A Lost Epigram

ἡμεῖς γ’ ἀρχαῖον κεραμόν τε λογόν τε φιλοῦμεν
συγκρίνειν φρονιμῶς λείψαν’ ὀρυσσόμενα

- Philologus Philadelphus

are we there yet?

no.

anyway, sorry for the dearth of posts the last couple of days. maybe something sometime soon. as journey says, don't stop believing.

Vergiliana

a few questions for pondering on the eclogues resulting from class today.

Eclogue 7: why is daphnis under the holm-oak? how did he get there? where did he come from? (see especially the first word of the poem, forte--'by chance'.) what sort of creature, exactly, is he?

i find vergil a very cinematic (if you'll forgive the anachronism) writer. In ecl.7, you can almost see the screen go fuzzy flashback-style as we move from line 20 and then clarifying in re at some unspecified point in the past as the contest gets underway.

by the way, if you've ever wondered where we get our term 'sardonic smile', see ll.41-44:

Immo ego Sardoniis videar tibi amarior herbis,
horridior rusco, proiecta vilior alga,
si mihi non haec lux toto iam longior anno est.
Ite domum pasti, si quis pudor, ite, iuvenci.

coleman points out ad loc. that 'the celery-leaved crowfoot, Ranunculus Sceleratus, though not peculiar to Sardinia, was thought to be responsible both fo the proverbial 'Sardonic smile' of those who ate it...and for the acrid flavour of Sardum mel (Hor. A.P.375)'. in other words, it's bitter.

Eclogue 8: why do we have daphnis again, when this part of the poem is modeled on Th.Id.2, where we find 'delphis' instead? does daphnis actually return at the end of the poem? or, to put in in amaryllis' words (who i take to be the 'I' of the second song), Credimus? to be sure, the dog is barking about something. but her final question leaves room for doubt--an qui amant ipsi sibi somnia fingunt? ('or do those who love construct dreams for themselves of their own accord?').

Ll.36-41 are indeed exquisitely beautiful:

Saepibus in nostris paruam te roscida mala
(dux ego uester eram) uidi cum matre legentem;
alter ab undecimo tum me iam acceperat annus;
iam fragilis poteram a terra contingere ramos: 40
ut uidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error!

page (ad loc.) quotes macaulay as saying the following about them: 'I think that the finest lines in the Latin language are those five which begin--saepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala. I cannot tell you how they struck me. I was amused to find that Voltaire pronounces that passage to be the finest in Virgil' (Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 1.371).

Eclogue 10: why does gallus appear in 6 and 10, the beginning and end of the second half of the book? what is the significance of his playing hesiod in 6 and daphnis in 10?

on the whole, i do not understand the eclogues. either their depth or my denseness (or 'denstrosity'?)--or, more likely, a combination of the two--baffles me. what is the significance of the recurring characters? are they always the same people? is it possible to construct a narrative all ten poems as a whole? what is arcadia? when does it signify something more than a region in greece, and how do we know? and if it is a 'spiritual landscape' (cf. Snell), at what point in the book does it become such a thing? finally, why does the contemporary world continually break into vergil's idyllic domains?

Alexander, the Multiculturalist Freedom-spreading Visionary?

and speaking of bruce thornton, he's got a rather pointed review of alexander here. with the exception of a few scenes, i thought the movie was a stunning disaster. (Lvrogueclassicism.)

matters calendrical

december 7 is an important date in history for at least two reasons. first of all, japan attacke pearl harbor on december 7, 1941.

second, it is the date on which, in 43 BC, cicero was executed:

On this day in 43 BCE, the greatest Roman orator, Cicero, was executed at Formiae by order of Mark Antony. Cicero had angered Antony by his famous speeches, the Phillipics, that called for a restoration of the Republic. Mark Antony ordered his hands cut off after his death -- the hands that had written the speeches.

feel free to post any thoughts about cicero here today, be they historical, philosophical, philological, or anything else.

On Scholarship as a vacuum

This one, pulled from the unpublished archives, goes out to Eric in response to his post on "Theorese."

---

Response to Doty: “The Cosmological Human Body: Biogenetic and Cultural Factors”

There are times when you have to stop and wonder whether anyone knows how to write clear academic prose anymore. Doty’s “Cosmological Human Body” reads like narratology. Abstraction is abused to no real end outside the confusion (or amusement) of the reader [thanks to Doty we can now discuss “particular parts” and “enacted performance” (as opposed to non-specific parts and latent performance)]. It is a genuine effort to carve away from his unnatural prose all the filler and senseless abstraction, and once that is done very little of value remains.

Put plainly he claims in the introduction that the human body is central to cosmology. This is hardly addressed and its ‘recognition’ gets us nowhere. Early on he claims that human physical nature both influences and interacts with the social/universal aspects of myth and ritual. The body in essence becomes a model. Culture and biology are non-exclusive determinants of what is characteristically human. Further, comparison with animal nature yields helpful data toward understanding the use of the body in ritual as both a link to and a microcosm of the universal. However, “Ritualization” among non-human animals is merely a helpful model that must not be given too much weight. Finally, the human body is correlative to one’s social structure, existing as an individualized code which makes the universal immediate. The apparent lack of ritual among moderns is an illusion: we simply have different types of ritual. So far so good. Now one should expect evidence beyond the scattered theoretical ramblings of scholars across several fields.

Instead we are told that the colors white, red and black have symbolic significance because they represent presumably sperm, blood and excrement, each of which (in some indeterminable way) relates to an intensity of emotion and hence power. The body is the source of all expressions of the social and universal (somehow, though he never quite says how or relates the sperm-blood-excrement triad with the rest of this disconnected section). He feels content then to move on to the social ramifications of what he has failed to prove.

Social themes develop from the human life cycle, of which themes three shall be considered: 1) suckling; 2) gender differences; and 3) the family’s role in establishing social class. All three are treated carelessly and there is no real reference to the body as cosmological symbol. Breasts show up in stories, boys and girls play differently—possibly because of their genitals—, and the ‘family’ of gods is at odds on gender lines. Never mind that his mythological facts are wrong [Gaia, not Hera bore Typhon. Hephaestus is the product of virgin birth at Hesiod 927, but is fathered by Zeus in Homer. And to call the leg of Zeus (in the account of Dionysus) his “genital region” is quite a stretch], and that his choice of evidence seems randomly selected. The real question is what has any of this to do with “the cosmological human body?”

The answer shall never be found. Myth is simply a response to the tensions and complexities of society in bodily terms. Doty does not feel the need to tell us how. Further, his claim at last that myth is a medium of communication is not new, and is not derived from anything he has said. Again, the disconnected conclusion of this section bears no relation to what precedes, but seems forced to connect myth and ritual somehow with the modern world.

‘Ludic liminality’ is the same. Doty believes that “play” is an essential component of life, and that sports and hobbies are pale substitutes. ‘Real’ play is an active participation in myth and ritual. There is no justification for this, and no connection with the chapter as a whole. Again, what has any of this to do with “the cosmological human body?”

