I’ve read on rogueclassicism of the death of Kenneth Dover, and thought it might be worth sharing what may be the first assessment of his work as a Hellenist in print.

When Kenneth Dover was just 19 (in 1939) Oxford published his winning lines for the Gaisford Prize for Greek Verse. His model was a selection of 113 lines from Racine’s Phèdre, and this publication was reviewed very favorably by the great Lionel Pearson (perhaps best known for The Local Historians of Attica, published three years after this review), who wrote that this “Oxford prize version in iambic trimeter is a reminder that the wholesome and fascinating practice of Greek verse composition has not been abandoned by English undergraduates and that their standard is a high one.”

I’d like to quote at length to show the respect the young Dover earned from Pearson, and which he should still command from us now:

The opening scene of the Phèdre introduces a theme entirely strange to the story told by Euripides. Hippolytus, after first giving the excuse that it is high time he departed in search of his absent father, explains to his tutor Theramenes that he must flee from Troezen because he has fallen in love with Aricia, whom he can never marry because of his father’s deadly feud with her brothers, the Pallantidae; and since he has not yet performed any heroic exploits, he dares not face the shame which his love is likely to bring him if he remains behind; the irregular loves of Theseus, he feels, can be excused only in consideration of his benefits to civilization; he himself cannot give that excuse

ὡς ταὐτὸ κείνω πανδίκως φράσαι παθεῖν.

Such argument is in the Euripidean spirit and it is admirably presented in lucid idiomatic Greek.

— CW 33. 5 (1939), p. 52

At 19 Dover was a master of Greek verse in a way that it seems none of us can be today, and in that he seems to have belonged to another time. The scholar he became seems just as out of time, but I suppose great scholars always do.

Reading through his commentaries (e.g., his Theocritus is still the best in my eyes) is an experience unmatched by more modern, chattier, less-definite works. He could be authoritative while being frank about the state of the evidence, cutting through the common mistakes and false suppositions of other editors without condescending. He was, unlike so many, willing to say that a question could not be answered, and both his front matter and notes were tempered by good judgment and attention to the needs of his readers. (Too often today scholars are prone to cram their research into every page, whether the reader needs it or not.)

I’ll be giving some time again to reading through his works and finding inspiration from his example.

Get your drink on from a cup that’s guaranteed to please: Nestor’s Drinking-Cup! Our latest offering is based on the 8th century BCE cup that you can read more about at Wikipedia. I remember working out the inscription as an undergraduate, and it’s always held a special place in my heart. Now I can hold it in my hands. As for the promise of the inscription, we are not liable for failure to find love.

Nestor’s Cup by thecampvs
Design promotional mugs on zazzle

Here’s my version in English:

I’m Nestor’s easy-drinkin’ drinking-cup:
And whoever drinks it up from this drinking-cup,
longing for lovely-crowned Aphrodite will snatch up!

(I left a bit out, I know.)

I agonized over the design, but we finally decided that simple would be best. A classic, uncluttered cup that’s easy to read (as long as you can read archaic Greek!)—it can even be used as a teaching tool. And for another $2 you can upgrade to a 15 oz. mug.

I had completely forgotten about about our other recent mug, which I have to say I think is really attractive: Aeneas and Anchises:

Aeneas & Anchises mug by thecampvs
Browse Latin Mugs

And don’t forget the reverse of this mug:

Aeneas & Anchises mug by thecampvs
View other Latin Mugs

Why not buy both for the classicist in your life?

This one is a real treat, but very odd: a work on Google Books listed as Opuscula by A.E. Housman. The truth is that no such work was published, and what we have is a poorly scanned PDF of a collection of Housman’s articles which had been collected by someone at Oxford and bound together.

Here are the contents:

