Persius 1.53: An Udderly Hypocritical Patron

Posted on Monday: March 3, 2014 by Michael Hendry

A rich patron fishes for compliments (1.53-55):

                        calidum scis ponere sumen,
scis comitem horridulum trita donare lacerna,
et ‘verum’ inquis ‘amo, verum mihi dicite de me.’        55

The two gifts offered as bait are oddly assorted. A worn cloak shows a suitably sordid mixture of generosity and parsimony, well worth having but far less valuable than a new one would have been. However, a hot sow’s udder is an unambiguous delicacy. Lee and Barr see the problem but try to wiggle out of it: “a popular and doubtless not over-expensive delicacy”. Kißel offers all the parallels one could wish to prove that sumen was “a choice delicacy” and hot “the ideal serving temperature”. It may have been popular in the sense that everyone liked it, but surely not in the sense that anyone but the rich could afford to eat it often, if at all. Jenkinson’s ‘caviar’ seems a legitimate translation into modern socio-economic terms.

The pairing of udder and cloak might be defended as combining gifts of approximately equal value – not that I feel qualified to calculate the value of either gift in first-century currency. When clothes were woven, cut, and sewn by hand, a new cloak would have been worth far more than a fresh-cooked sow’s udder – unlike today, when a brand new winter jacket from K-Mart may (experto credite) cost less than a lambburger with fries and imported Mexican Coca Cola at the hot new restaurant in town. Whether a used cloak would have been worth more or less than a fresh sow’s udder would presumably have depended on just how worn it was.

Nevertheless, this is satire, and I expect a foodstuff that is at least mildly sordid and degrading to go with the worn cloak: as I have suggested elsewhere, in satire and invective the rule is lectio foedior potior. I suggest therefore that Persius wrote gelidum (a polar error in more ways than one – tepidum would be less sordid and further from the paradosis). The patron serves his poor client a cold sow’s udder, presumably left over from dinner with rich cronies the night before. (At least he doesn’t invite the two classes of guests to the same feast to humiliate the poor ones, like Virro in Juvenal 5 or the anonymous villain of Pliny, Epistulae 2.6.) In the days before refrigerators, a day-old udder would have been none too fresh, though still edible. Like the contents of a doggy bag from a fine restaurant today, it would have been tastier than a lot of fresh foods, while still far less attractive than it had been when fresh.

Now the two gifts match: they’re both cold, though in slightly different ways, both are used or at least not fresh, both would have been more welcome if given new-made (fresh from the tailor or freshly-cooked), and both are still worth having, thus putting the client firmly in his place. Or perhaps the clients: we don’t know whether the recipients of udder and cloak are the same person, but identifying the two might add a bit of point. Anyone would rather have his cooked meat hot from the stove, but a man who’s shivering with cold would especially appreciate any kind of hot food or drink, just to help warm up.

On the other hand, the plural dicite shows that two or more clients are present. Does one get the udder, the udder other the cloak? Or is there a whole crowd of clients, and one gets the udder, one the cloak, while the rest are sent away cold and hungry, but still hoping to be among the lucky few next time? Either way, it looks like the patron is trying to elicit some competitive flattery.

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Persius 1.4: Machinical Error?

Posted on Sunday: March 2, 2014 by Michael Hendry

A minor question of orthography:

ne mihi Polydamas et Troiades Labeonem

The name of the Trojan hero Πολυδάμας does not scan in hexameters: the first three syllables are short. Homer therefore lengthened the first syllable to make Πουλυδάμας. How that should be spelled in Latin is not entirely settled.

The latest editors of the three Augustan poems in which Πολυδάμας is mentioned all print forms of Pulydamas: Heyworth in Propertius 3.1.29, Knox in Ovid, Heroides 5.94, and Tarrant in Ovid, Metamorphoses 12.542. Propertius’ older manuscripts are divided, with N giving poli and the descendants of A (FLP, Heyworth’s Π) puly (both as separate words). But the older manuscripts of Ovid – quite a bit older than Propertius’ – give Poly- in both works. Nevertheless, none of the three editors argues the point, and neither Knox nor Tarrant even mentions it in his apparatus, printing accusative Pulydamanta in both texts without explanation. Nor do Heyworth or Knox argue the point in their commentaries. It seems to be the consensus of modern editors (perhaps only ‘Anglo-Saxon’ editors) that Pulydamas is the proper way to spell the name, at least in the higher genres of verse during the reign of Augustus.

Is that how Persius would have spelled the name? His editors much prefer Polydamas: of those I have seen, only Valpy and Némethy print Pulydamas. However, only Gildersleeve and Kißel argue the point at all. I find their arguments unconvincing, and have therefore printed Pulydamas in my text. Kißel (116) adduces the preponderance of manuscripts in verse authors who name Polydamas, but does not explain why he would have preferred the Doric-Aeolic form. (Besides Propertius and Ovid, the sources are Ilias Latina 786 and Silius 12.212.) Gildersleeve doesn’t argue so much as assert: “Some write Pulydamas, corresponding with the Homeric form, Πουλυδάμας; but Pōlydamas (Πωλυδάμας) is the Sicilian Doric, like pōlypus (πωλύπος).” He goes on to expound the allusion to the Iliad, which makes nonsense of the supposed Sicilian origin. It seems obvious to me that most Romans would have learned pōlypus at the fishmarket, where Sicilian dialect would have been likely enough, while those Romans who knew the name of the hero at all would have learned it from reading Homer. They would have had no more need to assimilate the two spellings than the spellings of machina and mechanicus. Here, too, the less learned borrowing (machina from μαχανά) presumably came from personal contact with Dorian speakers, while the more learned (mechanicus from μηχανή) would have come from reading Attic texts.

