No Direction Home

I saw one of the best correctives I've come across in a while to academic extravagance in mountain-out-of-a-molehill-making (often in evidence in my own papers) while watching part two of Scorsese's recent Bob Dylan bio-pic No Direction Home. During the footage of a 1965 press conference in San Francisco, a reporter tries to inquire into the 'significance' of the Triumph Motorcycle t-shirt he is wearing on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited, telling him that there is a 'philosophy' embedded in it. Dylan's response is to laugh and tell the reporter he hasn't really spent a lot of time looking at it (the reporter says he has spent a lot of time looking at it) and says it was just a picture somebody took one day while he was sitting on the steps.

Not one to give up, the reporter asks if he can talk about the meaning of the motorcycle image in his song-writing. Dylan's only response to this is, 'Well, we all like motorcycles, don't we?', or something to that effect.

The moral of this story is: sometimes a t-shirt is just a t-shirt. I have to remind myself of that sometimes, when puzzling over individual words in a poem and attempting to make an entire interpretation hang on what, to the author, might have been a rather insignificant detail. That doesn't mean these details are always insignificant, but it seems good at least to pause over them, to take a step back and ask the more general questions: does this interpretation I'm gleaning from this one word make sense in the broader scope of the poem? How does it fit in with the whole body of data I'm working with? Would the author have used the word in this way and with this significance? What is his normal practice? How does he mark what is important and what is not in his poem, if at all? Am I foisting my own intent on the author, trying to make a square poem fit in a round hole, as it were? Or does it cohere with the rest of the work?

Ok. I'm done babbling. But it is always nice to find a reminder in a surprising place which causes some reflection on the pitfalls of interpretation--one which pulls me for a moment from the hermetically-sealed bubble in which I often attempt to work with ancient texts out into the wider world.

M-W's Word of the Day for All Y'all Late Antique and Numismatic Types

solidus \SAH-luh-dus\ noun

1 : an ancient Roman gold coin introduced by Constantine and used to the fall of the Byzantine Empire
*2 : a mark / used typically to denote "or" (as in and/or), "and or" (as in straggler/deserter), or "per" (as in feet/second)

Example sentence:
In her latest thriller, the author manipulates her readers into believing there are two killers until the final page, where she connects their two names with a solidus.

Did you know?
Call it a solidus, or call it a slash/diagonal/slant/virgule — whatever you call it, you are bound to run into this useful mark with some regularity. These days, one place the mark is commonly seen is in Internet addresses (http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/mwwod.pl, for example), but the history of the word "solidus" takes us back to a time well before computers. The ancient Roman emperor Constantine the Great borrowed the Latin term for "solid" ("solidus") for the gold coin that was the successor to the aureus. And in Medieval Latin, "solidus" designated the shilling. Before the introduction of decimal coinage, abbreviations of the shilling ("s," "sh," or "shil") were used. Eventually, the abbreviations were replaced with the simple symbol "/," which became known as a solidus.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

I never knew that the mark '/' was called a solidus. So perhaps now we should begin saying things such as 'The web address is aitch tee tee pee colon solidus solidus...'?

Milton as a Reader of Nicander

In Milton's essay Of Education we learn that if only we should teach children, in addition to the usual arts and sciences, 'the helpful experience of hunters, fowlers, fisherman, shepherds, gardners, apothecaries,' then 'those poets which are now counted most hard will be both facile and pleasant: Orpheus, Hesiod, Theocritus, Aratus, Nicander, Oppian, Dionysius, and in Latin, Lucretius, Manilius, and the rural part of Virgil.'

It comes as no surprise then when we find Nicander creeping up in book X of Paradise Lost. Satan has returned triumphantly to Hell and makes a self-congratulatory speech which doesn't go over quite so well. Note, particularly, the list of snakes, which even includes a scorpion, from verses 524-529:

