{"id":113,"date":"2006-03-01T23:18:24","date_gmt":"2006-03-02T04:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/63.247.138.2\/~curculio\/?p=113"},"modified":"2013-09-01T17:48:15","modified_gmt":"2013-09-01T22:48:15","slug":"supreme-erudition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=113","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Erudition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Terry Teachout<\/a> quotes some words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., on his 90th birthday:<\/p>\n

\n

And so I end with a line from a Latin poet who uttered the message more than fifteen hundred years ago:<\/p>\n

“Death plucks my ear and says, Live\u2014I am coming.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I thought it was odd that Holmes did not name the Latin poet, but it turns out that he is anonymous, or at least pseudonymous. The quoted words are a very close translation of the last line of Pseudo-Vergil’s Copa<\/em> (“The Barmaid”), on-line here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Mors aurem vellens \u00abvivite\u00bb ait, \u00abvenio\u00bb.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Holmes obviously knows that this is Pseudo-Vergil, since the original Vergil had been dead for 1950 years when he spoke. Of course, his 1500 years is just a very rough guess, and von Albrecht’s History of Roman Literature<\/em> (to look no further) puts the Copa<\/em> in the Augustan age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Terry Teachout quotes some words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., on his 90th birthday: And so I end with a line from a Latin poet who uttered the message more than fifteen hundred years ago: “Death plucks my ear and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,73],"tags":[51],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latin-literature","category-nachleben","tag-vergil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":733,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}