Some Introductory Notes on Livy

The normal dates give for Livy's life are: born 59 BC, died AD 17 (Syme has challenged this dating and has made a case for 64 BC-AD 12; see his paper 'Livy and Augustus'). He was a native of Padua, hence Asinius Pollio's recriminations over his Patavinitas, though the meaning of this accusation remains in question.

His history, Ab urbe condita, consisted originally of 142 books. Of these, 35 books are extant: books 1-10 and 21-45. Summaries (epitomes or Periochae) of most of the remaining books have come down to us (with the exception of books 136 and 137), the value of which varies. The work spans Rome's legendary beginnings to, most likely, the death of Drusus in 9 BC, or perhaps the defeat of Varro in the Teutoberg Forest in AD 9.

For those interested in Late Antiquity, it is worth noting that 'Q. Aurelius Symmachus corrected a set of manuscripts containing the whole of Livy's work, as we know from a subscription; this was a large-scale cooperative venture of the Nicomachi and Symmachi families and is the ultimate source for all surviving manuscripts of the first decade' (Conte 374).

(For very brief introductions, see the Oxford Classical Dictionary and G.B. Conte's Latin Literature, pp. 367-76 (quoted above).)

Images from Livy (1)

'The Oath of the Horatii', by Armand Caraffe (1762-1822) (Moscow, Pushkin Museum)

Notes on Teaching Latin with 'Courses'

More than half a century ago Jacques Barzun wrote, in Teacher in America, something I feel strongly about everyday when I go to work and struggle to teach with the Cambridge Latin Course:

We have all had in our hands these little works, which start off "Wie geht's heute mit dir, teurer Hans?" and go on with chitchat, anecdotes, and pictures of Salzburg. This is chumminess misplaced. Let the teacher say "how do you do" and let the book remain what a book should be -- a systematic exposition of the subject, in which the student can find what he is looking for. Nothing is more exasperating than to have to wonder whether the subjunctive was given together with a description of Bremerhaven or later, with the sad story of Struwwelpeter. Besides, no student is better off for having all the verbs given in bits, half a tense at a time.

Instead of Bremerhaven we have the remains of Pompeii. We're not lucky enough to have Shock-headed Peter, but the ghost of a gladiator makes a brief appearance. The subjunctive will wait for the second or third year, along with probably the ablative and many other useful things. Instead of chitchat we have an unending stream of Latin in the vein of 'See Spot run': servus anulum conspectat. servus anulum capit. servus abit. *yawn*

The 'course' is useful if you have little more Latin than the book will teach you, and even less history and culture.

The problem with courses is that they're proscribed -- teach the genitive if you wish, but the kids won't see one for another year. Every time you step off the course you're bound to wonder whether you should ever step on again.

Poetry and Livy's Preface

It is interesting to me that Livy's preface begins with the first four feet of a dactylic hexameter:

Facturusne operae pretium sim...

In other words, he inaugurates his prose history with the trappings of epic. This is only the first indication in the preface that Livy has poets on his mind.

He refers again to poetry when commenting on his refusal either to attempt to substantiate or refute the accounts of Rome's earliest days:

Quae ante conditam condendamve urbem poeticis magis decora fabulis quam incorruptis rerum gestarum monumentis traduntur, ea nec adfirmare nec refellere in animo est.

And, in a nice bit of ring-composition-cum-variatio, he ends the preface with a reference to 'the poets':

Cum bonis potius omnibus votisque et precationibus deorum dearumque, si, ut poetis, nobis quoque mos esset, libentius inciperemus, ut orsis tantum operis successus prosperos darent.

This is a present contrary-to-fact condition: 'If I were a poet, I would begin...'; in other words, he's not a poet, so he won't begin in such a way.

Or will he? By raising the issue in the first place, in a sort of praeteritio, he's already put such an invocation in the minds of his readers, his denials notwithstanding. And it's not as though he hasn't been thinking about the gods in the course of this preface:

Datur haec venia antiquitati, ut miscendo humana divinis primordia urbium augustiora faciat, et si cui populo licere oportet consecrare origines suas et ad deos referre auctores, ea belli gloria est populo Romano ut, cum suum conditorisque sui parentem Martem potissimum ferat, tam et hoc gentes humanae patiantur aequo animo quam imperium patiuntur.

