“There are some people who get puffed up if they manage to talk about something tolerably after they have themselves selected a strange and impossible subject. Men have also grown old claiming that it is impossible to say or disprove a lie or to speak two ways about the same matters. Others claim that courage, wisdom, and justice are the same thing, that we have none of these by nature, and that there is a single knowledge about them all. Others waste their time in conflicts which bring no benefit, which can only create more trouble for those who approach them.
I, if I saw that this superfluity had only just emerged in speeches and that these men were eager for honor in the novelty of what they discover, I would not be a surprised at them. But, now, who is such a late-learner that he does not know Protagoras and the sophists who were active at his time and that they left to us these types of things and speeches even more excessively composed than these? How could anyone overcome Gorgias who dared to say that nothing exists at all or Zeno who tried to demonstrate that the same things are possible and impossible or even Melissos who—although some things are countless in number—tried to provide a proof that everything is one!”
“Kosmos for a city is a good-population; for a body it is beauty; for a soul, wisdom. For a deed, excellence; and for a word, truth. The opposition of these things would be akosmia. It is right, on the one hand, to honor a man and a woman and a deed and a city and a deed worthy of praise with praise and to lay reproach on the unworthy. For it is equally mistaken and ignorant to rebuke the praiseworthy and praise things worthy of rebuke.
It is thus necessary for the same man to speak truly and refute those who reproach Helen, a woman about whom the belief from what the poets say and the fame of her name are univocal and single-minded, that memory of sufferings. I want, by giving some reckoning in speech, to relieve her of being badly spoken, and, once I demonstrate and show that those who reproach her are liars, to protect the truth from ignorance”
“Lampros the musician was a water-drinker. Phrynichus says of him: sea-weed lamented for Lampros, a water-drinker who died in it, whiny uber-sophist, a Muse mortician, the Nightingale’s nightmare, and a hymn to Hades”
“Ponticus, do you think that it’s no big deal
That you never fuck but just use your left hand
As a whore, a friendly crew to serve your desire?
Believe me: it’s a crime and one large enough
That you can barely understand it with your mind.
Horatius, I guess, fucked once to make a trio
Mars did it once with blushing Ilia to make two.
The whole world would have collapsed if either jerked off
And entrusted foul delights to their own hands.
Just think, the nature of the universe says to you:
Ponticus, what you spend on your fingers is a person too.”
Pontice, quod numquam futuis, sed paelice laeva
uteris et Veneri servit amica manus,
hoc nihil esse putas? scelus est, mihi crede, sed ingens,
quantum vix animo concipis ipse tuo.
nempe semel futuit, generaret Horatius ut tres;
Mars semel, ut geminos Ilia casta daret.
omnia perdiderat, si masturbatus uterque
mandasset manibus gaudia foeda suis.
ipsam crede tibi naturam dicere rerum:
istud quod digitis, Pontice, perdis, homo est.
Suetonius, Lives of Illustrious Men, On Grammarians 15
“Lenaeus, who was a freedman of Pompey the Great and his comrade in nearly every expedition, made a living with a school following the death of Pompey and his sons. He taught in Carinae near Tellus where the home of Pompey’s family had been. He remained so committed to the love of his patron that, in response to the fact that Sallust wrote that Pompey had “an honest man’s face but a rogue’s heart,” he attacked Sallust with the harshest satires, as a “victim of vice, a foodie, a cheap bastard, and a glutton, a beast for his life and writings, an uneducated thief of Cato’s ancient words.”
It is also reported that when he was still a boy, he returned to his home-country after breaking his chains, but once he received a liberal education, he returned this as a payment to his master, but was fully freed thanks to his innate ability and his education.”
Lenaeus, Magni Pompei libertus et paene omnium expeditionum comes, defuncto eo filiisque eius schola se sustentavit; docuitque in Carinis ad Telluris, in qua regione Pompeiorum domus fuerat, ac tanto amore erga patroni memoriam exstitit, ut Sallustium historicum, quod eum oris probi, animo inverecundo scripsisset, acerbissima satura laceraverit, lastaurum et lurconem et nebulonem popinonemque appellans, et vita scriptisque monstrosum, praeterea priscorum Catonis verborum ineruditissimum furem. Traditur autem puer adhuc catenis subreptis, refugisse in patriam, perceptisque liberalibus disciplinis, pretium suum domino rettulisse, verum ob ingenium atque doctrinam gratis manumissus.
