When I was an undergraduate reading Petronius’ Satyricon, I remember being struck by the word cinaedus (the Latinized form of the Greek kinaidos) in the phrase Intrat cinaedus (Satyricon 28).
My professor at the time gleefully shared his preferred translation:
“In walked a fucker…”
The word is somewhat difficult to translate because we have no clear English equivalent, and as delightful as the simple “fucker” may sound, it is not perfect. Most dictionaries try to shroud the meaning somewhat with a veil of circumlocution. (Liddell and Scott give us “a lewd fellow,” and translate kinaidia as “lust.”) This memory occurred to me this afternoon, so I decided to spend a bit of time with that most learned of tracts, the Suda, and see what sort of clarification I could find.
“Kraipalê: The pounding that comes from drinking too much wine. We also have the participle “carousing” which is when someone acts poorly because of drinking, or just being drunk. It derives from the word “head” (kara) and “pound” (pallein). Or, it could also come from screwing up (sphallesthai) timely matters (kairiôn)
Kraipalôdês: “Prone to drunkenness”: The ancients knew well the weaknesses of the spirit, weather it was a person who was prone to excessive drinking or a love-seeker who has his brain in his genitals.”
Nikokharês
“Tomorrow we will boil acorns instead of cabbage
To treat our hangover.”
εἰσαύριον .. ἀντὶ ῥαφάνων ἑψήσομεν
βαλάνιον, ἵνα νῷν ἐξάγῃ τὴν κραιπάλην.
Alexis, fr. 390
“If only we got hangovers before we drank
Then no one would ever drink more
Than is good for them. But now, because
We do not expect to escape drinking’s penalty,
We too eagerly drink unmixed wines”
“He bore the deaths of his family more readily than their disgraces. For, although he was not wholly broken by the deaths of Gaius and Lucius, he pronounced his judgment on his daughter Julia by having a letter read to the senate by a quaestor, and he long abstained from human interaction from shame, while even contemplating her execution. Indeed, at that same time, he heard that a freedwoman named Phoebe, one of Julia’s associates in debauchery, had ended her life by hanging herself, Augustus said that he wish he had been Phoebe’s father rather than Julia’s.”
Aliquanto autem patientius mortem quam dedecora suorum tulit. Nam C. Lucique casu non adeo fractus, de filia absens ac libello per quaestorem recitato notum senatui fecit abstinuitque congressu hominum diu prae pudore, etiam de necanda deliberavit. Certe cum sub idem tempus una ex consciis liberta Phoebe suspendio vitam finisset, maluisse se ait Phoebes patrem fuisse.
“At that same time, when Augustus looked upon the sarcophagus and body of Alexander the Great which had been removed from its tomb, and had honored it by placing upon it a golden crown and a sprinkling of flowers, he was asked whether he would like to see the tomb of the Ptolemies, he said that he wanted to see a king, not some corpses.”
Per idem tempus conditorium et corpus Magni Alexandri, cum prolatum e penetrali subiecisset oculis, corona aurea imposita ac floribus aspersis veneratus est, consultusque, num et Ptolemaeum inspicere vellet, regem se voluisse ait videre, non mortuos.
“I am at a disadvantage in this struggle against Aeschines in many ways, but two of them, Athenian men, are especially bad. First, I do not compete for equal stakes. For it is not the same for me now to lose your goodwill and for him not to win the charge. But for me—I do not wish to say anything harsh at the beginning of the speech, but he prosecutes me from a position of strength.* My second problem, which is shared by all men by nature, is that it is sweet to hear people slandering and accusing but annoying to hear praise. Hence, the one of those things which brings pleasure is his, and the annoying one is mine. Even if I were use that well–and speak about the things I have done–I would not seem to be able to evade the accusations, not even for those things for which I think I should be honored. If I proceed to the acts I performed politically, I will be compelled to speak about myself often; Therefore, I will try to do this in as limited a fashion as possible. Whatever this matter forces me to do, this man is rightfully to blame for it, since he initiated this kind of a case.”
Demosthenes, Greek orator. Marble head, Roman copy of a bronze statue by Polyeuctes (1st half 3 rd BCE).
*The Scholion to this passage offers several other interpretations to Aeschines’ advantage beyond Demosthenes’ own:
“This man accuses me from a position of strength”: Either he means that he has great wealth because Philip and Alexander gave it to him and he is not at all afraid about losing, since he is well-able to pay the considerable penalty. Or he means that it is not the same for someone accusing from a position of strength to not win (since he could have stayed out of the conflict) as it is for him to defend himself by necessity. For “it is not possible for me to be silent.” Some have interpreted “ek periousias” as simply “ek perritou”[superfluously]. So, he means “it is excessive to charge and accuse me in vain.”
