Richmond Lattimore

The old Bryn Mawr professor and still Homer's best translator was an underappreciated poet himself. I turned to this at random just now and thought it fit to post:

---

IN MEMORIAM
Elsie Campbell Sinclair Hodge, AB 1897.
Born Dec. 15, 1874. Died in the massacre of Christians
at Paotingfu, China, June, 1900.

This is the stone bench on the Bryn Mawr campus.
Sometimes in mild weather I teach classes
at the bench of Elsie, killed by Chinese Boxers.

Mobs, rage, weapons. The sleeping dragon shook
his scales between the spells before his last
awakening to red fire and howling guards.

The quaint and pretty graduation class,
round-eyed before the camera, gave her up
to her short duties, love, and violent death.

The Empress of India, small, yacht-prowed,
reeling in high waters off the Aleutians
(those stormy gray ships on the Eastern Grand Circle),

carried my parents, innocent and clever,
squeezed by hard means from their own academe,
to China, months and dollars away from home.

Where Elsie's blood was only six years faded,
at the hired temple, next the lily pond,
I was born in Paotingfu. The stars are joined.

All taught. It's in our blood, a hard gray strain
to discipline our little furies, knot
our stormy-colored lusts into cool form

until dragons shall dim their fires and smile.

basil, and not as in 'bunting'

i learned something new today from our greek textbook that makes me feel like a dancing songmistress. i learned that the name of the herb 'basil' comes from the greek word 'basileus' ('king'). and you know what? i'm not too disappointed to learn that one of my favorites is king of the herb world.

the dictionary has an argosy of definitions

merriam-webster's word-of-the-day for october 23 has prima facie sweet classical connections, but a surprising etymology:

argosy \AHR-guh-see\ noun

1 : a large ship; especially : a large merchant ship
*2 : a rich supply

Example sentence:
Uncle Ken is always armed with an argosy of jokes, and he keeps the family entertained for hours.

Did you know?
Looking at the first sense of "argosy," you might assume that this word is a close relative of "argonaut," but that isn't the case. Although both words have a nautical sense, they have different etymologies. The original argonauts sailed on a ship called the Argo to seek the Golden Fleece; their moniker combines the name of their ship and the Greek word "nautēs," meaning "sailor." "Argosy" comes from Arragosa, the English name for the city that is now Dubrovnik, Croatia. Over time, the Italian name of the town, Ragusa, was gradually modified into a noun for the laden merchant ships that sailed from that port in medieval days, and later still into one denoting any merchant vessel or rich store.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

garden abstract

the first line of this hart crane poem made me think of sappho:

Garden Abstract

The apple on its bough is her desire,--
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.

And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.

The Man and His Letters

today's quote of the day is about p.l.i.n.y and is from a.n. sherwin-white's (not to be confused with sherwin williams) 1969 article 'pliny, the man and his letters' (GR16(1969)76-90):

Pliny was neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but as a man superficially educated in the philosophical disciplines of his own day he was a rationalist, and his rationalism is not perverted or obscured by his devotion as a writer to the cult of style. It is the balance of these two qualities that his particular excellence lies. He was not a great writer any more than he was a great man, but he did little things well.

at the 100th derridean (where the great plains begin)

after a little hiatus of my own, i bring another link on derrida. i didn't realize he was such an avid tv-watcher. this is what he said:

"I watch TV all the time," he once said. What kind of shows did he watch? "Anything." But television was not mere passive entertainment — not for a Brilliant French intellectual. "I am critical of what I'm watching," Derrida insisted. "I am trying to be vigilant. I deconstruct all the time."

neat. that last sentence is something i would expect to be sampled and looped into a techno song.

uhn-ts, uhn-ts, uhn-ts, uhn-ts-ts, bad-ump, bad-ump, bad-ump, bad-ump--[fuzzy voice]i deconstruct all the time. i deconstruct all the time. i deconstruct all the time...

Funny Search Entry of the Week

I've noticed that we sometimes receive mistaken visits by people who find the Campus through search engines, and this one amused me quite a bit:

A&G italian sexy couple

This was entered over at google.it (Italy) by someone presumably looking for a sexy Italian couple with the initials A&G, not a classics-related blog which happened to mention Allen and Greenough's Latin Grammar (A&G), a retired Italian classics teacher, and what we'd been reading a couple of days before.

As for sexy, your guess is as good as mine.

Meter for the Masses

Ever wondered why that pesky, seemingly arbitrary, hiatus appears? Ever come across the term diastole (normally defined as artificial lengthening of a short syllable) and wondered why?