Getting to Hell is supposed to be easy. Yet, if one were to take a survey of popular culture, it seems rather a difficult task. A not insignificant part of this difficulty is the necessity of knowing Latin to get there.
At the beginning of Christopher Marlowe’s Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, we find Faustus in his study surfeited with the sorts of learning available to mere humans. Opening up books of theology, medicine, and law, he casts them aside and, having first claimed that Aristotle’s Analytics had ravished him, changes tack and says that it is magic and necromancy which occupy his soul.
Perhaps we should be more inclined to think that his famous bargain had already been struck in order to outfit him with the kind of heroic polymathy which could encompass three such disparate and apparently endless subjects. But Faustus is tired of the merely human, and decided to consult with Cornelius and Valdes, two dabblers in the demonic, about the procedure for summoning spirits from Hell. These two characters equip him with the requisite conjuring knowledge, but it is surprising that someone of such apparently limitless erudition would require help to be initiated into this art. Nevertheless, they provide him with the necessary incantatory formula, and later than night, Faustus expends a fair amount of breath on his Latin invocation of Mephistopheles:
Sint mihi dei Acherontis propitii! Valeat numen triplex Jehovoe! Ignei, aerii, aquatani spiritus, salvete! Orientis princeps Belzebub, inferni ardentis monarcha, et Demogorgon, propitiamus vos, ut appareat et surgat Mephistophilis, quod tumeraris: per Jehovam, Gehennam, et consecratam aquam quam nunc spargo, signumque crucis quod nunc facio, et per vota nostra, ipse nunc surgat nobis dicatus Mephistophilis!
We, in our own state of enlightenment, know that the Demogorgon invoked by Faustus is an entirely fictive deity, conjured into existence by a scribal error for demiourgon. Perhaps Faustus should not have abandoned book learning so early. But to return to the point: Mephistopheles appears after this lengthy invocation, but informs Faustus that the incantation was merely incidental to his appearance – the real trick being to abjure God and the Trinity:
MEPHIST. That was the cause, but yet per accidens;
For, when we hear one rack the name of God,
Abjure the Scriptures and his Saviour Christ,
We fly, in hope to get his glorious soul;
Nor will we come, unless he use such means
Whereby he is in danger to be damn’d.
Therefore the shortest cut for conjuring
Is stoutly to abjure the Trinity,
And pray devoutly to the prince of hell.
There is something slightly suspicious in this claim, given that Faustus first needed to seek out two known conjurers to learn the incantation, and received no visit from Mephistopheles earlier despite making clear his intentions to indulge in necromantic art at the potential price of his soul. Later, when Faustus is waiting for the return of Mephistopheles, he bids him to come, but Mephistopheles only arrives after Faustus delivers the command in Latin:
FAUSTUS. Of wealth!
Why, the signiory of Embden shall be mine.
When Mephistopheles shall stand by me,
What god can hurt thee, Faustus? thou art safe
Cast no more doubts.—Come, Mephistopheles,
And bring glad tidings from great Lucifer;—
Is’t not midnight?—come, Mephistopheles,
Veni, veni, Mephistophile!
Enter MEPHISTOPHELES.
Given that he conversed with Faustus earlier in English, the problem cannot simply be chalked up to a linguistic barrier. Devils, demons, and spirits appear to respond far more readily to Latin invocations. Though Mephistopheles claimed that abjuring God would suffice, he yet does seem to be a stickler for the niceties of a learned language.
In the utterly execrable film, The Ninth Gate, rare book detective Bob Corso is enlisted by antiquarian and Satan enthusiast Boris Balkan to validate the authenticity of his demon summoning tome:
BALKAN: Nemo pervenit qui non legitime certaverit.
