“I praise the dancer from Asia, the one who moves
From the tips of her fingernails with devious positions,
Not because she shows every passion or because she throws
Her delicate hands delicately this way and that,
But because she knows how to dance around a worn out stump
And doesn’t try to flee its aging wrinkles.
She tongues it, kneads it, throws her hands around it–
And if she throws her leg over me, she raises my staff back from hell.”
I am going to take a break and take a seat right here
And talk through how I will tell them things they believe, even the smarter ones.
“You seem wholly right and righteous to pray to the gods
But if you will only consider in what way
I risked so many things going where you ordered
How I took on sufferings away from this safety
And faced danger after danger to earn divine kleos,
Entering the enemy’s camp to learn clearly and well
To return unharmed to report back all the secrets
to the glorious Achaeans And the dear son of Atreus…”
Philokleon: A lot really.
First how Lamia was farting when they captured her
Or then how Kardopion and his mother…
Bd. Don’t give me myths! But stories about human concerns
The kinds of things we talk about the most, especially at home.
Ph. Oh, I really know stories for home too,
Like this: ‘once there was a mouse and a weasel…”
Bd. Oh, what a childish fool! As Theogenes said
To the shit-collector while he was mocking these things.
You’re about to talk about mice and weasels to men?
Ph. What kinds of stories should I tell?
Bd. Ennobling ones
Like how you went on a delegation with Androkles and Kleisthenes
Ph. But I never went on any delegation anywhere.
Except Paros, I guess, but I only got two obols for it.”
“I am going to say this thing in two parts: first, that from the earliest age a person cannot fully surrender to the contemplation of the truth, to seek out the way to live, and also to practice it when retired and then, in turn, that when someone has finished their work and is near the end of life, it is possible to do this with the best justice and to focus on different activities in the way of the Vestal Virgins who learn the second rites during their years devoted to their duties and then teach them.”
Hoc quod dico in duas dividam partes: primum, ut possit aliquis vel a prima aetate contemplationi veritatis totum se tradere, rationem vivendi quaerere atque exercere secreto; deinde, ut possit hoc aliquis emeritis iam stipendiis, profligatae aetatis, iure optimo facere et ad alios actus animum1 referre virginum Vestalium more, quae annis inter officia divisis discunt facere sacra et cum didicerunt docent.
Dedication of a New Vestal Virgin, Alessandro Marchesini
We know that the law is spiritual, but I am flesh sold under sin.
I don’t understand the things I do: for I don’t do what I want, but what I hate. But if I do what I don’t want to do, I’m acknowledging that the law is good. Then it’s no longer I who am responsible, but sin that dwells in me.
I know that the good does not dwell in me (in my flesh, that is), since I have the capacity to want the good, but I can’t actually do what is right. I don’t do the good I want to do; I do the evil I don’t want to do. And if I’m doing what I don’t want to be doing, it’s no longer I who am responsible, but sin that dwells in me.
With that, I arrive at this law: when I want to do good, evil is at hand. I rejoice in God’s law in my core, but I see another law in my limbs, one which wages war against the law of my mind, and I see myself captured by the law of sin which dwells in my limbs.
I am a miserable man! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our lord!
I am a slave to God’s law with my mind but a slave to the law of sin with my flesh.
“I am waiting for your letters on those events [in Rome]: what is Arrius saying and what is is opinion about being overthrown. Which consuls are being prepared—is it Pompey and Crassus as people claim or, as was just written to me, is it Servius Sulpicius with Gabinius. Are there new laws? Is there anything worthy of news at all? Or, who, since Nepos has left, is going to be nominated as Augur? (and this is the one thing I might be captured with by those people—look at how easy I am!)
Why do I ask these things when I want to put them aside and pursue philosophy with all my focus? This, I say, is what is in my mind. I wish I had pursued this from the start. But now when I have learned that everything which I thought was precious is empty, I am planning to dedicate myself to all the Muses.
Nevertheless, please do tell me in your reply about ?Tutius? and whether they have readied someone for his place and also what has become of Publius Clodius. Write me about everything, as you promised, at leisure. And also tell me on what day you think you will leave Rome so that I may tell you more certainly where I will be then? Please send me a letter right away on the things I have written you about. I am deeply awaiting your letter.”
