craven.fr

I've written previously about the ways in which Latin and Greek complement each other in traditional classical education. Another interesting parallel exists in the texts that are most often read by students as their first introduction to real classical prose: for Latin, Cæsar's De bello gallico, and for Greek, Xenophon's Ἀνάβασις.

Both texts are chosen by teachers because of their style is clear and direct (and therefore not too confusing for beginners), and because their style and vocabulary are considered exemplary by the standards of classical prose for the two languages.

It is surprising, then, to note that, by pure coincidence and independently of their suitability for education, the books' actual contents are very similar. Both are autobiographical texts, narrated in the third person, about military campaigns that the author took part in. As such, they are edifying reading, both for history—giving the reader a vivid picture of the very different world that people lived in over 2000 years ago, and as guides to leadership: both tales are some of the most inspiring texts in history in this regard, and the simpler world they took place in makes it easy to take lessons from the various leadership techniques and trials that the protagonists went through.

Despite the similarities, though, I think it would be unfair to Cæsar to equate the two. Firstly, the historical impact of Julius Cæsar on world history dwarfs that of Artaxerxes, let alone Xenophon, so the opportunity to hear him in his own words is so much the more valuable. Not only that, but he is the commander in chief of the campaign he narrates from start to finish, while Xenophon only comes to a position of leadership through necessity. And of course, although both outcomes can give instructive lessons, Cæsar was victorious in his conquest of Gaul, while the Anabasis, a story of a successful escape, takes place in the shadow of Cyrus' defeated attempt to overthrow his brother. Cæsar is a genius in terms of leadership and military strategy (as he intends his writings to get across to us), and also in literary terms: his Latin prose really is outstanding, and he probably still holds the literary title for best use of understatement.

Xenophon cannot be put on the same level, in my opinion. In fact I suspect that were I teaching Greek I might use Plato's Apology and Symposium as my baseline texts for Attic prose. (I think it might also be cool to compare and contrast Xenophon's and Plato's Apologies, but I haven't gotten around to doing this yet myself, so I can't vouch for this approach.) They are sublime stylistically without being too difficult, and the lessons they teach are perhaps of greater use to beginning students. The Anabasis is an adventure story, very exciting, to be sure—but you have to be able to read Greek at a certain level for a page-turner to be a page-turner!

That is not to sell the Anabasis short, though. When military campaigns go wrong, as here or in the events recounted in the movie Black Hawk Down, the ensuing story is often more exciting and more replete with heroism than when everything goes according to plan. (Cæsar's victory at Alesia, however, is a fine counterexample.) When I was a beginning student, in both Latin and Greek I skipped over these texts in favour of others that seemed more interesting to me at the time, but now that I've had time to go back to them later in life I really do think that their place at (Cæsar) or near (Xenophon) the beginning of any classicist's reading list is well deserved.

... Juno, æternum servans sub pectore vulnus,
Hæc secum: "Mene incepto desistere victam,
Nec posse Italia Teucrorum avertere regem?
Quippe vetor fatis! Pallasne exurere classem
Argivum, atque ipsos potuit submergere ponto,
Unius ob noxam et furias Ajacis Oilei?
Ipsa, Jovis rapidum jaculata e nubibus ignem,
Disjecitque rates, evertitque æquora ventis;
Illum exspirantem transfixo pectore flammas
Turbine corripuit, scopuloque infixit acuto.
Ast ego, quæ divum incedo regina, Jovisque
Et soror et conjunx, unâ cum gente tot annos
Bella gero! Et quisquam numen Junonis adoret
Præterea, aut supplex aris imponat honorem?"

A few weeks ago I signed up for a study group going through the Æneid. It's not part of my planned reading for this year, but the pace of the group is slow enough (around 30 lines a week) that it shouldn't be much of a distraction, and I have gained a new-found respect for the Æneid after my trip to Hadrian's wall (a topic for another article), so I thought, why not?

Anyway, this little internal debate of the goddess Juno, frustrated at having her hands tied in comparison to Minerva, generated some discussion, and since the list is not archived for posterity (both to encourage new discussion and to dissuade student cheaters), I thought I would republish my 2¢ here.

Our attention was called to the magnificent work of James Henry, who dedicated twelve years of his life to the intense study of the Æneid, publishing his notes in the remarkable Æneidea, which is now available online. One of our scholars called our attention to his notes on the word infixit in our text above—notes which consider this word under every angle, over the course of more than fifteen pages!

It is some very interesting commentary. I would take issue with at least part of his reasoning, though: he sounds disinclined to think that infixit even could mean 'impalement' (which is how I, and most people, usually translate it in these lines), because that would be 'revolting' and 'unworthy of the goddess'. I'm not sure that Virgil or his contemporaries would share such tender sensibilities: This was a culture, after all, that practised crucifixion and other similarly gruesome forms of execution, and that matched the form of death to the offender's crime. To the Roman mind, then, surely Locrian Ajax had a very nasty death coming to him, and nothing could be more just and fitting than that Minerva should mete it out, since it was on her altar that the rape of Cassandra took place.

What is so great about Henry's work, though, is that it lends itself to this kind of conversation about the poem. For those outside academia—and even within it—who might long for this kind of discussion, at least through Henry's notes we have someone else's opinion to weigh against our own. Most valuable, however, is the fact that this great scholar in no way limits himself to Virgil's text—he marshals a truly impressive amount of Greco-Roman authors, many of whom are quite obscure, in connexion with his topics. So, here, he can explore far more deeply than most people can questions like how the Greek tradition recorded Ajax's death, and how and whether Virgil might be innovating in his version of that or other legendary material.

Both as a reader's companion, and as a work of scholarship, then, Henry's Æneidea has a lot to recommend it.

When in adolescence I discovered my knack for languages, I shortly thereafter discovered something else: what linguists term the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. That is, I discovered how thinking and speaking in a different language influenced and changed the very ways I could think and talk about things. In short, each new language I learned provided me to some extent with a new way to think: not only a new perspective but even a new way in which to reason about the world.

This has powerful implications. It (or some formulation of it) is frequently the reason given to students of why they should learn Latin, since that language in particular being very different from English gives students a wholly new perspective on language and (especially for those who learn it to the point of being able to read Cicero or Seneca) on thought and reason. I have written before myself about how I believe that the specific ways in which Latin and Ancient Greek enrich our thought form a particularly powerful combination.

In studying a lot of languages, though, patterns begin to emerge. Latin and Russian are very different languages, yet their grammars are largely equivalent in how they function. (Each has a literature making it worth learning in its own right, though. But from a Sapir-Whorf perspective I don't believe one adds anything over the other—except, now that I think about it, for the perfective-imperfective verb aspect in Russian, vs. Latin's more traditional distribution of tenses and moods.) Without getting too technical, though, obviously a language like Dutch, which is very close to English, is going to be less of a mental eye-opener than, say, Japanese, with its completely different approach to grammar and syntax.

Getting back to my central point, then, realising and experiencing the power linguistic relativity gives to the mind changed the way I approached language learning, too. Rather than take the most direct road to speaking a ton of languages: learning every Slavic language (easy once you know one), then every Romance language, Germanic language, etc., I saw that it would be more profitable to prioritise languages that would complement each other by opening up new horizons for thought, rather than "waste time" on languages that were too similar.

For the most unique grammatical novelties, however, one must go far afield. The Cherokee verb has some fascinating aspects, unlike anything I've ever seen elsewhere. In Chukchi the letter k is pronounced k by men but ts by women. I'm sure the aboriginal languages of Australia possess a number of fascinating features as well.

