, clearly identifies Ulrichs’ target as the Prussians even if I’m still pondering the precise implication of feriundo.
[24.09.2023: My esteemed colleague Neil McLynn has clarified that feriundo for me. He’s surely right that the thing being “struck” is, precisely, the Order of the Black Eagle, which while rarely awarded could amount to a powerful exercise in Prussian public relations when it was. The most recent recipient had been Prince George, the future George V, during a trip to Berlin with his father the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII). He was formally invested with the order on March 22, 1890.]
The first half is trickier. I’m assuming, and this could be a basic mistake, that a civil war well enough known in Europe in 1891, which is significantly far in the past (quondam) but of which the aftermath is still contested (nuper), is likely to be the American Civil War. My best guess is that in the dux who was deprived of his possessions after the war, but managed without contest to receive an inheritance, Ulrichs is making a rather loose reference to the court case United States v. Lee in 1882, in which George Washington Custis Lee, son of Mary Anna Custis Lee and Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate forces in the Civil War, sued for the return of his mother’s Arlington estate, which had effectively been confiscated by the US government in the course of the war in 1864, and subsequently — an inspired gesture — largely turned into the Arlington National Cemetery.
In 1882, however, the Supreme Court ruled in Custis Lee’s favour, and while he never returned to Arlington, he received generous compensation from the government — recovered his inheritance, in other words. Custis Lee was himself quite prominent in the Confederate army, but if it is this case that Ulrichs is referring to, I think there’s some conflation in Ulrichs’ mind of the famous Robert E. Lee and the lesser-known Custis Lee.
So on the one hand we have a civil war and a recent high-profile case; on the other, if it is indeed the Lee suit at issue, a vagueness, at least, in the definition of the parties, as well as an inaccurate assertion that the claim to the inheritance was uncontested. I’m inclined to think this can be explained by Ulrichs’ passionate concern for the claims of Ernst August, which leads him in the process of condemning Prussian injustice to flatten and simplify a half-remembered recent controversy in the United States. But that doesn’t entirely satisfy me.
So if anyone has a better candidate for that dux dispossessed in civil war, I am all ears. I should say that it’s just the kind of thing that Ulrichs will himself decide to clarify in three issues’ time, in which case I’ll let you know.
Bamiyan after Bamiyan: civilization in ruins
Find here an essay gathering together some thoughts post-“The Buddhas of Bamiyan” for KabulNow, which is a source of English-language news on Afghanistan very much worth following.
From Srinagar to Stroud
I did indicate in my last blog that an item in the Proceedings of the Cotteswold Naturalists’ Club was intriguing me, and here it is. As far as I can tell from my perusal of these Proceedings (you too are welcome to peruse them here), this “Ode to the Cotteswold Society” (the Cotteswolds or Coteswolds are what we now call the Cotswolds, the comparatively elevated country that reaches roughly from Oxford in the east to Stroud in the west) was written probably in very early 1850, and is a jocular plea to be admitted as a member of the Society. It advertises itself a parodical version of Horace’s Integer vitae ode, 1.22.
The author, I confidently believe, is W. Henry Hyett, of whom this is an interesting account, mentioning his love of Horace, short career as a Whig MP for Stroud, and Fellowship of the rather more eminent Royal Society. His interests match well those of the Cotteswold Naturalists’ Club, which is a jolly-sounding group that gathered at hostelries in towns across the western Cotswolds to discuss the geology, history and natural history of the area. It is pleasing to note how happily the scientific interests of Hyett and his fellow members coexisted with the classical educations also much in evidence. Knowledge of Horace here functions, in a way readily paralleled, as a mark of elite status. “Clubbable himself, Horace granted access to the club”, I have written in my Horace: VSI draft, never expecting to find quite such a literal illustration.
Below is a translation of the text and notes (it is set out in the Proceedings to resemble a contemporary annotated classical text), and below that my notes on Hyett’s poem and notes. There is much I am unsure about, and I’ll have made mistakes. I welcome any further ideas.