While editing a friend’s book review, I was reminded of a charming passage from Athenaeus:
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 1.22
“You know that somewhere Timo the Philasian calls the Museum a birdcage as he mocks the scholars who are supported there because they were fed like the priciest birds in a big cage:
Many are fed in many-peopled Egypt,
The paper-pushers closed up waging endless war
in the bird-cage of the Muses.
“It would not be sweet for me to write about the relative age of Homer and Hesiod, even though I have worked on the problem as closely as possible. This is because I am familiar with the fault-finding character of others and not the least of those who dominate the study of epic poetry in my time.”
“And, you, my grammarians who do not inquire into these sorts of things, I quote from Herodicus the Babylonian:
Flee, Aristarcheans, over the wide back of the sea
Flee Greece, men more frightened than the brown deer,
Corner-buzzers, monosyllabists, men who care about Sphin and sphoin and whether its min or nin*.
This is what I would have for you storm-drowned men:
But may Greece and God-born Babylon always wait for Herodicus.
And, to add another, the words of the comic poet Anaxandrides:
…It brings pleasure
Whenever someone discovers some new notion,
To share it with everyone. But those who at first
Keep it to themselves have no judge for their skill
And are later despised. For it is right to offer the mob
Everything anyone might think is brand-new.
The majority of them departed at these words and slowly the party disbanded.”
“It would be annoying to list all the people who spent their lives pursuing board games, ball games, or sunbathing. Men whose pleasures are so busy are not at leisure. For example, no one will be surprised that those occupied by useless literary studies work strenuously—and there is great band of these in Rome now too. This sickness used to just afflict the Greeks, to discover the number of oars Odysseus possessed, whether the Iliad was written before theOdyssey, whether the poems belong to the same author, and other matters like this which, if you keep them to yourself, cannot please your private mind; but if you publish them, you seem less learned than annoying.”
Persequi singulos longum est, quorum aut latrunculi aut pila aut excoquendi in sole corporis cura consumpsere vitam. Non sunt otiosi, quorum voluptates multum negotii habent. Nam de illis nemo dubitabit, quin operose nihil agant, qui litterarum inutilium studiis detinentur, quae iam apud Romanos quoque magna manus est. Graecorum iste morbus fuit quaerere, quem numerum Ulixes remigum habuisset, prior scripta esset Ilias an Odyssia, praeterea an eiusdem essent auctoris, alia deinceps huius notae, quae sive contineas, nihil tacitam conscientiam iuvant sive proferas, non doctior videaris sed molestior.
And self loathing eventually takes over.
Palladas of Alexandria, Greek Anthology 9.169
“The wrath of Achilles has become for me, as a grammarian, the cause of my destructive poverty. I wish that that wrath would have killed me along with the Danaans, before the bitter poverty of scholarship put me to death. But instead, so that Agamemnon could take Briseis and Paris make off with Helen, I have become a beggar.”
“Since it is the imitation of action, it is performed by those who act, by those types of people who necessarily [do those things] due to character and thought. For we believe that actions are the sorts of things which have two causes, thought and character, and that through these things everyone either succeeds or fails. And thus the story [or plot, muthos] is imitation of an action, for I claim that myth is a connection of deeds and that “characters” are those reasons that certain people do certain things, and that thought is that in which they display in talking or when they communicate an opinion.”
Mark Turner. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford: 1996.
Turner 1996, 133: The stories minds tell (the ways in which we interpret the world) are based on roles and character, “formed by backward inference from such a role, according to the folk theory of “the Nature of Things,” otherwise known as “Being Leads to Doing.” In this folk theory, glass shatters because it is brittle and fragile. Water pours because it is liquid. Someone forgives because she is forgiving. A dog guards the house because it is watchful. A fool acts like a fool because he is foolish. In general, doing follows from being; something behaves in a certain way because its being leads it to behave in that way…
Character is a pattern of connections we expect to operate across stories about a particular individual with that character or across stories about a group of individual with that character. People of a particular character are expected to inhabit similar roles in different stories…
[134] A role in one story is not isolated but connects to the same role in other stories…Focus, viewpoint, role and character in narrative imagining give us ways of constructing our own meaning, which is to say, ways of understanding who we are, what it means to be us, to have a particular life. The inability to locate one’s own focus, viewpoint, role, and character with respect to conventional stories of leading a life is thought to be pathological and deeply distressing. It is a principal reason for recommending psychotherapy to people not obviously insane.”
[136] “We do not live in a single narrative mental space, but rather dynamically and variably across over very many…realism can indicate that a specific life is never contained within a single story space or even a collection of such spaces whose corresponding generic space tells us everything we want to know. The real is in the blend.”