The problem, though, is that it is not really feasible to learn most of these languages, for most people—not only are learning materials extremely difficult to obtain, but the languages are so different from the Indo-European 'norm' that the burden of learning vocabulary is significantly increased, as is the practical impossibility of finding speakers to practise with. Since these are the languages of primarily oral societies to begin with, that is a deal-breaker.

A Path to Maximal Sapir-Whorf Diversity

It seemed to me, then (as an adolescent, and I still hold to this approach now), that the best way to find a language with which to compliment English (with its SVO linguistic typology) and Latin (typically SOV), would be to opt for a VSO language—a language in which the verb typically comes first. This is rare: it is estimated that SVO and SOV languages together make up 75% of all the languages on earth, and among the easiest-to-learn Indo-European language group, there is only one family that it classified as VSO: the Celtic languages.

Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh all also benefit from there being an abundance of high-quality learning materials and dictionaries in English, and Breton has a comparable amount in French. From that perspective these languages are as easy to learn as French or German. Yet they are exotic, due to their unique orthography—it takes awhile to get used to the idea that in Scottish Gaelic, for example, mh and bh are pronounced v, or that dh and gh are silent (later on one learns the grammatical reasons why these spellings make internal sense to the language, though). Or that in Welsh, w is a vowel, which combines with frequent digraphs like ll, rh, and ch to give us seemingly unpronounceable words like nghwm.

In both cases, though, the oddities of spelling are quickly learnt, and soon thereafter the morphological reasons for the spellings make it so that they don't even seem odd. The upshot is that, in my opinion, the languages are the more beautiful for these spellings, which make a Welsh phrase like "Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i mi" or a Gaelic one like "Tha seo ceart cho fior mu deidhinn ceòl nam pìob 's a tha e mu dheidhinn puirt a' beul neo na h-òrain mòr" so exotic and beautiful.

So the Celtic languages are beautiful and comparatively easy to learn. But does a simple thing like putting the verb first in a sentence really make them mental eye-openers as well? I think that it does. Even only having learned a few basic conversations (Ciamar a tha sibh an diuch? Tha gu math, ciamar a tha thu fhèin?)—but having learned them thoroughly—I do feel like these languages present an approach to thought that is fundamentally different from what one gets in English, or in Latin. As such I would recommend anyone interested, perhaps like me after having learned another language and becoming convinced of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis themselves, to consider these oft-overlooked languages as an excellent way to expand the mind and widen your horizons.

"O stormy people, unsad and ev'r untrue,
And undiscreet, and changing as a vane,
Delighting ev'r in rumour that is new,
For like the moon so waxe ye and wane:
Aye full of clapping, dear enough a jane,
Your doom is false, your constance evil preveth,
A full great fool is he that you believeth."

This quote from the Clerk's tale, which Chaucer puts (after the fact) in the mouths of the sober-minded villagers, was refreshing to me in our present-day political context where "democracy" (a word whose very definition is becoming more and more vague in the mouths of commentators) is continually being held up as being (1) foolproof and (2) the only form of government worth tolerating.

Not that I am opposed to democracy—far from it!—but such a simplistic understanding of it is bound to lead society into a bad place (mob rule or blind populism) if it continues to be so naïvely embraced. Democracy, like any form of government, is only truly strong if those who enact it are mindful of its weaknesses.

Anyway, this lament on the mob's fickleness struck me as a pleasantly surprising stanza amid the otherwise predictable dénouement of the Clerk's tale, and since I won't be having occasion to quote it in some apt circumstance, I am just posting it up here instead.

My own composition, as it were...

Docta Thalia jubet, chartæ perfringere ceram,
Non ex Odrysiis partibus illa venit,
Non tibi terrificos narrabit epistola casus.
Lætitias mentis deperit ipsa tuas.
Cognita nostra domus gratus, qui metra paravit
Semper eras Ductor, quod mea Musa canit.
Justitiam observas, famæ mendacia rides,
Magnus in adversis cor patientis habes.
Tot dotes ornant, vigilant quot in æthere stellæ,
Quot Mars tella vibrat, fulmina quoque Jovi.
Quis te status habet? Non læso ego corpore vivo,
Accedant meritis sæcla beata tuis.
Sed quæ causa subest? Modulis tu absistere cæptis?
Aonios superans per metra docta sonos.

One of my favourite moments in the movie The Blues Brothers occurs when the band finds itself preparing to go on stage at "Bob's Country Bunker". As our heroes slowly come to grips with the hints (hay, cowboy hats, a suggestion that they set up their steel guitars) that they are in the wrong kind of place, Elwood hesitantly asks, "ma'am, what kind of music do you usually play here?" Her chirpy reply, "oh, we've got both kinds—country and western!", underlines just how far out in the sticks they are.

Besides underlining just how country this country bar is—definitely not the kind of place for Chicago blues musicians, the joke also plays on the stereotype that country folk have very limited horizons, mistrusting anything that "don't come from 'round these parts," as it were.

It is because of those disparaging associations that I was so delighted to read the preface to Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, precisely because that work is, to me, just about the polar opposite in terms of accepted erudition. Quintilian is considered one of the most heavily educated, serious writers of the ancient world, and his work has exerted an influence on education and literary criticism that can be felt to the present day. With all this running through my head, then, I opened the noble tome and read the first sentence:

Post impetratam studiis meis quietem, quæ per viginti annos erudiendis juvenibus impenderam, quum a me quidam familiariter postularent ut aliquid de ratione dicendi componerem, diu sum equidem reluctatus, quòd auctores utriusque linguæ clarissimos non ignorabam multa quæ ad hoc opus pertinerent diligentissime scripta posteris reliquisse.

As openings go, I must say, this is as pompous and formal as my understanding of Quintilian's reputation would have led me to expect, calling attention in the very first sentence to his twenty years of scholarship and long experience as a teacher—one who only hesitates to bestow his great knowledge upon us, for the humble reason that he is so widely read! The expression that surprised me so much, though, was the casual way he refers to "auctores utriusque linguæ"—both languages: Greek and Latin! No need to even enumerate them: for Quintilian it is just as much a given that these languages have all that's worth reading as it is a certainty for Bob's wife that country and western cover all the music worth listening to.

What it means, though, is that education in itself is no defense against close-mindedness. Indeed, often education—or rather, the assumption that one has done one's due diligence—is a key cause of close-mindedness. After all, with both Quintilian and Bob's wife, I think, we are dealing with people who have 'done their homework' and now feel confident that they know what they like. Presumably, at an earlier stage, they were more open to new things, but now that they consider themselves informed, they no longer are. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" at work? Perhaps, but the remedy to the phenomenon that that proverb describes is usually assumed to be more knowledge—more complete knowledge. I think that Quintilian's case proves that assumption false: it can happen that the more educated you are, the more susceptible you are to assume you know best.

The implication, for me, is that an open mind needs to be seen as something worth cultivating in and of itself, regardless of how much one may know about the world. However much one may adore or value something, the light that something brings into our life should not be the cause of a blindness to things outside of it.

I have written before about how the Romans of the late republic and empire used foreign cavalry rather than mustering their own forces, with Roman citizens instead always fighting as footsoldiers. Having now finished book VII of Cæsar's de Bello Gallico (ahead of schedule on my New Year's resolution!), I should amend that article now to nuance it a bit:

Beset on all sides by the Gaulish revolt under Vercingetorix, as Cæsar calls forth reinforcements we do see him bringing in horse from Spain and Italy, and to use Roman knights (which I understand to mean Roman soldiers on horseback, as in the incident I described in my first article, not actual equites) when he could no longer depend on his Gaulish allies. He did, however, hang on to his Hæduan cavalry for as long as he possibly could, which shows that using Romans on horseback was a last resort. And for further proof of this, one need only look at chapter LXV:

Cæsar, quòd hostes equitatu superiores esse intellegebat et interclusis omnibus itineribus nullâ re ex provinciâ atque Italiâ sublevari poterat, trans Rhenum in Germaniam mittit ad eas civitates quas superioribus annis pacaverat, equitesque ab his arcessit et levis armaturæ pedites, qui inter eos prœliari consuerant. Eorum adventu, quòd minus idoneis equis utebantur, a tribunis militum reliquisque equitibus Romanis atque evocatis equos sumit Germanisque distribuit.