Perhaps we must explore the personal/individual/restricted code by which liminality is universalized, whereby one might perhaps envisage, in essence, a peremptory acting-out of the transpersonal modes of what one might indeed call ritualistic polarities.

Or something.

the closing of the american mind?

QF45 pays homage to (a certain type of) closed-mindedness. i reproduce it here:

I had a conversation about the DaVinci code yesterday. I was unabashed in denouncing it as a pile of pseudo-scholarly garbage. The girl I discussed it with wasn't so sure. She thought I should at least be open to the possibility of its being correct, and found its implications fascinating. She didn't say it outright, but there was an air of presumption that I was being close-minded.

And so I have come to a conclusion: there is such a thing as being too open minded, and it is a pervasive form of intellectual shallowness. Almost every patent falsehood that presents itself is possibly true. It is not impossible that crystals cure cancer, that astrology is valid, and that 'true' Christianity is an eroticist mysticism.

But a mind with true depth isn't seduced by mere possibility- it demands probability, plausibility and evidence. A mind with depth is closed to most of the noise and clatter that pretends to bear the mark of truth. A mind with depth doesn't welcome in anything that cannot stand up and prove itself worthy of belief.
In other words, intellectual depth demands that one be close-minded to a substantial degree. Ideas do not have an inherent right to be taken seriously. It is a privelege- they must earn it first. To be an egalitarian in the world of ideas is to become the shallowest and most pathetic sort of thinker in the world.

discuss. any thoughts?

criticism 3

following tangentially on the last couple days, i came across an article by rainer friedrich in Arion 11 (2003) 33-50 called 'Theorese and Science Envy in the Humanities: A New Take on the Two Cultures Divide'. it is very interesting, and he does a nice send-up (though with serious intent) of the type of obfuscating jargon that currently muddles much so-called 'postmodern' criticism (though i do not agree with his defense of the word 'deconstruction'; for the process of reducing something to an ash-heap of meaninglessness, we already have a perfectly good and descriptive word in english, 'destruction'). here is the second paragraph:

Theorese

Theorese is the name of the beast. Among the justifications its apologists offer for the spawning of its neologisms, there is one that gives the game away. If there ever was an unnecessary one, it is narratology. Its cointers, apparently commanding small Latin and less Greek, must have assumed a Greek word by the name of 'narratos,' to which they unabashedly added the suffix -logy, thereby creating a linguistic monstrosity (topped only by another pseudo-Graecism, homographesis, claiming to denote 'gay writing'--which also proves that a little Greek can be a dangerous thing). Narrotology, in turn, gave birth to 'focalization,' 'focalizer,'focalisee,' 'narratee,' 'intradiegetic'--terms that fascinate for their sheer ugliness. Why these replellent neologisms when workable terms--'narrative theory,' 'perspective,' 'point-of-view,' etc.--are available? Because, as the apologists, when challenged, assure us with a straight face, 'narratology' possesses a more scientific air and sounds more recherche than unpresumptuous 'narrative theory.' This is the inadvertent caricature of a legitimate concern: like the natural sciences, the humanities need a differentiated and complex nomenclature, a technical terminology that distinguishes scholarship from belletrism. Fair enough. But we have that nomenclature already. It is an ensemble of the terminologies of poetics, aesthetics, rhetoric, and literary criticism, to be easily enriched if need be by the occasional neologism and by borrowing from the terminologies of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology and other social sciences. No need therefore of the current tidal wave of ugly and pretentious jargon words that disfigure the critical idiom.

he goes on to discuss later what he calls 'postmodern science-envy' in its linguistic pretensions, creating an odd paradox with postmodernism's characteristic ride on the last train departing from science and reason (or 'reasonicity', as they might say). he ends with a suggestion:

Here is an immodest proposal for the reform of the academy. Corresponding to the two cultures, the proposed division should be that between the Faculty of Science (in the broad sense of Latin scientia and German Wissenschaft), with its three traditional branches of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, each enjoying as much autonomy as desired, but all united in the espousal of the notion of objective knowledge; and a faculty comprising the postmodern discourses, whose appropriate name would proceed from postmodernism's notorious scorn of the very idea of scientia: the Faculty of Nescience.

insofar as this essay is a reaction to recent trends in the humanities, it is reminscent of camille paglia's 'junk bonds and corporate raiders', also published in Arion, though i don't have the volume number/year with me.

i should also point out that i finished the auden essay, and i think it's well worth reading. he sets criticism in the context of two types of societies--the totally open (which i take to correspond, more or less, to his later discussion of social democracy) and the totally closed (which i take to correspond to his later discussion of fascist totalitarianism)--of which he gives platonic idealizations as a way of illustrating and differentiating their views of the world and of the meaning of human experience. he does not make the case that all criticism should prioritize the political or should be the expression of a political agenda; i assume we've all seen the danger that lies down that path. but he wants to give the critic a sense of his responsibility to his fellow citizens and the importance of good criticism in an open society. also of great interest in the volume (to me, anyway) was norman foerster's essay 'the esthetic judgment and the ethical judgment'.

One more thing a classical education is good for

I watched Fox's "My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss" tonight with two of my fellow Bryn Mawr fellows, and as it turns out it's fun to watch people humiliate themselves.

But better than that the fictional company on the show is called IOCOR. That's Latin for "I'm joking."

Of course they pronounce it 'eye-oh-core', but how great is that?

more criticism

continuing with the discussion that is not yet a discussion begun yesterday on the place and function of criticism, i thought i would pass along a couple of excerpts from gian biagio conte's essay 'empirical and theoretical approaches to literary genre' (in The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics?, K. Galinsky (Ed.), P. Lang 1992). the first has to do with the huge success of deconstructionist criticism; i think the parenthesis in the middle, though relegated only to parenthesis, is perhaps the most telling statement herein (p.114) (all translations are those of glenn w. most):

As you certainly know better than I, hermeneutic criticism in its deconstructionist version is enjoying increasing success in many places, if for no other reason than because it answers to a widespread need. Many people seem in fact to believe that our relation with the classic texts is running the risk of becoming tired, static, unadventurous. The idea that these texts have shot all their bolts of meaning and have been definitively understood is truly frightening: we would then be left with sluggish readers on the one hand, and texts that are no longer interesting on the other. Deconstructionist hermeneutics responds to this crisis with a new movement that gives an undeniable impression of vitality: it draws its motto from a recognition that "there is no peace in the texts." As a struggle against conformism this is certainly positive (and also--but let us not say this too loudly--because it promises to provide a living for a larger number of interpreters, a promise all the more attractive for classicists, who are obliged to work on a finite body of material--a source of energy which cannot be renewed!). As a pre-deconstructionist critic, I wish these developments good luck; but I refuse to limit myself to a static and rigid vision of my own hermeneutic practice. I do not believe that literary criticism, as I understand and practice it, needs this medicine.

later in the essay, he slips into a place i cannot go, or where my miniscule brain will not allow me (to be fair, i allow the caveat that i am reading this in translation; perhaps there are nuances to the italian vocabulary and sense that i simply am not understanding in english):