I have a special reason for enjoying Hyett’s parody. The places he refers to have become familiar to us in the last three years while my elder son has attended a special college in Nailsworth, while living most of the year in Stonehouse (there’s a map elucidating this and Hyett’s geography at the bottom). He will probably be moving on from there this year, but we have grown very fond of the area and the people who have looked after him so brilliantly. With my Horace hat on, it tickles me, too, that an ode of Horace based in the Sabine country can provoke recognition in Srinagar and be replayed in Stroud.
- An ostracism was an Athenian mechanism for deciding if any citizen should be expelled from the city for ten years, and Hyett suggests melodramatically that a failure to give him membership of the Society would be tantamount to exile.
- The reference in “Steam” may be to the fiendishly complex manner in which Gloucester became connected to the growing railway network. “Baker” is Thomas Barwick Lloyd Baker, president of the club, and a figure very active in efforts to rehabilitate (particularly younger) criminals.
- Beneath Hiatus lies Hyett, but the sense of the line is difficult, and I wonder if there is also some play on “hiatus” meaning a pause or gap.
- A traditional rhyme. See the map below.
- Michael Wood, now best known as a Services on the M5.
- Very good…
- “Champagne mousseux” is what we would simply call “Champagne”, heavy drinkers of which are notoriously prone to gout.
- Lutetia Parisiorum being the classical name for Paris.
- Reading impulsa.
- Ovid, Met. 15.44, from the story of Myscelus, founder of Croton.
Lalage, a life
In 1913, Aurel Stein, archaeologist and explorer, was preparing for his third expedition into Chinese Turkestan, modern Xinjiang. He made sure to pack, as he always did, a copy of Horace’s Odes, on this occasion the recently published Odes and Epodes translated by C.E. Bennett in the new series of Loeb Classical Texts from Harvard University. On the inside cover of the book Stein wrote In ripis Hydaspis MDCCCCXIII, “On the banks of the Hydaspes 1913”. Later in his expedition he added Gravi vulnere aegrotantis solatium fuit iste libellus in montibus Sericis Nan-shan, “This book was a comfort when suffering from a serious injury in the Chinese Nan-shan mountains.” Stein had been thrown by an excitable horse and spent some time recuperating in camp, his Horace to hand. These inscriptions in Stein’s Loeb were recorded by L. Rásonyi, Stein Aurél és hagyatéka [Aurel Stein and his Legacy] (1960), on page 30, most fortuitously so as since that time the cover of the book, bequeathed along with much else by Stein to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, has been mislaid. I’m deeply grateful to Ágnes Kelecsényi of the Academy for all this information.
“On the banks of the Hydaspes” is a little Horatian joke on Stein’s part. He was in Srinagar, Kashmir, which lies on the river Jhelum or Vyeth, in Greek antiquity named Hydaspes, and so named in particular in one of Horace’s most popular odes, 1.22, Integer vitae:
I think I’ve now sent off a final text of Horace: A Very Short Introduction, which will see the light of day sooner or later, but I thought I might thread together some scattered references I make to this particular poem of Horace and its fairly remarkable life story. You can’t embed YouTube videos in a book, either, and it would be a shame not to share a couple of them.
Horace’s poem is a particularly satisfying exercise in playful misdirection. An apparently sombre and high-minded opening, claiming that the virtuous man should have no fear of any harm, a Stoic doctrine, is somewhat punctured by the appearance of an addressee for the poem, Aristius Fuscus, a literary type and friend of Horace who has been advertised as a man with a sense of humour in Satires 1.9 and would by implication be characterised as a Stoic with a sense of humour in Epistles 1.10. Greater damage still to the respectability of Odes 1.22 is done by the poet’s lover Lalage, whose name means “Chatterer”, “Babbler”. Horace is singing about her when the wolf runs away from him, but that seemingly incidental detail returns unexpectedly at the end of the poem to derail what we’re probably expecting to be a restatement of the opening: “No matter what inhospitable place I find myself in, my virtue will keep me safe” is instead “No matter what inhospitable place I find myself in, the answer is to sing about Lalage as I was doing when that wolf appeared.”