Some questions to ponder: what, exactly, is the relationship of Livy's history to epic poetry? Was he attempting to write 'epic in prose'? How close are the parallels we can draw between his treatment and use of foundation myths and the treatment and use of them made by Vergil?

I realize that these are questions that have probably been addressed at length in the scholarship. Nevertheless, they're some questions that came up as I was reading the preface, and it's always good to try to take a fresh look. And it's better, perhaps, to try to come up with some ideas and theories before rushing to the answers that have already been given.

As always, any comments or feedback is welcome.

The pretense of a classical education

Quoth Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber in Die Hard,

'When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.' Benefits of a classical education.

Hans clearly presents this as a quotation, presumably from a classical source, but there seems to be no real antiquity to it. At least not in that form. It may be a distortion of a passage in Plutarch, as the page linked suggests, a suspicion I had come to just before reading that page. Plutarch had actually said that Alexander wept upon hearing that there were infinite worlds, realizing that he had not yet conquered even one of them.

The mistake is easy enough to understand. A) Everybody knows that Alexander conquered the world, B) we hear that Alexander wept ... hm ... something about other worlds ... ah-ha! C) Alexander wept when he realized there were no other worlds to conquer!

Variations on the theme crop up throughout 19th century works in much the same form as today, namely as vague references to something we all just know to be true. One book review I found from 1842 uses a slight variant and justifies itself by saying, 'the books tell us,' suggesting that it was already a commonplace:

Alexander wept for other worlds to conquer, the books tell us, because, forsooth, he had marched with an army in one direction through countries whose utmost extent was about two-thirds that of the United States.

This is clearly drawn from the passage in Plutarch referred to above, though through some intermediate source that has blurred the original and offered the wrong context. (Incidentally, the review in which this crops up is for a work of alternate history by Louis Geoffroy, apparently one of the first of its kind.)

Even before this and for long after it was a commonplace in English grammar and composition books. Searches like those I performed with Google Print show wild variations more than a century and a half ago, indicating that this non-classical quotation was, even then, used by those professing a classical education, doubtless unchecked by others eager to maintain the same pretense.

It's clear in their contexts that earlier writers such as Calvin and Molière understood the original, but the repetition of an obscure quotation seems, in this case, like a particularly romantic game of telephone.

In fact, I wonder now if a misreading of Calvin wasn't the original culprit. Calvin used the reference in his interpretation of Psalm 146 ('3. Trust not in princes; in the son of man in whom there is not safety. 4. His breath shall go forth; he shall return to his earth, in that day his thoughts [285] shall perish.'):

When he says that in that day all his thoughts perish, or flow away, perhaps under this expression he censures the madness of princes in setting no bounds to their hopes and desires, and scaling the very heavens in their ambition, like the insane Alexander of Macedon, who, upon hearing that there were other worlds, wept that he had not yet conquered one, although soon after the funeral urn sufficed him.

That Calvin juxtaposed this event closely with Alexander's death (which I'm not sure Plutarch hints at) made it easier to confuse conquering no world with conquering this world, a feat acknowledged by all for Alexander, who died young.

Martial's Drinking Game

David Meadows, the rogue classicist, is wondering about an epigram of Martial that is bandied about here and there to support the claim that 'the Romans' (always a loaded phrase) would toast their ladies with a drink for every letter of their names. Unable to find the epigram due to the old-fashioned habit among old-fashioned writers of forgoing citations (as though everyone with a proper education should recognize every classical reference, as when Tully ruefully remarked ... you get the picture), David has asked for help in locating a verse translated in part as 'Six cups to Naevia's health go quickly round!'

That would be Martial 1. 71:

Laevia sex cyathis, septem Iustina bibatur,
Quinque Lycas, Lyde quattuor, Ida tribus.
Omnis ab infuso numeretur amica Falerno,
Et quia nulla venit, tu mihi, Somne, veni.