Well, neither is arbitrary, and actually diastole and hiatus are products of thesame phenomenon.

Diastole is derived from the old Greek grammatical term for a comma. It came to be used later as a technical term for the comma in texts which distinguishes ὅτι ('wherefore') from ὅ,τι (that).

But I digress. The primary function of the comma is to mark a kind of pause, and that's precisely what the metrical phenomenon labeled 'diastole' does.

Now, as I alluded to before the term is used in Latin prosody of a position normally counted short but which is counted long. This is a bit misleading (it seems arbitrary but it's not), so let's take a look at Catullus 64. 20 (we'll us d for dactyl and s for spondee):

tum Thetis humanos non despexit hymenaeos

This scans d-s-s-s-d-s. The phrase despexit hymenaeos is s-d-s, with the final syllable of despexit counted long. Now, initial h is never counted as a consonant and can not force the -t to close that syllable (i.e. it can't make it 'long by position'). So why is it scanned long? Why diastole?

The culprit is a 5th caesura which I found also at Aeneid 1. 720, also preceding hymenaeos: profugus | hymenaeos.

Diastole only occurs when (1) the syllable is composed of a short vowel + consonant, and (2) it is followed by a pause. Necessarily the following letter must be a vowel or h (a consonant would force the syllable to be counted long).

This pause is most often the 4th, 2nd, or 3rd foot caesura, in that order (in
Vergil at least, based on a quick glance at occurences of diastole in the Aeneid), but there are other possibilities. Vergil has a few examples of 5th foot caesura causing diastole.

Hiatus is the term used when such a pause causes a vowel-final syllable not to
be elided (again, a cursory glance at occurrences in the Aeneid shows a preference for hiatus at the 3rd foot caesura). Check out any occurrences of diastole or hiatus that you find in Latin hexameters. I'm willing to bet you'll find that caesura explains it.

I just figured this out today, so if there's anything I've missed or some deeper significance, please pass it along.

Bad Movie Latin!

I just watched the Punisher with my dad on his sweet new widescreen hi-def TV, and noticed an odd bit of Latin.

The main character talks about his military training and says he was told repeatedly sic vis pacem para bellum: 'if you want peace, prepare for war.'

Of course it should be si and not sic.

That's not so bad as far as films go. It's certainly not as bad as Rushmore's nihilo sanctum estne? which is supposed to mean 'is nothing sacred?,' but which can only mean 'in nothing there is something sacred. Isn't there?'

If I recall the Latin in Tombstone wasn't bad, even if they were only quoting proverbs to one other.

Quoth Samuel Johnson,

"Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth."

(Dedicated to the legacy of Jacques Derrida.)

today's quote

today's quote on my myway.com page is campus appropriate, so i thought i'd share it:

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
- -- Aristotle

jacques derrida

from the corner on nro:

JACQUES DERRIDA, RIP [John J. Miller]
The French father of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, has died at the age of 74, in Paris. His intellectual legacy essentially is to have articulated a theory proposing that communication is impossible. Think about that for a second, because that's what deconstruction really is: a theory that argues communication is impossible. As one critic of deconstruction has pointed out: "It is a contradiction to say that nothing can be said, and a multiple contradiction to say it at length."

the Catullan Galliambic

We're reading Catullus 63 this week and I've found no work very helpful on the meter.

So here is the schema, which is really much simpler than the commentaries and metrical treatises would have you believe:



And here is the most natural form of this ionic meter followed by Catullus' most common adaptation:



The places marked here by curly brackets allow the phenomenon called anaclasis, whereby two positions of different quantity may be switched. Put simply long-short become short-long, as the schema makes clear.

You'll notice that in the first half Catullus favors anaclasis in the bracketed portion, while he favors resolution in the second. I haven't bothered to calculate percentages but I'd bet he follows this as a rule 75% of the time.

Aside from resolution and contraction (which are pretty straightforward) the only seemingly tricky thing occurs between the curly brackets. But even that isn't so tricky. There are only three options:



Galliambic meter should never cause anyone headaches again.

Now who's a metrist of some repute?

NOTES:

The symbol showing two shorts below a long indicates 'contractible biceps,' i.e. a position which is properly filled by double breve (two shorts) but which may be contracted into a single longum.

The symbol showing two shorts above a long indicates 'resolvable long,' i.e. a position which is properly filled by a single longum but which may be resolved into double breve.