Philosophy gives way to a flippant love affair, then, and it’s possible also that the effect is reinforced by a move from poetry reminiscent of Alcaeus to a more Sapphic conclusion. The metrical form of the poem, the sapphic stanza, was shared between Alcaeus and Sappho, but there is a clear allusion to Sappho fr. 31 (and Catullus’ imitation of it) in the final image of Lalage, while specifically Alcaic elements in the poem have been argued for by Gabriele Burzacchini, QUCC 22 (1976), 39-58, and one might say (and once I did) that poetry focusing on an attractive young woman is itself intrinsically reminiscent of Sappho. I also suggested back then that the Mytilenean duo Sappho and Alcaeus offered Horace in his Odes a mini polarity between relatively serious and relatively unserious lyric poetry — always according to ancient stereotype.
That’s all as may be, but for our purposes what matters is that it follows from this account of Integer vitae that if you lop off the last four stanzas you have an apparently serious poem, and the remarkable truth is that historically 1.22 has probably been encountered far more often in this form, just the first or the first two stanzas, than as a whole. The reason for this is a melancholy musical setting by F.F. Flemming that became a standard at funerals in northern-European funerals. Here it is sung by a German collective, although somewhat inauthentically (I think) they sing the first three verses.
The other Latin author I’m currently working on, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, shares in his Latin-language newspaper a discussion of the poem between himself and a Finnish Classics professor in Helsinki, “F. G-n”, identified by my co-editor Michael Lombardi-Nash as Fridolf Vladimir Gustafsson, Professor of Latin at Helsinki University from 1882 to 1920 and according to Iiro Kajanto, “The Classics in Finland”, Arethusa 3 (1970), 205-226, a formative influence in the history of Classics in Finland. (This is a rich Classical culture under severe pressure at the moment, I’m sad to say: there are petitions worth signing relating to Classics at Oulu here and Turku here.) One thing that makes editing Alaudae such a fascinating activity are Ulrichs’ interlocutors across Europe and the US.
Gustafsson had attended a funeral of a friend at which Flemming’s Integer Vitae had been sung by the congregation, and the friend’s widow had asked him to translate the whole poem for her — an awkward dilemma, as Lalage is not especially funereal. What’s interesting is that Ulrichs, who is undoubtedly one of Horace’s very biggest fans, seems to agree with Gustafsson that the poem is unsatisfactory, a dignified opening spoiled by the entry and especially the reappearance of Lalage. “Someone once exclaimed, “How did Pontius Pilate creep into the Christians’ creed?” I exclaim, “How did Lalage into Integer Vitae?”” But both Gustafsson and Ulrichs will no doubt have attended numerous funerals where this strange hymn was sung, and the sombre associations were perhaps impossible to escape. They were not alone in wanting to lose Lalage, at any rate. The metrically identical socios, “fellows”, was another way of bowdlerizing away the love interest Lalagen in school texts.
The poem seems to have been favoured for musical setting also in the heyday of the frottola, the most widespread form of secular song in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy. Here you can find a setting by Bartolomeo Tromboncino, and here at 2:10 by Michele Pesenti.
A final outing for the poem now, accompanied by a request for any others you know of. (I have myself found and am pondering a parody of the poem in Proceedings of the Cotteswold Naturalists’ Club circa 1853, beginning Innocens vitis, cellar-isque purus, “Innocent of the vine, of the cellar pure”, and by (I believe) William Henry Hyett.) Below is the whole of the stunning film of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, directed by Julie Taymor and starring Anthony Hopkins, an appropriately gothic take on a Goth-driven Revenge Drama. Titus is a very classically-aware play, with an overarching debt to Seneca, Ovid’s Metamorphoses a key prop in the plot, and a general determination to collect and stage the most ghastly myths from antiquity. Do watch it, but count to ten before you do. At 4.2.18 (around 1hr 37mins in the film, where Shakespeare’s text is slightly adapted), Titus Andronicus, having discovered the plot of Aaron the Moor to destroy his family, sends his best weapons to the two Goth sons of the empress Tamora, who under Aaron’s guidance have committed their ghastly crimes, and along with them a note containing a meaningful quotation of the first two lines of 1.22:
DEMETRIUS
What’s here? A scroll, and written round about?