504    So having said, awhile he stood expecting
505    Their universal shout and high applause
506    To fill his ear; when, contrary, he hears
507    On all sides from innumerable tongues
508    A dismal universal hiss, the sound
509    Of public scorn. He wonder'd, but not long
510    Had leisure, wond'ring at himself now more:
511    His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare,
512    His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining
513    Each other till, supplanted, down he fell
514    A monstrous serpent on his belly prone,
515    Reluctant but in vain: a greater power
516    Now rul'd him, punish'd in the shape he sinn'd,
517    According to his doom. He would have spoke,
518    But hiss for hiss return'd with forked tongue
519    To forked tongue; for now were all transform'd
520    Alike, to serpents all, as accessories
521    To his bold riot. Dreadful was the din
522    Of hissing through the hall, thick-swarming now
523    With complicated monsters, head and tail:
524    Scorpion and asp and amphisbaena dire,
525    Cerastes horn'd, hydrus, and ellops drear,
526    And dipsas (not so thick swarm'd once the soil
527    Bedropp'd with blood of Gorgon, or the isle
528    Ophiusa); but still greatest he, the midst,
529    Now dragon grown, larger than whom the sun
530    Engender'd in the Pythian vale on slime,
531    Huge Python; and his power no less he seem'd
532    Above the rest still to retain. They all
533    Him follow'd, issuing forth to th' open field,
534    Where all yet left of that revolted rout,
535    Heav'n-fall'n, in station stood or just array,
536    Sublime with expectation when to see
537    In triumph issuing forth their glorious Chief.
538    They saw, but other sight instead--a crowd
539    Of ugly serpents. Horror on them fell,
540    And horrid sympathy; for what they saw
541    They felt themselves now changing. Down their arms,
542    Down fell both spear and shield, down they as fast;
543    And the dire hiss renew'd, and the dire form
544    Catch'd by contagion, like in punishment
545    As in their crime. Thus was th' applause they meant
546    Turn'd to exploding hiss, triumph to shame
547    Cast on themselves from their own mouths. There stood
548    A grove hard by, sprung up with this their change
549    (His will who reigns above) to aggravate
550    Their penance, laden with fair fruit, like that
551    Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve
552    Us'd by the Tempter. ...

Milton has clearly read Apollonius, Nicander, and Lucan.

If only more of us had been educated in his manner, we'd more easily see the allusion.

D gets in on the book action

Here are all (I think all) of my book finds for the past month:

• 101 Puzzles in Thought and Logic (Math & Logic Puzzles), C. R. Wylie
  
• ABC of atoms, Bertrand Russell
  
• American Heritage dictionary of idioms, Christine Ammer
  
• Anthology of Latin poetry, Robert Yelverston Tyrell
  
• Brideshead revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  
• Byzantium and Europe, Speros Vryonis
  
• Cassell's Italian dictionary,
  
• The Charioteer, Mary Renault
  
• The Cherry orchard a comedy, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
  
• Christmas holiday, W. Somerset Maugham
  
• Classical hand-list;, John Arbuthnot Nairn
  
• The classical heritage and its beneficiaries, R. R. Bolgar
  
• A clerk of Oxenford; essays on literature and life, Gilbert Highet
  
• The crown the Philippics and ten other orations, Demosthenes
  
• Das Nibelungenlied,
  
• De l'Institution des Enfants, Essais, liv. I, chap. xxv, Michel de Montaigne
  
• Dean's December, Saul Bellow
  
• Deutscher lehrgang, Eduard Prokosch
  
• A dictionary of economics, John Black
  
• Dictionary of historical terms, Chris Cook
  
• A dictionary of linguistics, Mario Pei
  
• Did you ever see a dream walking? American conservative thought in the twentieth century, William F. Buckley
  
• Dutch vocabulary, B. C. Donaldson
  
• The education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
  
• The eleven comedies, Aristophanes
  
• The empire of reason : how Europe imagined and America realized the enlightenment, Henry Steele Commager
  
• End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama
  
• The end of racism : principles for a multiracial society, Dinesh D'Souza
  
• English stress; its form, its growth, and its role in verse, Morris Halle
  
• The essays of Michel de Montaigne, Michel de Montaigne
  
• Framley parsonage, Anthony Trollope
  
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
  
• French Revolution: a history, Thomas Carlyle
  
• Goethe, J.-F. Angelloz
  
• Golden lion of Granpere, Anthony Trollope
  
• Graphically speaking : an illustrated guide to the working language of design and printing, Mark Beach
  
• Greek: A Complete Course for Beginners (Teach Yourself Books), Aristarhos Matsukus
  
• A handbook of Greek mythology including its extension to Rome, H. J. Rose
  
• Henderson, the rain king, Saul Bellow
  
• Herzog, Saul Bellow
  
• Histoire de l'eloquence latine depuis l'origine de Rome jusqu'à Ciceron, Victor Cucheval
  
• Histoire de l'éloquence romaine depuis la mort de Cicéron jusqu'à l'avènement de l'emper, Victor. [from old catalog] Cucheval
  
• Histoire des oracles Du bonheur. Essai sur l'histoire. Dialogues des morts, Fontenelle, M. de
  
• Historians' fallacies; toward a logic of historical thought, David Hackett Fischer
  
• A history of Greece to the death of Alexander the Great, J. B. Bury
  
• A history of private life, (vols. 1 & 2)
  
• The house of intellect, Jacques Barzun
  
• Humboldt's gift, Saul Bellow
  
• An introduction to linguistic science, Edgar H. Sturtevant
  
• An introduction to Roman history, literature, and antiquities, Alexander Petrie
  
