“The first place in explaining someone’s heritage is usually given to the father’s line, but we still owe much to our mothers. So it is not right that we give some smaller honor to the fact that we were our mothers’ burdens than that we were our father’s seeds.”
Est quidem princeps in genere monstrando partis paternae praerogativa, sed tamen multum est,quod debemus et matribus. non enim a nobis aliquid exilius fas honorari quod pondera illarum quam quod istorum semina sumus.
Vergil, Aeneid 2.796-798
“And here, I was shocked to find an overwhelming
Flood of new companions, mothers and men,
A band assembled for exile, a pitiable crowd.”
Bartolomeo Scala, Praefatio in Collectiones Cosmianas, (8)
But how much more humanely and intelligently act those who, having from their earliest youth embraced the brevity of human life in mind and thought, do not, in an effort to excuse their own idleness and lack of care, ‘accuse nature because life is short and age is weak’, as Sallust says. Rather, they think about how they can best compensate for the disadvantages of that brevity with zeal, care, and diligence.
Both antiquity and our own age have seen such people, who became famous in various pursuits. For, as far as this goes, there is not only one way in which the mind can overcome the brevity of life and commend itself to immortality. Philosophers are praised, orators are praised, generals are praised – even the administrators and helmsmen of republics and the moderators of the public have stood forth in the highest glory.
So far is it from being the case that human life is not sufficient to attain singular praise that we have read and heard of many people who have excelled in several or even in all pursuits at the same time, and we have seen some of them become famous. Wasn’t Julius Caesar – the one whose arms all nations feared – the greatest orator and the most elegant writer? Didn’t Cicero – about whose learning and elegance enough could not be said – accomplish things as consul which no general, however outstanding, could have deliberated about more gravely or accomplished more industriously, and for which he could not undeservedly boast of, ‘Rome, fortunate to be born in my consulship’?
Quanto vero humanius prudentiusque hi faciunt qui iam tum ab ineunte aetate brevitatem humanae vitae mente ac cogitatione complexi, non quemadmodum ignaviae socordiaeque suae causas excusantes, naturam, quod aevi sit brevis, quod imbecilla aetas, ut ait Crispus,’ criminentur, cogitant; verum quo pacto magis brevitatis ipsius damna compensare possint, summo studio, cura et diligentia perscrutantur! Quales et prisca et nostra aetas multos vidit,qui alius alia in laude claruere. Non enim una dumtaxat res est in qua possit animus aevi brevitatem superans sese immortalitati commendare. Laudantur enim philosophi, laudantur oratores, laudantur imperatores. Rerum quoque publicarum administratores rectoresque et temperatores populorum summa semper in gloria extiterunt; tantumque abest ut singulis consequendis laudibus humana vita non sufficiat, ut vel in plerisque vel in omnibus simul complures legerimus et audiverimus, [et] viderimus ipsi nonnullos claruisse. C. quidem Caesar, is cuius arma gentes omnes timuerunt, nonne summus orator fuit scriptorque elegantissimus? M. vero Tullius, cuius de doctrina elegantiaque dici non potest satis, nonne consul ea gessit quae nullus quantumvis egregius imperator vel consultasse gravius vel gessisse gnavius potuisset, quibusque, ut solebat, possit neque immerito gloriari, ‘O fortunatam natam me consule Romam’*— quanquam exemplis nobis extraneis non est opus?
In honor of mother’s day, our separation from each other, and missed parents everywhere, a re-post inspired by Paul’s Mom. I keep these words in mind all the time now when I reconnected with friends: we all have stories, we all want to be heard. As Arsenius records the proverb, “Conversation [ or ‘reason’] is the doctor for suffering in the soul” (Λόγος ἰατρὸς τοῦ κατὰ ψυχὴν πάθους.) To listen to another–and hear them– is a sacred act.
“To a youth talking nonsense, he said “We have two ears, but one mouth so that we may hear more but speak less.”
A few years ago now I noticed the Paul Holdengraber‘s 7-word autobiography from brainpickings.org.: “Mother always said: Two Ears, One mouth.” The phrase bounced around in my head a bit–it has that aphoristic perfection of brevity and familiarity. So, I reached out to Paul over twitter and told him it sounded like something from a Greek philosopher like Heraclitus.