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Persius 5.159: When Two Ets Are Two Too Many

Posted on Saturday: March 1, 2014 by Michael Hendry

A concise animal allegory illustrates the difficulty of achieving true freedom (5.157-60):

nec tu, cum obstiteris semel instantique negaris
parere imperio, ‘rupi iam uincula’ dicas;
nam et luctata canis nodum abripit, et tamen illi,
cum fugit, a collo trahitur pars longa catenae.        160

                159 et tamen αVXRW : at tamen P : ast tamen GLN : tamen C

Braund translates the last two lines “Even when a bitch breaks the knot after a struggle, a long section of chain still trails from her neck”. I don’t quite see the “when” in the Latin, and it seems to me that ut for the first et in 159 would provide better sense at very small cost. Now the first clause means “even supposing a bitch breaks the knot after a struggle”: a hypothetical is good here. As the OLD notes (s.v. 35), this concessive use of ut is often matched with tamen in the main clause, and that is exactly what we have after the comma. It also requires the subjunctive, so we must alter abripit to abripiat and then delete the second et to save the meter. However, that actually removes another small problem: the variants listed in the apparatus, particularly the unmetrical reading of C, point to interpolation. Once abripiat had lost its second a, et and at and ast were variously inserted to mend the meter, while C or its ancestor left it unmended.

My final text:

nam ut luctata canis nodum abripiat, tamen illi,
cum fugit, a collo trahitur pars longa catenae.        160

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Persius, Prologus 10-11: a Bit of Nachleben

Posted on Saturday: February 22, 2014 by Michael Hendry

An amusing bit of Nachleben seems worth mentioning here. In his Südelbucher, G. C. Lichtenberg wrote (L 315):

Ein Stoß auf den Magen beraubt alles Bewußtseins nicht den Magen sondern den Kopf selbst. Überhaupt wird immer von Kopf und Herz geredet und viel zu wenig vom Magen, vermutlich, weil er in den Souterrains logiert ist, aber die Alten verstunden es besser. Persius kreierte ihn bekanntlich schon zum Magister Artium, und in den 1700 (?) Jahren kann er doch wohl etwas hinzu gelernt haben.

A punch in the stomach deprives of all consciousness not the stomach but the head itself. In general, people are always talking about head and heart, and far too little about the stomach, probably because it lodges in the basement, but the ancients understood it better. As is well known, Persius awarded it the Master of Arts, and in 1700 (?) years it may surely have become more learned.

Of course, Lichtenberg cheats a bit by taking Persius’ magister artis is if it were magister artium. I do not know what the parenthesized question mark after 1700 is supposed to mean. Lichtenberg was writing in 1796, which was 1734 years after the death of Persius, so 1700 is a good round figure for the number of years the stomach had had to for further education. Did Lichtenberg himself add the query because he was unsure of Persius’ dates?

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Persius, Prologus 6: semipaganus

Posted on Saturday: February 22, 2014 by Michael Hendry

I suspect that more pages have been written on semipaganus than on any other single word in Persius. Not only is the meaning of paganus obscure – fellow-townsman? rustic? civilian? – it is far from obvious what the implied other half is. This is a problem with other semi- compounds. A semivir is obviously half a man, but whether the other half is a beast or a woman or a boy or an inanimate object depends on the context: Ovid might have called the Minotaur a semivir bos or a semibos vir or a semivir semibos (calling him semibovemque virum, semivirumque bovem in A.A. 2.24 was just overkill) but a simple semivir or semibos, without further clues in the context, would have left his readers scratching their heads.

I lean towards the (familiar) idea that the pagus of which Persius is a partial member is Poetopolis, and that he is claiming to be half a poet and (presumably) half a prosaic writer of philosophical diatribe. Satiric and choliambic verse are certainly prosier than most genres, and putting philosophy into verse, as Lucretius did, will also tend to prosify it. Did Persius think of himself as a Stoic Lucretius? Or perhaps a Semilucretius, omitting Stoic physics and writing only on ethics? He certainly sounds Lucretian in 1.1. However, this is a huge subject, best put off for another day.

In the mean time, whatever semipaganus means, it certainly implies that Persius is half one thing, and half something else. Given Persius’ intimate knowledge of all Horace’s works, and his thorough reworking of the Sermones, I wonder: can it possibly be coincidental that the only ‘Persius’ mentioned in any of Horace’s works is a hybrida, the pun-loving Clazomenian halfbreed of Sermones 1.7?(1)

What Gowers says about Horace’s Persius in her recent commentary on Satires I (CGLC, 2012) sounds rather like the Neronian satirist: “this rancid legal pickle of bitter flavours . . . The poem can be read as a literary-critical duel between two old kinds of satire, [Persius'] the Greek-influenced wit of Lucilius, sharp but uncontrolled, and [Rex's] the rustic and vinegary humour of Italy” (250). Was Persius inspired by ‘Persius’? It seems likely to me. Some may also wish to associate Horace’s Rupilius Rex with Persius’ supposed Mida rex or even Nero, but I’m not sure I’m willing to go so far.

As it happens, Persius’ other model Lucilius also mentions only one ‘Persius’ in the surviving bits of his satires, in two passages of what seems to have been his first published poem. We know that Book XXVI was his first collection of satires, placed after the hexameter works by officious editors. If Warmington and Krenkel are right in putting lines 632-4 W (= 591-3 K = 595-6 Marx) in the first satire of Book XXVI, then Lucilius stakes out his poetical position in his very first satire as midway between the tastes of the overlearned Persius and the underlearned Manius Manilius:

                                                  <ab indoctissimis>
nec doctissimis <legi me>; Man<ium Manil>ium
Persiumve haec legere nolo, Iunium Congum volo.

Different editors print different supplements, but Persium is safely outside them, and the general sense seems clear. Again, he says (Fr. 635 W = 594 K = 593 M)

Persium non curo legere, Laelium Decumum volo.

(We know from Cicero, who quotes this line, that Persius was the overlearned reader.) Is Persius the satirist thinking of Lucilius’ Persius when he writes his snobbish rejections of the common herd and professes that he doesn’t care whether anyone reads him?