1. Emendations Propertianae, JP XVI. 1 ff.
2. Note on Emendations Propertianae, JP XVI. 291
3. The Manuscripts of Propertius, JP XXI. 101 ff.
4. The Manuscripts of Propertius (cont’d.), JP XXI. 161 ff.
5. The Manuscripts of Propertius (cont’d.), JP XXII. 84 ff.
6. Review: Butler and Barber’s Propertius, CR XLVIII. 136 ff.
7. Note’s on Seneca’s Tragedies, CQ XVII. 163 ff.
8. The Silvae of Statius, CR XX. 37 ff.
9. Notes on the Thebais of Statius, CQ XXVII. 1 ff., 65 ff.
10. Notes on Latin Poets (Catullus, Horace, and Ovid), CR IV. 340 ff.
11. Remarks on the Vatican Glossary, JP XX. 432 ff.
12. Adversaria Orthographica, CR V. 293 ff.
13. Greek Nouns in Latin Poetry from Lucretius to Juvenal, JP XXXI. 236 ff.
14. Siparum and Supparus, CQ XIII. 149 ff.
15. The Latin for Ass, CQ XXIV. 11 ff.
16. Vester = tuus, CQ III. 244 ff.
17. Prosody and Method, CQ XXI. 1 ff.
18. Prosody and Method II: the metrical properties of GN, CQ XXII, 1 ff.
19. Praefanda, Hermes LXVI. 402 ff.
20. On Certain Corruptions in the Persae of Aeschylus, AJP IX. 317 ff.
21. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, JP XVI. 244 ff.
22. On the Aetia of Callimachus, CQ IV. 114 ff.
23. Dorotheus of Sidon, CQ II. 47 ff.
24. Dorotheus Once More, CQ XVII. 53 ff.
25. On the New Fragments of Menander, CQ II. 114
26. Sophoclea, JP XX. 25 ff.
27. The Oedipus Coloneus of Sophocles, AJP XIII. 139 ff.
28. The Michigan Astrological Papyrus, CP XXII. 257 ff.
29. Abstract of a paper read at the Cambridge Philosophical Society, “Dryden, Poem upon the death of his late highness, Oliver“

MORE:

Thanks to Kevin for pointing out that the OPVSCVLA seem to have been compiled by Eduard Fraenkel.

Housman, of course, wrote a letter recommending Fraenkel for the Corpus professorship at Oxford, and later defended his appointment in a letter to the Times:

Brilliant!

I’m always interested to hear from my colleagues, and I have a question for you (though I confess I already have an answer of my own). Have you any thoughts on the order of the declensions?

Oerberg’s Lingua Latina presents the cases in an order that makes all the songs and jingles students use, well, useless.

Nominative
Accusative
Genitive
Dative
Ablative

It’s an order that has a pedigree of its own, and that I’ve seen advocated here and there as an early pedagogical aid. I’ve always used the traditional order of the cases (I call it the American as opposed to the European order when I wean kids off of Oerberg), and I try to ingrain the uses of the cases by making up sentences in familiar vocabulary that use all five:

fēmina ducis mihi dōnum cum grātiā dedit.

This kind of sentence can be used to reinforce the order of the cases and some of the basic meanings of the cases, including the adjectival sense of the genitive and the adverbial sense of the ablative.

The tendency in Latin syntax is toward SOV (subject, object, verb), and while that oversimplifies the issue, simplification is helpful. We can build on that, and show the importance of the first and last positions, but we can also see a tendency to place indirect objects before direct objects, etc.

This is not to mention the importance of the genitive in recognizing noun stems/declension, and building and recognizing forms. Delaying the genitive can cause problems in recognizing stems, especially with the third declension.

So then what’s the pedagogical advantage of teaching the accusative second in the paradigm? You can still teach the nominative and accusative first, but provide students with a blank chart. They’ll see the blanks for the forms they haven’t learned yet, and will know that they’re coming. Still, in the end, they won’t have the culture shock of encountering a world of grammars, songs, and other resources that present the genitive, and not the accusative, second.

One of the principles that drove Housman’s approach to textual criticism was encapsulated in a quotation he had picked up from Moritz Haupt:

“The prime requisite of a good emendation,” said he, “is that it should start from the thought; it is only afterwards that other considerations, such as those of metre or possibilities, such as the interchange of letters, are taken into account.”

It’s sound advice, and I think many critics have judged it applied rightly in the case of Aeneid I. 343, but the result strikes me as the sort of banalization that good critics often find in ancient texts and root out. Here, it was never a part of the tradition, being inserted in 1722 by Pierre Daniel Huet.

Huet promised two conjectural emendations on Vergil that he was shocked had never been made, despite the mania for textual criticism that had led so many down false paths:

That’s a bold and cocky proclamation, and he should be able to wow us with his judgment, but he doesn’t.

Huet first discusses the introduction of Venus, specifically in line 317 (if you’re checking his text, his line numbers are not the same as ours). Venus, in disguise, runs up to Aeneas and Achates looking like a Spartan maiden, or sort of like the way Thracian Harpalyce tires out horses and outruns the winged Hebrus (a river in Thrace, naturally enough). Huet rejects this silly notion because the Hebrus is a gentle river, and any man can outrun a river’s flow. Besides, the Eurus (the East wind) makes better sense. Or so he says. But The Hebrus is by now a learned byword for Thrace in poetry, and Harpalyce is a Thracian girl. It doesn’t matter whether a river is gentle in its normal course. When it floods, it becomes deadly, as the Hebrus (now called the Maritsa) has done several times in the last decade. And according to John Henderson’s Telling Tales on Caesar, Pseudo-Plutarch credits Callimachus with the notion that the Hebrus was known to flood. Try outrunning a rushing river.

