Everything Old is New Again*

I mentioned Proba and her Cento in these pages recently; her poem, made up of bits of Vergil reorganized to tell the story of Christ, is a fascinating example of Late Antique Christian adaptation and appropriation of the classical past. I think that the statue pictured below demonstrates a similar phenomenon in the visual arts, though this adaptation did not, as far as I know, occur in Late Antiquity–I do not know when it was remade, but I assume that it was perhaps in the Renaissance. The statue sits in the Roman basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (other names are Basilica Eleniana or Basilica Sessoriana, which claims to preserve fragments of the True Cross as relics brought back from Jerusalem by Constantine’s mother Helena, along with some earth from Calvary. The basilica sits on the grounds of a 3rd-century imperial villa begun by Septimius Severus and completed by Heliogabalus, which served as Helena’s private residence. She is thought to have dedicated a room of the building for Christian worship and, perhaps around a decade later, an atrium of the building was turned into a Christian basilica.

Anyway, back to the statue. This work, found at Ostia, was originally a statue of Juno and was then transformed into a figure of Helena by replacing the head and arms and adding a cross.

*Information for this post was taken from the Blue Guide for Rome, the Guida d’Italia: Roma, and the Eyewitness Travel Guide for Rome.

Sea-monsters Again!

Rogueclassicism may be on to something, as I have come across yet another use of cetus. This is somewhat funny to me, as I haven't been seeking them out and, as I mentioned before, I don't recall seeing the word incredibly often in the past. This use, this time a Latin genitive, is also in reference to Jonah and is found in a speech of Christ in Book 2 of Juvencus. Here are lines 697-9:

Namque propheta cavo quantum sub pectore ceti
temporis absumpsit, terrae in penetralibus altis
progenies hominis tantum demersa manebit.

Sermones Germanici ... Latine!

My girlfriend is reading Roman satire right now, which currently gets lots of comparisons to hip-hop, thanks largely to Ralph Rosen who I think first made the comparison between iambic poetry and hip-hop.

I like the idea of using Horace's 'sermones' (referring to his satires, especially, but also to his epistles) to translate 'rap' because both words refer to informal speech or compositions which affect informal speech. There's often the pretense that the composition is off the cuff or at least not 'inauthentic,' however that's defined.

There's never a 100% correspondence, but it can be instructive.

Anyway, David Meadows at rogueclassicism linked to a story about some people in Germany who rap in Latin. The story he linked to, and other stories I found on the net, failed to link to the band's site, and with a name like Ista they proved difficult to find.

But here it is, for your amusement: www.ista-latina.de/.

Sound and Sense in Juvencus

In Book 2, lines 433-508, of his Libri Evangeliorum Quattuor, Juvencus places a long discourse of Christ in which he gives His disciples their instructions. Line 462, in a passage in which Christ tells the disciples that they will be persecuted and punished for His sake, includes an excellent example of sound corresponding to sense. The subject matter of the passage is harsh, as Christ mentions specific torments they will suffer, and the ugly sound of the line reflects this well. Here is the couplet 462-3:

Vos flagris vinclisque feris durisque tyrranis
frendens urgebit pro me violentia saecli.

Both lines have a rather heavy feel. The first scans -----^^---^^-x, while the second scans -------^^-^^-x. In 462, every word ends with an 's'-sound (if we discount the copulative -que endings), and the second through sixth words all end in long -is. Moreover, in flagris and feris, the pulse and ictus clash, so that the -is sounds receive a special sort of emphasis (I'm assuming that pulse and accent coincide for vinclisque and durisque due to an accent shift to the penultimate caused by non-elided -que--which reminds me: in Golden Latin Artistry Wilkinson states, I believe, that the question of whether accent shifts in a word containing an elided -que is undecided. That book was pubished in 1963; does anyone know what the current status of that question is?).

Perhaps I'm being fanciful, but I also detect in these slithering 's'-sounds a hint of the serpent, popular since the Garden of Eden as a figure for Satan and an appropriate one to evoke here in the context of the evil punishment of the disciples for the sake of the righteous Christ. If this hint is present, another interesting layer of meaning is added as well by the fact that only four lines earlier Christ had instructed His disciples to be as cunning as serpents (458):

sed vos arguto serpentum corde vigete...

On the Intentional 'Fallacy'

Some comments from James Zetzel, discussing whether Catullus 34 was written as a hymn for performance at an actual religious festival (he thinks it wasn't):

....Even if Catullus 34 were found in an ancient equivalent of "Hymns Ancient and Modern" that would not mean that its religious aspect was primary in its author's intention.