What we should avoid is thinking of reality naturalistically, as though it were a simple datum. In fact, reality is nothing but a system of perceptions determined by cultural codes and is therefore itself a construction, even if one at a different level from literature.

am i really supposed to believe this? to take a very simple example--if i were to stand on top of a 20-story building and to send a collection of derrida's writings plummeting toward the earth, i am under the impression that it will fall at 9.8 m/s/s (excluding drag from wind, etc.)--but according to the foregoing, that would merely be a perception i had determined by a cultural code. forgive me for saying so, but i think it rather beyond the scope of a cultural code to create something like, say, gravity. i am confident that the book would fall at the same rate regardless of whether i dropped it in america, japan, or the hindu kush of the 4th century BC. and, at any rate, how do views of reality such as that cited above really help the critic in his task? how does it help us understand roman poetry? if the romans' view of reality is completely conditioned by their own cultural codes, now lost to those of us who do not have the (radically alien) lived experience of a roman of (say) the augustan period, why should we trick ourselves into thinking we're actually discovering anything meaningful about roman poetry? and if we're not, how is criticism anything more than a narcissistic exercise in self-gratification?

ISI Guides

via rogue classicism, i found out that ISI has a bunch of 'student's guides' for various disciplines that can be downloaded in PDF here. the one on classics is by bruce thornton. other disciplines include philosophy, literature, liberal learning, history, core curriculum, u.s. history, economics, political philosophy, and psychology.

some auden

i've been reading w.h. auden's essay 'criticism in a mass society' (in the 1941 collection The Intent of the Critic), and thought the following passage was interesting enough to pass along. feel free to comment at will, all the better as it pertains to study of the ancients.

The contemporary critic has two primary tasks. Firstly he must show the individual that though he is unique he has also much in common with all other individuals, that each life is, to use a chemical metaphor, an isomorph of a general human life and then must teach him how to see the relevance to his own experience of works of art which deal with experiences apparently strange to him; so that, for example, the coal miner in Pennsylvania can learn to see himself in terms of the world of Ronald Firbank, and an Anglican bishop find in The Grapes of Wrath a parable of his diocesan problems.

And secondly the critic must attempt to spread a knowledge of past cultures so that his audience may be as aware of them as the artist himself, not only simply in order to appreciate the latter, but because the situation of all individuals, artist and audience alike, in an open society is such that the only check on authoritarian control by the few, whether in matters of esthetic taste or political choice, is the knowledge of the many. We cannot of course all be experts in everything; we are always governed, and I hope willingly, by those whom we believe to be expert; but our society has already reached a point in its development where the expert can be recognized only by an educated judgment. The standared demanded of the man in the street (and outside our own special field, we are all men in the street) rises with every genereation.

the funniest thing i heard on the radio this morning...

went something like this:

Imagine a gathering of Mozart, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, and Madame Curie. That's what it was like yesterday when Diane Sawyer sat down with the cast of Ocean's Twelve.

then again, if that means brad pitt will be sporting a colonial cut and george clooney will be wearing a buskin, that's good enough for me.

whee!

i have found my new favorite type of greek genitive, courtesy of m.l. west. it is in hesiod, theogony 5-6.

καί τε λοεσσάμεναι τέρενα χρόα Περμησσοῖο (5)
ἠ’ Ἵππου κρήνης ἠ’ Ὀλμειοῦ ζαθέοιο

you know what that's called? prof. west tells us: the 'genitive of water in (from)which one washes'. two further examples he cites are il.5.6 and 6.508.

UPDATE: by the way, i'm having a hard time getting the greek font to work. oops.

Etymology

One of our trusty field correspondents asked about the etymology of Helot, those serf-like minions of the Spartans, after being told that it may be derived from a verbal root.

I'm not buying it. My instinct was that this was an ethnic name.

The root in question is *hel-, which supplies the aorist of αἱρέω (e.g. εἷλον).

The lexicon records three forms, two masculine and one feminine:

Εἵλως, -ωτος
Εἰλώτης, -ου
Εἰλωτίς, -ίδος

One might fool oneself into thinking Εἵλως formally the perfect active participle of *hel-, but that the word is supposed to be passive in sense ('the captured,' rather than 'those who have captured'), and perhaps more importantly the stem of the perfect active participle is -οτ- rather than -ωτ-.

Considering the three forms it seems safe to say that the root is *εἱλωτ-. I might be willing to wager that should you compare any number of 3rd declension dental stems, 1st declension masculines, and 3rd declension feminines of the -ις/-ιδος type you wouldn't find any suffixed/lengthened deverbal nouns.

Correct me if I'm wrong, though. I haven't bothered to do serious research because *hel- is too easy an answer that seems to require too many shadowy shifts in the mists of time.

The old story that the Helots were the original inhabitants of Laconian Ἕλος is at least as probable.

But I would rule out the theory of a verbal root until someone is able to offer parallel constructions, which to my knowledge no one has done.

The fact that the Helots were viewed as a social class and that others might be described as living like Helots (in reference to social conditions) does not indicate that the term Helot originated as a descriptive term. It is at least as probable that the Helots as a people simply came to represent a certain social condition in the Greek world.

Regardless, no effort to root out the 'truth' or origin behind the name seems worthwhile or conclusive.

Bucolica

while reading vergil eclogue 3 today, i was surprised to come across the following couplet (ll.64-65):

Malo me Galatea petit, lasciva puella,
et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri.
[Galatea attacks me with an apple, playful girl,
and she flees to the willow grove and desires that she be seen before (she enters it).]

why my suprise? well, because i didn't know that pelting one's beloved with fruit was a conventional courtship signal in the ancient world. but it was (see coleman's commentary p.118). compare, e.g., theocritus Id.5.88-89.

by the way, i also wanted to congratulate dennius maximus on nailing down a thesis topic area. let the juvenalia begin!

hooray for horace!

i just came across what garrison labels 'complex poetic anastrophe' in epode 16. horace writes: Etrusca praeter et... . the normal word order? et praeter Etrusca... . and it even includes some metonymy, since Etrusca...litora = Italy (garrison p.195).

wow!

We have a winner ... and it's not you.

Well, a thesis topic has been provisionally approved, one which, however, is not leading the thesis poll here at the Campus.

Juvenal 6 it is.

No whining if your candidate didn't make the cut.

an oddity of the ancient world: hypercolor aminals

man, it's been awhile.

anyway.

i was just reading the fourth eclogue and came to the passage in ll.43ff. on the chromatically versatile lambs and rams. though i like vergil quite a lot, i'm afraid i have to agree, contra williams, with t.e. page's assessment (and even if i didn't agree, i would probably reproduce it here anyway, because it's just such a jolly-good piece of writing:

There is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous and Virgil has here decidedly taken it. According to Spinoza's famous formula 'Art' may no doubt be sometimes best defined as 'that which is not nature', and this picture of an earthly paradise bespeckled with purple, yellow, and scarlet rams might have suggested a warning to much medieval and modern extravagance which has parodied nature under the name of Art.

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.

Is this the fate that awaits us?