The custom, via this epigram, has even found its way into the Oxford Latin Dictionary under bibo 1 d, 'to toast (a name, by drinking once for each letter).'

Let Laevia be drunk with six glasses, Justina seven,
Lycas five, Lyde four, Ida three.
Let all my loves be recounted from the Falernian (wine) consumed,
and since none comes, you, Sleep, come to me.

David was right, I think, in suspecting the claim to be spurious in that the context makes it clear that this wasn't a custom, but simply a sad and lonely night for poor old Martial, drinking himself to sleep over thoughts of girls gone by.

That's why I've translated bibatur as 'let her be drunk' rather than 'let her be toasted.' The idea of a toast is misleading. Martial is not 'drinking to the health' of all the girls he knew before; rather, the alcohol acts as a surrogate for each.

It's heart-breaking, really.

I'm kind of a big deal

I'm conflicted. Is this a compliment?

I'm a great fan of your site, and wish I'd known of the grad school cheat sheet when I was a student...I'm a great fan of your site, and wish I'd known of the grad school cheat sheet when I was a student...

Or is it an ad?

I wonder if you're familiar with the blog by the TLS classics editor, Mary Beard http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/ - she discusses various aspects of classics (which she teaches at Cambridge) and today's entry discusses why the Romans didn't drink cocktails and why they should have

Either way, I'm honored as the author of that e-mail works for the TLS. Even if other (more consistent) blogs received similar messages, it's the TLS.

So that will allow me to rest on my laurels a bit more during what's left of Winter break. I'll play some more Nintendo Wii, read some soul-destroying books on education and teaching, and develop more lesson plans. What I am unlikely to do, however, is blog, so I reckon Mary Beard will have to keep picking up the slack for the Campus (I jest).

In Stabiano

Apologies for the long hiatus here from my end. Can't promise that's going to change in the near future.

While I was home briefly during the Thanksgiving break, I had the chance to check out the exhibition In Stabiano: Exploring the Ancient Seaside Villas of the Roman Elite at the Toledo Museum of Art (it is a traveling exhibition currently on display there). In addition to material artifacts such as vessels and some papyrus fragments (including a snippet of Thucydides), 'In Stabiano' boasts some magnificent frescoes from several villas in ancient Stabiae (destroyed, along with Herculaneum and Pompeii, in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79). If anyone is in the Toledo area, or in the vicinity of the other museums whither the exhibition will travel after departing thence, you might really enjoy checking it out.

Because Learning about Words is Fun

Merriam-Webster's word for today:

doyen \DOY-un\ noun

*1 : the senior or most experienced member of a group
2 : the oldest example of a category

Example sentence:
We watched a TV documentary by Jacques Cousteau, the doyen of undersea explorers.

Did you know?
English picked up "doyen" from French in the 17th century. The French term in turn comes from the Late Latin word "decanus," which itself comes from the Greek "dekanos," meaning "chief of ten." A "doyen" can be a leader of a group, such as a diplomatic corps. In this regard, the word has been used to refer to someone who is specifically or tacitly allowed to speak for that group. More broadly, a "doyen" refers to a highly skilled and respected veteran of a particular field. The feminine form of "doyen" is "doyenne."

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

John Calvin, Near-Classicist

Unlike Luther, Calvin was not a university-trained theologian. He had, of course, been sent by his father to the University of Paris in order to study for the priesthood. But the original plans for John's ordination were scuttled when his father, a notary for the bishop of Noyon in Picardy, quarrelled with the cathedral chapter. In the aftermath of the quarrel Calvin was sent instead to Orleans and later to Bourges to study law. By inclination Calvin preferred to be neither a lawyer nor a priest, though he did obey his father by earning a doctorate in civil law. In the preface to his commentary on the Psalms, written many years after the events, Calvin claimed that his chief ambition as a young man had been to lead a quiet life as a reclusive scholar, one who edited and interpreted classical texts. He might very well have lived such a quiet life, had he not experienced what he later described as a rapid, if somewhat reluctant, conversion to the Protestant movement. This unexpected conversion propelled him within a remarkably short time to prominence withing Protestant circles of reform.

