CAVE ID. MART.

15 March 2008 in funny, musings by Sam | 1 comment

On this date in 44 BCE, on the fifteenth (or ides, in the Roman calendar) of March, Gaius Julius Caesar was assassinated by a conspiracy of dissatisfied senators, including his good friend Brutus. As Shakespeare has it (and didn’t Shakespeare have it?):

CAESAR. The Ides of March are come.
SOOTHSAYER. Ay, Caesar, but not gone.

His famous last words are, naturally, legend. As the inimitable folks of I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again once put it:

Bill Oddie: Well, I know his famous last words!
David Hatch: And what were they?
Bill: Err…quod erat demonstrandum.
David: That means ‘which was to be proved’.
Bill: What was to be proved?
David: Which was to be proved!
Bill: Well, no wonder they were his last words.

Caesar’s last words were reported by Plutarch to be καὶ σὺ τέκνον; (’You too, my son?’) and literally translated by Suetonius as tu quoque, fili mi? (’You too, my son?’). However, the translation given in Shakespeare of et tu, Brute? is undoubtedly more popular and famous. Also, it flows better, despite the fact that Caesar, like other educated, upper-class Romans, would have probably spoken Greek in day-to-day use, unlike the vulgar Latin of the vulgar masses. In fact, there’s a terrific bit of dialogue from the beginning of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that picks up on this quite nicely:

CASSIUS. Did Cicero say anything?
CASCA. Ay, he spoke Greek.
CASSIUS. To what effect?
CASCA. Nay, an I tell you that, I’ll ne’er look you i’ the face again: but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.

But let turn back to ISIRTA for the last word:

David Hatch: Eventually, Caesar was stabbed in the Appian Way.
Bill Oddie: And that’s a very nasty way to be stabbed!
David: I’m sorry, did I say he was stabbed in the Appian Way? I meant he was stabbed in the Senate.
Bill: That’s even nastier.

My students asked me what they could do to commemorate the Ides of March, and I told them to stab their best friends before their friends could stab them. A good bit of advice, that, especially if you’re an ancient Roman, but I wonder how much utility it has today. I do hope they didn’t take me seriously. Ave atque vale, Caesar.

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16 March 2008 at 8:44 am

Leigh Walton

Leigh Walton’s avatar

Greek? Really? Even in Rome? In the Senate? By Caesar and Cicero themselves?

Surely in the late republic the vulgar language was Koine. The identity/status issues involved seem actually quite complex — I wish I’d had a course in this. Among the native Latin speakers of the senatorial class (e.g. between Cicero and Atticus), Greek is a sign of education and an occasional tool for adding spice to his prose — but it’s always marked as such. The primary language of their correspondence, and surely their conversation, was Latin. There must be a nationalist element at play, particularly in the city of Rome — Cicero writes about translating Greek speeches into Latin to improve his rhetoric and enrich the rhetorical arsenal of the Latin language itself. Not to mention all that Ellen Millender gyne/graece-phobic anxiety. Meanwhile everyone in the post-Alexandrian world uses Koine for commerce. And yet there’s a vulgar Latin as well, as you say. Later, we have a Roman emperor writing Meditations in Greek while campaigning in Serbia in the second century, but eventually we get to the point where western Europe speaks Latins and eastern Europe speaks Greeks. And the Church is involved in this eventually. It’s madness.

This book looks fascinating, but I can only view selected pages. I know we had it at Reed, but I didn’t read it as much as I wish I had.