So, although in a pinch the Romans could muster cavalry on their own, it is clear that they were either not comfortable, or did not consider themselves to be competent, fighting on horseback in Cæsar's time: no sooner do his Gaulish allies desert him, than he makes his first priority to raise cavalry among other allies—and, as amazingly to me as the fact that the Romans entrusted such an important part of their fighting force to foreigners—he even equips them with horses taken from the Romans when he sees that their horses are better! (This may also have been a way to ingratiate himself to them so they would fight better.) At any rate it turned out to be critical that he did this, since the ensuing victory of the Cæsar-allied German cavalry over the Gauls was the turning point in the war, since the Gauls were greatly disheartened, "quòd equitatu, quâ maxime parte exercitus confidebant, erant pulsi".

As a modern analogy, I would have thought that the Roman situation would be like if the United States had no Air Force of its own and just relied on NATO allies for air support! In practice, however, the Romans' superior knowledge of military strategy and discipline, and engineering know-how, gave them military superiority over the Gauls and Germani even when these were both physically stronger, and had the benefit of stronger cavalry.

It is interesting to notice how the Romans in this have some kinship with the inhabitants of that other mediterranean peninsula, the Greeks, who also distrusted fighting on horseback (though they had no qualms about chariots). I hold with those who argue that the origin of the centaurs is rooted in prehistorical Greek tales of the fearsome tribes to the north who fought on then-unfamiliar horseback, all the more so since Nestor's allusion to the centaurs in book I of the Iliad (which I'm citing here from a 1609 edition available on Google Books) can easily be read that way—the text itself is ambiguous enough that it is only because it is traditionally held to refer to a centaur war that we take it for an allusion:

        ... ἄμφω δὲ νεωτέρω ἐστὸν ἐμεῖο·
ἤδη γάρ ποτ᾽ ἐγὼ καὶ ἀρείοσιν ἠέ περ ὑμῖν
ἀνδράσιν ὡμίλησα, καὶ οὔ ποτέ μ᾽ οἵ γ᾽ ἀθέριζον.
οὐ γάρ πω τοίους ἴδον ἀνέρας οὐδὲ ἴδωμαι,
οἷον Πειρίθοόν τε Δρύαντά τε ποιμένα λαῶν
Καινέα τ᾽ Ἐξάδιόν τε καὶ ἀντίθεον Πολύφημον
Θησέα τ᾽ Αἰγεΐδην, ἐπιείκελον ἀθανάτοισιν·
κάρτιστοι δὴ κεῖνοι ἐπιχθονίων τράφεν ἀνδρῶν·
κάρτιστοι μὲν ἔσαν καὶ καρτίστοις ἐμάχοντο
φηρσὶν ὀρεσκῴοισι καὶ ἐκπάγλως ἀπόλεσσαν.

Are Homer's φῆρες ὀρεσκῷοι really centaurs, as so many English translations claim, or is that our anachronistic reading in light of later mythology, and could they not actually be "mountain-dwelling beasts" (whether actual beasts or perhaps even a metaphor for beast-like barbarians)? I don't have anywhere near the knowledge to weigh in with any authority one way or the other, but it seems ambiguous to me.

For a long time I have put off reading Xenophon's Anabasis, because although it is a standard text, and considered an ideal example of Attic prose, I skipped it as a beginner (diving straight into Homer and Herodotus as an undergrad and thereby never gaining much of an appreciation for the Attic dialect in the first place!) Afterwards, when I could qualify myself as "advanced intermediate" in Ancient Greek, I had the freedom to choose other authors such as Plato to read instead, and the Socratic dialogs held more interest for me than what sounded like little more than an adventure story in the Anabasis.

Now, however, that I am working on reading the list of the Greek and Roman classics that would have been considered basic in the past, I am going back to the Anabasis to give it its due as the book that anchors any reading list of Greek prose. The beginning pages are indeed ideally suited to a beginning student of Greek: a fair amount of grammar and vocabulary are on display, but the content is simple and repetitive enough ("ἐντεῦθεν ἐξελαύνει σταθμοὺς __ παρασάγγας __ εἰς __, πόλιν οἰκουμένην"!) that there is nothing much lost if the student is more concerned with decrypting words than with the overall meaning. It isn't until chapter 2 of book I, in section 8, that Xenophon said anything that really piqued my interest:

Ἔστι δὲ καὶ μεγάλου βασιλέως βασίλεια ἐν Κελαιναῖς ἐρυμνὰ ἐπὶ ταῖς πηγαῖς τοῦ Μαρσύου ποταμοῦ ὑπὸ τῇ ἀκροπόλει· ῥεῖ δὲ καὶ οὗτος διὰ τῆς πόλεως καὶ ἐμβάλλει εἰς τὸν Μαίανδρον· τοῦ δὲ Μαρσύου τὸ εὖρός ἐστιν εἴκοσι καὶ πέντε ποδῶν. ἐνταῦθα λέγεται Ἀπόλλων ἐκδεῖραι Μαρσύαν νικήσας ἐρίζοντά οἱ περὶ σοφίας, καὶ τὸ δέρμα κρεμάσαι ἐν τῷ ἄντρῳ ὅθεν αἱ πηγαί· διὰ δὲ τοῦτο ὁ ποταμὸς καλεῖται Μαρσύας. Ἐνταῦθα Ξέρξης, ὅτε ἐκ τῆς Ἑλλάδος ἡττηθεὶς τῇ μάχῃ ἀπεχώρει, λέγεται οἰκοδομῆσαι ταῦτά τε τὰ βασίλεια καὶ τὴν Κελαινῶν ἀκρόπολιν.

These 'tourist guidebook' remarks just seem so charming to me, because on the one hand they are so commonplace and everyday that you can almost see Xenophon taking his family to visit Niagra Falls. But at the same time they are so alien, coming from such a world apart, that they really bring home how different a world he is writing in: a world where the conversation can go from Apollo flaying a satyr to Xerxes' defeat at Platæa without batting an eye!

Granted, it is quite possible that having been exposed to the constant rambling tangents of Herodotus too early has coloured my expectations, but asides like this are what make Greek history most interesting to me. Here's another one:

Ἐντεῦθεν δὲ ἐλαύνει σταθμοὺς δύο παρασάγγας δέκα εἰς Θύμβριον, πόλιν οἰκουμένην. Ἐνταῦθα ἦν παρὰ τὴν ὁδὸν κρήνη ἡ Μίδου καλουμένη τοῦ Φρυγῶν βασιλέως, ἐφ᾽ ᾗ λέγεται Μίδας τὸν Σάτυρον θηρεῦσαι οἴνῳ κεράσας αὐτήν.

Anyway, I expect the Anabasis to be quite an exciting adventure story once I really get into it—and an excellent text from which to learn both history and leadership—so I don't expect to be depending on throwaway remarks like this for long to keep up my interest. But it is neat to come across such asides, if only because they remind me as a reader that I am not just reading something in a different language, but something written in a completely different world as well.

As much as I try to vary my topics, this week I just didn't have anything else to write about, so we'll have to have two classics articles in a row. As it happens I have been saving this one for a slow stretch; it's the kind of poem that is so intricately good you wonder where anyone else even gets up the courage to try their hand at poetry.

