classics

vixi puellis nuper idoneus
et militavi non sine gloria,
     nunc arma defunctumque bello
     barbiton hic paries habebit,
laevom marinae qui Veneris latus
custodit. hic, hic ponite lucida
     funalia et vectis et arcus
     oppositis foribus minacis.
o quae beatum diva tenes Cyprum et
Memphin carentem Sithonia nive
     regina, sublimi flagello
     tange Chloen semel arrogante.

My erstwhile beauty and my skill I sing,
   When I once soldier’d on Love’s battlefield,
But Arms made obsolete by War I bring,
   My sword, my lyre, my spear, fife, drum and shield.
Now I consign them to their rightful place:
   Rest, rest, ye arms, on pegs by Venus’ side!
And near the Goddess, born of foam, a space
   For torches, threat’ning War where they abide.
O Goddess who in Cyprus blest doth dwell,
   And Memphis, far from Thracian mountains snowy,
Queen, take thy Whip against her to rebel,
   And with one humb’ling blow, I pray, strike Chloe.

—Horace, Ode 3.26

I rendered this poem into alternate rhyming lines of iambic pentameter so as to keep the line numbers the same, thereby imitating the styles of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translators. It’s even better if you imagine it written out with elongated s and fl and ct ligatures, and the proper names in small caps. This poem would make a great sonnet, I think—there’s a pretty good volta right where the third quatrain would begin. Unfortunately, there are only twelve lines in the original, so if you wanted to stick your own ‘zinger’ couplet at the end, it’d have to be of your own devising.

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.

Today’s Dinosaur Comics speaks to one of the long-debated paradoxes of classical scholarship:

I’m not sure I agree with T. Rex, however—and I’m not sure the classics world would either. As the chorus say in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus 1225, μὴ φῦναι τὸν ἅπαντα νικᾷ λόγον, ‘By all reckoning, it is best not to be born.’ Utahraptor would have something to say to that, I’m sure.

The eminent classicist and translator Frederick Ahl has recently published his new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Now I have a little confession to make: I don’t really like the Aeneid. Aeneas may be pius (’pious’) by epithet, but his defining characteristic is really being in a perpetual state of weeping, moping, and Agonizing About His Destiny. He’s also a jerk to basically everybody he meets, especially Dido—it’s been suggested that some parts of Book IV would make a really great angsty LiveJournal entry once Dido discovered that Aeneas had changed his Facebook ‘Relationship Status’ to ‘It’s Complicated’. Basically everything after Book VI is unreadable as well, because it’s all about random battles between people we don’t care about so Aeneas can found his city of Lavinium (code for Rome). And to top it off, the work is filled with the most transparent, perfidious, and insufferable propaganda for Augustus Caesar, filled with ‘prophecies’ that ‘predict’ how much the world will need this Augustus to lead and rule and generally be a great and terrific guy. It’s insufferable, really. This may well get me banned from the Great Fellowship Of Classicists, many of whom seem to have this thing for Virgil, but he’s simply not my thing.

If Virgil is your thing, however, you will probably have something to say about Ahl’s new translation. It is written in something approximating English dactylic hexameter, which gives him a lot of room to play with per line (the line count is the same as in the Latin original). Also, Ahl’s hexameters are a damn sight better and more natural-sounding than Longfellow’s awful

This is the forest primeval: the murmuring pines and the hemlock

But Ahl’s hexameters—especially in terms of versification—are not perfect, and he has to deal with the problem of sustaining the hexameter through thousands of lines in English, which can start to sound quite tiresome even after only a few verses. Additionally, there is a lot of unnecessarily technical vocabulary retained, significantly in some of the crazier battle scenes. Much of this is explained via endnotes linked to asterisks in the text, which seems clunky and inelegant poetry to me. But then again, what is a translator to do?

For example, let me quote twelve lines from Book IX, during one of the interminable ‘fight scenes’ (9.503–514):

Far off, the resonant bronze of a bugle has crackled staccato
Terror. There follows a thunderous cheer bellowed back by the heavens.
Quickly the Volscians approach in an interlocked tortoise formation,
Ready to fill in the trenches, to ram through and rip apart ramparts.
Some look for ways to get in and to scale outer walls upon ladders:
Points undermanned, where the crown of defence admits flickers of daylight
Through less dense crenellations of troops. In response, though, the Teucrians
Blast them with all kinds of weapon, prise ladders away with strong levers.
Holding a wall under siege was a skill they’d acquired in prolonged war.
Further, they tried hurling boulders of murderous heaviness, hoping
Somehow to break through this covered attack. But whatever they threw down,
Troops underneath that dense-packed tortoise easily handled.

In the text, ‘Volscians’ has an asterisk and endnote, referring the reader to a different endnote, in which these people are identified, and a cross-reference to yet a third endnote to explain the ‘interlocked tortoise formation’. Yet I would be doing a disservice to Ahl to carp too much upon this: certainly there are many other features about this translation that are redeemable. The line ‘Ready to fill in the trenches, to ram through and rip apart ramparts’ has some terrific alliteration, nicely rendering the Latin alliterative vellere vallum in the same line, for example. Ahl is also a master of making the metre ‘paint’ his text, parallelling this feature in Virgil: the original ferre iuvet subter densa testudine casus, heavily spondaic as it is, is reflected as such in Ahl’s translation: ‘Troops underneath that dense-packed tortoise easily handled’—a very heavily accentual and spondaic line to reflect the tightness of the soldiers’ formation.