(From David C. Steinmetz, 'The Theology of John Calvin' (in The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology, edited by David Bagchi and David C. Steinmetz [2004], pp. 113-29), pp. 113-14.)

Auden's Thoughts on Catullus (et al.)

From 'New Year Letter', Part One:

There DRYDEN sits with modest smile,
The master of the middle style,
Conscious CATULLUS who made all
His gutter-language musical,
Black TENNYSON whose talents were
For an articulate despair,
Trim, dualistic BAUDELAIRE,
Poet of cities, harbours, whores,
Acedia, gaslight and remorse,
HARDY whose Dorset gave much joy
To one unsocial English boy,
And RILKE whom die Dinge bless,
The Santa Claus of loneliness.

An Article on Novels Set in Ancient Rome

You may find it here.

(Link via Arts&Letters Daily.)

'Sermo Beati Augustini super Verbis Apostoli ad Galatas...

The Boar's Head Tavern currently has a banner quote by Augustine (not sure how long it will remain up there) that reads as follows:

We, who preach and write books, write in a manner altogether different from the manner in which the canon of Scriptures has been written. We write while we make progress. We learn something new every day. We dictate at the same time as we explore. We speak as we still knock for understanding. … I urge your charity, on my behalf and in my own case, that you should not take any previous book or preaching of mine as Holy Scripture. … If anyone criticises me when I have said what is right, he does not do right. But I would be more angry with the one who praises me and takes what I have written for Gospel truth than the one who criticises me unfairly.

For anyone interested (which perhaps is only me), I believe this is pulled from one of Augustine's Dolbeau sermons (the 'Sermo Beati Augustini super Verbis Apostoli ad Galatas...'). Here is some of the Latin, which includes part of the passage quoted above:

Certe non quiesco, quantum possum, ubi esse possum utilis fratribus, et loquendo et scribendo. Admoneo caritatem vestram, a me, usque ad me, ne cuiusquam disputationis librum aut disputationem pro canonica scriptura habere velitis. In scripturis sanctis iudicare discimus, in scripturis nostris iudicari non dedignamur. Illud quidem eligendum est et hoc potius de duobus optandum, ut scribendo vel loquendo vera dicamus, nusquam erremus. Sed quoniam hoc implere difficile est, ideo aliud est firmamentum canonis, tamquam caelum ubi sunt constituta luminaria scripturarum, velut inter aquas et aquas, inter populos angelorum et populos hominum: illos supra, istos infra. Teneamus scripturam tamquam scripturam, tamquam deum loquentem; non ibi quaeramus hominem errantem. Non enim frustra canon in ecclesiam constitutus est: spiritus sancti hoc officium est. Si quis ergo legit librum meum, iudicet me: si rationabile dixi, sequatur non me, sed rationem ipsam; si hoc provavi testmonio evidentissimo atque divino, sequatur non me, sed scripturam divinam. Se autem aliquid quod ego recte dixi reprehendere voluerit, non rect facit, sed plus irascor tali lauditori meo qui librum meum tamquam canonicum accipit, quam ei qui in libro meo etiam non reprehendenda reprehendit. Rogo vos: quamvis intentos vos videam et paene recentissimos, velut modo audire coeperitis, tamen nolo aliquid amplius dicere, ut hoc quod ultimum dixi fortiter teneatis.

The whole sermon is an interesting survival from Late Antiquity and can be read with great profit.

An Exhortation to Read Better

The following is from Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book. It can be found on pp. 6-10 of the 1940 edition of the book; it is here cited from the 1965 edition, the entirety of which is available online by clicking the title of this post. You can also find the link through the Wikipedia page for 'How to Read a Book'.

I did not discover I could not read until after I had left college. I found it out only after I tried to teach others how to read. Most parents have probably made a similar discovery by trying to teach their youngsters. Paradoxically, as a result, the parents usually learn more about reading than their children. The reason is simple. They have to be more active about the business. Anyone who teaches anything has to.

To get back to my story. So far as the registrar's records were concerned, I was one of the satisfactory students in my day at Columbia. We passed courses with creditable marks. The game was easy enough, once you caught on to the tricks. If anyone had told us then that we did not know much or could not read very well, we would have been shocked. We were sure we could listen to lectures and read the books assigned in such a way we could answer examination questions neatly. That was the proof of our ability.

