“This smallest part of a composition is called a phrase [komma]. This often defines a phrase: it is shorter than a clause” [kôlon], as in the previously quoted “Dionysus [is] in Korinth” or “know yourself” or “follow god”, those sayings of the wise men. Brevity is a characteristic of proverbs and maxims and it is cleverer to compress a lot of meaning into a small space, just as seeds have the power of whole trees. If someone works a proverb out at length, it develops into teaching or rhetoric instead of a proverb.”
“Just as poetry is separated by meters—such as half-lines, hexameters, and the rest—so too will sections called clauses [kôla] separate and define prose composition. They allow rests to the speaker and what is spoken and they give the composition boundaries in many places, since it would be long and endless and would just exhaust anyone reading it otherwise.
These clauses are really meant to bring an end to a thought. Sometimes they convey a complete thought on their own, as when Hekataios says at the beginning of his History, “Hekataios speaks thus”. In this a case a whole thought coincides with a single clause and both end together. At another time, a clause doesn’t effect a complete thought, but merely part of one.
For, just as the hand is a whole thing but has individual parts of the whole, such as the fingers and the wrist—each of which has its own particular shape and recognizable parts—so too will the parts of a larger thought which is complete and whole be subsumed within it even though they too are recognizable and defined.”
Thrasymachus: While I like the alliteration, I don’t think *donum* works here.
As a “trick”—in this sense—isn’t really a deceit (more like a joke), and as the “treat” is something trifling (not a *gift*, which carries a sense of formality), I am wondering on something like “nugas nucesve,” “jests or nuts.”
While nuces were strewn at wedding and festivals (I’m thinking of the throwing of small bits of candy at bar mitzvahs, etc.), they were also children’s playthings, which captures, I think the idea of “treat,” as something given informally, even anonymously, and without expectation of return
A friend of mine (not a classicist) found a vintage Latin Magnetic Poetry set and gave it to me. It’s not so much for Latinists as it is for English-speakers familiar with Latin: it’s got all the familiar phrases from law (habeas corpus) and Catholicism (in nomine patris) and general fancy talk (caveat emptor).
I decided to give it a go, and see what syntactically coherent sentences and phrases I could put together in classical-ish Latin. I set myself the rule of using every word in the kit, and not reusing any word that wasn’t duplicated in the kit. Don’t bother scanning them, as they’re not metrical, but who’s to say they aren’t Saturnians?
some Magnetic Poetry, in Latin, assembled during a frantic semester teaching Latin Prose Composition
Some of them sound like they could plausibly have been written or at least thought by an actual historical Roman:
ars firma uitae est scientia in libris life’s reliable skill is book-knowledge
homini est nihil beati humankind has no share of happiness
Magna Mater omnes forma mala amat the Great Mother loves everyone who has a bad body
uidi populum facile errare et labi ad bellum
I’ve seen the populace easily going astray and slipping towards war
aurea uox mea non est pura my golden voice is not pure
sic ego rebus maximis gratias non emeritus sum that’s why I haven’t earned thanks for my super-great accomplishments
Some had a feeling of banter that could, if you squint real hard, fit in a comedy of Plautus:
amor ab ipso bono quem hominem amas; te uici, Maria
I’m loved by the very nobleman whom you love; I’ve beaten you, Maria
idem sum de quo delirium est I’m the very guy everyone’s crazy about
tu Brute carpe artes pauperes salis dum gratia patris fiat tibi absurdo
you, Brutus, pick out the impoverished arts of wit so long as you’ve got your dad’s good will, you ridiculous man
aue homo quid in curriculum uadis de quo non bene cogito?
hey, dude, why are you wandering onto the racetrack that I don’t think well of?