What is more, the reader is drawn in to the action of the text, not left standing as an observer outside the text (this, I feel, is the downside of many modern translations, including Mandelbaum’s celebrated version and possibly even Fagles’ recent effort; a step backwards, in a way, from his masterful Iliad and Odyssey). But I can’t help feeling that this is compromised in some ways by awkwardnesses in the text—’all kinds of weapon’, for instance, does not strike me as particularly elegant English, and the two lines beginning with ‘Points undermanned’ does not read like natural language, and is complicated by needlessly obscure vocabulary (’crenellations‘, for example, are those square bits cut out of the tops of towers at castles; I don’t see how the word is really being applied here to this situation). Finally, there are some nice and some not-so-nice features about the versification—the enjambment of ’staccato / Terror’ is well done, but ‘In response, though, the Teucrians’ smacks of metrical filler, and ‘they’d acquired in prolonged war’ scans badly with respect to the line’s accentuation.

So take the new Ahl translation for what it’s worth (mine cost £16.99 plus postage and packing, though it seems now to be available in North America via the usual outlets)—hopefully it will be able to take its rightful place among the excellent efforts of the modern translators.

ὑπερβολῇ λέγουσι τὸν Φιλόξενον
τῶν διθυράμβων τὸν ποιητὴν γεγονέναι
ὀψοφάγον. εἶτα πουλύποδα πηχῶν δυεῖν
ἐν ταῖς Συρακούσαις ποτ’ αὐτὸν ἀγοράσαι
καὶ σκευάσαντα καταφαγεῖν ὅλον σχεδὸν
πλὴν τῆς κεφαλῆς. ἁλόντα δ’ ὑπὸ δυσπεψίας
κακῶς σφόδρα σχεῖν· εἶτα δ’ ἰατροῦ τινος
πρὸς αὐτὸν εἰσελθόντος, ὃς φαύλως πάνυ
ὁρῶν φερόμενον αὐτὸν εἶπεν· εἴ τί σοι
ἀνοικονόμητόν ἐστι διατίθου ταχύ,
Φιλόξεν’· ἀποθανῇ γὰρ ὥρας ἑβδόμης.
κἀκεῖνος εἶπε· τέλος ἔχει τὰ πάντα μοι,
ἰατρέ, φησί, καὶ δεδιώκηται πάλαι·
τοὺς διθυράμβους σὺν θεοῖς καταλιμπάνω
ἠνδρωμένους καὶ πάντας ἐστεφανωμένους·
οὓς ἀνατίθημι ταῖς ἐμαυτοῦ συντρόφοις
Μούσαις Ἀφροδίτην καὶ Διόνυσον ἐπιτρόπους—
ταῦθ’ αἱ διαθῆκαι διασαφοῦσιν. ἀλλ’ ἐπεὶ
ὁ Τιμοθέου Χάρων σχολάζειν οὐκ ἐᾷ
οὑκ τῆς Νιόβης, χωρεῖν δὲ πορθμίδ’ ἀναβοᾷ,
καλεῖ δὲ μοῖρα νύχιος, ἧς κλύειν χρεών,
ἵν’ ἔχων ἀποτρέχω πάντα τἀμαυτοῦ κάτω,
τοῦ πουλύποδος μοι τὸ κατάλοιπον ἀπόδοτε.

They say that Philoxenus, the poet who wrote dithyrambs, was the biggest glutton of all time. This one time in Syracuse, they say that he bought and ate all of a two-foot-long octopus—almost, except the head. Seized by heartburn, he was in a bad way. A doctor came to him, and seeing that he wasn’t feeling so well, he said, ‘Philoxenus, if there’s anything you need to set straight in your domestic affairs, do it right away, because you’re going to die at the seventh hour.’ Philoxenus replied, ‘All of my belongings are in order, doctor, and were set straight long ago. I leave behind my grown-up dithyrambs, all crowned by the grace of the gods, which I have consecrated to the Muses and Aphrodite and Dionysus—but my will makes all that clear. Seeing as Charon (as in Timotheus’ Niobe) does not permit lingering, and is shouting that his boat is departing, and dark Fate calls, and we must heed her—and so that I can go below with all of my stuff, give me the leftovers of the octopus.’

—The comic poet Machon, in Athenaeus 8.341a–d

Tantalus had murdered his son Pelops and served him as a banquet to the gods. For this crime, he was sent to the underworld where he was sentenced to eternal hunger and thirst. Pelops, restored to life, bore Atreus and Thyestes. Because Thyestes had committed adultery with Atreus’ wife, Atreus was unsure of the legitimacy of his sons Agamemnon and Menelaus. To reconcile themselves, Atreus invites Thyestes and his sons to a banquet. Atreus murders Thyestes’ sons and serves them to the dim-witted Thyestes at the banquet, and after Atreus reveals the deed to Thyestes, the following dialogue ensues at the end of the play.