Of course, my second point is less compelling than my first. We have only a small percentage of Lucilius’ works, so he may have mentioned this Persius or others many times in passages now lost. My first point is much stronger. We have no reason to believe that Horace wrote any lost works except for juvenilia that he did not wish to survive. It seems likely that his single ‘Persius’ caught the satirist Persius’ eye and influenced his work.

(1) If no one (so far as I know) has noticed the connection between the satirist Persius and his Horatian forebear, that may be because Sermones 1.7 is everyone’s least favorite poem of Horace, except for possibly Iambi 8 and 12.

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Persius’ Choliambi: Prologue, Epilogue, or . . . ?

Posted on Friday: February 21, 2014 by Michael Hendry

Most manuscripts (followed by most editors) place Persius’ fourteen choliambic lines before the six hexameter satires, but two of the three best (AB = α) place them after all six, while the third (P) omits them entirely. The lines themselves fall into two halves of seven lines each, with a very abrupt transition. Some have therefore argued that they are two separate poems, though this opinion is now out of fashion.(1) A bit of ring-composition – the first and last lines both contain allusions to Pegasus – makes it hard to separate them.

There is one other possible arrangement I think worth outlining, since, so far as I can tell, no one else has suggested it before. (If I am mistaken, please correct me in the comments.) I don’t believe it myself, but hope that it may prove a stimulus to further thought.

Is it conceivable that the choliambs are in fact Persius’ prologue and epilogue, that lines 1-7 should be placed before Satire 1 and lines 8-14 after Satire 6? That would explain their uncertain position in the manuscripts: faced with two bits of verse in the same non-hexameter meter, a scribe might well have been tempted to combine them in one place, and either end of the corpus would have done as well as the other. The lack of connection between lines 7 and 8 would obviously not be a problem if they originally had 660+ hexameters between them, and the Pegasean ring-composition would work just as well as a device to unite an entire book, rather than a single short poem.

The first half without the second would arguably work as a lead-in to Satire 1. It could almost be printed with a colon at the end: “I’m bringing a poetic offering to the Holy Rites:” . . . and here it is, in a new paragraph and a different meter. So far, so good. However, the second half doesn’t work for me at all as an epilogue. It starts out as an interesting new poem, but whether we punctuate the last line with a full stop (editors) or with a question mark (as Harvey suggests, ad loc.), it doesn’t seem to provide anything in the way of closure. That is why I do not believe my hypothesis. I could modify (and complicate) it by arguing that something is missing at the end of 8-14, but that would ruin the matching lengths of the hypothetical Prologue and Epilogue, so I’m not willing to go that far.

(1) Dessen (16 and n4) attributes it to F. Leo, “Zum text des Persius und Iuvenal”, Hermes 45 (1910) 48. I will look it up next time I’m in a research library, since Google Books refuses to tell me whether they have even scanned it, much less whether I can read it, no matter how carefully I tailor my search terms.

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At Last: Notes on Persius

Posted on Friday: February 21, 2014 by Michael Hendry

This has been taking a lot longer than expected, but I will post my first note on Persius’ Prologus in a few minutes, and at least a couple more later tonight. I still hope to finish the whole thing by March 15th: the Prologus is particularly beset with interlocking problems.

In the next day or two, I will also put up a Persius front page (modeled on the Juvenal front page), with a table of contents, list of manuscripts, list of editions consulted, and a select bibliography.

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Why Start with Persius?

Posted on Monday: February 17, 2014 by Michael Hendry

Briefly, I have three reasons for starting with Persius’ Satires: it’s a short text (one book, seven poems, 663 lines), a very difficult text that offers interesting textual and exegetical problems on every page, and (not least) I have a lot to say about it. All this makes Persius an appropriate subject for an experiment in on-line publishing, distributed discussion, and open refereeing.

The general consensus seems to be that Persius’ manuscripts are “almost good”, as Housman put it (Collected Papers ii.525) and that conjectural emendation is rarely needed. In the Juvenal section of the current Loeb edition (2004), Braund demonstrates that she has no aversion to conjectures, old or new, but in the Persius section she prints just two in the text, one more (mine as it happens) in the apparatus. That is not a lot even for so short a text. The oldest of the three (Madvig’s) is not yet 150 years old, and the other two not yet fifty. Vergil’s manuscripts are the best of any classical Latin author, hundreds of years older than any of Persius’, but the first 663 lines of Goold’s Loeb Aeneid contain three conjectures (all old) in the text, plus one transposition and one deletion. Is Persius’ text in better shape than Vergil’s?

A glance at a fuller apparatus of Persius – Clausen’s separate edition of 1956 or Kissel’s 2007 neoTeubner – shows that even his oldest manuscripts are in fact riddled with idiotic errors. That is why I find Housman’s summary (CP ii. 602) overoptimistic: “Persius is not difficult to edit. The two authorities which preserve him, P on the one hand and AB on the other, are both exceedingly corrupt, yet each so well repairs the deficiencies of its rival that emendation is hardly required. Even recension is no troublesome or dangerous business; for where the two witnesses dissent it mostly happens that either the one or the other is unmistakably wrong; and in some places where the text is doubtful it matters next to nothing how we choose, because both alternatives are good and even equally good.” Is it true – can it be true – that two cloths, each full of holes, would just happen to provide complete coverage when laid together? I find that hard to believe. I also find many of the places where the manuscripts agree dubious.

The contents of the MSS have been thoroughly investigated by very competent scholars, numerous helpful commentaries have been written, and the Internet offers new possibilities for scholarly communication – particularly important for less popular authors, whose admirers are less likely to be able to meet. It seems a good time to take another look at the text and interpretation of Persius.

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More on My Plans for an On-Line Edition of Persius

Posted on Monday: February 17, 2014 by Michael Hendry

Two days ago, I announced that I will be publishing an on-line text of Persius with apparatus criticus and accompanying adversaria over the next month, with comments open for suggestions from anyone who is interested. This is only the first step. Once I have made up my mind on the many remaining textual and interpretative questions, I will (a) freeze the text as a ‘virtual first edition’, and (b) make inexpensive printed copies available through a POD publisher, most likely Amazon CreateSpace. I will do the same with the adversaria, making a single collected on-line edition, linked and indexed for easy access to each note, plus a POD version.