Proverbs have a special place in language and society cross-culturally–they strike a promise of insight that demands contemplation or explanation. They also have an air of authority and antiquity, even when they actually possess neither. And, unlike longer, less anonymized forms of language, they are repeated, borrowed, and stolen without end.
My late father was a great aphorist–perhaps missing him is part of why Paul’s tweet stuck with me. Most of my father’s words, however, were far more Archie Bunker than Aristotle. Those I can repeat were likely taken from his own father, a Master Sargent in WW2 who died a decade before I was born. The tendency to inherit and pass down proverbs is something I only really noticed when I had children and found myself ‘quoting’ (or becoming?) my father (“if you take care of your equipment it will take care of you”) or my grandmother (cribbing Oscar Wilde: “Only boring people get bored”).
So, when Paul thought it would be a gas if we actually translated his mother’s words into ancient Greek (and eventually Latin), I was ready. I got help from some great Classicists too. We came up with a few versions.
First, I went with classical rhetoric, a close antithesis: μήτηρ ἀεὶ ἔφη ὦτα μὲν δύο, ἕν δὲ στόμα. But our friend the Fantastic Festus argued that Heraclitus or Hesiod would not use use μὲν and δὲ so, so he suggested losing them for something like this:
μήτηρ ἀεὶ ἔφη ὦτα δύο, ἕν στόμα [“mother always used to say two ears, one mouth”]
This gave us Paul’s mother’s advice in seven Greek words and his mother’s advice. But this didn’t get us out of trouble. The critic, author and Classicist Daniel Mendelsohn suggested hexameters and from across the Atlantic the extraordinary Armand D’Angour obliged with a composition of his own:
At this point, I felt like I had entertained myself on a Saturday morning, involved my internet friends in a silly, though somewhat academic caper, and done a favor for a new friend to please the spirits of parents no longer with us. But the world wide web had a a plot twist I should have thought of.
Ancient Greek and Roman authors and scholars loved proverbs. Writers like Zenobius and Photius made collections and interpretations of them. The Byzantine Encyclopedia, the Suda, uses the word for proverb (in Greek paroimia) over 600 times and presents nearly as many distinct proverbs. (Many of which are wonderful.) And in the modern world, we have an entire academic field dedicated to the study of proverbial sayings: paroemiology. Let me tell you, we could have used en expert last fall.
While we were playing around with translations, one of our ‘players’, the grand Gerrit Kloss, let us know we were, to use a proverbial saying, reinventing the wheel. Zeno, the Cynic philosopher, was credited with this saying over two thousand years ago:
“These things seem quite entertaining to me, but they are not true. I have also heard another reason for the bit, much more credible. I am happy with what is said by those who generally agree in Greece, who believe that the goddess is Hera and the work was made by Dionysus. For Dionysus went into Syria on the road that goes to Ethiopia. There are many signs left by Dionysus in the Shrine, among them are foreign clothing and Indian stones and Elephant horns which Dionysus brought from Ethiopia. There are also two really big phalluses that stand up at the entrance gates. This epigram has been inscribed upon them. ‘Dionysus dedicated these phalluses to Hera, his stepmother.’
This remains enough for me, but I will tell you of another oddity in the temple of Dionysus. The Greeks bear phalloi in honor of Dionysus, and they carry something in front of it, a little man carved out of wood which has huge genitals. These are called puppets. There is also one of these in the temple. On the right side of the temple, there is a small bronze man that has giant genitals.”
According to the Greek Anthology there was a temple to Apollônis, the mother of Attalos and Eumenes, at Cyzicos. The temple had at least nineteen epigrams inscribed on columns with accompanying relief images. All of the epigrams have mothers from myth and poetry as their subjects. The Eighth Epigram is on Odysseus’ mother Antikleia.
On the eighth tablet is the underworld visit of Odysseus. He addressed is own mother and asked her for news of his home (Greek Anthology 3.8)
“Wise-minded mother of Odysseus, Antikleia
You didn’t welcome your son home to Ithaka while alive.
Instead, he is shocked when his glance falls upon his sweet mother
Now wandering along the banks of Akheron.”
Of course, this scene plays upon book 11 of the Odyssey doubly: the image recalls Odysseus describing his mother in the Odyssey and it also plays upon the Odyssey’s catalogue of heroic mothers motif, which it in turn shares with the fragmentary Hesiodic Catalogue Of Women.