Necte comam myrto, maternas junge columbas;
    qui deceat, currum vitricus ipse dabit,
inque dato curru, populo clamante triumphum,
    stabis et adjunctas arte movebis aves.
Ducentur capti juvenes captæque puellæ;
    hæc tibi magnificus pompa triumphus erit.
Ipse ego præda recens factum modo vulnus habebo
    et nova captiva vincula mente feram.
Mens Bona ducetur manibus post terga retortis,
    et Pudor, et castris quidquid Amoris obest.
Omnia te metuent; ad te sua bracchia tendens
    vulgus 'io' magna voce 'triumphe!' canet.
Blanditiæ comites tibi erunt Errorque Furorque,
    adsidue partes turba secuta tuas.
His tu militibus superas hominesque deosque;
    hæc tibi si demas commoda, nudus eris.
Læta triumphanti de summo mater Olympo
    plaudet et adpositas sparget in ora rosas.
Tu pinnas gemma, gemma variante capillos
    ibis in auratis aureus ipse rotis.
Tunc quoque non paucos, si te bene novimus, ures;
    tunc quoque præteriens vulnera multa dabis.
Non possunt, licet ipse velis, cessare sagittæ;
    fervida vicino flamma vapore nocet.
Talis erat domita Bacchus Gangetide terra;
    tu gravis alitibus, tigribus ille fuit.
Ergo cum possim sacri pars esse triumphi,
    parce tuas in me perdere, victor, opes!
Adspice cognati felicia Cæsaris arma—
    qua vicit, victos protegit ille manu.

This is just an extrait of the poem; I'd rather do that than limit myself to short poems every time (or imbalance my articles with multiple screens of verse). But what a beautiful picture and complete picture out excerpt paints! To my surprise, though, I couldn't find any good paintings of Cupid's triumph online; there are a few, such as here, but they don't follow Ovid's description since his chariot is always being pulled by ducks or swans, not doves. I did find this great painting of Bacchus' triumph, though, which Ovid also alludes to in our selection:

A triumph, as I expect most people who know Latin are probably already aware, is the ritual parade held to publically celebrate the achievements of an army commander who had won great military successes, and was the highest honour a Roman general could aim for, paraded through the streets of Rome surrounded by the captives he had caught in chains. In the Amores, though, Ovid (ostensibly) sets out to write on epic military themes, but is struck in the first elegy by one of Cupid's arrows, and forced thereby to write on love instead. So now here, in the second elegy, he mock-laments his being taken captive by the victorious Cupid, and imagines in great and delightful detail what sort of triumph Cupid would have. This mood is a continuation of that set in the first elegy of the Amores, and reading these two back-to-back is the best way to experience them.

Anyway, I just love all the imagery of this poem, and think it's a lot of fun. The mythology, the undercurrent of mockery, the allegory—even the complement to Cæsar at the end is well paid, so that it does not in the least come across as gratuitous or out of place. Quite a work.

The Ionic dialect of Ancient Greek is something you need to be able to understand if you want to read Herodotus' Histories in the original, which is a worthwhile thing to do if you want to read the first book of history in the modern sense ever written, and read about the Greek and Persian wars which can be considered the beginning of European culture and civilisation. It is also very similar to Homeric Greek, the dialect used in the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, which no self-respecting classicist can omit from his reading list.

Most Ancient Greek textbooks, however, focus on the Attic dialect of Ancient Greek or the Hellenistic Greek of the New Testament (both of which are pretty similar), so the intermediate student of Greek who is working on his own might be lost if attempting to read Ionic without assistance. And yet, the differences between Ionic Greek and Attic Greek are slight enough that I can address them within the space of one blog post, which I shall now do for the benefit of anyone who might need it.

I shall use the following text, which I've already written about in a previous article, since besides being quite humorous, it also happens to show the key features of Ionic Greek:

Ἐπείτε δὲ οἱ ἐξελασθέντες Σαμίων ὑπὸ Πολυκράτεος ἀπίκοντο ἐς τὴν Σπάρτην, καταστάντες ἐπὶ τοὺς ἄρχοντας ἔλεγον πολλὰ οἷα κάρτα δεόμενοι· οἳ δέ σφι τῇ πρώτῃ καταστάσι ὑπεκρίναντο τὰ μὲν πρῶτα λεχθέντα ἐπιλελῆσθαι, τὰ δὲ ὕστατα οὐ συνιέναι. Μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα δεύτερα καταστάντες ἄλλο μὲν εἶπον οὐδέν, θύλακον δὲ φέροντες ἔφασαν τὸν θύλακον ἀλφίτων δέεσθαι. Οἳ δέ σφι ὑπεκρίναντο "τῷ θυλάκῳ" περιεργάσθαι· βοηθέειν δ᾽ ὦν ἔδοξε αὐτοῖσι.

The first word that you come across that you're not going to find in a dictionary is ἀπίκοντο. That's because in Attic it would be ἀφίκοντο: in general, whenever you get a prepositional prefix to a verb that begins with a rough breathing, in Ionic the consonant doesn't change (whereas in other dialects π becomes φ, τ becomes θ, and κ becomes χ).

Now that we have our verbs in the first sentence, let's turn to the rest. Forms like Πολυκράτεος and βοηθέειν probably won't shock you if you were rigorous about learning your stems the way Greek students are supposed to, but you will notice that in Ionic (and Homeric) Greek, there is no contraction. This happens to make a lot of verb conjugations much easier in Ionic, so that's one less thing to worry about.

ἐς (which we see in the first sentence) is just εις, which is also true when it serves as a verb prefix. In Ionic there are a lot of cases like this where a dipthong and a short vowel get switched around compared to Attic. Similarly, near the end, ὦν is the Ionic version of οὐν. In the same vein, η doesn't become an α after an iota, which is different from Attic and changes the appearance of quite a few words.

In a few cases, π and κ also get switched around between Attic and Ionic, which sure seems strange to me. (And like koine Greek but unlike Attic, Ionic uses σσ instead of ττ in words like Θάλασσα.)

These are all cosmetic changes though, as you can see, and it doesn't take much to get used to them. Only the word σφι could really be an impediment to comprehension: you just have to know that it is the dative form of σφεῖς, which is in turn just a synonym for αυτοί. Other than that, and the occasional rare word that you probably would have had to look up anyway, Ionic Greek is really just Greek, and should pose no real problems to the reader.

Cui fuit indocti fugienda hæc semita vulgi,
Ipsa petita lacu nunc mihi dulcis aqua est.
Ingenuus quisquam alterius dat munera servo,
Ut promissa suæ verba ferat dominæ,
Et quærit toties, "Quænam nunc porticus illam
Integit?" et, "Campo quo movet illa pedes?"
Deinde, ubi pertuleris, quos dicit fama, labores
Herculis, ut scribat, "muneris ecquid habes?"
Cernere uti possis vultum custodis amari,
Captus et immunda sæpe latere casa ?
Quam care semel in toto nox vertitur anno!
Ah pereant, si quos janua clausa juvat !
Contra, rejecto quæ libera vadit amictu,
Custodum et nullo septa timore, placet;
Cui sæpe immundo Sacra conteritur Via socco,
Nec sinit esse moram, si quis adire velit.
Differet hæc numquam, nec poscet garrula, quod te
Adstrictus ploret sæpe dedisse pater;
Nec dicet, "Timeo; propera jam surgere, quæso :
Infelix! hodie vir mihi rure venit."
Et quas Euphrates, et quas mihi misit Orontes,
Me capiant; nolim furta pudica tori;
Libertas quoniam nulli jam restat amanti,
Nullus liber erit si quis amare volet.