Some of us took one course which increased our self-satisfaction enormously. I had just been started by John Erskine. It ran for two years, was called General Honors, and was open to a select group of juniors and seniors. It consisted of nothing but "reading" the great books, from the Greek classics through the Latin and medieval masterpieces right down to the best books of yesterday, William James, Einstein, and Freud. The books were in all fields: they were histories and books of science or philosophy, dramatic poetry and novels. We discussed them with our teachers one night a week in informal, seminar fashion.

That course had two effects on me. For one thing, it made me think I had struck educational gold for the first time. Here was real stuff, handled in a real way, compared to the textbook and lecture courses that merely made demands on one's memory. But the trouble was I not only thought I had struck gold; I also thought that I owned the mine. Here were the great books. I knew how to read. The world was my oyster.

If, after graduation, I had gone into business or medicine or law, I would probably still be harboring the conceit that I knew how to read and was well read beyond the ordinary. Fortunately, something woke me form this dream. For every illusion that the classroom can nourish, there is a school of hard knocks to destroy it. A few years of practice awaken the lawyer and the doctor. Business or newspaper work disillusions the boy who thought he was a trader or a reporter when he finished the school of commerce or journalism. Well, I thought I was liberally educated, that I knew how to read, and had read a lot. The cure for that was teaching, and the punishment that precisely fitted my crime was to having to teach, the year after I graduated, in this very Honors course which had so inflated me.

As a student, I had read all the books I was now going to teach but, being very young and conscientious, I decided to read them again- you know, just to brush up each week for class. To my growing amazement, week after week, I discovered that the books were almost brand new to me. I seemed to be reading them for the first time, these books which I thought I had "mastered" thoroughly.

As time went on, I found out not only that I did not know very much about any of these books, but also that I did not know how to read them very well. To make up for my ignorance and incompetence I did what any young teacher might do who was afraid of both his students and his job. I used secondary sources, encyclopedias, commentaries, all sorts of books about books about these books. In that way, I thought, I would appear to know more than the students. They wouldn't be able to tell that my questions or points did not come from my better reading of the book they too were working on.

Fortunately for me I was found out, or else I might have been satisfied with getting by as a teaching just as I had got by as a student. If I had succeeded in fooling others, I might soon have deceived myself as well. My first good fortune was in having as a colleague in this teaching Mark Van Doren, the poet. He led off in the discussion of poetry, as I was supposed to do in the case of history, science, and philosophy. He was several years my senior, probably more honest than I, certainly a better reader. Forced to compare my performance with his, I simply could not fool myself. I had not found out what the books contained by reading them, but by reading about them.

My questions about a book were of the sort anyone could ask or answer without having read the book—anyone who had had recourse to the discussion which a hundred secondary sources provide for those who cannot or do not want to read. In contrast, his questions seemed to arise from the pages of the book itself. He actually seemed to have some intimacy with the author. Each book was a large world, infinitely rich for exploration, and woe to the student who answered questions as if, instead of traveling therein, he had been listening to a travelogue. The contrast was too plain, and too much for me. I was not allowed to forget that I did not know to read.

My second good fortune lay in the particular group of students who formed that first class. They were not long in catching on to me. They knew how to use the encyclopedia, or a commentary, or the editor's introduction which usually graces the publication of a classic, just as well as I did. One of them, who has since achieved fame as a critic, was particularly obstreperous. He took what seemed to me endless delight in discussing the various about the book, which could be obtained from secondary sources, always to show me and the rest of the class that the book itself still remained to be discussed. I do not mean that he or the other students could read the book better than I, or had done so. Clearly none of us, with the exception of Mr. Van Doren, was doing the job of reading.