Any further changes will be listed in detail on a separate page, with dates. If these accumulate a sufficient mass, I can always do a second edition. Export for the formatting, my Juvenal text has not changed in the last ten years, but I have a lot of ideas for additions, alterations, and deletions, and plan to do a second edition of that later this year.

To get to the finished work, I will need help, and for this I envision a public on-line textual-exegetical seminar or POTIS – not a MOOC because it is neither massive nor a formal course. (More on this soon.)

The advantages of publishing an on-line text with apparatus criticus and accompanying adversaria are fairly obvious: anyone with a web connection will be able to consult them at any time, without cost. See my previous post for more on this point. Though still under construction, my QLTP page provides adjustable formats not possible in printed texts: macra can be shown or concealed, u’s and v’s and national styles of quotation marks adjusted to the reader’s tastes, and much more. Persius’ Prologus is here, and the rest will be uploaded to QLTP as I edit it.

The main advantage of providing a hard-copy text along with the web-text is that it would be useful for students. If you’re teaching Persius in the next few years (don’t everyone speak up at once!) why not urge your students to buy a copy of Kißel’s Teubner Saur De Gruyter text (currently only $46.06 on Amazon US) for consultation and the long term, plus a copy of mine to write in. God knows an unannotated Persius is not very intelligible, and mine will have plenty of room for notes, since I plan to put the text on the left-hand page, with the apparatus facing it on the right, just as it appears on the website. That will provide many of the practical advantages of an old-fashioned interleaved text – without the constant back-and-forth from right to left. I should be able to offer a complete text for US $8.00 or so, and even make a small profit.

The advantages of hard-copy adversaria are less obvious, and I don’t expect to sell many copies. However, I do hope that scholars who find my thoughts interesting or convincing or both will recommend that their university libraries order a copy of the finished work, when it is finished. It would be nice to have a few hard copies around in case of a Carrington Event, an EMP attack, or the kind of webmelting electronic pandemic (perhaps a global deletion by a mad scientist at cloud-computing headquarters) that we hope will stay entirely within the world of Science Fiction. Persius scholars may also want to acquire their own copies of my notes to annotate, correct, or defile. If you find that you really hate them, why not buy a whole stack for your fireplace? Like the text, it should be only 60-80 pages, and correspondingly inexpensive. Help support an impecunious scholar: don’t make me take a job unless it is a good one.

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Why Publish Original Scholarship On-Line?

Posted on Sunday: February 16, 2014 by Michael Hendry

I can think of at least seven good reasons to publish original classical scholarship on my own site where anyone can read it, and only three against. In favor are these:

  1. Access: Anyone can read what I have to say. Most of those interested in the structure of Silius Italicus’ Punica (link) or the text of Cymbeline (link), or any of the other subjects on which I have posted or will be posting, are probably academics with easy access to JSTOR, but not all. I personally have to drive 35 miles each way and pay for parking whenever I need to look up articles in even the more widely-distributed classical journals, and I’m sure there are others who have even less convenient access to scholarship. Easier access to my work may turn out to be a competitive advantage. Not that classical papers are often interchangeable, but, ceteris paribus, those that are easier to get hold of will be read more.
  2. Immediacy: There is no need to wait a year or two or three for what I’ve written to appear in print: I can upload it as soon as it’s done. As I get older, I find this instant gratification more compelling. Friends and colleagues can also read it immediately, even without access to JSTOR, and I don’t have to spend money on postage for hard-copy offprints. (Then again, offprints have their charms.)
  3. Accuracy: In the short run, there will surely be more mistakes in my web-publications, given the lack of any editor or proofreader other than myself. However, in the long run, there will certainly be fewer, since any that are found can and will be removed, and there is no specific date before the death of the author at which that becomes impossible. I will, of course, record and date any significant changes I make in each paper, and credit the authors of those I don’t think of myself. (Instant gratification for them, too.) Publishing my work in blog-form with open comments means that these will often be obvious.
    Journal referees are often wonderfully helpful, and usually work harder and more systematically at correcting errors than ordinary readers, but it seems likely that the casual remarks of all those interested in the subject could be at least as useful, if less well-organized, as long as they are abundant and come from a variety of points of view. Given sufficient time, a sufficient number of interested blind men should be able to describe an elephant more accurately than a single sighted man facing a deadline.
    A commented blog offers opportunities for dialogue, as well. If comments are unconvincing, they can be argued with, or rejected, politely or otherwise. Defying unconvincing objections would not require one to withdraw the paper, find another journal, and wait another however-many months or years for another set of (possibly incompatible) comments.
  4. Up-to-Dateness: Printed texts are often out of date before they even appear, partly because pertinent work has a way of appearing just when the work has gone to press, partly because no one can read everything and it’s easy to miss important work that could have been included if only it had been found in time. The last two things I looked for in recent editions were not there. (Should I provide details? Not tonight: I want to post this before midnight.) Whether text, commentary, or more traditional paper, an on-line publication whose author is still alive and keeping up with the latest research – or even just responding to comments from others who are keeping up – need never be out of date by more than a day or two. Careful choice of an intellectual heir may even remove the limitation of death.
  5. Microscholarship: Nothing is too small for the web. (Or too large, though that’s never been a problem for me.) Scholars have been known to publish collections of tiny notes on tiny problems as ‘adnotatiunculae’ or ‘limaturae’, but editors of paper journals are not fond of them. Posted on-line and properly indexed, these will be easy to find, and very easy to read without even leaving one’s comfy chair. If good enough, such scholarly tidbits will eventually be gathered up into standard commentaries.
    In passing, I should mention that web-publication also makes the stupider kind of index or concordance superfluous: once a text is on-line, Ctrl-F will do the job. The more intelligent kind, the analytical index or lemmatized lexicon, can be done on-line as easily as in book form. The on-line version can also be consulted much more easily: it’s always quicker to type in the word or form or name you’re looking for than to leaf through many pages looking for it.
  6. Unity of Design: On-line work can be recycled and collected for the convenience of author and reader, without having to worry about copyrights and the qualms of publishers. I have often seen collections of adversaria on a particular author or work in which some of the notes say ‘see my paper in journal x’. I would have liked to have all the notes on a single work in a single place, but can certainly understand why a traditional publisher would not want to include something that is not new, even when it is not already copyrighted by a different publisher. An author who is his own publisher can just paste previous work in where it belongs in a larger work, with or without changes and updates.
  7. Illustrations: Even for a lit critter such as myself, illustrations are sometimes necessary to make a point, and the web can often provide excellent color illustrations at no cost, though we do have to watch out for link-rot and permissions. One paper I hope to finish in the next month or two is a revision of the geography of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Part II. If I can get the permissions, I can illustrate it far more profusely than any journal would allow, at zero cost. For this paper, a print journal would probably have told me to omit the map on page 4 and refer readers to a classical atlas, which would have made it slightly less intelligible.