This is a great one, but there's no commentary I would dare make on it without the benefit of anonymity! Suffice it to say that whether you enjoy this poem or not probably depends on how much you enjoyed the movie Risky Business :-)

I was reading A Dissertation on Reading the Classics on Google Books, an XVIIIth-century book written for the son of a duke, telling him what classics he ought to read, when the following quote gave me pause:

I will go no farther in the Poets, only for the Honour of our Country, let me observe to Your Lordship, that while Rome hath been contented to produce some single Rivals to the Grecian Poetry, England hath brought forth the wonderful Cowley's Wit, who was beloved by every Muse he courted, and hath rivalled the Greek and Latin Poets in every Kind, but Tragedy.

He's referring to Abraham Cowley, but I had to look him up in order to know that! (I had assumed he was building up to Shakespeare.) Amazing that the author assumed Cowley to be of such enduring greatness that he would go down in history as the equal of Homer and Vergil! The fact that he was so far off the mark gives us some perspective on history all the same, though—and how surprised we might be at how the things we assume to be historic or enduring from our own lifetimes could end up being in the scheme of things.

Looking at the keywords people use to bring them to this site, "Learn Russian" is one of the most common searches. This is because of my previous article on How to Learn Old Church Slavonic, in which I argued that it is necessary to learn Russian as the first step to learning OCS. However, I didn't actually go into any detail about how one learns Russian, which means that the poor visitors to my site who had come with that search query doubtless left empty-handed.

It would not be possible to write an article about how to learn Russian that would be applicable to all sorts of readers and situations, but I can at least tell the story here about how I learned Russian, in the hope that it might provide some useful pointers for someone who wants to learn it—especially someone who decides to go the self-taught route like I did.

I give nearly full credit to my having learned Russian to the aptly-named book Teach Yourself Russian by Daphne West. With this book and a Russian-English dictionary I was over the course of a couple years able to teach myself the alphabet, basic vocabulary, and grammar of Russian, all without a teacher. Now, I make no secret of the fact that I am something of a language enthusiast (the variety of articles in my Languages category should make that clear enough), but all natural aptitude aside, I think that anybody who has sufficent motivation can be equally succesful. I had learned French already so this was not my first exposure to a foreign language though, which probably did help. Still, this was my first language with a different alphabet, and (as turns out to be more important—alphabets aren't as big a deal as it might seem when you're just starting out), Russian was my first language inflected with case endings, which are a very difficult concept to wrap your head around when you first encounter them. (Those who took Latin in high school will have a head start here.)

Despite these difficulties, and the difficulty of learning vocabulary (which is the most burdensome part of learning any language), I was able to persevere because I had motivation. Russian just seemed so exotic and cool at the time (this coincided with my Tom Clancy phase), and this pushed me to continue to make progress. My ultimate goal was to be able to read War and Peace in the original (ironically, although my Russian is now good enough to do this, I still haven't gotten around to it after all these years! But I digress.) At the time I did not think I would ever travel to Russia, but due to some very fortunate circumstances, it turned out that I actually got to spend a month in Russia before I even finished Teach Yourself Russian (I was only as far as the chapter on the instrumental case, as I recall.)

This fantastic opportunity allowed me the chance to fix what was inevitably way off due to my self-taught method: my pronunciation. Among other things, I pronounced the letter x like an English h, and did not distinguish at all between stressed and unstressed o, nor the words меня and мне. (In layman's terms, my pronunciation was downright terrible.)

If you've ever seen the movie Stargate, there is a scene where the Egyptologist main character, confronted with an actual speaker of Ancient Egyptian, learns to adjust his own reconstructed pronunciation (remember that no one has heard what Ancient Egyptian actually sounded like in 4000 years), and a only few scenes later he is able to speak fluently. As it turns out, this is not just Hollywood's creative license: my situation with Russian was quite similar, and with a few adjustments, my pronunciation fell into line in no time.

I've since read many other Teach Yourself language books. Some are better than others, but generally they do a good job of getting the grammar and basic vocabulary of a language across. Such books are easy to buy and easy to begin, but in order to make it to the end you do need to be self-motivated. Lose interest in the language and culture you're learning about, and your progress will grind to a halt.

Taking things to the next level—speaking fluently—was not something I was able to do with a book. I did buy a few intermediate Russian books, and readers with the difficult vocabulary annotated, but these didn't help much. The next level of proficiency came by speaking with Russian-speakers every chance I got. Once you know the cases, verb conjugations, and tenses, you have to realise that you know enough Russian to get out there and start talking to people. Doing this not only gives you a sense of achievement in that you're actually speaking Russian: more importantly, you learn vocabulary, expressions, and cultural traits without even trying.

I was lucky in that I happened to run into a lot of Russian speakers over the years who had the patience to bother speaking with an American with a poor command of their language. This is why today I speak Russian more or less fluently (though far from perfectly—and I am quite rusty), while so many other languages that I learned the basic grammar of have languished unused. In my experience the occasions to use this language are plentiful. I have memories of long conversations in Russian not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg but also Montreal, Boston, Des Moines, Lille, Havana—nearly everywhere I've spent a lot of time, and with a lot less effort to seek out Russian speakers than you might think.

So I hope those pointers will give some useful information for people looking to learn Russian. I can't say much about classroom learning because that's not how I got my start (I took some Russian classes at university, but most were taught in Russian, so it was not a beginner's experience); I also imagine that my advice would be different for those who struggle with learning languages (but I do think that Teach Yourself Russian is a good starting point even if that is you; you just might need to supplement it with other, slower paced material, to get you over the parts that cause you the most difficulty). But the main thing is to stay motivated.

So I hope that that anecdotal account will be of some use to those who have found their way here looking for information about how to learn Russian. (The next highest-ranking unanswered search traffic comes from those looking for information about Craven A cigarettes, though, and I'm sorry to say that I will not be writing an article for those searches any time soon!)

An interesting facet of Classical studies as opposed to other academic majors is that it requires the study of two languages—Latin and Ancient Greek. Linguistically this is very unusual, in that the two languages come from completely different branches of the Indo-European family; that is, they are pretty unrelated.

The reasons for this are of course historical and not linguistic: our civilisation is based on Greek and Roman foundations, so those are the languages to learn if we want to understand our roots and our culture, whether they be related languages or not. But the side effects are very interesting intellectually, because the ways in which Greek and Latin differ are quite intriguing, and, I believe, very beneficial to the mind.

Ancient Greek to me is, compared to English but also any other language I've ever encountered, best described as 'florid'. Take this line from Homer (Iliad, I.96):

τοὔνεκ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἄλγε᾽ ἔδωκεν ἑκηβόλος ἠδ᾽ ἔτι δώσει·

Contractions, particles, that lovely movement implied in the almost-redundant-but-not-quite phrase "ἠδ᾽ ἔτι δώσει". What's more that same paragraph (which I won't quote in full here so as not to overwhelm my point) ends with the verb "πεπίθοιμεν"—an aorist optative. Greek verbs have so many levels of nuance between the indicative, subjective, optative, and imperitive (which can occur even in the third person) moods; the aorist, perfect, and present stems; passive, active, and middle voices—that although you can grasp these nuances in the Greek, trying to translate them into any other language just brings out how poor other languages' verb systems are in comparison. As for πεπίθοιμεν, we can always get the optative out of it by sticking in 'might' before it (although if we did that with every optative our translation would quickly become unreadable), but even then, 'we might persuade' in English is the same whether we're translating a present or aorist optative; the closed nature is just implied. One the one hand this means that it is not strictly necessary for understanding the meaning of the phrase—but you are still losing something by not having it.