CORSO: You only succeed if you fight by the rules?
BALKAN: More or less. Ever heard of the Delomelanicon?
CORSO: Heard of it, yes. A myth, isn’t it? Some horrific book reputed to have been written by Satan himself.
BALKAN: No myth. That book existed. Torchia actually acquired it. The engravings you’re now admiring were adapted by Torchia from the Delomelanicon. They’re a form of satanic riddle. Correctly interpreted with the aid of the original text and sufficient inside information, they’re reputed to conjure up the Prince of Darkness in person.
Here we have all of the prerequisites for talking about the demonic: a little bit of Latin, a book of incantations with some fictive erudition to trace its history, and a couple of assholes engaged in dialogue which would embarrass even the most pretentious undergraduate. (Why would two people with fluent understanding of Latin would translate it to each other like they’re in an intermediate reading class?) The plot of the movie is ridiculous and in no way worth recounting, but much time and money has been spent and many lives have been lost before Corso finally has the engravings necessary for conjuring the Devil himself. But why should it be so hard?
Of all the cinematic or literary treatments of soul selling, only The Simpsons has caught the true spirit of the enterprise. One day, Bart casually remarks that he would sell his soul for a Formula 1 race car, at which point the Devil appears and tells him that it can be arranged. That’s it. No book hunting, no incantations, no experts on demonology, and most importantly no Latin.
We are reliably informed that the Devil is preeminently concerned with enlarging his kingdom as much as possible by ensnaring souls to drag to Hell. Indeed, in certain lines of Christian thought, going to Hell is for all practical purposes the default fate for most of humanity. And so, it strikes me as peculiar that admission to Hell is guarded by something resembling an entrance exam to an elite college in the 19th century: the formulaic repetition of recondite knowledge couched in a learned language. Surely, the Devil is multilingual, or at least has a translation team at hand. Indeed, if the plan were to ensnare souls, one would expect that there would have been a shift away from official demoniacal use of Latin to guarantee broader and more democratic access to eternal damnation. Maybe Satan should have taken a cue from Vatican II.
As it stands, there are still firm believers in Latin both on this earth and below. Consider this little bit of pompously introspective douchebaggery from The National Catholic Register:
I felt like a bit of a fraud that day. Any idiot can pray in their native tongue. And given the panoply of televangelists, it seems like many idiots do. Moreover: our Church HAS an official language: Latin—hence the term, “The Latin Church.”
[…]
“Well, so what?” a reader might well ask. Well, for one thing: it takes effort to pray the Office in Latin. The pre-Vatican II Liturgical Hours are all longer than the post-Vatican II vernacular version (and there are more of them), so more time is spent in prayer.
Plus, I think God appreciates effort. […]
I am no more conversant in Latin today than I was the first day I picked up the Latin-English Little Office. However, I am convinced that the Devil, whom we are constantly being told does not exist, must truly hate anyone who, with a sincere heart and extra effort, prays in the official language of the Church—a language which traces itself back to the great Fathers of The Church and their inestimable writings. For that matter, I’m pretty confident that the Devil hates prayer in language of any sort, but I like to think Latin drives him absolutely crazy—and keeps him away.
Well buddy, I have some bad news for you: it seems that the Devil appreciates the extra effort, too. All of the Latin one learns for hymnals and the Vulgate is really just jeopardizing young souls who could easily turn conjugations in to conjurations. Worse still, they could then read all of the smutty parts in Ovid. Perhaps we ought to counsel an abstinence-only educational approach to ancient languages. Indeed, if its effectiveness for sexual education is a reliable indicator, we may still be able to save most university Classics programs by letting high school students know that the only way to safely avoid bodily and spiritual damnation is to avoid studying Latin. This has the inestimable benefit of not even being a lie.