The basic Ionic metron is composed of two shorts followed by two longs. The Galliambic is properly an Ionic dimeter plus an Ionic dimeter catalectic (catalexis refers to suppression of the final element at line end -- note that the second dimeter is always short one syllable).

classics from a different culture 2

see here for photos of the inscription:

Solving a Riddle Written in Silver
New York Times ^ | September 28, 2004 | JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Posted on 09/27/2004 9:26:45 PM PDT by 68skylark

The words are among the most familiar and ecumenical in the liturgies of Judaism and Christianity. At the close of a worship service, the rabbi, priest or pastor delivers, with only slight variations, the comforting and fortifying benediction:

"May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and grant you peace."

An archaeological discovery in 1979 revealed that the Priestly Benediction, as the verse from Numbers 6:24-26 is called, appeared to be the earliest biblical passage ever found in ancient artifacts. Two tiny strips of silver, each wound tightly like a miniature scroll and bearing the inscribed words, were uncovered in a tomb outside Jerusalem and initially dated from the late seventh or early sixth century B.C. - some 400 years before the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

But doubts persisted. The silver was cracked and corroded, and many words and not a few whole lines in the faintly scratched inscriptions were unreadable. Some critics contended that the artifacts were from the third or second century B.C., and thus of less importance in establishing the antiquity of religious concepts and language that became part of the Hebrew Bible.

So researchers at the University of Southern California have now re-examined the inscriptions using new photographic and computer imaging techniques. The words still do not exactly leap off the silver. But the researchers said they could finally be "read fully and analyzed with far greater precision," and that they were indeed the earliest.

In a scholarly report published this month, the research team concluded that the improved reading of the inscriptions confirmed their greater antiquity. The script, the team wrote, is indeed from the period just before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. by Nebuchadnezzar and the subsequent exile of Israelites in Babylonia.

The researchers further reaffirmed that the scrolls "preserve the earliest known citations of texts also found in the Hebrew Bible and that they provide us with the earliest examples of confessional statements concerning Yahweh."

Some of the previously unreadable lines seemed to remove any doubt about the purpose of the silver scrolls: they were amulets. Unrolled, one amulet is nearly four inches long and an inch wide and the other an inch and a half long and about half an inch wide. The inscribed words, the researchers said, were "intended to provide a blessing that will be used to protect the wearer from some manner of evil forces."

The report in The Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research was written by Dr. Gabriel Barkay, the archaeologist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel who discovered the artifacts, and collaborators associated with Southern California's West Semitic Research Project. The project leader is Dr. Bruce Zuckerman, a professor of Semitic languages at U.S.C., who worked with Dr. Marilyn J. Lundberg, a Hebrew Bible specialist with the project, and Dr. Andrew G. Vaughn, a biblical historian at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn.

A companion article for next month's issue of the magazine Near Eastern Archaeology describes the new technology used in the research. The article is by the same authors, as well as Kenneth Zuckerman, Dr. Zuckerman's brother and a specialist in photographing ancient documents.

Other scholars not affiliated with the research but familiar with it agreed with the group's conclusions.

They said it was a relief to have the antiquity and authenticity of the artifacts confirmed, considering that other inscriptions from biblical times have suffered from their uncertain provenance.

Scholars also noted that early Hebrew inscriptions were a rarity, and called the work on the amulets a significant contribution to an understanding of the history of religion in ancient Israel, particularly the time of the Judean Monarchy 2,600 years ago.

"These photographs are far superior to what you can see looking at the inscriptions with the naked eye," said Dr. Wayne Pitard, professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern religions at the University of Illinois.

Dr. Pitard said the evidence for the antiquity of the benediction was now compelling, although this did not necessarily mean that the Book of Numbers already existed at that time. Possibly it did, he added, but if not, at least some elements of the book were current before the Babylonian exile.

A part of the sacred Torah of Judaism (the first five books of the Bible), Numbers includes a narrative of the Israelite wanderings from Mount Sinai to the east side of the Jordan River. Some scholars think the Torah was compiled in the time of the exile. A number of other scholars, the so-called minimalists, who are influential mainly in Europe, argue that the Bible was a relatively recent invention by those who took control of Judea in the late fourth century B.C. In this view, the early books of the Bible were largely fictional to give the new rulers a place in the country's history and thus a claim to the land.

"The new research on the inscriptions suggests that that's not true," Dr. Pitard said. In fact, the research team noted in its journal report that the improved images showed the seventh-century lines of the benediction to be "actually closer to the biblical parallels than previously recognized."

Dr. P. Kyle McCarter of Johns Hopkins University, a specialist in ancient Semitic scripts, said the research should "settle any controversy over these inscriptions."