If Greek is florid and organic, Latin on the other hand is clean, rational, logical. There is very little decoration in the way of unnecessary words. Having six cases instead of four certainly helps keep the word count down, but even the way Latin is written compared to Greek to me illustrates a different æsthetic: while Greek text dances with accents, breathings, iotic subscripts, and apostrophes, Latin text is dignified and unadorned. The reduction in particles and prepositions and the lack of articles make Latin verse somewhat freer than Greek verse, in the sense that its word order is even looser. Look at how different this line of Ovid is from our Homeric example (Amores, I.i.28):

Ferrea cum vestris bella valete modis!

It is impossible for me to wrap my mind around this verse without mentally re-arranging the word order, even though I usually make a point of trying to read the language as it is written. Parsing it is an analytical, logical process (even in the context of what is a very fun-loving poem), far removed from the flowing nature of Greek.

I don't mean to imply that these two languages are some how unique or 'better' than other languages, though. Hungarian has around twenty cases—far more than Latin's six. Armenian is an incredibly supple language. And Cherokee verbs are conjugated differently along an axis completely unknown to Greek: 'I carry' changes form according to whether the thing being carried is living or dead, long or round, or one of a number of such categories.

The difference is in the literatures of these languages: Cherokee may be fascinating linguistically, but Greek has Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Demosthenes writing in it, while Cherokee literature is largely made up of old newspapers and missionary material. All I'm saying here, then, is that the languages that we do study in Classics have fascinating linguistic properties—I am not thereby implying that other languages do not. This is just an added benefit of studying Classics, in addition to the more obvious benefits of learning about the literary, philosophical, and historical foundations of Western Civilisation.

I wonder though if this interesting mental balance provided by studying expressive Greek and analytical Latin is not what makes students of Classics so succesful in so many and varied fields. (Any Classics department's website will have lists boasting of presidents, billionaires, generals, and other great minds who were Classics majors.) Whatever the case, I do find the two languages to be quite complementary, and I'm thankful for the variety they bring to the study of the ancient world.

Not many people know this about me (because it hardly ever has occasion to come up), but I can actually read Yiddish at a reasonably competent level. This despite the fact that I am not Jewish and have no Jewish heritage or other connexions to Yiddish culture. I have decided that I should talk more about it, though, because the language is in bad shape these days, and I find that sad. So I thought a few remarks were in order on why I, a non-Jew, find it worthwhile, fulfilling, and rewarding to study Yiddish, and why putting time and effort into the appreciation and preservation of this unique and fascinating language is a worthwhile endeavour for anyone to get involved with.

Yiddish was until recently the language spoken by the majority of the world's Jews, and as such was the language of an international culture (this was before the creation of a Jewish state in Israel), a culture that prized learning and literacy and which therefore produced many great cultural fruits, in music, theatre, literature, etc.

Today Yiddish is spoken by only a tiny minority of the world's Jews, and were it not for a few religious sects that cling to it as an article of faith (such as the Satmar hasidim), it's future survival beyond the 21st century would be in great doubt. In any event, though, the language is a shell of its former self: before World War II, Yiddish had 12 million speakers. Now there are around 300,000 and the overwhelming majority of these are quite elderly. At one time Yiddish theatres in New York put on productions of a quality and attendance that equaled those put on in English, and the Forward, then a daily paper, had a circulation of 275,000.

It is now a weekly paper whose circulation hovers around 5,000—every Yiddish-speaking man, woman, and child on the planet would have to subscribe for it to rival its former glory; the paper's original building in Manhattan (pictured here) has been converted into appartments.

There were three key reasons for Yiddish's rapid decline. First and most obviously, the massacre of the holocaust led to the murder of six million Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom were Yiddish speakers. But still, one may legitimately ask why the remaining Jews abandoned the language. After all, if Hitler and the Nazis failed in their quest to exterminate all Jews, should not Jews have fought to restore their culture? If Yiddish culture (the only Jewish culture the Nazis knew about, to the extent they knew anything about Jews) were allowed to perish, would not that be allowing the holocaust to wreak still more destruction, even after the Nazis themselves were stopped?

Of course the Jewish nation did re-assert its identity in the wake of the holocaust, re-taking the Holy Land in 1948 and creating the Jewish state of Israel. But the new state took as its language Modern Hebrew—and the use of Yiddish was actively discouraged. This effort to eradicate Yiddish from Israel is the second major reason for the language's decline.

It may seem paradoxical to replace a language with such a vibrant intellectual heritage with one that, in its modern incarnation at least, had little past—although of course Ancient Hebrew has through the Bible one of the most important literary heritages in the history of the world, it was produced some two thousand years before the modern state of Israel or the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language.

But the fact is that Yiddish culture was very much out of style following World War II: the founders of Israel wanted to make a new beginning, in a strong and independent state, and the image of the ghetto Jew, discriminated against and persecuted in Europe for so long, was something that the Jewish people were now eager to distance themselves from. And Yiddish was for many too closely tied to these images of the ghetto to be allowed to continue in "Eretz Israel". It was a past they were ashamed of.

Another, more practical reason for Hebrew to be used in place of Yiddish in Israel was that the holocaust had changed the demographics of world jewry. Whereas before most Jews were European and Yiddish-speaking, the slaughter perpetrated by the Nazis made these Jews, called Ashkenazi, less numerically dominant. Middle Eastern Jews, called Sephardi, had no knowledge of Yiddish, but if the state of Israel was to survive it would have to have as many Jews as possible on board to build it. Hebrew was a neutral language and a link to the common heritage of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi; Yiddish was not. Thus Modern Hebrew, a spoken language less than a century old, became the official language of Israel.

The third reason for Yiddish's decline lay with the diaspora. Not all Jews live in Israel, obviously; many millions continue to reside in other countries all over the world. Here too, though, modernity and a desire to fight the anti-semitism seen in the ghetto have led Jews to abandon Yiddish. American Jews now most often speak English at home, French Jews speak French, etc. The older generation, eager to see their children better integrated, simply did not teach them Yiddish, and as their generation dies out, a large percentage of the remaining Yiddish speakers in the world will go with them.

So far I have laid out what Yiddish is, and how it once flourished, and how it came to be that it is now becoming endangered. However now that I have traced the reasons for Yiddish's decline I want to get back to my main topic, which is why, despite all this, one might still get a heck of a lot out of knowing Yiddish.

Cultural Charm—the Joys of Yiddish

There is no other language like Yiddish. It is a Germanic language (it shares a common ancestor with German), written with Hebrew letters, and with a large amount of borrowings from other languages, mostly Hebrew and Slavic. It has a wealth of idiomatic expressions, which combine to give it a character and personality that are completely unique. Many Yiddish words have come into English, such as klutz, chutzpah, and tukhes—and the fact that these are some of the most colourful words in English should give you a taste of what sort of personality Yiddish has as a language. This makes Yiddish a fascinating language to study for linguists and those interested in quirky languages. For those with a more casual interest in this side of Yiddish, all of this is explored in Leo Rosten's book The Joys of Yiddish, which provides an accessible look at Yiddish as a language of humour and personality that is aimed at those who are not big on learning languages.

The Language of Literary Heavyweights

Yiddish was once the language of an international intelligentsia whose literary works have gained international acclaim. As a language that is highly idiomatic, and with its own personality and character, it should be obvious that Yiddish literature is best appreciated in the original. Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Nobel prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer provide a wealth of literary classics in Yiddish that are not read often enough by students of world literature today. Admirers of world literature have a lot to gain by reading Yiddish; in this light the objection "but I'm not Jewish" seems as absurd as avoiding Victor Hugo because one is not French, or Dostoyevski when one is not Russian.

