And another thing

Remember your Latin? Don't all speak at once!

Wednesday, 8th November 2006

An optimist, listing for me the reasons that the deplorable state of the world is not quite as bad as we think, cited, as one of them, ‘the Latin revival’.

Ovid is overrated too. Horace is a better poet than either and was once widely enjoyed among the ruling classes of the Anglosphere. There is some subtlety in the man. And I like his contemptuous Hoc genus omne, which I render as ‘all that crew’, a useful phrase in politics. He survives chiefly in a few such phrases, as in his Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus, though the English version, ‘even Homer nods’, is much more of a snapperoo, as Mark Twain would say. I am surprised that Horace still rates 105 entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, the most of a classical writer I think. Virgil gets 82, more than he deserves. By contrast, Cicero has a mere 20, though some of his sayings are more quoted than anyone else’s. O tempora, O mores! has, I believe, been used more often in the Commons (and still more in the Lords) than any other Latin tag. There is also his pithy and useful phrase Cui bono?, though that may have been a quote from some other Roman, now forgotten. His boast Civis Romanus sum has the honour of being quoted by St Paul more than a century after he uttered it. As for his observation ‘There’s nothing so silly but some philosopher has said it’, it is one of the most timeless digs to come down from antiquity and apter today than at any time in the past. But I note that Cicero used 15 words for what we say more sharply in ten.

We sweated over Caesar’s Gallic War. Few, I think, have ever re-read the text since their schooldays, though it holds useful lessons for any public figure (and not just generals) who writes memoirs. Caesar was a sly man, perhaps a bad man, who still raises hackles. I heard of an elderly don, normally taciturn to a fault, who burst into the senior common room at breakfast and announced, ‘I am coming to the conclusion that that man Julius Caesar is an abominable scoundrel!’ as though he were Putin, Chirac or George W. Bush. It is good to know that a potentate who died two millennia ago can still rouse passion in an academic breast. Caesar, like Cicero with his O Tempora!, also coined an immortal and useful ejaculation, ‘Et tu, Brute?’ But the general feeling today is that, being an educated fellow, Caesar spoke his dying words in Greek - kai su, teknon - ‘you too, kiddy?’ Not the same thing at all, and the tone might be ironic or even contemptuous. Which reminds me: I have just had my 78th birthday and I have not yet decided my famous last words. But that is a theme for another essay.