Let’s see:
[reads] Integer vitae, scelerisque purus,
Non eget Mauri iaculis, nec arcu.
CHIRON
O, ’tis a verse in Horace, I know it well.
I read it in the grammar long ago.
AARON
Ay, just — a verse in Horace, right, you have it.
[aside] Now, what a thing it is to be an ass!
Here’s no sound jest. The old man hath found their guilt
And sends them weapons wrapped about with lines
That wound, beyond their feeling, to the quick.
Anachronistically, these depraved young Roman-era Goths were educated using the so called Brevissima Institutio, a Latin textbook composed during the reign of Henry VIII by John Colet, Erasmus, but mainly William Lily, and in continuous use in schools for centuries thereafter. The first stanza of 1.22 is used in Lily as the model for its metrical form, the sapphic stanza. The textual variant Mauri, present in Lily and in Titus Andronicus, allows a pun, targeting Aaron: “The man pure in life and innocent of crime/ needs not the javelins nor bow of the Moor.” Aaron, at least, gets the point of it.
A moral of this very short history of Odes 1.22 is that, however much you try to suppress Lalage, she has a habit of resurfacing, sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking — a dynamic that began with Horace himself. A final thought is whether there’s a hint of the same here in Titus. Titus Andronicus’ beloved only daughter Lavinia has been raped and maimed by the Goth princes, at Aaron’s instigation, who have cut off her hands and removed “that delightful engine of her thoughts,/ that blabbed them with such pleasing eloquence” (3.1.83-4), her tongue. Yet she has managed to communicate the truth of their ghastly crimes nevertheless, mainly by means of a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses opened to the story of Philomela, and Titus’ revenge on Aaron and the princes follows.
Titus is surely conveying by the citation of Integer vitae not just that he knows of the plot, but that Lavinia has communicated it, the beloved babbler still babbling.
Ancient & modern
An ancient excerpt and two modern posted without comment, except to say that they are roughly datable in their content to AD 81, 1824 and 1879, respectively.
“Agricola had given protection to one of the chieftains of the Irish who had been driven out by internal conflict, and under the pretence of friendship was holding onto him in case an opportunity presented itself. I have on many occasions heard him say that Ireland could be conquered and held by a single legion and a moderate number of auxiliaries.” (Agricola expulsum seditione domestica unum ex regulis gentis exceperat ac specie amicitiae in occasionem retinebat. saepe ex eo audiui legione una et modicis auxiliis debellari obtinerique Hiberniam posse). Tacitus, Agricola 24.3
“If the British did not get their hands on Afghanistan first, [William Moorcroft] warned, then the Russians almost certainly would. And what better moment than the present, when two rival factions were vying for the Afghan throne? A single British regiment, Moorcroft argued, was all that would be needed to place a suitably compliant candidate on the throne.” Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, p. 99
“But if [Col. George Pomeroy] Colley [private secretary to the Viceroy of India] was an admirable theorist in the art of war, he did not give me the impression that he would be equally good in practice. He tried to convince me quite seriously that a British regiment 1,000 strong, and armed with Martini-Henry rifles, ought to be able to march through the length and breadth of Afghanistan, when once clear of the Khyber and Kuram Passes.” J. L. Vaughan, My Service in the Indian Army—And After, p. 182
Mascarpone
The joke in my Christmas cracker this year went something like, “What cheese is best for hiding a horse?” Answer: “Mascarpone”. This sets the standard for what follows.
As I may have mentioned once or twice, my time when not teaching or walking the dog this academic year is taken up editing and annotating translations of the Latin newspaper Alaudae, published by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the last years of his life from 1889 to 1895. I’ve just finished a primary edit of Issue X (out of a total of XXXIII), January 1890, translated by Phillip Dupesovski, and a selection of its contents might be: discussion of the motto of the House of Savoy, FERT, as found on the edges of nineteenth-century Italian coins; an encounter between a Goliardic poet and an Archbishop based on a twelfth-century poem attributed to the Anglo-Welsh priest/courtier/writer Walter Map; a love poem which makes poignant sense against a poem Ulrichs had written in German 40 years before; and acknowledgement of receipt of a book from Max Müller, proving there was an avid and eminent reader of Alaudae at 7 Norham Gardens, Oxford.