Preserving What has Nearly Been Wiped Out

I try to avoid talking about politics in my posts on this blog, however I am willing to go so far as to say that I am not in favour of Nazism. Dead set against it, as a matter of fact. It is not for me to judge, living in another time and place and not being Jewish, the feelings of those who decided that Yiddish culture was something to be ashamed of. However, with the perspective that distance does bring, I can see this much: the Nazis wanted to eliminate Yiddish culture, and in light of the events of the last 65 years, they have been largely succesful. Learning Yiddish and appreciating its culture is one small way to, symbolically at least, refuse them that success.

There are religious communities within Judaism that feel the same way, and more strongly than I do. I am confident that because of their existence, Yiddishkeit is not really in danger of extinction. Yiddish-speaking communities exist in the United States and Israel who are not persecuted (and have phenomenally high birth rates), and some still remain in Europe as well, so the language will not be allowed to die out. Secular Yiddish culture, though, such as that embodied in the Forward, has clearly seen its glory days come and go.

Still, there is nothing like the connexion one feels through a first-hand knowledge of Yiddish with the world of pre-war European Jewry, the vibrant world of intellectual debate and artistic achievement that lives on in their writings, music—and cinema. The most poignant illustration of this for me is the 1936 movie Yidl Mitn Fidl (a film that is as charming as the name sounds), filmed on location in Poland (then home to hundreds of thousands of Jews; now home to barely any). Many of the extras in the film were inhabitants of the local shtetls (Jewish villages). In other words, the faces of many of the extras in this movie are those of the very people who would soon be rounded up into concentration camps. To me, hearing the songs of this film gives us a connexion to what happened in the holocaust that makes Schindler's List pale in comparison—so much so that I feel it is unfortunate that for so many people, holocaust awareness pretty much begins and ends with that movie. A far cry from cold memorials and remembrances, learning Yiddish gives one the opportunity to connect directly with the past and to know those who lived and died in it through their own voices.

(Posted on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2009. Move ahead a few minutes in the clip above to see an extract of the movie Yidl Mitn Fidl.)

Since antiquity, Greek rhetoric has been viewed as having three schools: the grand style, associated with Thucydides, the plain style, represented by Lysias, and the middle style, epitomised by Demosthenes.

In this very humourous passage from Herodotus (III.46), however, we have evidence of a fourth, Laconic, school of rhetoric:

Ἐπείτε δὲ οἱ ἐξελασθέντες Σαμίων ὑπὸ Πολυκράτεος ἀπίκοντο ἐς τὴν Σπάρτην, καταστάντες ἐπὶ τοὺς ἄρχοντας ἔλεγον πολλὰ οἷα κάρτα δεόμενοι· οἳ δέ σφι τῇ πρώτῃ καταστάσι ὑπεκρίναντο τὰ μὲν πρῶτα λεχθέντα ἐπιλελῆσθαι, τὰ δὲ ὕστατα οὐ συνιέναι. Μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα δεύτερα καταστάντες ἄλλο μὲν εἶπον οὐδέν, θύλακον δὲ φέροντες ἔφασαν τὸν θύλακον ἀλφίτων δέεσθαι. Οἳ δέ σφι ὑπεκρίναντο "τῷ θυλάκῳ" περιεργάσθαι· βοηθέειν δ᾽ ὦν ἔδοξε αὐτοῖσι.

Apparently, the Spartans weren't big on oratory :-)

I was reading Cæsar and came across this obscure bit that I would have been completely unable to understand had I not just happened to have read in another book a description of the Roman class system, so I thought I'd pass on the info in the hope that it might someday connect with a confused reader and be helpful.

Ariovistus postulavit 'ne quem peditem ad colloquium Cæsar adduceret: vereri se ne per insidias ab eo circumveniretur; uterque cum equitatu veniret: alià ratione sese non esse venturum.' Cæsar, quòd neque colloquium interpositâ causâ tolli volebat neque salutem suam Gallorum equitatui committere audebat, commodissimum esse statuit omnibus equis Gallis equitibus detractis eò legionarios milites legionis decimæ, cui quàm maximè confidebat, imponere.

(De Bello Gallico, I, XLII). Why does Cæsar have to borrow horses from the Gauls in order to take his legionnaires to the parley? The fascinating thing that one must know in order to comprehend this passage is that the Romans had no mounted cavalry of their own! So Cæsar's army only had Roman footsoldiers, and all the mounted knights were supplied by his Gaulish allies. Which strikes me as so strange, because throughout history knights are always held in higher prestige than footsoldiers—and weirder still, knights were also held in prestige in Rome itself! One of Cæsar's soldiers even jokes about being promoted to knightood:

Quod quum fieret, non irridiculè quidam ex militibus decimæ legionis dixit, 'plus, quàm pollicitus esset, Cæsarem ei facere: pollicitum se in cohortis prætoriæ loco decimam legionem habiturum, nunc ad equum rescribere.'

The equites in Cæsar's time formed the second estate of Roman society, between the lower class populus and the noble, senatorial class. (By this time, the older Republican division between plebians and patricians had ceased to exist—although those rare senatorial families with patracian roots were proud of the fact—most nobles had their roots in the plebs.) To be a knight required great wealth, just as in so many other times in history, since being able to supply a horse and the necessary equipment for mounted warfare to the state was the original prerequisite for the status. In earlier centuries of the Republic, the equites were the Roman cavalry force. Moreover, since the nobility were barred from trade and business, the equites came to be a very powerful class in their own right: they were Rome's economic élite in contrast to the senatorial political élite (whose wealth could only come from inheritence or corruption).

What happened, then, over the course of time, was that knighthood came to be in Rome something completely honorary and status-related. And so the equites rode their horses in parades and other ceremonial occasions, but were not expected to actually fight—not any more than we would expect some one who gets a British knighthood today to ride out in battle!

I find it fascinating that this could take place in a time when actual mounted fighting was still going on, though. (And would continue to be for another 1900+ years.) I had always assumed that Sir Elton John (e.g.) is not expected to ride onto the field of battle today because warfare has evolved away from that kind of thing—but here Cæsar actually has to borrow the horses from his Gaulish allies to give to his legionnaires, because he trusts the latter more with his life! It's amazing that such a military juggernaut as the Roman Empire would have fully entrusted its cavalry—one of the most essential arms of its military force—to outsourcing. And yet that's the way it was.

UPDATE 14.05.2009—I have written a follow-up article to this one that addresses further aspects of the Roman use of cavalry under Cæsar.

While we're on the subject of books, I've recently gotten around to finally reading a random find I picked up in a used bookstore in Montreal, a gem of a book called The Translator's Art: Essays in Honour of Betty Radice. What was so curious about this book was that it was in the Penguin classics series: one of the most mainstream, widespread series of paperback translations out there. A collection of essays by the translators seemed like a fascinating 'behind the scenes' glimpse into what for me had seemed like a very impersonal, corporate series of paperbacks—especially since this book's reason for existing—a tribute to one of the series' long-time editors who had died suddenly—was so personal and 'in-house'. I was amazed that Penguin would even have put out such an obviously non-commercially viable book, and since I was able to pick it up in the bargain bin for nearly nothing, I didn't hesitate to buy it, even though I knew I wouldn't have time to read it anytime soon.

So The Translator's Art has come with me across two continents, sitting unread but always cherished as a prized find. I knew I had found a rare treasure with this book, but I was saving reading it until I could savour it properly, the way an œnophile saves an old bottle of a fine wine until just the right occasion. I mean, just a quick glance over the table of contents was sufficient to see how far up my alley this book was going to be: "On Translating Sanskrit Myths" by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, "Classical Prose at its Extremes" by Walter Hamilton, "Translating 'the Sound of Water': Different Versions of a Hokku by Bashō" by Noriyuki Yuasa, "Translating the Mabinogion and Early Irish Tales" by Jeffrey Gantz... I don't know what they were smoking when they decided to publish this as a Penguin paperback, but I sure love that they did!