What about the reasons against?

  1. Lack of Respect I: There is of course one very large disadvantage to publishing one’s own work on one’s own website. With no stamp of approval from a first- or second-rate journal and no official refereeing, there is no guarantee of quality, probably less scholarly respect, and definitely far less credit towards tenure. That matters very little to me, since (a) I’ve published enough (link) to have a pretty good idea what is worth publishing and what is not, and (b) I’m not on a tenure-track or likely ever to be. That means that I can afford to care very much whether people read my stuff and find it convincing, not at all whether it would convince a committee to hire or promote me. (Do feel free to contact me if anything I write here makes you want to hire me to teach Latin.) I am very curious to see how long it takes for someone to follow my example.
  2. Lack of Respect II: If classicists start publishing their work on their own websites, and this is counted for tenure, there is a danger that the web will be flooded with crap by desperate scholars – as Amazon has been flooded with print-on-demand reprints of out-of-copyright books, reprints whose quality is always dubious and often abysmal. On the other hand, open comments will provide some promise of quality even for personal ‘vanity’ websites, and those that do not allow comments, or selectively delete them, can be (a) shunned or (b) freely discussed on other sites where the author has no power to delete.
  3. The Other Side of Access: There is one real danger of on-line scholarship that worries me. I have published papers on some of the filthier passages of Latin literature, and have also taught at high schools and middle schools, as well as universities, both secular and religious. I’ve never had any problem with a student being offended by something I wrote in a journal, because none of them has ever read the papers in question. (I’ve posted PDFs of most of my publications on this site (link), but felt obliged to omit the ones I wouldn’t want my younger students to read.) The fact that anything I write on-line is available to anyone with a web-connection means that a student who wanted to get me in trouble with parents, teachers, or administrators can do so with a simple link, where a visit to a major research library would previously have been necessary. Writing on-line about some passages of Roman Satire, or Martial, or Aristophanes, might mean never being able to teach high school again. This danger can be palliated, but not removed entirely. I hope that participants in my Persius seminar (see previous post) will not be too enthusiastically blunt about the meanings of some passages, though I won’t ask them to do as Housman did in his paper “Praefanda” and write their remarks in Latin. I’ll have more to say on this in my suggested Rules for Commentators late tonight or early tomorrow.

In Conclusion: Digital Humanists have been arguing over ‘green’ and ‘gold’ Open Access for quite some time. What I have in mind is something better than either, the ultimate in Open Access: just post your work on the web where anyone can read it. (Or almost anyone: some governments, and many employers, ban even inoffensive scholarly websites for no apparent reason, but most of us outside a few countries can read whatever we want, though we may have to wait until we get home from work.) So what color is my ‘Extreme Open Access’? Green, gold, . . . what comes next? I don’t know, maybe ‘transparent’?

Note: Comments on this post – or any other – will be very much appreciated. Your first comment will be moderated, but once it is approved, further comments will appear immediately, unless you write something so offensive that I feel compelled to ban you.

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Announcement: A New Edition of Persius

Posted on Saturday: February 15, 2014 by Michael Hendry

Over the next month, I will be editing the text of Persius’ Satires for this site, with a select apparatus criticus containing a few of my own conjectures and an original selection of older readings. These will be expounded, along with some new interpretations, in accompanying on-line adversaria. There is no need for a full commentary: Persius is well-provided with those, most notably Walter Kißel’s huge one (Heidelberg, 1990). I therefore plan to comment only where I have something new to say, or something new to ask: there are many passages where I have questions but no answers, or only partial answers, and hope that others will be able to help nail down convincing solutions. Ordinary blog software with a comment function should suffice to allow something very like an on-line seminar.

Tomorrow I will post more on the whys and hows of this project. Starting Monday, I will edit and upload roughly 25 lines of text and apparatus per day, with however many separate notes are needed to support my more original or controversial decisions, or to seek help in the many cases where I am still unsure. The last two Persius posts each day will be open posts, where readers will be invited to (a) propound their own ideas (problems or solutions) on issues I haven’t written about, and (b) offer corrections and comments on minor issues (typographical errors, formatting issues, bibliographic omissions, and such).

At that rate, the job will be done on the Ides of March, one month from today. I will be going out of the country for a week or so soon after that, so it will be a good time for a break. If the Persius project works out well, I will start another author or two at the beginning of April.

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Casaubon – and Cicero?

Posted on Thursday: February 6, 2014 by Michael Hendry

At Laudator Temporis Acti, Michael Gilleland quotes a witticism of Casaubon. It looks to me like a far more succinct variation on a story Cicero tells in his De Legibus – or rather has his character Atticus tell, since it’s a dialogue. I posted the story as the second item on my Ancient Jokes page eleven years ago. (I hope to restart the page at some point, but as a searchable database.) I wonder whether the learned Casaubon was alluding to Cicero, and if so, whether he expected his hearers to recognize the allusion.