Lonely Italian Pensioner Gets Adopted

Sep 26, 7:57 AM (ET)

By Antonio Denti

SAN POLO DEI CAVALIERI, Italy (Reuters) - A lonely pensioner who turned to Italy's classified pages to find someone willing to "adopt" him as a grandfather is finally heading to his new home and family in northern Italy this weekend.

Giorgio Angelozzi, 80, has lived alone outside Rome with seven cats since his wife died in 1992, but he took the unprecedented step of putting himself up for adoption last month via the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

Not satisfied with just running the advertisement, Italy's main daily ran a front-page story about Angelozzi's plight.

Inundated with offers from families across Italy and as far away as New Zealand, Brazil and the United States, the retired schoolteacher has decided to go to live with Elio and Marlena Riva and their two teenage children in Bergamo, northern Italy.

"I was hit by a torrential downpour. I didn't think I would be able to choose among so many offers," the white-bearded Angelozzi told Reuters during his last hours in his simple two-room flat.

"But I chose the woman whose voice reminded me of my wife."

Angelozzi's appeal struck a chord in family-loving Italy where up to four generations have traditionally lived under the same roof or at least in the same neighborhood.

Today, one in five Italians is over the age of 65 and almost half of them live alone, partly because of the more mobile lifestyle of younger generations. Italy also has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe.

"Remember that my problem is one that affects so many elderly people in Italy. Always remember that," Angelozzi had said during the initial flurry of attention.

He will travel with Marlena Riva to Bergamo on Saturday night where his new home boasts a garden with apple, cherry and pomegranate trees and a beagle called Pablo to replace his cats.

"I will become a grandfather -- this was my plan. I will have the affection of this woman who is already calling me 'daddy' and the children who call me Grandpa Giorgio," said Angelozzi, who has a daughter working abroad with a charity.

The former classics teacher had told potential families he would contribute 500 euros ($615) a month to expenses, but the Rivas say what they really want is a grandfather.

"This grandfather needs help and we need him," Marlena told Corriere. Her relatives live in her native Poland and her husband's parents recently died.

Their 16-year-old daughter Dagmara said: "I just want a grandfather, the rest isn't important." ($1-.8129 Euro)

And you thought we were through with provisos!

I've been getting a lot of pressure to post some Greek syntax rules, so following up on last week's Latin Proviso, I give you the much simpler Greek equivalent.

Interestingly Goodwin refuses to use the term 'proviso' and classes this as a type of consecutive clause, though one could just as easily make the case that a proviso is analogous (in sense though not form) to conditionals. Perhaps understanding this potential overlap Smyth gives the proviso its own place, sandwiched between result clauses and conditionals:

CLAUSES WITH ἐφ' ᾧ AND ἐφ' ᾧτε INTRODUCING A PROVISO

§2279. ἐφ' ᾧ and ἐφ' ᾧτε on condition that, for the purpose of take the infinitive or (less often) the future indicative, and may be introduced, in the principal clause, by the demonstrative ἐπὶ τούτῳ. Negative μή.

αἱρεθέντες ἐφ' ᾧτε συγγράψαι νόμους having been chosen for the purpose of compiling laws X. H. 2.3.11 , ἔφασαν ἀποδώσειν (τοὺς νεκροὺς) ἐφ' ᾧ μὴ καίειν τὰ̄ς οἰκίᾱς the barbarians said they would surrender the dead on condition that he would not burn their houses X. A. 4.2.19, ἀφί̄εμέν σε, ἐπὶ τούτῳ μέντοι, ἐφ' ᾧτε μηκέτι . . . φιλοσοφεῖν we release you, on this condition however, that you no longer search after wisdom P. A. 29c . Future indicative: ξυνέβησαν ἐφ' ᾧτε ἐξίᾱσιν ἐκ Πελοποννήσου ὑπόσπονδοι καὶ μηδέποτε ἐπιβήσονται αὐτῆς they made an agreement on condition that they should depart from the Peloponnesus under a truce and never set foot on it again T. 1.103.

a. These constructions do not occur in Homer. The future indicative is used by Herodotus and Thucydides on the analogy of relative clauses equivalent to consecutive clauses. These authors also use ἐπὶ τοῖσδε for ἐπὶ τούτῳ.

ut i got home, we made dinner

and now i'd like to say something about ut temporal clauses for our syntax point today. did you KNOW ut could take a temporal clause? well, it can, cowboy. and when it does, do you know what mood of the verb it takes? INDICATIVE, which i think is swell! in fact, it usually takes the PERFECT INDICATIVE or the HISTORICAL PRESENT. sometimes it takes the imperfect to show a past state of things, or the pluperfect to show action completed in past time.

hey drum-major, toss me that hyper baton!

yes, i know that was dumb. but what i really wanted to tell you is that i just came across a nice example of hyperbaton in catullus 65:

namque mei nuper Lethaeo in gurgit fratris
pallidulum manans alluit unda pedem...

'For recently has the flowing water washed the pale (dim.) foot of my brother in the Lethaean stream...'

i would also like there to be a transference of the diminutive from the foot itself to the adjective. i don't know why calling his foot a 'little foot' would bring about pathos, but for some reason it seems to me that it would.

red derrick

we haven't had a rhetorical post in a few days. my sincere apologies. in the meantime, here is something i read today in michael trapp's collection 'greek and latin letters' about letter 42 in his collection--a letter by jerome (letter 23 in his own works, written in 384) to marcella on the death of lea. trapp writes in his commentary:

Using a (very) recent even as his cue, Jerome constructs a letter of consolation...which is also a sermon on the superiority of spiritual over worldly values; central to its rhetorical structure is a comparison (synkrisis, comparatio) that combines eulogy of a recently deceased Christian with invective against a recently deceased pagan. Rhetorical polish is evident also in the attention given to rhythm: e.g. in the double cretic clausulae (ex)isse de corpore, (doce)amus in tartaro, quanta mutatio, cernit inquirere.

i admit my complete ignorance about prose rhthym; if anyone cares to comment on it, please feel free!

relax and let the syntax bring you home

today's lesson is on Christian latin and comes from albert blaise's 'A Handbook of Christian Latin: Style, Morphology, and Syntax'.

Quo is sometimes used in place of ut even when the clause does not contain a comparative, which is rare in Classical Latin:
rogabam te...quo sanares dolorem meum, Aug.Conf.2.12; 6.13; 8.13; Tert.Apol.27; 47.

review of 'sailing the wine-dark sea: why the greeks matter'

here is n.s. gill's review of thomas cahill's book 'sailing the wine-dark sea':

The Bottom Line:
In a non-pretentious format, "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea - Why the Greeks Matter" does indeed show to those interested why the ancient Greeks should matter -- even to modern Americans.

Pros

* Clear, easy reading
* Photographs of representative artwork
* Puts all of ancient Greece into a compact framework

Cons

* Needless profanity and slang
* Some factual errors

Description

* Retells various important Greek myths and puts them in historical context.
* Describes the contributions the Greeks made in all aspects of culture.
* Discusses Plato's Republic's cave and the sex discussion in the Symposium.
* Contains many photographs of ancient Greek sculpture and pottery.
* Compares ancient democracy and leaders with modern politics and political
leaders.
* Catalogues important writers and philosophers.
* Drenched with facts and anecdotes.