At the end of Issue X there is a poem on coffee, presented with a translation below, and I need some help with it. Cafea is written in hendecasyllables, Catullus’ trademark metre (so a playful form), albeit not consistently respecting Classical rules of versification; or more accurately, following a nudge from Antigone, always a source of illumination, the Catullan hendecasyllables are alternated, pretty much at random, with sapphic hendecasyllables—the latter of which Ulrichs used a lot in his Latin poetry. The poem begins by describing Ulrichs’ morning ritual of brewing coffee over a spirit burner. (Ulrichs spent his final years in very straitened circumstances.) Then the figure MINITANTE appears, sharing Ulrichs’ addiction to coffee to a comic degree, and at the end he asks us to identify her.
I say “her” because that is clearly the gender of Minitante in the Latin. My best guess is that Ulrichs is punning, with a word that could be Latin but make no sense as such in situ, on German “meine Tante”, “my aunt”. The instruction to change a letter, but only one (if we’re understanding him correctly), I take to mean changing the first “i” of “minitante” to “eye”, but not the second, which unstressed could sound like the -e of “meine”. It would be nice to discover that “My aunt” is a regular feature of comic anecdotes, but I have no reason to believe that is true.
Anyhow, I’m inviting better theories, as well as any corrections of my (and Phillip’s) reading of the Latin. If we’ve got it all backwards, we’d be delighted to know!
28.12.2022. In addition to the suggestion in the comments below, two from Twitter. Eric Sheng points out that minutante in Italian can mean retailer or shopkeeper, and that might make better sense of the financial considerations towards the end. Meanwhile Charles Stewart, and independently my co-editor Michael Lombardi-Nash, have pointed out dialectal forms of “meine” that would bring the first syllable closer to “min-“. Editing Alaudae offers a great deal of intellectual fun!
The Song of the Allobroges
A Horace blog to mark, a little belatedly, the draft of Horace: A Very Short Introduction that I submitted to OUP at the start of the month. But the Horatian poem I’ll be talking about here came to my attention through an entirely different project, the text and translation (with light commentary) of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ late-nineteeth-century Latin-language newspaper Alaudae that will be my major preoccupation this year (cf. recent blogs, passim).
The poem I’m concerned with here is not by Horace but an imitation of Horace by J. P. Steele written in 1894 and published, perhaps surprisingly, in The Lancet on March 31st of that year. It is a twenty-stanza Latin ode in alcaics on the occasion of the Eleventh International Medical Congress in Rome in April 1894, and it honours Guido Baccelli (1830-1916), the President of the Congress, an eminent physician and Ministro della Pubblica Istruzione (Minister of Public Education) in the Italian government. It also celebrates the Policlinico Umberto I, a modern teaching hospital in Rome, the first of its kind, of which Baccelli was the prime mover and in which the Congress was held, though this huge undertaking was not finally completed for another decade.
The poem is presented below along with a rough-and-ready translation done on trains through France, corrections to which would be welcome. But in summary, the author proposes, with a healthy dose of Horatian irony, that Rome had owed its ancient greatness as much to its devotion to the god of medicine Aesculapius as to its martial abilities, and that the recent revival of Rome as capital of the new nation of Italy is reflected in the renewed concern for the study of medicine in the city that Baccelli and the Policlinico exemplify.
We are informed by The Lancet that the poem was written for The Lancet and presented to Baccelli in advance of the Congress. Some explanation of this lies in Baccelli’s own enthusiasm for Latin. In his obituary in the British Medical Journal, 15 January 1916, p. 115, we learn that he “could discourse in Latin of a Ciceronian quality”, and at the preceding meeting of the triennial International Medical Congress in Berlin in 1890 Baccelli had flouted the requirement that communication be restricted to German, French and English by addressing the conference in Latin. The poem picks up on the breadth of Baccelli’s interests, bonarum cultor et artium et/ scientiarum.