Others entered the danger zone, of either hanky panky or sacrilege:
ueni ad opus sub toga filii proximi I got to work underneath the toga of the boy next door
coitus habeas tremens ante nauseam may you, trembling, have sex to the point of nausea
pax alma mirabilis pacifici Satanas domini beati toto anno aureo in cetera terra beata
the wondrous nourishing peace of the peace-bringing blessed lord, o Satan, within the entire golden year in the remaining blessed land
nosce unum partum e culpa dei: filius caueat de te pater et de poena dura et nomine minimo delicti
recognize one born out of God’s mistake: the Son is on guard against you, Father, and against harsh punishment and against the slightest name of criminal action
But the best ones took me into the realm of the bizarre:
lupus bipes Christum in flumina sequitur minima cum cura
a wolf walking on its hind legs chases Christ into the rivers he don’t give a fuck
alter emptor lupi mortui exit e gloria populi the dead wolf’s other buyer has lost the good reputation of the public
uiam inueniam aut bona faciam absentia nulla fide
I’ll find a way— or I’ll make all my property disappear with no regrets
mortem malo sed corpus magnum uirile ago per uitam annum perpetuum
I prefer death but I drag my giant manly body through life for an endless year
And in case it wasn’t clear what the whole Magnetic Poetry set was trying (with middling results) to do, notice that one standalone magnet at the top of the photo: LATIN.
I managed to use every single word in the kit, which means this page has the sum of all Latin Magnetic Poetry options — so now it’s your turn to mix & match. Post your handiwork in the comments!
“This smallest part of a composition is called a phrase [komma]. This often defines a phrase: it is shorter than a clause” [kôlon], as in the previously quoted “Dionysus [is] in Korinth” or “know yourself” or “follow god”, those sayings of the wise men. Brevity is a characteristic of proverbs and maxims and it is cleverer to compress a lot of meaning into a small space, just as seeds have the power of whole trees. If someone works a proverb out at length, it develops into teaching or rhetoric instead of a proverb.”
“Don’t write very long clauses, since your sentence then becomes unmeasured and hard to understand. Even poetry rarely exceeds the bound of a hexametric line, and only a little bit. For it would be ridiculous of poetry had no limits and we would forget what started when the line began! And yet, if the length of some clauses are not proper to prose because it goes on too long, others are too short and would create what is called “dry composition” as in the phrase, “life is short, art long, the right time brief.”
“Does anyone know the ancient Greek for shitting the bed?”
It is a sign of the high rhetoric of our sophisticated era that this (perhaps rhetorical) question was posed in Marina Hyde’s Guardian opinion piece on the befuddled blond-con PM Boris Johnson who just happens to have a Classical education.* It is perhaps also a sign of my esteemed place in this ecology of elevated discourse that multiple people tweeted me the question. And, finally, it is a sign of my own academic training that I resisted the urge initially because my first thought was “well, now, Ancient Greek just does not have that idiom.”
But, if it did, well, it might look like one of these:
“to shit the bed,” κλινοχέζειν
“bed-shitter,” κλινοχέστης
“to recline in dung,” κοπροκλίνειν
“shit-sleeper,” σκατοκαθεύδων
(for Ancient Greek students, we have two compound infinitives, a compound agentive noun, and a compound participle!)
There are many Greek words for bed apart from klinê. One could also select koitê, strômnê, lektron, or lekhos. I chose klinê because it may be familiar from the English clinomania. I avoided koitê because it has a sexual use in English and the last thing I would want to do is imply that we are talking about a shit-fucking politician. I chose khezein for the verb because it is, according to Henderson’s Maculate Muse, the “standard term” (188). The ending χέστης is a totally made-up agentive from khezein. The participle χέσας appears for the “shitter” at Aristophanes Birds 790.
Based on the parallel βορβορκοίτης (“lying in filth,” Batrakh 220) we could have σκατοκοίτης / κοπροκοίτης (“lying in shit”) but I don’t think this compound gets to the sense of the English idiom which is, essentially, to fuck up so completely that you might as well be lying in a post-mortem pile of shit.