After the first year of teaching, I had few illusions left about my literacy. Since then, I have been teaching students how to read books, six years at Columbia with Mark Van Doren and for the last ten years at the University of Chicago with President Robert M. Hutchins. In the course of years, I think I have gradually learned to read a little better. There is no longer any danger of self-deception, of supposing that I have become expert. Why? Because reading the same books year after year, I discover each time what I found out the first year I began to teach: the book I am rereading is almost new to me. For a while, each time I reread it, that I had really read it well at last, only to have the next reading show up my inadequacies and misinterpretations. After this happens several times, even the dullest of us is likely to learn that perfect reading lies at the end of the rainbow. Although practice makes perfect, in this art of reading as in any other, the long run needed to prove the maxim is longer than the allotted span.

Dante on Drugs?

Peter Hainsworth, in his TLS review of Barbara Renolds' Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man, notes that Reynolds suggests that Dante may have enjoyed cannabis (this would, of course, put him in line with many a modern hip-hop versifier):

But the novelties come thick and fast, beginning (so far as I was concerned) with the suggestion on page 10 that Dante and other poets he associated with in Florence as a young man might have given their visionary and dreamlike imaginings a boost with the stimulus of love-potions. These herbal stimulants, cannabis perhaps, may, it turns out later, be what Dante is referring to in the comparison, near the start of Paradiso, between his own “trans-human” experience and what Glaucus felt “on tasting of the herb” (nel gustar dell’erba) which made him into a sea-god. As Reynolds explains at greater length when she comes to the final vision of the Godhead, mystics did often use drugs of one kind or another in conjunction with fasting and meditation in their pursuit of visionary illumination. There is no reason, she argues, why Dante should not have done so too.

This was news to me. I'd never heard or read that medieval mystics were fond of these, ahem, stimulants. Does anyone have any additional information on this topic?

Bundy Online

Although the Rogueclassicist (from whom I got this information) has already mentioned it, I thought I would link to it to because it's very useful news: E.L. Bundy's Studia Pindarica is now available online here.

Did Lucan Understand Condensation and Evaporation?

We report. You decide. Here is Housman's text, followed by Braund's traslation.

iamque polo pressae largos densantur in imbres
spissataeque fluunt; nec seruant fulmina flammas
quamuis crebra micent: extinguunt fulgura nimbi.
hinc inperfecto conplectitur aera gyro
arcus uix ulla uariatus luce colorem
Oceanumque bibit raptosque ad nubila fluctus
pertulit et caelo defusum reddidit aequor. (Bellum Civile 4.76-82)

And now, they [i.e., the clouds] are squeezed and thickened by the sky into abundant rains
and pour down condensed; thunderbolts cannot preserve their flames;
although they flash incessantly, the rain-clouds quench the lightning-flashes.
Then the rainbow embraces the air with its hoop
incomplete, its colour hardly varied by light,
and drank the Ocean and swiftly carried up the waves
to the clouds and restored the water which had flooded from the sky.

Ancient Cemetery to Open in Rome

Here's the beginning; click on the post title to read the rest.

In cemetery, clues to ancient Rome's middle class
By Frances D'Emilio, Associated Press | October 10, 2006

VATICAN CITY -- Visitors to the Vatican soon will be able to descend into an ancient world of the dead, a newly unveiled necropolis that was a burial place for the rich and not-so-affluent during Roman imperial rule.

The necropolis, which was unearthed three years ago during construction of a parking lot, will open to the public this week. One archeologist said yesterday that sculptures, engravings, and other objects found entombed with the dead made the find a ``little Pompeii" of cemeteries.

The burial sites, ranging from simple terra-cotta funerary urns with ashes still inside to ornately sculptured sarcophagi, date from between the era of Augustus (23 BC to 14 AD) to that of Constantine in the first part of the fourth century.

From specially constructed walkways, visitors can look down on some skeletons, including that of an infant buried by loved ones who left a hen's egg beside the body. The egg, whose smashed shell was reconstructed by archeologists, might have symbolized hopes for a rebirth, officials at a Vatican Museums news conference said yesterday.

Regarding the last paragraph quoted here: does anyone know of any parallels for eggs in funeral goods or visual art representing hopes for rebirth?

A Reference to Ovid in Calvin's Commentaries

2 Thess. 1:5 reads:

...Ostensionem iusti iudicii Dei: ut digni habeamini regno Dei, pro quo et patimini.