The author of the poem, James Peddie Steele (1836-1917), we’d know less about but for a long and affectionate obituary in Papers of the British School at Rome 9 (1920), 1-15, by John Sandys, Cambridge Classicist and Public Orator. From this it emerges that he was another doctor-Classicist, a Scot who was a long-time resident of Italy, and latterly Florence, and who had a passion for Horace, and “was himself particularly fond of writing Alcaic odes after the model of Horace” (Sandys in an earlier eulogy in the TLS August 2, 1917 p.369). Sandys records Steele’s gift of books and bookcases to the nascent British School at Rome, his generous and authentically Horatian style of hospitality, and the summers he spent with friends at a villa in Tivoli, Sant’ Antonio, which a sequence of British owners had identified as the site of one of Horace’s properties. In letters to Sandys he described the view from the villa in a couplet adapted from Epistles 1.10, one of Horace’s most appealing poetic letters: Prospiciens Anienis aquas, et Tiburis umbram,/ Excepto quod non simul esses, cetera laetus, “Looking out over the waters of the Anio and the shade of Tivoli,/ in all respects happy except that you are not with me” (cf. Epist. 1.10.50). This intense identification with Horace is a feature of his afterlife, really unlike any other ancient poet.
For me, the trickiest detail of Steele’s poem to interpret were the references to the Allobroges. I had assumed a very loose reference to “barbarians”–Alaric conquering Rome in 410. But that seemed weak and didn’t make much sense in context. Illumination struck at Beaulieu-sur-Mer train station as I fell down a very deep rabbit hole in pursuit of the Italian/French character of this part of the Côte d’Azur. Key to the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian reunification, had been Victor Emmanuel of the House of Savoy, king of Sardinia and then from 1861 king of Italy. It was his forces that in 1870 “completed” the reunification by capturing Rome, entering the city by the Porta Pia in the Aurelian Walls, not far from the later site of the Policlinico, itself named after Victor Emmanuel’s son Umberto. The Allobroges, an Alpine people, are best known as Cicero’s informants during the Catilinarian Conspiracy, but their territory coincided with Savoy, or at any rate sufficiently so for Savoyards to claim the Allobroges as ancestors. Le Chant des Allobroges is one product of this.
Steele knows his Horace and does a good pastiche. A speech by Hannibal is inspired by Odes 4.4, and there’s one direct quotation from elsewhere in the Odes and no doubt others I’ve missed. He has managed a Horatian combination of adventurous word order and clarity, and exploits the inherent dynamics of the alcaic stanza, for instance using the emphasis given anything placed in the middle of the third line to highlight Baccelli’s name. I’ve mentioned already the characteristically Horatian elusiveness of tone. This poem is light and serious simultaneously.
Finally, it’s probably worth observing that with hindsight some of the assimilation of ancient and modern Rome that Steele pursues in 1894 foreshadows fascist ideology a generation later. An editorial in the same issue of The Lancet also addresses the Congress, Baccelli and the Policlinico (Steele was close to the editor, and may have effectively written it), and quotes a stanza from Horace’s Carmen Saeculare, alme Sol! … possis nihil urbe Roma/uisere maius (11-12), which was later inscribed on the fascist Arch of the Philaeni in Italian Libya; it was a fascist motto, in effect. Studying the 1890s, as I have certainly said before, is an eerie exercise in dramatic irony, seeing all the ingredients of the ruinous Twentieth Century as its protagonists plough on regardless.
I’ve added some even rougher and readier explanatory notes below. For Daphne I should have directed the reader to Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.452-567, where she is transformed into a laurel tree. In any case, enjoy what seems to me a remarkable transposition of Horace to the scientific aspirations of the late nineteenth century.
- The Gauls expelled from the Capitol by Manlius (and the geese) in 390BC.
- Pyrrhus of Epirus, of “pyrrhic victory” fame, defeated by the Romans in 275BC.