• Johnson's London; selected source materials for freshman research papers, Roland Bartel
  
• La guerre civile la pharsale . tome 1, livres I-V, texte établi par a. bourgery., Lucain
  
• Langenscheidt's new college German dictionary,
  
• Latter-day pamphlets, Thomas Carlyle
  
• Le Symbolisme dans la mythologie grecque, Paul Diel
  
• Learning to look; a handbook for the visual arts, Joshua Charles Taylor
  
• Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée, Victor Bérard
  
• Liberal education (Beacon paperback no. 86), Mark Van Doren
  
• The life and strange surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
  
• Linguaphone; introduction to Russian grammar,
  
• Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
  
• Man's unconquerable mind; studies of English writers, Raymond Wilson Chambers
  
• Method of philological study of the English language, Francis Andrew March
  
• Michelet oeuvres choisies, Gaillard H.
  
• The natural, Bernard Malamud
  
• A new introduction to Greek, Alston Hurd Chase
  
• A new Russian grammar in two parts, Anna Hering Semeonoff
  
• Nieuw volledig Engelsch-Nederlandsch en Nederlandsch-Engelsch woordenboek, I. M. Calisch
  
• Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo
  
• Oeuvres, François Rabelais
  
• Official Scrabble Players Dictionary,
  
• On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, Thomas Carlyle
  
• Patriotic gore; studies in the literature of the American Civil War, Edmund Wilson
  
• Pensées de Pascal, Blaise Pascal
  
• Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley
  
• The rights of woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
  
• Samuel Johnson, John Wain
  
• Say It In French: Phrase Book for Travelers, Leon J. Cohen
  
• The small house at Allington, Anthony Trollope
  
• Songwriting : a complete guide to the craft, Stephen Citron
  
• Source readings in music history from classical antiquity through the romantic era, W. Oliver Strunk
  
• The story of Apollonius, King of Tyre : a study of its Greek origin and an edition of the two oldest Latin recensions, G. A. A. Kortekaas
  
• The story of philosophy; the lives and opinions of the greater philosophers, Will Durant
  
• The synonym finder, J. I. Rodale
  
• Thomas Mann: profile and perspectives with two unpublished letters and a chronological list of important events, André Von Gronicka
  
• Three comedies: The circle, Our betters, The constant wife, W. Somerset Maugham
  
• To Jerusalem and back a personal account, Saul Bellow
  
• The voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin
  
• The way of all flesh, Samuel Butler
  
• Winnie ille Pu, A. A. Milne

Wow ... an even 90. And I paid about $30 for the lot.

MORE: Eric ... do you think the W. Oliver Strunk who wrote Source readings in music history from classical antiquity through the romantic era is your Oliver Strunk?

More on 'd.d.'

Caelestis suggests below that the abbreviation stands for 'donum dat/dedit'. I was looking through the epigraphy book mentioned below and have found some confirming evidence. In it is reproduced an inscription from an obelisk in Rome:

IMP.CAESAR.DIVI.F
AVGVSTVS
PONTIFEX.MAXIMUS
IMP.XII.COS.XI.TRIB.POT.XIV
AEGVPTO.INPOTESTATEM
POPVLI.ROMANI.REDACTA
SOLI.DONVM.DEDIT

And here are a few more abbreviations (the second of which lends support to Dennis' suggestion 'dedit') listed in chapter 7 employing the letter 'D':

D: dat
D, D.D: dedit
D, DED, DD: dedicavit
D.D.D: dedit idemque dedicavit
D.D: dono dedit (is dono some sort of predicative dative here? Or is this a parallel construction to one in which we would find the accusative of the person and the ablative of the thing (cf. Allen & Greenough 225d)?)

Book Buys 2

Ok, so today I returned to the book sale and stuck more to the task at hand (which is not to say that I still didn't have a few divergences). Thankfully there were still some items of interest that I hadn't noticed yesterday, and some that I had, but put off getting.

Bloch, Raymon. L'epigraphie latine (in the 'que sais-je?' series).
Brueder Grimm. Kinder- und Hausmaerchen.
Christ, W., and M. Paranakis. Anthologia Graeca Carminum Christianorum (Hildesheim 1963).
Dickens, Charles. The Life of Our Lord (the title of the work in the original manuscript written for his own children is The History of Our Saviour Jesus Christ).
Dolan, John P., ed. and trans. The Essential Erasmus.
Fraser, W.H., and J. Square. Heath's Practical French Grammar.
Friend, A.M., Jr. The Portraits of the Evangelists in Greek and Latin Manuscripts (reprinted from Art Studies: 1927).
Lateinische Gedichte Deutscher Humanisten (Lateinisch/Deutsch).
Lawall, Gilbert. Theocritus' Coan Pastorals: A Poetry Book.
Langenscheidt's German-English/English-German Dictionary.
Lesky, Albin. Die Tragische Dichtung Der Hellenen (paperback).
Porphyry. Peri Apochhs Empsuchwn (De l'abstinence), tome 1, livre 1 in the Bude series, edited with French translation by Jean Bouffartigue.
Waugh, Evelyn. Black Mischief.