...Which is a manifest token of the righteous judgment of God, that ye may be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which ye also suffer...

In commenting on the phrase 'a demonstration of the righteousness of God', Calvin refers to a remark of Ovid in the Amores:

Without mentioning the exposition given by others, I am of opinion that the true meaning is this — that the injuries and persecutions which innocent and pious persons endure from the wicked and abandoned, shew clearly, as in a mirror, that God will one day be the judge of the world. And this statement is quite at antipodes with that profane notion, which we are accustomed to entertain, whenever it goes well with the good and ill with the wicked. For we think that the world is under the regulation of mere chance, and we leave God no control. Hence it is that impiety and contempt take possession of men’s hearts, as Solomon speaks, (Ecclesiastes 9:3) for those that suffer anything undeservedly either throw the blame upon God, or do not think that he concerns himself as to the affairs of men. We hear what Ovid says, — “I am tempted to think that there are no gods.”

The footnote gives the reference:

“ Solicitor nullos esse putare deos .” — Ovid in. Am. 9:36. In order to see the appropriateness of the quotation, it is necessary to notice the connection of the words “ Cum rapiant mala fata bonos.... Solicitor ,” etc. ; — “When misfortunes overtake the good, I am tempted,” etc. — Ed

In addition, Calvin makes another 'classics reference' immediately after the passage

just cited:
Nay more, David confesses (Psalm 73:1-12) that, because he saw things in so confused a state in the world, he had well-nigh lost his footing, as in a slippery place. On the other hand, the wicked become more insolent through occasion of prosperity, as if no punishment of their crimes awaited them; just as Dionysius, when making a prosperous voyage, boasted that the gods favored the sacrilegious. [The note explains thus: "Our author alludes to a saying of Dionysius the younger, tyrant of Sicily, on occasion of his plundering the temple of Proserpine."] In fine, when we see that the cruelty of the wicked against the innocent walks abroad with impunity, carnal sense concludes that there is no judgment of God, that there are no punishments of the wicked, that there is no reward of righteousness.

How to be a Classicist, pt. 1

I've been shirking my duties here to focus on those of being a full-time Latin teacher, but now that I have a three day weekend, I thought I'd write up a little guide for burgeoning classicists trying to make their way through the academy. This is really very simple: success is adherence to a number of predictable formulae.

Our first installment: How to Choose a Title.

Never make the mistake of giving away a paper's subject with an accurate title. Repeat after me: mystery invites interest, cleverness invites admiration, accuracy invites your reader to question your politics, or at least to yawn.

You have two ways to go here: (1) quotation + alliteration, or (2) the magical number three.

The first is probably the most popular (and successful) today, and consists of quoting a profound-ish line ripped from its context (though sometimes a 'cleverly' altered cliche will do), followed (usually) by a two-term alliterative phrase (...: x and y in the ...).

You really can't go wrong with 'Blah blah blah blah: poetics and politics of such-and-such in whatchamacallit of so-and-so.' Another winner (currently on the rise): 'gender and genre in the such-and-such of so-and-so.'

Don't worry if you're unsure what poetics is, or how gender and genre can be manipulated to make a point. That doesn't matter. Professional classicists will be so impressed by your cleverness that they'll let such small concerns slide. Attention to detail is what led to the extinction of the Philologists, and good riddance.

The second option, the magical number three, has the distinct advantage of not being the number two. Two is such a small number, and binary opposition is frankly gauche. Let me explain:

If you were to write a paper on, say, motherhood and murder in Euripidean tragedy, your subject would appear to be just as arbitrary as it actually is. But along comes magical number three, and we suddenly have the suggestion of a theme. Anything will do, but how do we decide? Alliteration to the rescue again! Let's say 'myth.'

Plug them into the formula: 'Myth, Murder, and Motherhood in the Tragedies of Euripides.' That sure sounds like a paper!

If you simply begin arranging words according to established patterns, your papers will seem to write themselves. Here's a term paper for one of our more adventurous readers: 'Unmovable Feast: Symposium and Sin in the Poetry of Archaic Greece.

Half the fun is pretending that it makes sense.