*”happens to have” is perhaps unfair and untrue. He has this education because he is part of a moneyed elite who use education as one of many tools to decorate the facade of their elitist pillaging of their country and blithe assumption to the privilege of rule.
h/t @brixtandrew and the others who brought this to my attention
I found this while searching:
Sophron, fr. 11
“They filled their bedroom with shit while dancing”
βαλλίζοντες τὸν θάλαμον σκάτους ἐνέπλησαν
Damox, fr. 2. 15-16
“Rub him down with shit / and expel him from school”
“Just as poetry is separated by meters—such as half-lines, hexameters, and the rest—so too will sections called clauses [kôla] separate and define prose composition. They allow rests to the speaker and what is spoken and they give the composition boundaries in many places, since it would be long and endless and would just exhaust anyone reading it otherwise.
These clauses are really meant to bring an end to a thought. Sometimes they convey a complete thought on their own, as when Hekataios says at the beginning of his History, “Hekataios speaks thus”. In this a case a whole thought coincides with a single clause and both end together. At another time, a clause doesn’t effect a complete thought, but merely part of one.
For, just as the hand is a whole thing but has individual parts of the whole, such as the fingers and the wrist—each of which has its own particular shape and recognizable parts—so too will the parts of a larger thought which is complete and whole be subsumed within it even though they too are recognizable and defined.”
Thrasymachus: While I like the alliteration, I don’t think *donum* works here.
As a “trick”—in this sense—isn’t really a deceit (more like a joke), and as the “treat” is something trifling (not a *gift*, which carries a sense of formality), I am wondering on something like “nugas nucesve,” “jests or nuts.”
While nuces were strewn at wedding and festivals (I’m thinking of the throwing of small bits of candy at bar mitzvahs, etc.), they were also children’s playthings, which captures, I think the idea of “treat,” as something given informally, even anonymously, and without expectation of return
“Does anyone know the ancient Greek for shitting the bed?”
It is a sign of the high rhetoric of our sophisticated era that this (perhaps rhetorical) question was posed in Marina Hyde’s Guardian opinion piece on the befuddled blond-con PM Boris Johnson who just happens to have a Classical education.* It is perhaps also a sign of my esteemed place in this ecology of elevated discourse that multiple people tweeted me the question. And, finally, it is a sign of my own academic training that I resisted the urge initially because my first thought was “well, now, Ancient Greek just does not have that idiom.”
But, if it did, well, it might look like one of these:
“to shit the bed,” κλινοχέζειν
“bed-shitter,” κλινοχέστης
“to recline in dung,” κοπροκλίνειν
“shit-sleeper,” σκατοκαθεύδων
(for Ancient Greek students, we have two compound infinitives, a compound agentive noun, and a compound participle!)
There are many Greek words for bed apart from klinê. One could also select koitê, strômnê, lektron, or lekhos. I chose klinê because it may be familiar from the English clinomania. I avoided koitê because it has a sexual use in English and the last thing I would want to do is imply that we are talking about a shit-fucking politician. I chose khezein for the verb because it is, according to Henderson’s Maculate Muse, the “standard term” (188). The ending χέστης is a totally made-up agentive from khezein. The participle χέσας appears for the “shitter” at Aristophanes Birds 790.
Based on the parallel βορβορκοίτης (“lying in filth,” Batrakh 220) we could have σκατοκοίτης / κοπροκοίτης (“lying in shit”) but I don’t think this compound gets to the sense of the English idiom which is, essentially, to fuck up so completely that you might as well be lying in a post-mortem pile of shit.
*”happens to have” is perhaps unfair and untrue. He has this education because he is part of a moneyed elite who use education as one of many tools to decorate the facade of their elitist pillaging of their country and blithe assumption to the privilege of rule.
h/t @brixtandrew and the others who brought this to my attention
I found this while searching:
Sophron, fr. 11
“They filled their bedroom with shit while dancing”
βαλλίζοντες τὸν θάλαμον σκάτους ἐνέπλησαν
Damox, fr. 2. 15-16
“Rub him down with shit / and expel him from school”