De istis rebus exspecto tuas litteras, quid Arrius narret, quo animo se destitutum ferat, et qui consules parentur, utrum, ut populi sermo, Pompeius et Crassus, an, ut mihi scribitur, cum Gabinio Ser. Sulpicius, et num quae novae leges et num quid novi omnino, et, quoniam Nepos proficiscitur, cuinam auguratus deferatur, quo quidem uno ego ab istis capi possum—vide levitatem meam! sed quid ego haec, quae cupio deponere et toto animo atque omni cura ϕιλοσοϕεῖν? sic, inquam, in animo est; vellem ab initio, nunc vero, quoniam quae putavi esse praeclara expertus sum quam essent inania, cum omnibus Musis rationem habere cogito.
3Tu tamen de †Tutio†1 ad me rescribe certius et num quis in eius locum paretur, et quid de P. Clodio fiat, et omnia, quem ad modum polliceris, ἐπὶ σχολῆς scribe. et quo die Roma te exiturum putes velim ad me scribas, ut certiorem te faciam quibus in locis futurus sim, epistulamque statim des de iis rebus de quibus ad te scripsi. valde enim exspecto tuas litteras.
Homer, Iliad 7.97-100 [Menelaos speaking to the Achaeans]
“This is going to be a truly awful disgrace
unless some Greek goes against Hektor now.
But I wish you would all turn into water and dirt
Each of you sitting there, similarly feckless, fameless.”
“I hope you become water and dirt”. Water and earth are elements that don’t move by their nature, but other things move through them. So, he is rebuking them in this way for their paralysis.
Or, this means that they are made of these substances and he is praying they will dissolve back into them. So Xenophanes says: “we are all made of dirt and water / and everything from earth returns to earth again.”
“I say that the over-powering son of Kronos assented
On that day when the Argives took to the fast-faring ships
Bringing murder and death to the Trojans,
Showing clear and favorable signs by flashing lightning.
So let no one be compelled to return home,
Before each one has taken a Trojan wife to bed
As payback for the struggles and moans of Helen”
[To pay back the struggles and moans of Helen]: “The separatists say that the poet of the Iliad presents Helen as enduring it badly and groaning because of the trauma of rape by Alexander while the poet of the Odyssey presents her as willing.
This is because they do not understand that the account is not from her perspective, but that we need to understand that it is from outside her perspective, that she is the object. So, there is the interpretation that it is is necessary to take vengeance in exchange for how we have groaned and suffered about Helen.”
The debate here, then, seems to be whether Helen is the actor behind the ὁρμήματά τε στοναχάς τε or the reason the ὁρμήματά τε στοναχάς τε are experienced by others. What I find more interesting in this passage is the assertion that ancient scholars split the authorship of the epics based on whether Helen seems a willing participant or not. Also not to be overlooked here: Nestor is rallying the troops by telling them they won’t go home until each of them “lies alongside” (κατακοιμηθῆναι) a wife of a Trojan.
(Most of our information about the separatists comes from scholia attributed to Aristarchus. There are eleven direct mentions of the scholiasts in Erbse’s edition.)
Fresco from Pompeii, Helen Boards the Ship to Troy
Leonidas, the earth has covered her the well famed men
Who died there alongside you, king of wide-wayed Sparta,
After they met face to face the strength of the most bows
And swift-hooved horses and Persian men in war.
“But this woman will not believe it right that her father,
Called upon from below, be talked badly about
When he was the most well-famed before. She is in control of this now.”
“When he was at the beginning of adolescence and learned that his father lived in the country because of a terrible marriage…Although when he was recalled from Athens by Nero he was included among his group of friends and even honored with a quaestorship, he still did not remain in his good graces.
Because he took it badly when Nero suddenly left while he was giving a reading for the sake of holding a senate meeting but for no other real reason accept for chilling the reading, he did not later on restrain himself from either words or deeds against the prince, some of which are well-known.
For instance, once when he was in the public restrooms, he followed a rather clear and loud fart to empty his bowels with a half-line written by Nero as the great crowd of those around him fled: “you could believe that it thundered beneath the earth.”
Hic initio adolescentiae, cum ob infestum matrimonium patrem suum ruri agere longissime cognovisset*** Revocatus Athenis a Nerone cohortique amicorum additus atque etiam quaestura honoratus, non tamen permansit in gratia. Siquidem aegre ferens, recitante se subito ac nulla nisi refrigerandi sui causa indicto senatu recessisse, neque verbis adversus principem neque factis exstantibus post haec temperavit, adeo ut quondam in latrinis publicis clariore cum strepitu ventris emissi hemistichium Neronis magna consessorum fuga pronuntiarit: Sub terris tonuisse putes.