That emendation (which had been previously proposed by Johannes Rutgers, sapping the force of Huet’s pronouncement) has been debated, and appears in the ap. crit., but is not generally accepted. That’s not our main concern, but I include it because it shows the kind of thinking that lay behind Huet’s emendations, which are lazy and smug. Whatever reputation he had for his work as editor of the Delphin Classics or for his learned edition of Origen should not matter when he is wrong regarding Vergil.

(For what it’s worth, we read in Sandys that the Dauphin ‘for whose benefit … this series … was organised by Huet, … celebrated the completion of his education by limiting his future reading to the lists of births, deaths, and marriages in the Gazette de France.’)

What I want to look at is his next emendation, which has been accepted, changing agri at the close of line 343 into auri, and justifying the change by appeal to context:

I think this should require relatively little comment.

Venus is now letting Aeneas know the outlines of the story of Dido, namely that ‘her husband was Sychaeus, the wealthiest of the Phoenicians in terms of land,’ and so on. Huet conjectured ‘gold’ (auri) instead of ‘land’ (agri) because, as Vergil goes on to tell us, Pygmalion killed Sychaeus for his wealth, ‘an unknown weight of silver and gold’ (line 359). I hope that you see why I find this so objectionable. Land is status and land is wealth. To say that someone is the richest in terms of gold is no more specific and certainly no more poetic than to say that he was the richest in terms of land. Further, Huet justified the emendation by noting that only required the change of a single letter. But a good emendation, if it really follows the thought, can change more than a single letter, and a simple change is no argument in itself.

Returning to Housman, in nearly the same place he quoted Haupt again saying, ‘If the sense requires it, I am prepared to write Constantinopolitanus where the MSS. have the monosyllabic interjection o.’

Does anything in the sense here require gold, or is gold just a banalization? Is there any reason to preserve the reading of the manuscripts?

For one thing, we have no compelling reason to change the text (as Mynors unfortunately did). For another, that unknown weight of silver and gold was hidden in the earth (tellure), revealed to Dido by her husband’s shade. Sychaeus, the ‘richest in terms of land,’ was able to aid his widow’s escape by revealing a buried treasure. Now that’s more like it.

Patrick Callahan of Fordham offers an impressive map showing the origins of the Argonauts (and he has taken it a step further with color-coding):

As he notes, “Hasty work, but I wanted to confirm my suspicion that the catalogue was not wholly arbitrary in the order of heroes (they form a map of Hellas, going in geographic order).” That’s exciting stuff.

And I’ve just spent some time putting together a map of Aeneas’ journey from Troy to Laurentum. It still needs work, but it’s a start:

I really have high hopes for this this, and I would love to see some more.

I’m having my Latin IV students read Ovid in translation while we work through Livy in Latin to see a few different perspectives and the way that authors can draw from a range of sources to create markedly different works of literature. I was impressed with Ovid’s densely packed catalogue of mountains in book 2, as he recounted the destruction of Phaethon’s unfortunate ride, and had a go at plotting the mountains.

Ovid’s Catalogue of Mountains (Met. II. 217-26)

You’ll definitely want to view the larger size on Google Maps.

Here’s the Latin for good measure:

217. ardet Athos Taurusque Cilix et Tmolus et Oete
218. et tum sicca, prius creberrima fontibus, Ide
219. virgineusque Helicon et nondum Oeagrius Haemus:
220. ardet in inmensum geminatis ignibus Aetne
221. Parnasosque biceps et Eryx et Cynthus et Othrys
222. et tandem nivibus Rhodope caritura Mimasque
223. Dindymaque et Mycale natusque ad sacra Cithaeron.
224. nec prosunt Scythiae sua frigora: Caucasus ardet
225. Ossaque cum Pindo maiorque ambobus Olympus
226. aeriaeque Alpes et nubifer Appenninus.

I then updated an old map I had played around with, plotting the locations of the Pre-Roman settlements according to Vergil: Laurentum, Lavinium, Alba Longa, and finally Rome:

From Aeneas to Romulus

It takes some playing around with and getting used to, but I hope that more people take on projects like this. Perhaps we can organize ourselves and our students to attack certain tasks and post an easily accessible list. Any takers?

MORE:

I’ve just plotted one of my favorite mnemonic devices (and not just because I came up with it) for the Hills of Rome, previously discussed in these very pages:

The map gives you a serpentine visual to accompany the following phrase:

Ianicvlvm
AC Palatinvs
CapitolinvsQVE.

You begin with the Janiculan (the ‘plus 1′), and follow the line till you reach the Esquiline. Only three hills are named (arguably the three most significant for Roman history), while the others are abbreviated as Latin conjunctions. (AC = Aventine & Caelian, QVE = Quirinal, Viminal, & Esquiline.)