Homer,Odyssey: Epithets of Odysseus
“Sing to me, Muse, of the man of many ways…”
1.1 ῎Ανδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
“Send many-minded Odysseus to his own home”
1.83 νοστῆσαι ᾿Οδυσῆα πολύφρονα ὅνδε δόμονδε,
“Ah, you are Odysseus of many-ways….
10.330 ἦ σύ γ’ ᾿Οδυσσεύς ἐσσι πολύτροπος, ὅν τέ μοι αἰεὶ
“[Odysseus] will know how to return, since he is a man of many-devices”
1.205 φράσσεται ὥς κε νέηται, ἐπεὶ πολυμήχανός ἐστιν.
“Divine-raced, son of Laertes, many-deviced Odysseus
5.203 “διογενὲς Λαερτιάδη, πολυμήχαν’ ᾿Οδυσσεῦ,
“If very-clever Odysseus were in these rooms again…”
4.763 εἴ ποτέ τοι πολύμητις ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ᾿Οδυσσεὺς
“So she spoke, and much-enduring, shining Odysseus shivered”
5.171 ὣς φάτο, ῥίγησεν δὲ πολύτλας δῖος ᾿Οδυσσεύς,
“So she spoke, and much-enduring, shining Odysseus laughed”
13.250 ὣς φάτο, γήθησεν δὲ πολύτλας δῖος ᾿Οδυσσεὺς
“And you, many-pained old man, since a god brought you my way…”
14.386 καὶ σύ, γέρον πολυπενθές, ἐπεί σέ μοι ἤγαγε δαίμων,
“They would not conquer me. I am truly much-enduring”
18.319 οὔ τί με νικήσουσι· πολυτλήμων δὲ μάλ’ εἰμί.”
“…I am a man of many-sorrows…”
19.118 μνησαμένῳ· μάλα δ’ εἰμὶ πολύστονος· οὐδέ τί με χρὴ
“Antisthenes in interpreting this asks “why, then, is wretched Odysseus called polytropos? Really, this is the way to mark him out as wise. Isn’t it true that his manner never indicates his character, but that instead it signals his use of speech? The man who has a character difficult to penetrate is well-turned. These sorts of inventions of words are tropes/ways/manners”
John Peradotto. Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990: 44
“Events in a narrative are determined by its end. In the telling, however, a narrative gives us the illusion of being motivated, as a historical account appears to be motivated, from the opposite direction, from beginning to end…It is in effect a process of retroactive necessity in composition generating in performance, the illusion of progressive contingency.”
A few months back I posted Athenaeaus’ record of the epitaphs of Sardanapalos, the Greek name for Ashurbanipal. The King of Ninevah reigned in the 7th century BCE and was famed for the library he collected in his city (no largely held in the British Museum). The Greek poetic fragments mark him for his decadence and pleasure. The Suda seem to imply he had a bit of swagger too.
S.v. Sardanapolous
“Kallisthenes claims in the second book of his Persian Histories that there were two men named Sardapapalos [Assurbanipal], one was active and well-born, but the other was a dandy. In Ninevah, his memorial bears the inscription
“The son of Anakundaraxes built Tarsos and Ankhialê in a single day.
Eat, drink, screw because other things are not worthy of this.”
That is, [worthy of] a snap of his fingers. For when he set up the statue in his memory it was made with its hands over its head, as if it were snapping its fingers. The same thing is inscribed in Ankhialê and Tarsos, which is called Zephurion now.
There is also a proverb: “May you grow older than Tithonos, wealthier than Kinyras, and more industrious than Sardanopalos. Then you can prove the proverb:Old men are children twice.” This is used for the very old, since Tithonos avoided aging with a prayer and became a cicada. Kinyras was a descendent of king Pharakes of the Cypriots and he was distinguished for his wealth. And Sardanapalos, king of the Assyrians, destroyed his own kingdom while he lived in luxury and immoderation. He was the son of Anakyndarakes, the king of Ninevah which falls within Persian lands. The story is that he founded Tarsos and Ankhilaê in a single day. And that, shamefully, he was too proud to be seen by his servants unless they were girls or eunuchs. He rotted himself with wine and was found after he died indoors.”
“Know well that you are mortal: fill your heart
By delighting in the feasts: nothing is useful to you when you’re dead.
I am ash, though I ruled great Ninevah as king.
I keep whatever I ate, the insults I made, and the joy
I took from sex. My wealth and many blessings are gone.
[This is wise advice for life: I will never forget it.
Let anyone who wants to accumulate limitless gold.]