- Hannibal. The Gallic capture of Rome and Pyrrhus’ and Hannibal’s campaigns in Italy could be considered the three most significant conflicts in Rome’s rise to prominence.
- Epidaurus in the Peloponnese was a cult centre of Asclepius/Aesculapius, the god of medicine. In response to a plague in 293BC, the Romans sent an embassy to Epidaurus to secure the god for Rome, encouraged either by the Sibylline Books or the oracle at Delphi (in either case a Sibyl), and the god expressed his willingness by boarding the Roman ship in the form of the snake wrapped around his staff. In the last book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses the poem finally reaches Rome on the ship bearing Asclepius.
- Asclepius, still in the form of a snake, chose the Tiber island as his new residence, and that was the location of his shrine in Rome, perhaps constructed to recall the ship that first brought him there.
- The wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus.
- A Muse, speciality history, her name suggesting fame.
- The kings of the Allobroges are the nineteenth-century House of Savoy: see above.
- In a gorgeous couple of lines (I seem to share Steele’s taste in Horatian verses) Horace had asked his long-exiled friend Pompeius, quis te redonavit Quiritem/ dis patriis Italoque caelo, “who has restored you as a Roman citizen to your ancestral gods and the Italian sky?” (Odes 2.7.3-4), the unspoken answer being Augustus.
- Staged hunts of wild animals and gladiatorial munera, fights between men with variations of weaponry and armour, were two forms of Roman public entertainment in the Colosseum.
- Machaon and Podalirius, sons of Asclepius, were both doctors, described as such in Homer’s Iliad.
- The International Medical Congress was designed to be a triennial event, thus Washington D.C. in September 1887, Berlin in August 1890, Rome in March 1894, Moscow in August 1897. Trieteris strictly, by ancient inclusive counting, denoted a festival that occurred at intervals of two years, not three.
- Steele echoes Odes 3.29.35-6.
Further Larks
I’ve been translating some more issues of Alaudae (“Larks”), the Latin newspaper produced by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs from 1889 to 1895: for earlier thoughts about Ulrichs and Alaudae, see here. A three-volume edition–intro, Latin text, translation and explanatory notes–is going to be published by Bloomsbury in the fullness of time, but here is a taster, from the two issues I’ve just been translating, of the (I think, fascinating) snippet views of Europe in the 1890s (through the eyes of an activist and Classicist) that Ulrichs’ newspaper offers. The first three are from issue 17-18 in March 1891, and the last two from issue 32b in June 1895. Ulrichs is in roman; any comments from me in italics.
Latin in Istanbul:
“Not even in Constantinople is the Latin language spurned. In a Greek high school in the suburb of Pera, whose headmaster is Ch. Hadjichristou, Esq., it is taught by two teachers. And years ago in Würzburg I got to know two young men studying medicine there from Asia Minor, Greek speakers, who had received a thorough grounding in Latin. “I have read “Aeneidos β” (Book 2 of the Virgilian poem), one of them said. Moreover I remember them saying, “Wir sind Romi” (Romīi, that is, “We are Romaei.”) They declared themselves to be Romans, not Hellenes, Romans of the eastern branch, descendants of those Romans who fought under the Comneni and the last of the Palaeologi.”
Paraphrasing a Finnish scientist’s account of a research trip to the Kola Peninsula:
“In the month of July the author witnessed the plain still covered in snow, surrounded by land already cleared by the sun’s rays, and in the middle of the plain more than a hundred head of reindeer. They had retreated there to avoid the torment of mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes were not willing to follow them into the snow.”
A self-defence against criticism of his activism for the recognition and tolerance of homosexuality:
“To my critic from Munich. How unkind you are! You have certainly not read the books I have written about that remarkable mystery. Have you explored the profundities of Nature? Have you penetrated her secrets? I somewhat doubt it. And do you presume to pass sentence, a judge before your time? Forbear then, if you wish to sit in judgment, forbear to pass judgement on the defenceless, lest you harm the daughter of great Jupiter the Thunderer, heavenly Justice. If it is so much your wish to have someone to condemn, have it out with Nature the creator. Condemn her. She it was that committed the crime of not creating things according to your instructions, you silly man. A Swiss historian, a man of the purest judgment, has read my books carefully and wrote the following to me: “A wicked case cannot be defended as you have defended yours.” It is worth something, I think, to know truth, and its power to disperse the darkness and expunge unpardonable evil. To know it and remain silent, when I have the ability to speak, I have judged unworthy. Rightly would you scorn me, if I had kept silent, like someone of the basest kind and the weakest of spirits. But I was not willing to abandon what I considered my duty. I wanted to fulfil my duty. I acted fearlessly, though my heart was pounding.”