Guide Review - Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea - Why the Greeks Matter:
In eight chapters Thomas Cahill covers the history of ancient Greece in a light, informal manner, using anecdotes and comparisons with modern mores and political figures. Although Cahill has been criticized for exactly this modern outlook, this seems to me crucial to a look at a distant world with an eye to making it relevant as the subtitle "Why the Greeks Matter" demands. If we do indeed have problems with people who are racist, classist, and sexist, as Cahill says the ancient Greeks were, they must have other redeeming characteristics if they're to be worth studying. They developed art, adapted Egyptian mathematics, added vowels to the Semitic consonants to produce the alphabet, produced innovations in various literary fields, created science and philosophy, and introduced the democratic system. It is a bit hard to decide the audience for Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea. It is not a scholarly work, nor is it a work for people who can't tell Ancient from Medieval History. A certain familiarity with ancient Greece seems crucial, but if you already have that understanding, "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea" is somewhat redundant. Still, it is hard to keep the wealth of detail in mind at all times, so Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea seems a refresher for those of us who originally learned about ancient Greece -- whether at the Met, like Cahill, or in school -- in our youth and have since forgotten some of the lessons we learned.

and here is what publisher's weekly had to say:

In this elegant introduction to Greek life and thought, Cahill provides the same majestic historical survey he has already offered for the Irish, the Jews and the Christians. He eloquently narrates the rise of Greek civilization and cannily isolates six archetypal figures representative of the development of Greek thinking. He opens with a consideration of Homer's Iliad and its glorification of the warrior way as an exemplum of life in the Greek state. Cahill then proceeds to offer an evolutionary look at the rise and fall of Greece by examining the wanderer (Odysseus), the politician (Solon), the playwright (Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides), the poet (Sappho), the philosopher (the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle) and the artist (Praxiteles). These figures provide lessons in how to feel, how to rule, how to party, how to think and how to see. For example, Cahill contends that Odysseus reveals longing and desire for love, domestic peace and his homeland, while the rage of Achilles offers us lessons in the way to fight for one's homeland. The book is full of whimsical characterizations, such as the depiction of Socrates as a "squat, ugly, barefoot man who did not bathe too often." The author includes generous portions of the original writings in order to provide the flavor of the Greek way. Once again, Cahill gracefully opens up a world that has provided so much of Western culture's characteristic way of thinking.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

desine fata deum flecti sperare precando...

i'm sorry to say that we didn't get this up yesterday, but better late than never.
yesterday was the anniversary of vergil's death in 19 BC at brindisii.

also, around this time are the approximate dates for initiation into the eleusinian mysteries.

(via about.com).

Hendecasyllabics and the Epigrammatic Tradition

The question was posed whether the hendecasyllabics of Catullus are epigrams, and it was noted that Martial's are.

I thought I'd take up the question, and started with the meter. As others have noted any eleven syllable line can be called hendecayllabic, and I quickly found reference to both Sapphic and Phalaecean hendecasyllabics.

The Phalaecean is the meter of our poet, yet solid information is hard to come by. Even harder to find is information on the man who lent his name, Phalaecus. The helpful little handbook on Greek and Latin meter by Rosenmeyer, Ostwald and Halporn (is that the order?) is not helpful here. In fact you'd think no Greek had ever used the meter, but you'd be wrong.

As it happens the meter was used considerably throughout the Alexandrian period, and according the West in his Greek Metre was the only Aeolic meter in constant use through to the imperial period. It wasn't until I'd turned to West that I found more than a hint that the meter preceded Catullus. (That's not entirely true. Some journal article on JSTOR mentioned a Phalaecean in a sepulchral inscription, published by Wilamowitz, but that was my best lead till West.)

West pointed me toward a number of extant Greek epigrams in the phalaecean meter, and his list included two in the A.P. which came as a surprise to everyone as most of the collection seems to be in elegiacs. This has probably led many to the conclusion that elegiacs are the sole or the best meter for epigrams, though this ignores the plethora of verse inscriptions and epigrams in hexameter.

But I digress. On to the elusive Phalaecus. He's not an easy figure to track down, but through L'Année philologique I was able to find an excellent article (one of only two on the subject) published in Greek! (Skiadas, A. D. - ὁ ποιητὴς Φάλαικος. EEAth 1967-1968 XVIII : 65-88.)

Skiadas says that Phalaecus was not the first to use the meter, but was the first to turn this Aeolic lyric measure to use in epigrams. Couple with the testimony on the meter's use and popularity as treated by West, this article goes a long toward establishing the meter as comfortably within the epigrammatic tradition.

If we turn back to Catullus carmen L, treated here previously, in light of Maria Carilli's 1979 article, in which she related that poem to a fragment of the Alexandrian epigrammatist Hedylus, everything will tie together nicely.(Carilli, M. G. "Rapporti tra Catullo e gli epigrammisti greci." RAAN 1979 LIV : 163-184.)

The imagery of the poetry exchange in carmen L echoes closely the kind of poetic affair treated in the Hedylus fragment: I suggest a light-hearted round of wine and erotic epigrams, though the subject could change with the occasion.

The important point for us however is that carmen L is written in hendecasyllabics: Phalaecean hendecasyllabics.

It is an epigram about the writing of epigrams in a largely forgotten epigrammatic meter. It would behoove us all to reconsider the arbitrary classification of Catullus' poems that calls these epigrams, and those something else.

Martial knew better than we.

catullus and his world

i just finished reading the first chapter of t.p. wiseman's catullus and his world, called 'a world not ours'. it is quite eye-opening, and disturbing. catullus includes a number of incredibly violent images in his poems, and wiseman comments (p.5):

What lies behind these sadistic imaginings is the Roman idea of punishment, for that is what Catullus wants to exact.

It is striking that throughout Roman literature, from Plautus to Prudentius, we find instruments of torture referred to as something familiar.

he goes on to describe just how ubiquitous violence and cruelty was in the roman world of the late republic (and early empire). he goes on to remind the reader of the public nature of such violence (p.7):

Judicial torture was also done in public: at the entrance to the Subura the bloody scourges hung ready for use, and any passer-by in the Forum might see, and hear, the dreadful carnifices in their red caps (to mark them out as men beyond the pale) inflicting agony on some criminal before his execution. It was a spectacle to enjoy: the populace could 'feast their eyes and satisfy their souls' at the torture and death of a notorious malefactor.

furthermore, there was no police force to protect one from harm (p.8):

A passing rustic makes an untimely joke? A humble neighbour's dog keeps you awake? Out with the whips, and have the culprit beaten--if he dies, too bad. In a city without a police force, where self-help was basic to the operation of the law, the humble citizen needed a powerful friend for his protection, and the great men of the time went about with armed escorts as a matter of course.

this is why i argued, when 'The Passion' was criticized due to its extreme violence, in spite of the Gospel writers not having included such detail in their accounts, that these criticisms were ill-founded. there is a reason the Gospel writers did not include the gruesome violence visually depicted in the movie: they did not need to. such brutality, at the state's hands, would have been commonplace for someone living in the roman empire. as wiseman writes, quoting suetonius' life of vespasian (f.n.18), 'It was, after all, a city where a dog might pick up a human hand in the street.'

don't disguise your provis(o)

i dedicate these two provisos that i just came across in catullus 114.5-6 (ad mentulam) to dennis:

quare concedo sit dives, dum omnia desint.
saltum laudemus, dum modo ipse egeat.

what's certain in this life? death and (syn)taxes!

time for a latin syntax rule. hmmm...possibly we should also begin including greek syntax. anyway, for the moment, placet mihi to do some latin. for the moment, we are leaving questions behind and switching to the genitive.