A close study, Dr. McCarter said, showed that the handwriting is an early style of Hebrew script and the letters are from an old Hebrew alphabet, which had all but ceased to be used after the destruction of Jerusalem. Later Hebrew writing usually adopted the Aramaic alphabet.

There was an exception in the time of Roman rule, around the first centuries B.C. and A.D. The archaic Hebrew script and letters were revived and used widely in documents. But Dr. McCarter noted telling attributes of the strokes of the letters and the spelling on the amulets that, he said, ruled out the more recent date for the inscriptions. Words in the revived Hebrew writing would have included letters indicating vowel sounds. The benediction, the scholar said, was written in words spelled entirely with consonants, the authentic archaic way.

The two silver scrolls were found in 1979 deep inside a burial cave in a hillside known as Ketef Hinnom, west of the Old City of Jerusalem. Dr. Barkay, documenting the context of the discovery, noted that the artifacts were at the back of the tomb embedded in pottery and other material from the seventh or sixth centuries B.C. Such caves were reused for burials over many centuries. Near this tomb's entrance were artifacts from the fourth century, but nothing so recent remains in the undisturbed recesses.

It took Dr. Barkay another seven years before he felt sure enough of what he had to announce details of the discovery. Even then, for all their microscopic examination of the inscriptions at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, scholars remained frustrated by the many unreadable words and lines.

About a decade ago, Dr. Barkay enlisted the help of Dr. Zuckerman, whose team had earned a reputation for achieving the near-impossible in photographing illegible ancient documents.

Working with scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dr. Zuckerman's group used advanced infrared imagining systems enhanced by electronic cameras and computer image-processing technology to draw out previously invisible writing on a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The researchers also pioneered electronic techniques for reproducing missing pieces of letters on documents. By examining similar letters elsewhere in the text, they were able to recognize half of a letter and reconstruct the rest of it in a scribe's own peculiar style.

"We learned a lot from work on the Dead Sea Scrolls," Dr. Zuckerman said. "But at first a processing job like this would send your computers into cardiac arrest. We had to wait for computer technology to catch up with our needs."

As the researchers said in their magazine article, the only reasonably clear aspect of the inscriptions was the Priestly Benediction. Other lines preceding or following the prayer "could barely be seen."

To get higher-definition photographs of the inscriptions, Ken Zuckerman applied an old photographer's technique called "light painting," brought up to date by the use of fiber-optic technology. He used a hand-held light in an otherwise dark room to illuminate a spot on the artifact during a time exposure. In addition, he photographed the artifact at different angles, which made the scratched letters shine in stark relief.

The next step was to convert the pictures to digital form, making possible computer processing that brought out "the subtleties of the surface almost at the micron level." This analysis was particularly successful in joining a partial letter stroke on one side of a crack with the rest of the stroke on the other side. It also enabled the researchers to restore fragments of letters to full legibility by matching them with clear letters from elsewhere in the text.

In this way, the researchers filled in more of the letters and words of the benediction itself and for the first time deciphered meaningful words and phrases in the lines preceding the benediction.

Scholars were particularly intrigued by a statement on the smaller artifact. It reads: "May h[e]/sh[e] be blessed by YHWH, the warrior/helper, and the rebuker of Evil."

Referring to God, Yahweh, as the "rebuker of Evil" is similar to language used in the Bible and in various Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars said. The phraseology is also found in later incantations and amulets associated with Israel, evidence that these artifacts were also amulets, researchers concluded.

"In the ancient world, amulets were taken quite seriously," Dr. Zuckerman said. "There's evil out there, demons, and you need protection. Having this around your neck, you are involving God's presence and protection against harm."

Dr. Esther Eshel, a professor of the Bible at Bar-Ilan and an authority on Hebrew inscriptions, said this was the earliest example of amulets from Israel. But she noted that the language of the benediction was similar to a blessing ("May he bless you and keep you") found on a jar from the eighth century B.C.

If the new findings are correct, the people who wore these amulets may have died before they had to face the limitations of their efficacy. They might then have asked in uncomprehending despair, "Where was Yahweh when the Babylonians swooped down on Jerusalem?"

Other scholars, including those previously skeptical, will soon be analyzing the improved images. In a departure from usual practices, the researchers not only published their findings in a standard print version in a journal but also as an accompanying "digital article," a CD version of the article and the images to allow scholars to examine and manipulate the data themselves.

The research group said, "As far as we are aware, this is the first article to be done in this fashion, but it certainly will not be the last."

cassius hueffer

a couple of days ago i mentioned the spoon river anthology and its relation to epigrams from the greek anthology. so here is one for today:

Cassius Hueffer

THEY have chiseled on my stone the words:
"His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man."
Those who knew me smile
As they read this empty rhetoric.
My epitaph should have been:
"Life was not gentle to him,
And the elements so mixed in him
That he made warfare on life
In the which he was slain."
While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
Graven by a fool!