On poems in Latin in honour of Guido Baccelli, a senior Italian physician and politician, and President of the Eleventh International Medical Conference in Rome in 1894, who according to his obituary in the British Medical Journal 15th January 1916, pp. 114–115 “could discourse in Latin of a Ciceronian quality” himself; Dr. J.P. Steele’s poem is to be found in The Lancet 31st March 1894, pp. 819-20, or more conveniently, here:
“Two Latin poems have been written for Guido Baccelli. One is by a British doctor, Steele, twenty alcaic stanzas which The Lancet in London published: “At the part of the wall where the standard bearer of the Allobroges etc.” The other by the Roman doctor Cesare Ballabene is four elegiac couplets: “The … which once shone with diverse marbles and gold etc.” (Balla bene, that is, “he dances well”. If there weren’t ten elisions in these eight verses I’d judge he made good verses, too.)”
In the process of deciphering this section, I discovered (with some effort) two things: the first was that “Guido” can be rendered in Latin as “Vitus”, and the second that Ulrichs’ Latin abbreviation for Baccelli’s governmental position in 1894, “min. regius a p. instr.”, could be expanded as “minister regius a populo instruendo”, “Regio Ministro della Pubblica Istruzione”, “Royal Minister of Public Education”, which was indeed Baccelli’s role in 1881, 1881-4, 1893-6, and 1898-1900.
Excerpt from a Latin oration delivered by John Sandys, Public Orator, on the occasion of the award of an honorary doctorate to the future George V by Cambridge University, June 1894; the child mentioned is the future Edward VIII, born just a few days before the ceremony:
“Most worthy sir, Mr Chancellor, and the whole University! How happily we hail the grandson of the Queen and Prince Albert, once our Chancellor. We hail his father, our most eminent Prince, whom thirty years ago we saw honoured with the same accolade. We hail his mother, whom we rejoice is today herself in attendance. We hail the Prince, who almost from boyhood has devoted himself to mastering naval science; who, having traversed the oceans, visited our colonies separated from us by the whole world but joined with us with their whole hearts, as yet unaware of the kingship that would one day be his; who has shown again and again that the naval glory of the British Empire is his greatest love. … Almost a year ago he took as wife the granddaughter of the first Duke of Cambridge *) Today we rejoice that the heir of the heir of this great kingdom has been blessed with a son and that the royal line has been continued to the third degree. I bring before you Prince George Frederick, Duke of York.”
At *) Ulrichs comments, “I love this name. The Duke of Cambridge ruled the kingdom of Hanover, my homeland, as Viceroy when I was a boy. U.” Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, was Viceroy of Hanover from 1816 to 1837, at which point Victoria’s accession in Great Britain caused the dissolution of the “personal union” between Britain and Hanover. Adolphus was the grandfather of Mary of Teck, the wife of George V, and was associated by Ulrichs with a more liberal constitution in Hanover than followed after the separation, and then again some years later after Hanover’s annexation by Prussia.
The View from Malakand
There are links here, here, here, and here to a pdf of my and Prof. Olivieri’s open-access book on Harold Deane, political officer and archaeologist.
Blogs related to the research it involved me in are here (the Jahanabad Buddha, destroyed and restored); here (the search for Alexander’s Aornos); here (the edicts of Ashoka, and Deane’s role in their interpretation); here (Aurel Stein and Deane’s botanical collection); here (a Persian wordplay applied to Deane); and here (Deane’s dreams of Alexander).
You can also find me here, back in 2020, struggling to figure out Deane’s frankly shocking handwriting.