At last the time has come for me to read this book, and although I couldn't have known it, this was the most perfect time imaginable in my life for me to have read it. Not only the essays, but the story of Betty Radice's life itself was just as edifying (to be clear, I had never heard of this person beforehand). It is rather like an episode of 'This American Life'—only in this case focusing on an English housewife who kept her translation of Pliny under her bed and worked on it any time she had a spare moment for a period of over ten years as she balanced her love of the classics and Oxford education with the challenges of cooking, cleaning, and changing diapers. There do not seem to be many people who, after university, continue to read the Latin and Greek classics out of a love for them, and so in reading her story I could relate quite a bit.

The same is true of many of the essayists. By and large the essays were smart insightful treatises on translation—some of the most erudite stuff I've read in a long while, in fact. But they also provided glimpses here and there into the translators' lives. Literary translators are pretty much exclusively working out of love for their subject matter. Many are teachers and academics, but others, like myself, had unrelated careers while still cultivating their love for literature and language on the side: W.G. Shepherd makes only one oblique reference to ""my job (I mean that by which I make a living)", when writing about his translation of Horace. I could just picture Betty Radice's doctor, seeing her reading the Odyssey in the original Greek while nine months pregnant, suggesting that she read something 'a little lighter'. Or Barbara Reynolds, who always kept a few pages of the Italian epic Orlando Furioso on a clipboard with her, so she could work on it on the bus, while standing in line—any time she had a spare minute. ("Ask me some questions, love" offered one bus driver, who mistook her for a pollster!)

Many of their attitudes, too, were ones I could relate to. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, in particular, remarked that she once felt as I often do, "I don't want to write a translation for anyone stupid/lazy/uneducated enough to make use of a translation." Peter Green's essay on translating Ovid is a must read for anyone thinking about translating Latin poetry. And Trever Saunders and Walter Hamilton's tales of translating from Latin and Greek were wonderful insights into the kind of life that I sometimes daydream about. And more than one author acknowledged Roy Campbell's aphorism that "translations (like wives) are seldom faithful if they are in the least attractive" :-) I was lucky in that most of the essays are about translating Latin and Greek, so this fell in perfectly with my recent enthusiasm for improving in these languages.

In sum, this rare little ultra-niche book was even more than I had hoped it would be. A real case of just the right book finding its way to just the right person to be read at just the right time.

ἢ μὴ γενοίμαν ἢ πατέρων ἀγαθῶν
εἴην πολυκτήτων τε δόμων μέτοχος.
εἴ τι γὰρ πάσχοι τις ἀμήχανον, ἀλκᾶς
οὐ σπάνις εὐγενέταις,
κηρυσσομένοισι δ᾽ ἀπ᾽ ἐσθλῶν δωμάτων
τιμὰ καὶ κλέος· οὔτοι λείψανα τῶν ἀγαθῶν
ἀνδρῶν ἀφαιρεῖται χρόνος· ἁ δ᾽ ἀρετὰ
καὶ θανοῦσι λάμπει.
κρεῖσσον δὲ νίκαν μὴ κακόδοξον ἔχειν
ἢ ξὺν φθόνῳ σφάλλειν δυνάμει τε δίκαν.
ἡδὺ μὲν γὰρ αὐτίκα τοῦτο βροτοῖσιν,
ἐν δὲ χρόνῳ τελέθει
ξηρὸν καὶ ὀνείδεσιν ἔγκειται δόμος.
ταύταν ᾔνεσα ταύταν καὶ φέρομαι βιοτάν·
μηδὲν δίκας ἔξω κράτος ἐν θαλάμοις
καὶ πόλει δύνασθαι.

I've already given one concrete reason why learning classical languages does indeed have practical utility: it can save you from getting a nonsense tattoo. This selection from Euripides' Andromache is another example; but explaining why requires a little context.

The section that is in italics in the text above, "οὔτοι λείψανα τῶν ἀγαθῶν ἀνδρῶν ἀφαιρεῖται χρόνος· ἁ δ᾽ ἀρετὰ καὶ θανοῦσι λάμπει," is engraved in stone at McGill University (my alma mater), over the entrance to the Sir Arthur Currie Memorial Gymnasium and Armoury, which was the main student sports building, where I regularly worked out as a student.

The noble sentiments expressed in this quote, clearly intended in memory of McGill's war dead, are only part of what make it an inspirational thing to read on one's way to a workout. As choral verse, this passage also happens to be in the Doric dialect of Ancient Greek—the dialect of Sparta (as you can immediately see from "ἁ ἀρετά"). There is nothing more motivating, when you are setting off to lift weights and train, than having an inspirational verse of Spartan Greek put into your head on your way in the door. Not only does the entire Greek ideal of physical perfection come to mind, but beyond that the extreme training of the Lacedæmonian state as well. (ἢ τᾶν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς!) By the time you lift the first weight, you already picture yourself training for Leonidas! I have no doubt that my university workouts were far more effective because of this inscription over the door than they would have been otherwise, and it would have had no effect if I did not know Ancient Greek :-)

Besides that personal anecdote, I do think that this is a fine passage of Greek poetry, easy to read while at the same time offering a thought-provoking pre-Judæo-Christian take on morality, so I recommend taking a look at it if you study Ancient Greek. Bonus points for any commenters who relate the selection to this quote from Sallust :-)

Nam sæpe ego audivi Q. Maximum, P. Scipionem, præterea civitatis nostræ præclaros viros solitos ita dicere, cum majorum imagines intuerentur, vehementissime sibi animum ad virtutem accendi. Scilicet non ceram illam neque figuram tantam vim in sese habere, sed memoria rerum gestarum eam flammam egregiis viris in pectore crescere neque prius sedari, quam virtus eorum famam atque gloriam adæquaverit.

When I was at McGill, in our intermediate Greek class we translated three books of Homer's Odyssey, studying at home of 50 lines or so per day and then coming to class the next day and reading it over as a group, discussing the nuances and making sure we had the sense right. In order to facilitate this, I wrote my own glosses in the margins, so that I wouldn't have to flip back and forth from text to notebook when reading in class. Here is a picture of my old copy of the Odyssey:

I enjoyed this class, and enjoyed Homer, so I still read some as often as I can (although in the context of all my other eclectic hobbies, that doesn't work out to all that often). I prefer the Iliad, though, so that's what I'm reading. Here's a picture of my Iliad, and with it a picture of how well I've progressed in Greek since college:

There are three big differences between then and now. (I) I now have the good sense to write my glosses lightly in pencil rather than in loud blue pen! This is also because my Iliad is a nice hardcover while my school text was a fairly ugly paperback. (Notes in black pen were written in class; it means I hadn't figured out the right meaning on my own.) (II)There are a lot less glosses. This shows how much my vocabulary has improved—now there are often whole paragraphs that go by without a single gloss, which never happened back in my school days. Back then I usually wrote my glosses in longhand too, for compactness, whereas now I use so many fewer that I can always use shorthand instead. (III) My school text has grammatical glosses ("3 pl perf"); I never need these anymore. Partly this is because I don't have to live in fear of a professor saying, "parse that for me, please", but mostly it is because grammatical rules are rules, and once they are learnt, they stay learnt, whereas vocabulary is a never-ending process of learning.

It's nice to be able to look back and see one's progress like this, especially since I haven't studied Greek anything like regularly since college. Yet nowadays I can do 50 lines in 15-20 minutes, whereas back then took a lot longer. On the other hand, back then I did 150 a week, every week, because it was homework, whereas now I am nowhere near so consistent (I might do 150 in a day, and then not touch it again for weeks). But it's just because I so infrequently have the time to look at Homer that I am so proud to see that I have still managed to make so much progress.