Why to study Antiquity

I thoroughly enjoyed Mary Beard's post yesterday concerning her recent visit to the Colossi of Memnon.   Although I must admit that I would have not taken the trouble to search out these towering 14th c. BC artifacts personally, known to the Romans as statues that could sing, I feel very satisfied that Mary should do  so.

If you have time to examine her report, be sure to follow the indicated links, they are an education in themselves. The sheer oddity of much of what one encounters in classical studies--imagine a woman of Roman nobility, a tourist, having some self-composed Sapphic verses inscribed in Greek on the leg of one of the two statues--is one small yet fascinating part of the wider adventure of attempting to understand civilizations far differently reasoned than our own.

Photo: Wikicommons Media

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Proposal for an Annual Fog-Burying Ceremony

Gustaf Sobin writes of the discovery of numerous stone tablets bearing the inscription “Buried lightning” (Fulgur conditum) on the plateaus above rural Provence. They were placed on the location where a lightning bolt had struck: the lightning was then ritually buried along with whatever charred pieces of wood or rooftops or horsecarts were lying around.

Citing Lucian and Plutarch, Sobin says that a wall was erected around the place where the lightning fell, then an animal was sacrificed and a priest would consecrate the enclosed ground. Considered sacred, the lightning bolt was memorialized and ritually "housed" as the signature of Iupiter Fulgator, and any further destructive powers were assumed to be rendered harmless thereby.

I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to conduct an annual fog-burying ceremony here in San Francisco. I suggest we convene at the top of the Buena Vista Park annually in August (a good time of year for it, when folks have given up hope of ever seeing the sun shine again) and conduct a ritual interment, somewhat along the lines of placing a quantity of San Francisco fog in a lead casket along with a tube of suncream oil to counteract its noxious effects, and then burying the casket several feet underground.

After some prayers of deliverance and a short sermon by an especially appointed Fog Bishop, the rites might be concluded with a sacred bonfire, during the course of which the congregation would be urged to get naked and dance around with broomsticks up their asses and indulge in whatever other festive activities might be considered appropriate or not, as the case may be.

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Photo from Gustaf Sobin, Luminous Debris. 
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Intermissa, Venus, diu rursus bella moves?

I finally found time over Christmas to translate one of the most genial poems ever written, in the Odes of Horace, iv.1:

Venus, you're inciting me to fight wars
that I've long since broken off?
Please, please, I beg you,
I'm not the same man I was
when good Cinara reigned.

Savage mother of cupidinous
joys, stop trying to butter me up.
After five decades I'm quite impervious now
to your seductive commands. Go look
elsewhere, go answer the eager prayers
of the young people who call out to you.

And if you're really looking for a good time,
why not steer your purple-winged swans
to the house of Paulus Maximus? He's
just the right one for you.

He's a decent, well-bred lad
and lets everyone hit on him:
he's really knows what he's doing,
and he'll wave your banners far and wide.

Whenever his rivals show up with
expensive presents, he just laughs all the more.
He'll make a marble statue of you and place it
under a wooden roof made of citrus trees
near the Alban Lake.

At your command you'll be delighted
there with ample frankincense for your nose,
and Berecyntian lyres and flutes, and songs
played with shepherd's pipes.

Twice daily boys and young virgins
will celebrate your divinity there,
with their fair-skinned feet
they'll shake the earth in triple measure
like the Salian priests.

But in my case, neither boys nor women,
nor hopes that mutual love might return,
nor drinking contests, nor killing time
while wreathed in flowers --
none of this does anything for me.

But then why, Ligurinus,
do tears run down my face,
why among these eloquent words
does my tongue fall awkwardly
silent?

At nights, when I'm sleeping,
sometimes I hold you fast,
at other times I follow after
as you fly across the grassy Field of Mars,
follow you through the waters,
where you wind your way, unfeeling.


Horace jokes around about being too old for sex, referring Venus instead to her younger neophytes, or to Paulus Maximus (perhaps a Greek friend with a very big dick?!). But the wit and the eloquence skid to a crashing halt at the beginning of the ninth stanza, when the poet without warning shows us the real reason for his reluctance to worship Venus -- a failed relationship with a boyfriend, whom he now addresses, named Ligurinus, who still invades his dreams.

We don't know who Ligurinus was, or whether Horace really followed him into the Tiber or just had a strange dream about it, but it hardly matters. What started as a comically conventional renunciation of sexual activity by a poet who thinks he's getting too old for it transforms into a howl precipitated by love's sorrow.

I've translated the poem fairly literally. The Latin original is here. What's fun about translating Latin poetry is that it comes from an age when, as gradually again in our own, Christian proprieties about sex don't obtain. What's frustrating is that Latin has a distinctive language architecture that simply does not work well in any Germanic language.

Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo

Mary Beard's rather hilarious comments this week concerning Catullus' even more hilarious Carmen 16 led me to polish up my own translation. In this clever poem, Catullus heaps gender mockery upon two friends who've evidently criticized his poems for being too gay:


I'll ram my cock right up your ass,
Aurelius, you queen,
and then I'll shove it down your throat,
Furius, you filthy faggot,
since the two of you think my little verses are indecent
just because they're a little sensitive.
A dutiful poet should be restrained himself,
but his poems don't have to be:
they'll have more pizazz and humor
if they're a little delicate and indecent
and make people feel horny.
I'm not speaking to boys, but to
hairy old men who can't get it up anymore.
You've read about thousands of people getting
kissed, and you think I'm not butch enough?
I'll shove my cock up your ass
and then I'll fuck you right in the face.


Mary Beard's blog is at http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/; see the entry for November 25, 2009. Catullus' poem in Latin:


Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,
qui me ex versiculis meis putastis,
quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.
Nam castum esse decet pium poetam
ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est;
qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem,
si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici,
et quod pruriat incitare possunt,
non dico pueris, sed his pilosis
qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos.
Vos, quod milia multa basiorum
legistis, male me marem putatis?
Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.

Tiberius

In Roman seminar we are currently slogging our way through Tiberius, which is a bit of a let-down after the glory that was Augustus, for whom evidently there was never a dull moment. We view the political history of the Roman Empire in the 1st century through the eyes of a half-dozen contemporary historians, Tacitus chief among them, and then study those works through the eyes of a half-dozen modern historians (Syme, Scullard, Garzetti, et al.), a somewhat distinctive historiographic situation.
There is a fabulous set of drawings of the Campus Martius at http://www.maquettes-historiques.net/P22.html.

Fall semester 2009

I got into the 1st-century Roman Empire research seminar I was hoping for with Prof Richard Hoffman at SFSU, which means we'll be reading Tacitus, Cassius Dio, Suetonius, Petronius and Pliny's letters pretty much in toto, with two interim essays and then a research paper due December 16th. I'll be writing about the Roman invasions of Germania in the first century, which involves reviewing all the astonishing material culture discoveries made in Germany in the past few decades -- the site of the Varus battle in 9 AD at Kalkriese, the discovery of Roman shipyards at Haltern on the River Lippe, and last year's sensational find of a Roman battlefield site at Kalefeld. If this works out, I should know pretty much all there is to know about the Roman presence in Germany by December 16th, after which I can return to human society for a short while before the spring semester begins end of January.