A noun used to limit or define another, and NOT meaning the same person or thing, is put in the Genitive.
Examples:
libri Ciceronis, the books of Cicero
inimici Caesaris, Caesar's enemies
vacatio laboris, a respite from toil
petitio consulatus, candidacy for the consulship
regnum civitatis, royal power over the state

rhetoric schmeteric

first of all, thanks go out to rogue classicism for the links and kind words.

second, the weekend's over and it's time to get back to figures and tropes. today's rhetorical figure is...

PROSOPOPEIA: personification. For example: 'The pine trees smiled wide and danced a jig to the tune of bob seger's "the fire down below".' i encourage you to submit your own prosopopeia in the comments section. the best one (as decided completely according the caprice of dennis and me, and possibly magister coke) will be awarded ITS OWN ENTRY, with A COOL TITLE.

personify away!

question of the day

'What am I doing? Why am I doing it?'
--Title of a 'conversation with graduate students', taking place at Princeton University on 20 September 2004.

quote of the day

'I'm all in favor of an empire that is large, that is based on conquering, and that has room for quirky nerds.'
--Peter Brown, 9/19/04

Calling Magister Coke

This will be meaningless to most of our readers, so let me apologize at the start.

But Magister Coke, please let us all know how things are going. The Campus extends far beyond the Main Line.

Privy to Livy ... Proviso-a-Go-Go?

Russell T.'s sight reading session is one of the few true joys of my week, outside of the Roche or course. He walked us through part of book one like a timeless tour guide on a gentle Autumn morn.

Let the world know that there's little in this world more soothing than Russell T.'s casual delivery. And the man knows good beer.

But there are many things in this world which stand in violent contrast both to Russel T. and to Livy.

Some of those things are the Latin letters of the Church fathers, one of which you've read about recently. But light finds a way even in the darkest of places, here in a letter of Augustine (who is infinitely more readable than Paulinus and quickly repairing my opinion of Late Latin).

On the first page of a letter written by Augustine to Jerome I found not one but two Proviso clauses, one positive, one negative, and each construed with a different adverb. So without further ado, the Proviso clause, stolen from A&G:

CLAUSES OF PROVISO

§528. Dum, modo, dummodo, and tantum ut, introducing a Proviso, take the Subjunctive. The negative with these particles is nē:

* ōderint dum metuant (Off. 1.97) , let them hate, if only they fear.
* valētūdō modo bona sit (Brut. 64) , provided the health be good.
* dummodo inter mē atque tē mūrus intersit (Cat. 1.10) , provided only the wall (of the city) is between us.
* tantum ut sciant (Att. 16.11.1) , provided only they know.
* modo nē sit ex pecudum genere (Off. 1.105) , provided [in pleasure] he be not of the herd of cattle.
* id faciat saepe, dum nē lassus fīat (Cato R. R. 5.4) , let him do this often, provided he does not get tired.
* dummodo ea (sevēritās) nē variētur (Q. Fr. 1.1.20) , provided only it (strictness) be not allowed to swerve.
* tantum nē noceat (Ov. M. 9.21) , only let it do no harm.

NOTE.--The Subjunctive with modo is hortatory or optative; that with dum and dummodo, a development from the use of the Subjunctive with dum in temporal clauses, § 553 (compare the colloquial so long as my health is good, I don't care).

The Hortatory Subjunctive without a particle sometimes expresses a proviso:--

* sint Maecēnātēs, nōn deerunt Marōnēs (Mart.Mart. 8.56.5 ) , so there be Mœcenases, Virgils will not be lacking.

The Subjunctive with ut (negative nē) is sometimes used to denote a proviso, usually with ita in the main clause:--

* probāta condiciō est, sed ita ut ille praesidia dēdūceret (Att. 7.14.1) , the terms were approved, but only on condition that he should withdraw the garrisons.

NOTE.--This is a development of the construction of Characteristic or Result.

For a clause of Characteristic expressing Proviso, see § 535. d.

nursery rhymes for old people

today we introduced our greek class to the fact that, in greek nouns of the first declension, etas turn into alphas after epsilon, iota and rho (or, rather, etas go back to the alpha found in other dialects, about which subject i'm sure dennis will have something to say). to help remember this, i came up with a little rhyme. i haven't shared it with the class yet, but i'm thinking about it. it goes like this:

epsilon, iota, rho,
etas all to alpha go.

classics from a different culture

it was recently Rosh Hashana. Thus, here is merriam-webster's word-of-the-day for 16 september:

shofar \SHOH-far\ noun

: a ram's-horn trumpet blown by the ancient Hebrews in battle and during religious observances and used in modern Judaism especially during Rosh Hashanah and at the end of Yom Kippur

Example sentence:
The first blast of the shofar echoed within the sanctuary, announcing the beginning of the High Holy Days.

Did you know?
One of the shofar's original uses was to proclaim the Jubilee year (a year of emancipation of Hebrew slaves and restoration of alienated lands to their former owners) or the anointing of a new king. Today, it is mainly used in synagogues during the High Holy Days. It is blown during the month of Elul (the 12th month of the civil year or the 6th month of the ecclesiastical year in the Jewish calendar) until the end of Rosh Hashanah and again at the end of the last service on Yom Kippur as reminders to attend to spiritual matters. The custom is to sound the shofar in broken notes resembling sobbing and wailing followed by a long unbroken sound.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

and, in case you're interested, here is a little bit more about it:

ROSH HASHANAH:
Origins

By: Amy J. Kramer

Rosh Hashanah, which literally means the head of the year, commemorates the anniversary of the creation of the world. It is celebrated on the first and second days of the seventh Hebrew month, Tishri. Depending on the solar calendar, Rosh Hashanah occurs in September or October.

Rosh Hashanah, when all living things are judged, is often referred to as the beginning of the Jewish New Year. However, the Hebrew month of Nissan, in which Passover is celebrated, is the first month of the Jewish calendar.

Rosh Hashanah is actually only one of four symbolic Jewish new year celebrations. The Talmud identifies these as:

* Nisan: The Hebrew month of Passover marks the birth of the Jews as a free
nation. It was also the symbolic new year day for kings.
* Elul: The Hebrew month preceding Rosh Hashanah was the symbolic new year for
tithing animals, an ancient form of giving tzedakah, or charity;
* Shevat: The Hebrew month of the holiday, Tu Bishvat, was the symbolic new year
for trees.
* Tishri: The Hebrew month of Rosh Hashanah, was the symbolic anniversary of the
creation of the world.