11.84-89
“Then came the spirit of my mother who had passed away,
The daughter of great-hearted Autolykos, Antikleia
Whom I left alive when I went to sacred Troy.
When I saw her I cried and pitied her in my heart,
But I could not allow her to come forward to touch
The blood before I had learned from Teiresias.”
Attalos, Eumenes and Apollônis? These were members of the Attalid clan who ruled from Pergamon during the Hellenistic period (after 241 BCE). Attalus I married Apollônis who was from Cyzicos.
Plutarch’s prepared guidelines for choosing what to watch on Netflix.
Plutarch, Pericles 1.1
“When Caesar saw that many wealthy foreigners in Rome were carrying around and caring for puppies and monkey babies, he asked whether or not their wives bore children—he was warning in a masterly way that they were wasting our innate love and affection on beasts when it is owed to human beings.
Therefore, when our soul naturally possesses a certain love of learning and love of observation, isn’t it logical to rebuke people who fail to use it for anything worthy of hearing or seeing, people who neglect what is noble or useful?
Perhaps it is necessary for our perception—which apprehends the things it meets through the experience of their force—to examine everything which appears for whether it is useful or not. But each person, if he wishes to use his mind, can naturally turn himself away and change most easily to gaze upon something which seems right—with the result that it is necessary to pursue what is best, not only to look at it, but to be enriched by doing so.”
“But you wouldn’t mix things up like those debate-me guys who talk about a principle and its results at the same time if you really want to discover something real. These guys probably have not one single understanding or concern for the truth.
They’re just good enough to please themselves with their ‘wisdom’, even though they’re mixing everything up.”
“Bigness seems to me not only never willing to be big and small at the same time, but the bigness in us is never eager to accept smallness nor to be surpassed, but it does two things: it flees or shrinks whenever the opposite—smallness—is present or, once it has approached, it perishes.”
Bartolomeo Scala, Praefatio in Collectiones Cosmianas, (5)
Passing over the rest, what do you think is the fruit of memory in old age, or what utility in the recollection of the things you have done in life? Once all of these things are compared to the things that happen in daily life, they understand that one thing is to be chosen and another to be escaped much more readily than do those who, uncultured and inexperienced, make their own judgments of the matter. For we were not born to grasp wisdom with all of its light immediately – it is furnished by our zeal, our diligence, and not in the least by the length of our life.
They say that Democritus was an exceptionally wise man, since after he had reached the age of one hundred and seven (for he lived that many years) understood that he would die, and lamented that he was leaving life just at the moment when he had begun to be wise. Critias, in Plato’s Timaeus says that Solon of Athens was once chastised and mocked by an Egyptian priest because the Greeks were always children, and never had an old man among them. That is to say, their memory was always of the most recent stuff, and there was never any old gray-haired wisdom among them. Is it not right then for people to complain and lay fault at their nature, when they are deprived of such great advantages and profits of life at the very time when they are able and indeed ought to enjoy them the most? What else could be the reason, except that nature feels spite for the human race, and offers herself up as the most unjust author of all of its misfortunes?
Ut enim cetera omittam, quis, putas, est senilis memoriae fructus, quaeve rerum in vita gestarum recordationis utilitas, quibus cum his quae in dies accidunt collatis, hoc quidem deligendum, illud vero fugiendum esse multo hercle noverunt facilius quam qui rudes adhuc rerum atque inexperti iudicant? Neque enim ita nati sumus ut statim cum luce ipsa sapientiam nanciscamur; sed ea studio ac diligentia nostra nee minus vitae diuturnitate comparatur. Democritum virum egregie sapientem ferunt, cum expletis septem supra centum (tot enim vixit) annis, mori se intelligeret, dolere dixisse quod tunc egrederetur e vita quando sapere incepisset.” Et Critias in Timeo Platonis refert Atheniensem Solonem aliquando et reprehensum et irrisum ab Aegyptio sacerdote extitisse, quod pueri semper essent Graeci, neque quisquam esset apud illos senex. Novella enim semper esset memoria, neque ulla apud eos unquam cana sapientia. Cur igitur non iure querantur homines naturamque accusent suam, qui tot tantisque utilitatibus vitaeque commodis tunc maxime morte priventur quando his uti commo- dissime potuerunt et iure debuerunt? Quid enim aliud videtur causae’^ fuisse nisi invidisse naturam generi hominum fortunarumque ipsius inquis- simam se auctorem praebuisse?