“Next is Zephurion which has the same name as a place near Kalydnos. Nearby, not far from the sea, is Ankhialê, founded by Sardanapallos according to Aristoboulos. There he claims is a monument of Sardanapallos, a stone sculpture that shows the fingers of his right hand as if they are snapping. Beneath is an epigraph in Assyrian letters reading: “Sardanapallos the son of Anakundaraxes / founded Ankhialê and Tarsos in a single day. / Eat. Drink. Play, because no other things are worthy of this”, indicating the snapping fingers.
Khoirilos also mentions these things–and the following verses are known everywhere. “Everything I have eaten, the insults I have made, and the delights I have taken in love are mine. These numerous blessings I leave behind.”
λάθε βιώσας· “Live in secret”: This is said customarily in a proverb but enacted by deed. “Live in secret so that I might expect no one living or deed to understand what I say”
“Iron mind: This means an unpersuadable spirit. There is also the saying “Atlas’ iron shoulders.” The fact is that a Samian man named Glaukos first developed the welding of iron. From this we have the proverb “The art of Glaukos” which is applied to things done easily.”
“Simôn, Simônos: a proper name. There is also the proverb “more rapacious than Simon”. This comes from Aristophanes, whenever men saw Simon, they immediately became wolves. He was a sophist who stole public property.”
Yesterday I quoted a bit from Plutarch’s essay On Exile and received a bit of feedback about the fact that Plutarch was not the first to claim that we are all citizens of the same country. He wasn’t even the first to assign the remark to Socrates! As far as I can tell, there is no clear articulation of this idea in Plato or Xenophon. The first person to have said such a thing was Diogenes the Cynic.
Diogenes Laertius, 6.63, on Diogenes the Cynic (4th Century BCE)
“When asked where he was from, he said “I am a world-citizen.”
ἐρωτηθεὶς πόθεν εἴη, “κοσμοπολίτης,” ἔφη.
“Diogenes” by Jules Bastien-Lepage
Cicero is one of the earliest sources attributing the sentiment to Socrates.
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.108
“Socrates, when he was asked what state was his, used to say “the world”. For he judged himself an inhabitant and citizen of the whole world.”
Socrates cum rogaretur, cujatem se esse diceret, Mundanum, inquit. Totius enim mundi se incolam et civem arbitrabatur.”
Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius articulate different versions of what becomes a central part of Stoic philosophy.
Seneca, De vita beata, 20.5
“I know that my country is the world and that the gods are guardians, those judges of my deeds and words above and beyond me.”
Patriam meam esse mundum sciam et praesides deos, hos supra circaque me stare factorum dictorumque censores.
Seneca, De Otio, 4.1
“We encounter two republics with our mind–one is great and truly public, by which gods and men are contained and in which we may not gaze upon this corner or that one, but we measure the boundaries of our state with the sun; the other we enter by the fact of being born. This will be the state of Athens or Carthage or of any other city at all. It does not extend to all people but to certain ones. Some people serve the good of both republics at the same time, the greater and the lesser, some serve only the lesser or only the greater.”
Duas res publicas animo complectamur, alteram magnam et vere publicam, qua dii atque homines continentur, in qua non ad hunc angulum respicimus aut ad illum, sed terminos civitatis nostrae cum sole metimur; alteram, cui nos adscripsit condicio nascendi. Haec aut Atheniensium erit aut Carthaginiensium,aut alterius alicuius urbis, quae non ad omnis pertineat homines sed ad certos. Quidam eodem tempore utrique rei publicae dant operam, maiori minorique, quidam tantum minori, quidam tantum maiori.
Epictetus, Dissertationes 1.9.1
“If what is said about the kinship of humans and god by the philosopher is true, what is left for all people other than that advice of Socrates never to say when someone asks where you are from that you are Athenian or Corinthian but that you are a citizen of the world?”
“Nothing is as productive of an expansive mind than to consider truly and as completely as possibly everything you encounter in life and always to look at things so that you realize what the nature of the universe is, what each thing is used for, and what worth it has in relation to the whole, and how it relates to man, who is a citizen of the highest city, within which the rest of the cities are like houses. Think: what is it, and where is it from, and how long has it endured which now makes this impact on me.
And: what are the demands of virtue from me because of it? Gentleness, bravery, fidelity, simplicity, self-sufficiency and others. This is why at every opportunity we must say that this comes from god, this is according to the serendipity and spinning of allotment and this is from the same chance, while this is from the same character and family in common, even when one is ignore about what is his because of nature. But I am not ignorant. This is why I treat each person according to the natural law of the commonwealth, kindly and justly, just as at the same time, when dealing with indifferent things, I try to assign them their true value.”
“If the power of thought is common then our reason is also shared, through which we are rational beings. If this is true, then we also share the assignment of what to do or not to do according to reason. If that is true, than law is shared. If this is the case, we are fellow citizens. And if that is true, we shared some state. If we share a state, the world resembles a city. For what other state could claim to contain the whole human race?…”