Latin’s association with both the liturgical and the demoniacal is likely too firmly rooted now ever to be shaken, and I suspect that as Latin recedes farther and farther both from public life and from general educational accessibility, its association with the dark arts will likely become stronger. When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin for his Vulgate edition, Latin was still a living, vital, spoken language. Consequently, there was no sense at the time that Latin was the particular language of the Devil and his dark arts. Indeed, it is only after Latin ceased to be a language for daily speech and began to be used only among ecclesiastics and other highly learned functionaries that it took on its associations as especially apt for liturgy, exorcism, and conjuration. The farther Latin recedes into dusty obscurity among the archives of arcana, the more potent its current cultural associations will become. For those of us who have taken the time to master it, we can take comfort in the fact that we have earned ourselves a special spot in Hell.
The following essay by Dio Chrysostom is fragmentary. I can imagine where it goes from where it starts, but I might be wrong. One of the seductive things about fragments is their lure to be ‘completed’ or ‘restored’. Here’s one about happiness–a topic perhaps profitably left unfinished for each of us to write our own endings.
Dio Chrysostom, 24 Discourse on Happiness
“The majority of people have generally given no thought regarding what kind of people they should be nor what at all is best for a person, nor what it is right to do in all other things. Instead, they have spent their lives in private pursuits—some dedicate themselves to horses; others to military leadership; others to athletic competition. Some are devoted to music; while others look to farming; and others to being able to speak well. But they neither know nor try to figure out what use each of these pursuits has for them or what profit might come from it.
As a result, while some people do become good horsemen—the kinds of people who love to work at it and care about it completely—and while others are better than some at wrestling and boxing, and running, and the rest of the athletic games, or in not screwing up planting, or sailing without ruining a ship, and some know the matters of the art of better than others—it is not possible to find among them a good and prudent man who also knows what makes a good and intelligent person.
Start first with the example of oratory—there are many people altogether of noble families who also seem to be ambitious who are dedicated to it so much that they compete in public courts, even speaking to the people and because of this have gained more than others and can do what they want while others [endeavor] so that they might be considered clever on account of the fame of their field.
But there are some people who say that they want what they get from experience, and some of these are speakers some are only writers, people whom someone of former times said were on the border of philosophy and politics. Whatever advantage their work brings them or what use their reputation is or what the profit of their experience might be, they do not examine.
But I claim that all the rest is worthless without this kind of care and examination For the person who has considered and understood this, it is clear that the advantage of public speaking or military leadership or any other thing we do comes when it it directed towards good.
For being praised by ignorant people in itself—for most people are like that—or having power among them or living pleasurably will not bring any more happiness than being rebuked by these people, having no power among them, or living a hard life.”
Literature is, for many people, the instrument of madness, and for all it is an instrument of arrogance unless (a thing exceptionally rare) it happens to fall upon a good and well educated mind. This last mentioned author has written much about beasts and birds and fish. How many hairs a lion’s mane has, how many feathers are in the hawk’s tail, how many spirals the octopus wraps the shipwreck in; how the elephants have sex from behind and how they remain pregnant for two years, and how they are a teachable and vivacious animal approaching human intelligence and living almost two or even three centuries; how the phoenix is consumed in aromatic fire and is reborn after being burned; how the sea urchin reins in a prow driven by any force but can do nothing when taken out of the waves; how the hunter deceives the tiger with a mirror, how the Arimaspean spears a griffin, how whales deceive the sailor with their tails; how ugly is the child of a bear, how rare the child of a mule, and how the viper gives birth but once and unluckily at that; how moles are blind, how bees are deaf, and finally how the crocodile alone of all animals moves only its upper mandible.
Most of these things are false, which was clear enough when similar kinds of animals were brought to our part of the world. Or, if they were not false, at least unknown to the authors themselves, and either believed more readily or more readily invented on account of their author’s absence. Yet, for all of this, even if they were true, they have nothing to do with living a good life. For, I ask, what good will it do to know the natures of beasts, birds, fish, and serpents when we are either ignorant or contemptuous of human nature – for what purpose we are born, from where we come and where we are headed?