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Happy Holiday

Posted on Saturday: February 1, 2014 by Michael Hendry

I hope everyone’s having a pleasant Groundhog’s Eve – or already had one if you’re in the Eastern Hemisphere.

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Except the first of the wombats . . .

Posted on Monday: January 20, 2014 by Michael Hendry

From Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works (IV.ii, pp. 154-55 of the new Penguin edition):

“[Of pets] he had at one time and another a Pomeranian puppy called Punch, an Irish wolfhound called Wolf, two brown owls called Jenny and Bobby, some rabbits, dormice, hedgehogs, white mice, squirrels, a mole, a chameleon, some salamanders, a deer, a wallaby, some kangaroos, two wombats, a Canadian marmot, a woodchuck, an armadillo, a raccoon, a Brahmin Bull, a jackass, and numerous birds including peacocks, Chinese horned owls, talking grey parrots, a raven, and a grass parakeet. These lived a life of conflict and depredation in and about the house and gardens and those of his neighbours. The armadillo disappeared for several weeks, and suddenly appeared through the floor of a basement kitchen some distance away, to the great alarm of the cook, ‘who opined that if it was not the devil, there was no knowing what it was’; the deer stamped out all the tail feathers of the peacocks, who in turn made so much noise that a clause was in future introduced into all the leases on the Cadogan Estate forbidding them to be kept in the neighbourhood. The racoon was particularly ferocious and destructive.

“It does not appear that Rossetti lavished any personal affection upon his various pets, except perhaps upon the first of the wombats; he met their frequent deaths and disappearances with fortitude; some indeed died or disappeared almost the moment they were acquired, and some, such as the Brahmin Bull, which Rossetti bought for twenty pounds at Cremorne Gardens because it had eyes that reminded him of Janey Morris, proved quite unmanageable. But he liked to have them about the place, . . .

Apparently Janey Morris (one of his models) was as “ox-eyed” as Homer’s Hera.

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Another Curculio

Posted on Sunday: January 19, 2014 by Michael Hendry

Two things I learned last week:

  1. That there is a Curculio Institute, headquartered in Mönchengladbach, Germany. The website (www.curci.de) helpfully defines it as “Center for Studies on western Palearctic Curculionoidea”, in other words, European weevils.
  2. That their newsletter, formerly Weevil News, has been renamed Snudebiller. It was obvious that that must mean ‘weevils’ in some language or other, and that ‘snude’ is cognate with English ‘snout’, but it took Google Translate’s ‘Detect Language’ button to tell me that the word is Danish. Why a Danish title, when the institute is in Germany, the editors are Germans, and the website is in English and German? I don’t know, but I like the sound of ‘snudebiller’ – even better than ‘weevil’ or ‘Rüsselkäfer’ – so perhaps euphony was the key.
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Faustian Latin VIII – Faustus’ Oath

Posted on Monday: January 13, 2014 by Michael Hendry

It seems best to divide the text (I.2.230-34) into convenient pieces, number them for easy reference (and speaking), and interleave text and translation, with all the notes below:

1. Sint míhi déi Acheróntis propítii!

May the gods of Acheron be favorable to me!

2. Váleat númen tríplex Jehóvae!

Goodbye, threefold power of Jehovah!

3. Ígnei, aérii, aquátici, terréni spíritus, salvéte!

Fiery, airy, watery, earthy spirits, all hail!

4. Oriéntis prínceps Lúcifer,

Lucifer, Prince of the East,

5. Beélzebub, inférni ardéntis monárcha,

Beelzebub, monarch of burning Hell,

6. et Demogórgon, pròpitiámus vos,

and Demogorgon, we ask your favor,

7. ut appáreat et súrgat Mephistóphilés! Quid tu moráris?

that Mephistophiles may appear and rise up! Why do you delay?

8. Per Jehóvam, Gehénnam, et consecrátam áquam quam nunc spárgo,

By Jehovah, Gehenna, and the consecrated water which I now sprinkle,

9. signúmque crúcis quod nunc fácio,

and the sign of the cross which I now make,

10. et per vóta nóstra,

and by our vows,

11. ípse nunc súrgat nóbis dicátus Mephistóphilés!

May Mephistophiles himself now rise up, dedicated to us!

My voice-recording (such as it is) is in three parts: 1-3, 4-7, 8-11. I need to find out how to link them from the page so readers can read and hear simultaneously. But that will have to wait a few hours, since it’s almost time for The Devil’s Charter, another Jacobethan play about selling one’s soul for power (in this case, the Papacy), performed by the same troupe that is doing Doctor Faustus in two weeks, and asked me for advice on the Latin.

Notes:

  1. Acheron is one of the rivers of the Underworld, so ‘the gods of Acheron’ are either Pagan underworld gods or Christian devils or (most likely) a bit of each. I believe some Christian theologians identified the two.
  2. Rather like ‘fare well’ in English, Valeat means both ‘be strong’ and ‘goodbye’, and it’s hard to decide between the two here. It can hardly mean both, since ‘be strong’ is a compliment, ‘goodbye’ a mild insult – almost ‘go away’. I prefer ‘goodbye’ because he says ‘hello’ (salvete) to the spirits of the Four Elements in the very next line. God’s ‘threefold’ power obviously refers to the Trinity.
  3. The early editions have garbled a lot of the Latin. Aquatani is not good Latin for ‘watery’. Tucker Booke changed it to aquatici and Greg added terreni ‘earthy’ so all four elements would be present. It looks to me like Aquatani merged the beginning of aquatici with the end of terreni.
  4. Lucifer was inserted by Greg, since he is called ‘Prince of the East’ in the Bible, and Lucifer and Beelzebub are different characters later on in this play, at least in the stage direction in II.iii, though I don’t think Beelzebub actually speaks there.
  5. Without Lucifer in the previous line, it would be very difficult to tell whether this is all in apposition or not.
  6. I assume Demogorgon is a third devil, to make a mocking Satanic anti-Trinity. I don’t think Demogorgon is another name for Mephistophiles, who seems to be of lower rank, a mere captain or colonel in the Army of Darkness. ‘Your’ is plural, but I didn’t think anyone would want ‘y’all’s’ even in the subtitles of an Elizabethan play
  7. The reading of the early editions is nonsense, and quid tu moraris? is Bullen’s plausible conjecture for quod tumeraris. Here the ‘you’ is singular, so he’s speaking to Mephistophiles alone. There should be a pause before the question, as he waits for Mephistophiles to appear. More colloquially: ‘What are you waiting for?’
  8. This is an odd mixture of holy (Jehovah, holy water) and unholy (Gehenna is more or less Hell). I suppose Faustus is as confused about magic as he is about philosophy.
  9. I suspect this is some kind of backwards or twisted Sign of the Anti-Cross: a normal one would hardly be appropriate here. Then again, see previous note: maybe Faustus makes a normal Sign of the Cross unthinkingly, from habit.
  10. Here and in the next line ‘our’ and ‘us’ mean ‘my’ and ‘me’: Latin uses the ‘royal We’ all the time, without any royal or pretentious implications. The vota are vows, promises, wishes, all wrapped up in one word.
  11. ‘Himself’ (ipse) means ‘in person’: Faustus wants Mephistophiles, not some go-between messenger devil with no power to deal – not that Mephistophiles has that power, as it turns out. The meaning of dicatus is difficult: ‘dedicated to us (=me)’ must mean something like ‘at my command’ plus ‘to serve me’.

Anything else?

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Faustian Latin VII – some bits I missed, one of them not Latin

Posted on Sunday: January 5, 2014 by Michael Hendry

I will get to Faustus’ oath soon, but in the mean time here are three bits I missed. At some point, I hope to put these all together on one page, in order, with line references to the various editions, since those are highly variable (these numbers are from Bevington & Rasmussen’s Revels edition):

I.1.12:

On kai me on

This is not Latin, but Classical (and Philosophical) Greek. It would be spelled like this in Greek script: ὂν καὶ μὴ όν, but that’s more than you need to know to pronounce it. (Several early editions have ‘economy’ but that is just a wrong guess by a confused typesetter.) The pronunciation is easy: On Kye May On.

The words mean ‘being and not being’, the subject of some of the more abstruse parts of metaphysics (on, ‘being’ is related to ‘ontology’, kai means ‘and’, and me means ‘not’). Probably all the words except the ‘and’ (kai) should be accented. It should sound something like this.

II.1.29:

Véni véni Mephistóphile.

This is not the same veni as in Caesar’s famous Veni, vidi, vici. That veni has a long E and means ‘I came’. Faustus’ veni has a short E and is imperative singular, a command addressed to one person: ‘come’. (One verb having two forms that are spelled the same but pronounced differently is not unheard of in English, where ‘read’ as in ‘I read books’ rhymes with ‘reed’ when it’s present tense, with ‘red’ when it’s past tense.) He’s just telling Mephistophilis to come to him, repeating the verb to show urgency or impatience: “Come, come, Mephistophilis”. The dropped S on the name is not classical Latin, but is the sort of thing Greek and Latin do with vocatives. The whole thing should sound like this.

II.3.57:

Intelligéntia.

The meaning is easy: ‘intelligence’, meaning presumably that an angel is in charge of turning each sphere, they don’t just turn by themselves. For pronunciations, it’s hard to say whether Marlowe would have said ‘intelligént-ee-yuh’ like modern Latinists or ‘intelligénts-ee-yuh’. More likely the latter, I think, and it might be more intelligible to the audience, too. Here’s my version.

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Faustian Latin VI – Faustus (all except the oath)

Posted on Saturday: December 28, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Most of the Latin in Doctor Faustus is spoken by Faustus himself, and some he glosses himself:

I.1.35:

Béne dissérere est fínis lógices.

In the next line, Faustus asks “Is to dispute well logic’s chiefest end?” which just rephrases this as a question. Literally, it means “To dispute well is logic’s end” (‘end’ meaning ‘aim, goal, purpose’ – there’s no ‘chiefest’ in the Latin). I believe Marlowe would have used soft G and soft C in the last word, like this. The Romans would have used hard G (not = J) and hard C (= K), but Marlowe didn’t know that. Of course English ‘logic’ has soft G and hard C, so logices is going to sound awkward however it’s pronounced.

I.1.41:

Úbi désinit philósophus, íbi íncipit médicus.

This means “Where the philosopher stops, the doctor begins”, which has always puzzled me: does it mean that the philosopher only theorizes, while the doctor acts on his understanding of human nature? (Rather like Marx’s “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it”, but applied to single human beings rather than the whole world?) It should sound like this.

I.1.44:

Súmmum bónum medicínae sánitas.

This means “The highest good of medicine is health”, and Faustus paraphrases it in the next line (“The end of physic is our body’s health”). It sounds like this.

I.1.56:

Si úna eadémque res legátur duóbus,
álter rem, álter valórem réi, et cétera.

This is the kind of obvious, common-sense law that anyone could figure out without going to law school or even reading a law book: “If one and the same thing is left/willed/bequeathed to two [heirs], one [should receive] the thing, the other the value of the thing, etcetera” – it’s not actually a complete sentence, because Faustus is too bored to finish it. (Verbs usually go last in Latin, and this one is omitted, so “one the thing, the other the value of the thing . . . – duh! ‘should receive’, but I can’t be bothered to finish the thought!” It should sound something like this, but maybe more bored and perfunctory.

I.1.58:

Èxhaerèditáre fílium non pótest páter, nísi, et cétera.

This is not boring obvious law, like the previous example, but tedious technical law: “A father cannot disinherit a son unless” – presumably, unless he makes the statement in just the right technical form, with the proper number of witnesses, to avoid legal challenges. Faustus interrupts himself because the details are boring, though not obvious to non-lawyers. It should sound something like this, but again more bored and impatient.

I.1.66:

Stipéndium peccáti mors est.