If you haven’t listened yet, you’ll want to check out professor Francese’s latest Latin Poetry Podcast on various lists in Latin hexameters, which includes the following by Ennius (which it would be good for students to memorize):

1. Iuno Vesta Minerva Ceres Diana Venus Mars
2. Mercurius Iovis Neptunus Volcanus Apollo

(My students and I had fun with these on Friday.)

Prof. Francese notes the odd prosody of the second line, but Ennius allows the names to fit by exploiting the juncture of -s and n-, pronouncing Iovis Neptunus as Io – vi – sNep – tu – nus.

Here it is again with macrons and syllable divisions:

1. Iū|nō | Ves|ta | Mi|ner|va | Ce|rēs | Dī|ā|na | Ve|nus | Mars
2. Mer|cu|ri|us | Io|vi|s Nep|tū|nus | Vol|cā|nu|s A|pol|lō

This syllabification necessitates a hephthemimeral caesura.

Prof. Francese also discusses a recipe in hexameter, a hexameter line composed of one word from each part of speech, and one that contains every letter of the Latin alphabet.

It was that one that reminded me of my own post on Latin hexameter pangrams, in which I composed my own:

1. heu Zama, quam Scipio celeber dux frangit inique!

MEA CVLPA:

A colleague and I were just corresponding about some of the metrical features of the two lines by Ennius on the gods, and I realized in the exchange that I was wrong about the second line, which I analyzed thus:

1. Mer|cu|ri|us | Io|vi|s Nep|tū|nus | Vol|cā|nu|s A|pol|lō

In reality, it was possible in early Latin to drop final -s, so that the line would actually be pronounced like this:

1. Mer|cu|ri|us | Io|vi’| Nep|tū|nus | Vol|cā|nu|s A|pol|lō

Notice that the final -s of Iovis is not pronounced, and so does not ‘make position.’

I had just carelessly assumed that Ennius was applying a rude, young form of the Latin hexameter, but I should have remembered that final -s could be elided in early Latin. You see it as an archaism in Lucretius, for example, but we’re all so used to reading Augustan poetry that we forget features like this. (These lines are sometimes actually printed with Iovi’ instead of Iovis.)

Edgar Sturtevant’s notes in his Pronunciation of Greek and Latin are very instructive on this final -s, as he includes what the Romans themselves had to say on the matter:

And then there’s William Lindsay’s Early Latin Verse. You can download a PDF (curiously not available on Google Books). He has lots to say on the subject, and treats S specifically from p. 126. He’s a lot of fun to read. He can sound at times like Housman when he finds scholarship not up to his standards.

Alisa Michelle Designs demonstrates bad numismatics

This ring by Alisa Michelle Designs is called the “Caesar Is Not Just A Salad Ring.”  The description of the ring on the website that was selling it (Hautelook.com) said, “Caesar was a powerful man that was named the dictator of Rome for life. This gold plated ring is detailed with an etched image of Caesar. This ring should be worn for strength and courage!”

Wow.  This image is of an ancient powerful man taken from a coin, but of course the image is that of Alexander the Great, not of Julius Caesar.  Alexander is depicted wearing the horn of Ammon, which no Roman could get away with in the Late Republic, not even Caesar (who, when he is depicted on coins in his lifetime, is usually depicted veiled or laureate).

Here is a very nice image of the type of coin being reproduced on the ring, the Alexander-as-Ammon type being a favorite of Lysimachos of Thrace.

The sad thing about this mix-up is that Alisa Michelle Designs could have used practically the same marketing slant if they had appropriately identified the image, since of course Alexander the Great had a pretty impressive track record himself, and his image could probably “be worn for strength and courage!” just as easily as that of Caesar.

The good folks at Walter de Gruyter just sent me information in the mail about free trial access to the Bibliotheca Teubneriana Latina (BTL) and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TTL). I have missed this kind of access dearly since moving from graduate school to high school teaching. Perhaps I shouldn’t have logged on, but it is powerful and fun.

BTL Online offers access to all of the Latin texts published by Teubner, from classical antiquity through to modern Latin.

TLL is, of course, the most scholarly and impressive dictionary in the world, and “the first to cover all the Latin texts from the classical period up to 600 A.D.”

So if you would like try, here’s the information:

www.BTLtrial.degruyter.com

It’s not clear how long you have access, but if you find it’s worth your while, you can always set aside some time to do research at a subscriber institution — unless of course you have an extra $1,637.00 to spend on an annual subscription.

You don’t suppose my high school library would purchase a subscription, do you? Hmm … anyway of ‘affiliating’ myself with your research institution, fair reader?