I realize that I am here committing the intentional fallacy, and I am doing so intentionally, because I do not believe that it is a serious critical problem. In any case, given the assumption--and it is an assumption--of poetic intelligence and control of the text, and given the assumption that we are ultimately interested in the poetry and its composition rather than in using it as evidence for something else, a critic must deal not only with what the historical circumstances are, but how the poet uses them; not with the reconstruction of the psychology and emotions of the poet, but with the depiction of them in the poem; not with what the generic conventions are, but how the poet manipulates them.

From 'Roman Romanticism and Other Fables', p. 50, in The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics? (entire article pp. 41-57)

How not to read Latin

I found myself sorely bothered today by technology in classics, but before you write me off as a curmudgeon or a snob hear me out. It won't take long.

I was reading about a program that purports to help you read classical Latin by parsing words, highlighting syntactic units, offering speech bubbles filled with grammatical information pointing to words and clauses -- in short, reading the Latin for you.

I know there's always been a drive to keep up with the Joneses, where the Joneses are other academic disciplines, particularly in the sciences. It's been going on longer than I've been alive. (I remember seeing an old movie as a kid and being puzzled about the conflict faced by the humanities professor whose son had turned to the dark side of math, i.e., science, with which his impractical discipline was ever at odds.)

Anyway, that's no reason to dispense with the time-honored tradition of actually learning how to read Latin. I can hear you saying, 'but this software will help students to learn grammar better and to read sooner!' But it won't.

As it is we're already too dependent upon commentaries. This indicates that we produce translators of Greek and Latin rather than readers. And they're not even passable translators. Why would a person fully capable of walking with a little effort choose to rely on so many crutches?

Teach grammar properly and your students won't require linguistic calculators.

On a related note I've been annoyed lately by the number of teachers who write to a certain mailing list with the most inane questions easily answered by reaching for a grammar or a dictionary. These posts are invariably followed up by a half dozen or so well-intentioned guesses by other teachers who haven't thought to look it up elsewhere than thei Dick and Jane textbook of choice.

Of course I'm being unfair, and of course a lot of meaningful discussion takes place. And of course some people do post references to good grammars.

But the numbers are against them, and teachers who've learned Latin poorly will continue to teach it poorly and will fail to impart to their students any deep familiarity with the tools at their disposal.

They'll just keep on sneaking peeks at translations when their commentaries, cd-roms, and pocket dictionaries fail them.

The Sleeping Jonah (Before His Wake-up Call)

In the brief entry in Schanz/Hosius on the anonymous poem De Jona, the author of the poem is praised for his 'originality' and 'blooming imagination' in his description of the storm at sea. Schanz/Hosius then comments that the rest of the narrative is in accordance with the Biblical account: 'Die weitere Erzaehlung schliesst sich an den biblischen Bericht an' (p. 189). This is not entirely correct, however, in one interesting respect. The anonymous poet states that Jonah goes to sleep in the interior of the boat, just as the Biblical account does (et Iona descendit ad interiora navis et dormiebat sopore gravi, Jonah 1:5, Vulg.), but he adds the humanizing and somewhat comic detail that he is snoring through his swollen or puffed up nose:

Nescius haec reus ipse cavo sub fornice puppis
stertens inflata resonabat nare soporem. (53-4)

I also wonder whether there is a play on a double-meaning of inflata here, since the word can also mean 'haughty' or 'proud', which describes fairly well the attitude of Jonah in not wanting the Ninevites to come to repentance (cf. Jonah 3:10-4:2 (NASB): 'When God saw their deeds, that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented concerning the calamity which He had declared He would bring upon them. And He did not do it. But it greatly displeased Jonah and he became angry. He prayed to the LORD and said, "Please LORD, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity.').

More on Sea-monsters

Earlier, I inquired about the frequency of the use of cete, which I had come across in Proba's Cento. Bret Mulligan commented that one often finds it in Late Antique exegesis, especially of the Book of Jonah. Today I was reading the anonymous Late Antique poem De Iona Propheta and came across the word again, this time in the singular and spelled with an ending in the Latinized -us instead of Greek -os (interestingly, Lewis' Elementary Latin Dictionary enters the word as cetos, while Lewis & Short uses cetus and puts in parentheses afterwards 'acc. to the Gr. cētŏs).

The anonymous author of De Iona Propheta then uses another word transliterated from Greek in the following line. Here are the two lines in question (85-6):

Iamque illic imo exoriens de gurgite cetus,
squamosum et conchis evolvens corporis agmen...