The commandment to observe Rosh Hashanah is found in the second and third books of the Torah, the five books of Moses:

In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall be a solemn rest unto you, a memorial proclaimed with the blast of horns, a holy convocation... and you shall bring an offering made by fire unto the Lord. Leviticus 23:24-5

In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall observe a holy day; you shall not work at your occupations. You shall observe it as a day when the shofar is trumpeted. Numbers 29:1

The first two days of Tishri were not called Rosh Hashanah until Talmudic times. Jewish leaders of the day may have been reluctant to promote large celebrations around a fall new year because moon festivals were common among pagan religions. Many Near Eastern religions, for example, celebrated divine coronation festivals in the Fall.

By the fourth century, B.C.E., when the Jews returned from Babylonian exile to build the second temple, Rosh Hashanah was well established. By the time of the Mishnah, the codification of Jewish oral traditon, Rosh Hashanah had developed a more serious tone. Now, having suffered the loss of the second temple, Rosh Hashanah emphisized the anniversary of creation, and of G-d as judge, dispensing mercy or justice to those who do or do not repent their sins.

The Torah refers to Rosh Hashanah as Yom Teruah, the day of sounding the shofar, the traditional ram's horn. It is also called Yom Ha'Din, the day of judgement as well as Yom Hazikaron, the day of remembering. Yom Hazikaron is a reference to the patriarch Abraham who offered his only son, Isaac, to G-d as proof of his obedience. As the result of his readiness to sacrifice Isaac, G-d caused a ram to appear and be killed instead. According to Jewish tradition, this sacrifice is believed to have occurred the first of Tishri.

Today, aside from liturgical additions and literary interpretations made by poets during the Middle Ages, the customs, traditions, mood and spirit of Rosh Hashanah remain basically unchanged.

don'tne you want your syntax lesson for the day?

continuing on the question theme from yesterday, here's today's syntax point (from AG):

When the enclitic -ne is added to a negative word,--as in nonne,--an AFFIRMATIVE answer is expected. The particle num suggests a NEGATIVE answer.

how does this rhetoric accentuate my figure?

that's right, kids--it's the moment you've all been waiting for. drumroll please...and today's rhetorical figure is...

HYPERBATON: violation of the usual order of words. for examples of this, read ANYTHING by ausonius or paulinus of nola. an example in english might be: 'read this really to letter hard is' instead of 'this letter is really hard to read'. to put a normal english sentence into hyperbaton, i recommend that you simply think about the sentence for a moment, then think about what it would sound like if yoda said it, and then write that down.

putting the 'syn' back in syntax

and here is a latin syntactical rule for you today (courtesy of allen & greenough):

A question of SIMPLE FACT, requiring the answer YES or NO, is formed by adding the enclitic -ne to the emphatic word.

as the day has gone on today and i have continued attempting to read the correspondence of augustine and paulinus, i have been further confirmed in my belief that 'quod' is the most difficult word in the latin language. perhaps this will warrant a post in futurum.

that is all for now.

trope time

here is today's rhetorical figure:

PARONOMASIA: the use of words of like sound. for example: 'dennis the menace'. or: 'the sound wound down'. you could say that at the end of a concert given by one of your heavy-metal jerks. remember: for the price of two of their CDs, you could get a thucydides OCT--in the words of JHG, a priceless treasure forever.

cui dono lepidum...

i'm too tired tonight to write my catullus post. in lieu of that, though, i'd like to inaugurate a new feature, which is shamelessly self-serving, but which i also hope is helpful to our loyal readers. to wit: we shall now commence our review of rhetorical figures and tropes, taking our starting point from the allen and greenough's 'new latin grammar'.

today's figure is ANTONOMASIA--the use of a proper for a common noun, or the reverse.

examples:

sint Maecenates, non deerunt, Flacce, Marones: so there be patrons (like Maecenas), poets (like Vergil) will not be lacking, Flaccus (Mart. viii. 56. 5).

illa furia et pestis: that fury and plague (i.e. Clodius).

Homeromastix: scourge of Homer (i.e. Zoilus).

Catullus 50: Poetry 'Couched' in Erotic Terms

Many people seem intent on defending Catullus against charges of homosexuality, and apart from being stupid, it's unnecessary.

Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi
multum lusimus in meis tabellis,
ut convenerat esse delicatos:
scribens versiculos uterque nostrum
ludebat numero modo hoc modo illoc,     5
reddens mutua per iocum atque vinum.
Atque illinc abii tuo lepore
incensus, Licini, facetiisque,
ut nec me miserum cibus iuvaret
nec somnus tegeret quiete ocellos,     10
sed toto indomitus furore lecto
versarer, cupiens videre lucem,
ut tecum loquerer simulque ut essem.
At defessa labore membra postquam
semimortua lectulo iacebant,           15
hoc, iucunde, tibi poema feci,
ex quo perspiceres meum dolorem.
Nunc audax cave sis, precesque nostras,
oramus, cave despuas, ocelle,
ne poenas Nemesis reposcat a te.       20
Est vemens dea: laedere hanc caveto.

William C. Scott is typical. In 1969 he wrote a lot of romantic nonsense about a man of genuine taste and perception discovering a true soul and passionately recording the find for posterity. Many who followed him assumed the same and continued to rephrase his sentiments. These scholars tend to write about what the poem is not, ignoring what it is.

It is not, they say, about homosexuality. And after many pages stomping vainly along a path much tread they conclude that Catullus uses erotic imagery to express the depth of his passionate (heterosexual) friendship. Content with the old dust on their shoes they trot away accomplished critics.

We would have been better served had they simply written 'I concur' in Scott's margins and not bloated our journals with pap.

They are right to say that it is not about homosexuality, but that is all, and it is disappointing as Catullus has done his best to make things clear.

1) We traded dirty little verses yesterday over wine.
2) Here's a dirty little verse to tell you how much I enjoyed it.
3) Let's do it again sometimes.

It really is that simple.

This is a poem as much about Catullus' wit and charms as it is about Calvus'. Our poet's use of sexually charged terms that admit often of double meanings is dictated by the brief description of the previous day's activities.

Writing versiculi over wine points to one thing, and that is the erotic epigram. Recall carmen 16. It is precisely for a misinterpretation of his versiculi that Catullus threatens his critics with sexual humiliation. The power of the piece is centered in his declaration that the poet and his work are not one, and that 'it becomes a poet to be chaste,' but not his versiculi. As professor Gaisser noted the kind of poems he is referring are probably not the Lesbia, but poems such as carmen 48, which is a perfect erotic epigram on desire of a youth.

Accepting the versiculi to be what they are elsewhere in Catullus, dirty little verse or erotic epigrams, we can accept the sexual imagery suggested throughout. Ludo is often sex play of any kind, forms of convenio can stand in for coitus (cf. e.g. συνουσία), delicatus refers to illicit sex, jocus to dirty talk, labor first to the work of prostitutes then to sex in general, and membrum means genitals whether singular or plural.