Ok, so maybe I went a little overboard. But I was given the advice previously to build the library (Field of Dreams style?...Well, maybe not).

St. Cecilia

Rogueclassicism tells us that today is the anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Cecilia, patron saint of music. Here is a shot of the facade of S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome, thought (I think) to be on the site of her house and martyrdom:

When her tomb was opened in the late 1599, supposedly her body was found in tact and undecayed, and the sculptor Stefano Maderno, present at the opening, was able to depict it:


There are some excavations underneath the church of Roman remains which I haven't visited yet, but would like to. If and when I do, I'll try to get some pics up from them.

UPDATE: I had a feeling that some of the information I read on the catholic-forum.com site conflicted with something I had read before. Here is what the Blue Guide for Rome says (whence some of the above information also comes):

[The church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere is] on the site of the house of St. Cecilia and her husband St. Valerian, whome she converted to Christianity. This building was adapted to Christian use probably in the 5C, and the body of St. Cecilia was transferred here and a basilica erected by Paschal I (817-24). The church, radically altered from the 16C onwards, was partly restored to its original form in 1899-1901. The slightly leaning campanile dates from 1120.

St. Cecilia, a patrician lady of the gens Cornelia, was martyred in 230, during the reign of Alexander Severus. She was shut up in the calidarium of her own baths, to be scalded to death. Emerging unscathed, she was beheaded in her own house, but the executioner did such a bad job that she lived for three days afterwards. She was buried in the Catacombs of St. Calixtus, where her body remained until its reinterment in her church in 820. As the inventor of the organ, she is the patron saint of music. On 22 November churches hold musical services in her honour.

Book Sale Scores

The library had a book sale today, and I picked up a few things:

Berg, William. Early Virgil.
Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim's Progress.
Die Bibel (Luther's German translation)
Cassell's New French Dictionary. (I actually like Harper/Collins/Robert, but I wanted to get a copy of this as well.)
James, Henry. Italian Hours.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Either/Or (translation).
Pascal, Blaise. Pensees (translation by W.F. Trotter with an introduction by T.S. Eliot).
Septuaginta X (ed. A Rahlfs): Psalmi cum Odis (the 'Odes' are Novem Odae ecclesiae graecae). Handwritten in the front is, I believe, the name of William Strunk's (of 'Strunk and White' fame) son Oliver. Perhaps someone can tell me what this inscription means. It reads: 'O. Strunk d.d. J. Raasted, Sept. '63'. Does anyone know what the 'd.d.' stands for?

As you can tell, I didn't do a very good job of sticking to classics books, but I am very glad to have gotten a copy of Berg; there's a lot I enjoy in that book. There were some others in the classics field I wanted to get, but I was getting outside of what I thought I should spend. The one I'm most disappointed to have passed up was John Jones' On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, my personal favorite as far as works on the Poetics and Greek Tragedy go. I also passed on a Cassell's Latin Dictionary, which I don't actually own. There was a pristine copy of the Appolonius Rhodius Loeb as well, and Merrill's Catullus. In addition, they had the first part of an edition of the Catalepton, with Latin, English, and Latin commentary. Finally, I had to pass on A.P. Burnett's The Art of Bacchylides.

Dennis: they had a very nice edition of Victor Bers' Greek Poetic Syntax in the Classical Age. I think it was about EUR 8 ($10 or $12). Let me know if you want it and I could try to pick it up if it's still there.

UPDATE: I have a hunch 'd.d.' could stand for dedicavit. Can anyone confirm or deny?

UPDATE 2: I was just poking around at the book sale again and came across Charles Segal's copy of Anne Lebeck's Studies in Aeschylus. They seem to have had several tragedy books that I missed the first time around, as I saw someone absconding with Winnington-Ingram's Studies in Aeschylus. Ah, well.

Comment Moderation and Numismatics

First a bit of business: apologies to anyone who posted a comment recently only to find it no appear. We don't know how comment moderation was enabled (perhaps all of that numismatic wine Eric's been drinking?) but it wasn't intentional, it's been turned off, and all such comments have been indiscriminately approved and posted.

But back to that wine, I said in the comments that I'd link to Sarah's blog if she posted about the coin we identified the other day, and sure enough she has. So here it is: a Cilician coin from Tarsus featuring the emperor Gallus Trebonianus (Gaius Vibius) with interesting translations and transliterations from Latin into Greek.