(Seneca, Thyestes 1096–1112, my own translation. The text is R. J. Tarrant’s 1985/1998 edition (APA).)

Psalms 120 through 134 each begin שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת (shir ha-ma’alot, ‘A song of ascents’). However Psalm 121 begins שִׁיר לַמַּעֲלוֹת (shir la-ma’alot, ‘A song to ascents’)—a troubling variant that should have alarm bells going off in the minds of the manuscript-oriented. Were this small prepositional variation correct, it would be quite interesting, but what a shame it’s probably nothing more than a scribal error.

The Hebrew text that reads ‘to ascents’ for the beginning of Psalm 121 is the Masoretic Text and its manuscript tradition, and it is the reading that has filtered down to us today. But the Septuagint (LXX Ps 120) reads Ὠδὴ τῶν ἀναβαθμῶν (ōdē tōn anabathmōn, ‘A song of ascents’)—the very same formula used to begin the entire sequence of Psalms 120 through 134 in the Septuagint (translating the Hebrew construct state by the Greek genitive), without altering it as the Masoretic Text does. The apparatus to the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the best Hebrew edition of the Masoretic Text ever compiled, notes rather cryptically, Q nonn Mss ‘הַמּ ut 122,1 etc, which essentially translates into ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls and some other manuscripts of the Masoretic Text read ‘of ascents’, like Psalm 122 verse 1 and the rest’. But it doesn’t tell you which Dead Sea Scroll—you have to look in more specific reference sources, which will tell you that 11QPs^a, one of the scrolls discovered in the eleventh cave at Qumrān, in its Psalter, uses the reading ‘of ascents’, in keeping with the pattern of the surrounding psalms.

Much has been made of this one letter’s difference in traditional and modern commentaries and in Jewish homiletics. I will provide but two small but representative examples. The ArtScroll Siddur, commenting on this psalm, says (emphases original), ‘This song differs from all others in this series because it is not called שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת, a song of ascents; but is dedicated לַמַּעֲלוֹת, to the ascents. It describes the means whereby Israel finds the strength to attain godly heights and ascend to His glorious Presence.’ However, we must keep in mind that the ArtScroll series is written by Orthodox Jews for other Orthodox Jews (and for more subliminal conversionary purposes, but that’s a separate rant), so we might look in the ecumenical Jewish Study Bible, which contains the (usually excellent) translation of the Jewish Publication Society along with a (usually excellent) modern commentary, for a more informed and balanced view. Yet they also make this one letter sing and dance: ‘Uniquely, the opening is A song for ascents rather than “to ascents.” It is unclear why the psalmist is looking to the mountains; some have suggested that this is a polemic against deities on the mountains (see esp. Ezek. 18.6), or this expresses the pilgrim as he moves toward Jerusalem in the Judean hills; more likely “it is the custom of anyone in straits to lift his eyes to see if help will come to repel the enemy” (Ibn Ezra).’ Not a word about the manuscript tradition—this is surprising given that the commentary on Psalm 145, which has a whole verse that has been deleted by the manuscript tradition, gives a rather thorough exposition of the fact that a verse has been dropped but exists in other manuscripts (though it hastens to add that its presence there is ‘most likely secondarily’).

One might raise an objection to the reading ‘of ascents’, even though it is apparently indicated in the older sources (the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint both precede the Masoretic Text by a good millenium), on the grounds of the old paleographic canard lectio difficilior preferenda est, ‘the more difficult reading is to be preferred’. Since the variant reading ‘to the ascents’ is definitely stranger and more difficult, one might be tempted to consider it the correct reading—especially since it is a quite noticeable deviation from a well-established pattern. However, I would argue that the overriding pattern of Psalms 120 through 134 is powerful evidence for the ‘of ascents’ reading; the Bible simply doesn’t like to deviate from its patterns, as much as we want to make hay out of a single mistranscribed letter. A better explanation, in my opinion, is that the reading we have is unsatisfactory and has been transmitted to us through a flawed manuscript tradition.

Do traditional Jews just not care about the manuscript tradition? Certainly they don’t. But why not? Is it so hard to conceive of the fact that scribes wrote things out and made mistakes doing it? Psalm 145, to which I alluded earlier, is a perfect example: its dropped verse begins with the letter nun, which is subsequently conspicuously missing from the psalm’s alphabetic acrostic scheme. Traditional Jews have made much out of it, e.g. claiming that the nun verse was intentionally left out because nun refers to n’filah, ‘downfall’, alluding to the possibility of Israel’s downfall. Never mind that in other alphabetic acrostics, such as Psalm 34, or chapters 1 through 4 of the book of Lamentations (despite the probable transposition of two verses in that book), or Psalm 119, all contain the letter nun: this one time it is left out, it could not possibly have been due to a scribal error. Never mind that every other source—the Greek Septuagint, the Syriac Peshitta, the Dead Sea Scrolls—include the verse. It has to not exist in the text because a homiletical point can be made. I suspect something similar has happened with Psalm 121’s ‘A psalm to ascents’—but don’t expect Jews to start changing the text around any time soon.

Good shabbos.