I Love Thucy!

Here's a brain bender for you.

I've just started on Thucydides 3. 82 and was almost immediately hit with what Marchant calls "perhaps the most extraordinary anacoluthon in Thuc." All of the commentaries say that the men-de construction sets a participle against a finite verb, but I just can't get myself to believe that:

καὶ ἐν μὲν εἰρήνῃ οὐκ ἂν ἐχόντων πρόφασιν οὐδ’ ἑτοίμων παρακαλεῖν αὐτούς, πολεμουμένων δὲ καὶ ξυμμαχίας ἅμα ἑκατέροις τῇ τῶν ἐναντίων κακώσει καὶ σφίσιν αὐτοῖς ἐκ τοῦ αὐτοῦ προσποιήσει ῥᾳδίως αἱ ἐπαγωγαὶ τοῖς νεωτερίζειν τι βουλομένοις ἐπορίζοντο.

Is it at all possible that the men-de construction is part of an elaborate genitive absolute? (The genitive absolute is, afterall, a kind of circumstantial participle.)

My reading would run thus:

"And though they neither had a reason to nor were prepared to summon them [i.e. the Athenians or the Spartans] in peacetime, but--while they were at war--(they) even (had reason and were willing to summon their) allies together with either side [i.e. Athenians and Spartans again] for the ruin of their opponents and, from the same thing, for their own gain, the introductions [i.e. of the Athenians or Spartans] were easily contrived by those who wanted to change the system a bit."

The argument as I see it is that while the people weren't prepared to bring in foreigners in peacetime, but were in war, those who wanted to shake things up found reasons to bring in foreigners and thus to agitate things sufficiently to effect change.

Does that make sense? Can anyone make better sense?

Am I being unreasonable in refusing to accept "perhaps the most extraordinary anacoluthon" in Thucydides?

ut i am a world-class bodybuilder, the u.s. olympic team didn't want me

did you know ut can govern a concessive clause? it can! and it takes the subjunctive! and the negative is ut non!

elsewhere, i've recently mentioned edgard lee masters. while poking around online, i learned something that was totally new to me and quite apposite for the campus:

In 1909 Masters was introduced to Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, given him by Marion Reedy, editor of Reedy's Mirror of St. Louis. This inspired Masters' most famous work, Spoon River Anthology, realistic and sometimes cynical epitaphs spoken by about 250 persons buried in the graveyard of a village in the Middle West. "You will die, no doubt, but die while living / In depths of azure, rapt and mated, / Kissing the queen-bee, Life!" Original idea for the book came from his mother, with whom he discussed people they used to know in the villages. The work appeared first anonymously in Reedy's Mirror in 1914 and 1915. It was then published anonymously in book form. A sequel, The New Spoon River, appeared in 1924, but it was less successful. Spoon River was Masters's revenge on narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy. It gained a huge popularity, but shattered his position as a respectable member of establishment.

so: you can find the greek anthology even in that most quintessential piece of americana, written in the early 20th century in the american middle west!

catullus as transformer/thundercat

i was just reading d.e.w. wormell's essay called 'catullus as translator' (found in 'the classical tradition: literary and historical studies in honor of harry caplan', ed. luitpold wallach) and came across a couple of points of interest:

Discussing Catullus' version of Sappho's poem Swinburne wrote "a more beautiful translation there never was and never will be; but compared with the Greek it is colourless and bloodless, puffed out by additions and enfeebled by alterations. Let anyone set against each other the first two stanzas, Latin and Greek, and pronounce."

I suspect he is unfairly harsh with Catullus, and I shall perhaps (though perhaps not) have more to say on that in the future.

the second point of interest regards latin vocabulary:

[F]rom Terence onwards exprimere, originally "to take the impression of a seal," comes increasingly to be used of literal translation, often with verbum de (or e) verbo added. The Greeks had, of course, translated documents from other languages on occasion; but Greek translation from the literature of foreign countries appears to be unknown. Latin literature, on the other hand, began with free adaptation of Greek models, and the word used from Plautus onwards to describe this kind of translation is vertere ("to turn," but also, significantly, "to change").

catappho

i am supposed to help this week with a group presentation on catullus 51 and its relationship to sappho 31. it is a pretty interesting investigation, and renders true the words of t.s. eliot, which apply especially well to ancient poets:

Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.