As Faustus says, this means “The reward of sin is death” (or “the payment” – stipendium is related to ‘stipend’.) Good Biblical Latin, from Romans 6:23, but taken out of context. It sounds like this.

I.1.68:

Si peccásse negámus, fállimur,
et núlla est in nóbis véritas.

Again, Faustus paraphrases: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us”. Again, a direct Biblical quotation, from John 1:8. Fallimur could also be translated “we are deceived” (by someone else – not hard to guess who that would be) or just “we are mistaken”.) This should sound something like this.

I.2.230-34:

(Faustus’ long complex oath will be analyzed in my next post.)

I.3.246:

Quin rédis, Mèphistópheles, frátris imágine?

“Why don’t you return, Mephisopheles, in the image of a friar?” (Literally, “of a brother”, but he means the religious kind.) It sounds something like this.

II.1.461:

Cònsummátum est.

“It is finished.” (The Latin participle is the same word as “consummated” in English, but “It is consummated” sounds a little too sexual and marital to me, unless you want to go that way in depicting the relation between Faustus and Mephistopheles.) As commentators note, this is a blasphemous quotation of the last words of Christ on the cross. It should sound like this.

II.1.464:

Hómo fúge.

Homo is not ‘man’ as in ‘male human being’ but ‘man’ as in ‘mankind’ – it means a human of either gender. (‘Human’ and ‘humane’ both comes from the Latin adjective corresponding to homo, while ‘virile’ comes from the adjective for vir, which is the Latin word for male human being. The whole does-man-mean-male-or-include-both-sexes question is entirely a problem of the English language, not Latin.)

The sentence is hard to translate plausibly: “Flee, human”? – sounds like an alien in a bad sci-fi movie. “Flee, person”? – awkward. “Flee, man”? – misleading as to gender and awkwardly hippie-sounding. However translated, it should probably sound something like this.

II.3.623:

Sítu et témpore?

“In place and time?” – the phrase is technical-scientific-philosophical. (Situ is related to English ‘site’ and tempore to ‘temporal’, ‘temporary’, and ‘contemporary’.) It should sound like this.

V.2.1269:

O lénte, lénte cúrrite, nóctis équi!

As with Mephistopheles’ first quotation, this is an entire line of Latin verse, specifically Ovid, Amores 1.13.40, in which Ovid (or his poetic persona) asks the goddess Night (or Dawn? not quite clear) to extend the night so he and his girlfriend will have more time for love-making. Literally, “Run slowly, slowly, o horses of the night” (or “of Night” if that’s the goddess meant) – winged horses pulling a divine chariot – very pagan and not at all Christian.

Following Roman rules for a so-called elegiac pentameter, the rhythm is long-long-long-long-long long-short-short-long-short-short-long, and sounds something like this. If we give the words their proper prose accents, it (fortuitously) makes a decent English-style iambic pentameter, with an extra syllable in the fourth foot and another at the end. (Do they still call that a feminine ending?) It would sound something like this. I prefer the latter for Marlowe, and they don’t sound as different as I would have thought.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

As always, questions or remarks may be submitted as comments. The first will be moderated, but once you’ve had one approved, they will go through immediately, unless you do something to make me ban you.

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Faustian Latin V – Mephistopheles

Posted on Friday: December 27, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Mephistopheles has three bits of Latin:

II.1.429:

Solámen míseris sócios habuísse dolóris.

Solamen is ‘consolation’ – relative, not interrogative – miseris is ‘to/for the wretched/miserable’, socios (related to ‘social, society, associate’) is ‘companions, associates, allies’ (plural direct object), habuisse is a perfect infinitive ‘to have had’, and doloris is ‘of pain, sorrow, trouble’. Put together, it means ‘(it is) a consolation to the [plural] wretched to have had companions of [=in] sorrow’, pretty much ‘misery loves company’ but more concrete (‘miserable/wretched people’ for ‘misery’) and with a past tense added.

The line is a complete Latin dactylic hexameter, which mixes spondees with the dactyls in the first five feet, and ends with a spondee: in this case we have one spondee, then four dactyls, then a spondee to end the line. It looks like a quotation, but if so the author is unknown: perhaps Marlowe composed it himself. As with Wagner’s Qui mihi discipulus, we can read it according to the Latin rules, like this, or we can give the words their proper prose accents, like this. The second half sounds pretty much the same either way.

II.3.639:

Per inaequálem mótum respéctu tótius.

This is a tedious bit of scholastic Latin prose, pseudoscientific jargon that doesn’t really answer Faustus’ question. Why do different planets pass each other in their courses around the sun, or even sometimes appear to back up (‘retrograde motion’ as in the All’s Well joke)? ‘Through [= because of] the unequal motion in respect of the whole’. Mephistopheles doesn’t know enough, or care enough, to give a more precise scientific answer. It should sound something like this.

III.1.793:

Súmmum bónum.

SUH-muhm BO-nuhm. This is two trochees, and the Us all sound like the U in English ‘put’ or ‘push’. Summum is ‘highest’ (as in ‘summit’ and ‘sum’ and ‘summary’), and bonum is ‘good’ (= ‘good thing’ – neuter adjective used as a noun, as in English). It’s philosophical Latin: the ‘highest good’ is whatever is most important in life – pleasure for Epicureans, duty for Stoics, God’s will (I think) for Christians, and so on. It should sound something like this.

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Faustian Latin German – Wagner again

Posted on Thursday: December 26, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Should Faustus’ servant’s name be pronounced like Richard Wagner’s last name (VAHG-ner) or like Honus or Robert or Lindsay Wagner’s (WAG-ner)? I’ve heard it both ways in productions. Would Marlowe have known the basic German pronunciation? Presumably: between his mysterious travels on the continent and his use of the German Faustbuch as a source, he would surely have picked up so basic a fact of German as the pronunciation of W. Would he have preferred the German pronunciation in writing for an English audience? That’s a difficult question. I’ve always preferred the Anglicized pronunciation, but have to admit that I can think of no good argument either way.

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