The genius of the piece is in writing about the composition of a certain kind of poetry in its own terms. This is the charm of the piece, and it pretends to nothing more. The passion for a friend is no more expressed than the passion for a lover. The poet is simply having fun.

As scholars writing recently tend to parrot Scott, they overlook a 1979 piece by Maria Carilli which explores elements of Greek epigram in several of Catullus' poems. On poem 50 Carilli points to an epigram by the Alexandrian Hedylos (Carilli points to Gow-Page, but in my haste I couldn't locate it, though the text is taken from Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 11.45.19).

ἐξ ἠοῦς εἰς νύκτα καὶ ἐκ νυκτὸς πάλι Σωκλῆς
εἰς ἠοῦν πίνει τετραχόοισι κάδοις,
εἶτ’ ἐξαίφνης που τυχὸν οἴχεται. ἀλλὰ παρ’ οἶνον
Σικελίδου παίζει πουλὺ μελιχρότερον,
ἐστὶ δὲ δή, πολὺ <δὴ> στιβαρώτερος. ὡς δ’ ἐπιλάμπει
ἡ χάρις, ὥστε φίλει καὶ γράφε καὶ μέθυε.

Odd grammar aside (ὥστε + imperative?), the piece shows the some key themes of the writing session described by Catullus already in place among Alexandrian epigrammatists.

Oddly enough, this poem reads as a Callimachean program.

From dawn into the night and from night back into dawn, Socles, you drink from three-gallon vessels. Then suddenly, somehow, by chance it’s gone! But by the Sicilian’s wine you play much more sweetly, and it is in fact quite a bit stronger. How grace shines forth! So go ahead and love, and write, and get drunk!

The Sicilian, as Carilli reminds us, is Asclepiades, the purported founder of the Alexandrian erotic epigram. Here the poet Socles is encouraged to 'love, write, and get drunk' on the wine of Asclepiades, which is sweeter than his old stock, which has dried up anyway. This is reminscent of Callimachus' claim in the Aetia prologue that poetry is sweeter his way. 'Let others let fly their arrows far against the Mede.'

Asclepiades, however, is known to have praised the Lyde, so his apparent connection with a Callimachean recusatio is bot puzzling and potentially fruitful.

Carilli points out too that Nemesis is a stock figure at the ends of erotic epigrams, and that semimortua is a translation of Philodemus' ἡμιθανές, a reference to his half-limp penis (AP 11.30).

In addition, no one has paid much attention to the verb versarer which stands at the start of line 12, and which conjures the writing of verse as it describes the poets 'limbs' rolling around restless on his bed. This is an explicit clue from the poet that the poetry is meant by the image of the lover's body.

One last note before I go. The phrase 'illinc abii ... incensus' has led most people to assume that Catullus was returned from a party at Calvus' house, and this has even prompted one old editor to wonder whether the text should be emended to read 'in tueis tabellis.'

There is no reason for this. Illing need not be treated as a concrete term, 'from that place,' but can instead be treated metaphorically (it is even used to refer to people). I suggest 'and from that (experience) I have come away (into a state of being) inflamed by your wit.' Abii often means 'to come away' into a certain state, rather than to physically depart from a physical place. 'In meis tabellis' implies that the party took place at Catullus' house, and that our poets prayers in line 18 involve an invitation by Calvus.

today is 14 september

you heard me right. today is september 14. that means that on this day, drusus died in AD 23 and domitian became emperor in AD 81.

also, in honor of our alexandrian class, i thought i would post this brief review of lionel casson's book Libraries in the Ancient World:

In "Libraries in the Ancient World" Lionel Casson discusses all the important topics about ancient writing and libraries, and supplements the chapters on ancient Mesopotamian libraries, the Greek, Alexandrian, and Roman libraries, the evolution of codex from papyrus roll, and the beginning of the Middle Ages, with ample diagrams and useful photographs. Among other intriguing anecdotes, Casson explains the development of parchment from papyrus as the result of a rivalry between Ptolemy V and the king of Pergamum (whence the word parchment), both of whose cities held important libraries. It was parchment on wooden tablets that were later joined together to make the first books. Greek libraries housed scrolls, but provided no room for reading and contained only Greek literature. In Republican Rome, Greek literature was greatly admired, copied by booksellers, and imitated by early Roman writers. Roman libraries in the time of Augustus had two rooms, one for Greek literature and one for Roman, which meant there needed to be some degree of selectivity about what to store, and that, in turn, required competent librarians. In the late Republic, the first public libraries and reading rooms were introduced, and later some were connected with the social centers known as public baths. Although there is a wealth of information in "Libraries in the Ancient World," Casson writes so that a reader can breeze through Libraries in the Ancient World.

essays on demand

here is an article comparing alexander pope and eminem (thanks to classics in contemporary culture for the link).

New Weekly Feature!

Mark your calendars kids because by this time tomorrow you should find not one but two original contributions to Catullan poetics right here at the Campus.

Expect this feature to recur weekly, though we'll move beyond the Big Cat soon enough.

So on tomorrow's plate:

Eric on Carmen I
Dennis on Carmen L

Be there!

thoughts on euergetism

here are peter jones' thoughts on 'ancient and modern' from the spectator for 11 september 2004:

Today’s rich are not, apparently, giving enough of their wealth to good causes. The ancients would have known why.

Euergesia — ‘benefaction, philanthropy’ — had always been seen as a virtue of the well-born Greek (for Aristotle it was an act that characterised the ‘magnificent’ man). It was, therefore, highly popular among the great and good of the Hellenic world, as the vast number of inscriptions and statues attesting such ‘euergetism’ indicate, whether erected by the euergetist himself or a grateful people. The culture spread to Rome too. Pliny the Younger, for example, endowed his home town, Como, with a school and a library, and in his will bequeathed it a public bath and a capital sum to give everyone a free annual dinner. The emperor himself was the ultimate euergetist: public buildings, banquets, free bread, extravagant games, cheap baths, etc., were all treated as if they were personal benefactions to the Roman people.

In 5th-century bc Athens, however, where radical democracy reached its full flowering under Pericles, the culture of liberal benefaction was slightly frowned on. The reason was that the citizens saw each other as equals, and suspected any citizen who lavished benefactions on others of trying to gain political ascendancy. If benefaction, therefore, was not to dry up, it would have to be under the Assembly’s direction. As a result, Athenians invented the leitourgia system (our ‘liturgy’), under which the 300 richest citizens in each year were ordered to subsidise a number of state activities, like the annual drama festivals, equipping a trireme, and so on.

This sounds like a New Labour paradise, but unfortunately we already have a tax system that achieves the same purpose all too well. Is the state, then, the universal euergetist? No. It certainly sets itself up as the universal provider, but simply grabs our money and spends it how it likes. The point about ancient euergetism is that it was personal and reciprocal: it served the interests of the giver — everything from patriotic display to political self-advancement — as well as that of the recipient.

There will always be saints to whom the ‘what’s in it for me?’ mentality is anathema. In their absence, however, good causes will be properly served again only when the giver is as much the ‘good cause’ as the cause to which he is giving.