Sunt enim litere multis instrumenta dementie, cuntis fere superbie, nisi, quod rarum, in aliquam bonam et bene institutam animam inciderint. Multa ille igitur de beluis deque avibus ac piscibus: quot leo pilos in vertice, quot plumas accipiter in cauda, quot polipus spiris naufragum liget, ut aversi cocunt elephantes biennioque uterum tument, ut docile vivaxque animal et humano proximum ingenio et ad secundi tertiique finem seculi vivendo perveniens; ut phenix aromatico igne consumitur ustusque renascitur; ut echinus quovis actam impetu proram frenat, cum fluctibus erutus nil possit; ut venator speculo tigrem ludit, Arimaspus griphen ferro impetit, cete tergo nautam fallunt; ut informis urse partus, mule rarus, vipere unicus isque infelix, ut ceci talpe, surde apes, ut postremo superiorem mandibulam omnium solus animantium cocodrillus movet. Que quidem vel magna ex parte falsa sunt — quod in multis horum similibus, ubi in nostrum orbem delata sunt, patuit — vel certe ipsis auctoribus incomperta, sed propter absentiam vel credita promptius vel ficta licentius; que denique, quamvis vera essent, nichil penitus ad beatam vitam. Nam quid, oro, naturas beluarum et volucrum et piscium et serpentum nosse profuerit, et naturam hominum, ad quod nati sumus, unde et quo pergimus, vel nescire vel spernere?
So, a twitter correspondent (.@stustin) asked me about this one:
This is so fake that it has been debunked by Snopes and Politifact, which traced the simplistic sentiment to a goodreads account in 2008. A simple google books search shows that the misattribution made the leap to books a few years ago and seems to be growing like a virus or cancer.
On my fake quotation scale, this stands somewhere between Peisistratos Fake–because it has been obviously manufactured–and Racist Fake because it is used in political debates by those trying to prevaricate when their interlocutors mention the moral turpitude of someone like a Supreme Court Justice who likes beer and putting his genitals in people’s faces. This is just another one of those lame, nitpicking logic-memes which put on a false mantle of antiquity for authority.
Socrates does talk a lot about slander, but he is usually worried about how slander prejudices audiences against speakers before a debate even happens (he says this in the Apology). In this case, the concern is the opposite of that in the spurious quotation: the quotation fears that debate devolves into name-calling and away from fact whereas Socrates is actually worried that previous name-calling and unquestioned assumptions makes it impossible for his audiences to apprehend the facts of a case.
Plato, Apology 19a
“Well, so be it. I need to defend myself, Athenians, and I need to try to take from you the slander you have absorbed over so long a period in such little time.”
“You all seem to me to understand, Athenians, that it is better to make a just peace than to keep going to war. That politicians agree to peace in name but they oppose the acts that foster peace, you do not all perceive this. For they claim that, once peace is achieved, there is the greatest peril for the people that the current regime may be dissolved.
Therefore, if the people of the Athenians had never made peace before with the Lakedaimonians, we might rightly fear this because of inexperience of the process or distrust for them. Since you have often made peace with them previously when you were already ruled as a democracy, how would it not be right for you to first examine the things that happened before. For, it is right, Athenians, to use prior events as a guide about what will happen in the future.”
ὡς ἔστι δεινότατον… Smyth §2224 δεινός εἰμι functions grammatically as an expression of fear, triggering the fear clause postponed to the end of the sentence (μὴ καταλυθῇ)
An number of these are very close to their Greek equivalents
Aelian Varia Historia 5.52
“Nature has produced animals which have the greatest range of voices and sounds, in the same way, in fact, as she has made people. Just as the Skythian speaks one way and the Indian speaks another, or the Aithiopian has his own language and the Sakai have theirs. And the language of Greece is different from Rome. Indeed, it is the same with animals who in various ways utter the a sound or an song native to their tongue. One roars, another moos, a neigh comes from another, a bray from one, a bleat or maaaa from another. A howl is dear to one; a bark to another; while some growl. There are those who scream, whistle, hoot, sing, croon and tweet. There are endless gifts proper to different animals by nature.”
“Snorting is neighing. A snorting echo. This, I believe, means neighing. But neighing is not the same as snorting. It is the sound that comes through horses’ noses when they prance.”
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