beelzebufo

I was going to post about the discovery of Beelzebufo, but I was beaten to it, so I'll leave you with a quote, and direct you elsewhere to find out more.

Beelzebufo had a wide mouth and powerful jaws, plus teeth. Skull bones were extremely thick, with ridges and grooves characteristic of some type of armor or protective shield. The name comes from the Greek word for devil, Beelzebub, and Latin for toad, bufo.

a puzzle

Here is a puzzle for you, inspired by last week's visit to the cricket (twenty points will go to the winner).

What do these three people have in common (apart from being white and male)?

Robin Williams (actor) Michael Clarke (cricketer) Wilfred Owen (poet)

gratias maximas...

Last Friday I had the great pleasure of spending the afternoon at the cricket, thanks to the exceedingly generous girls from last year's HSC class. Australia won, it didn't rain, Adam Gilchrist and Michael Clarke both scored fine half-centuries, Sangakkara put up some spirited resistance, Nathan Bracken took five wickets, and I had a pie with sauce for dinner. A great night all round. vobis gratias maximas do.

Meditations

Over the holidays I took great pleasure in dipping in and out of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations (a very kind Christmas present). It turns out I wasn't the only one; Canadian author Yann Martel (who wrote Life of Pi- one of the best books I've read in the past few years) has been sending the Canadian prime minister a book every fortnight- accompanied by his own reflections on each book. He has also been publishing the letters on this website. As his 22nd book for the prime minister he chose the Meditations.

The whole letter is well worth reading; here is just a short extract:

The case of Rome is worth studying. How a small town on a river became the center of one of the mightiest empires the world has known, eventually dominating thousands of other small towns on rivers, is a source of many lessons. That Rome was mighty is not to be doubted. The sheer size the empire achieved is breathtaking: from the Firth of Forth to the Euphrates, from the Tagus to the Rhine, spilling over into Northern Africa, for a time the Romans ruled over most of the world known to them. What they didn’t rule over wasn’t worth having, they felt: they left what was beyond their frontiers to “barbarians”.

Another measure of their greatness can be found in the Roman influences that continue to be felt to this day. Rome’s local lingo, Latin, became the mother language of most of Europe, and Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese are still spoken all over the world. (The Germanic hordes beyond the Rhine, meanwhile, have managed to sponsor only one international language, albeit a successful one, English.) We also owe the Romans our calendar, with its twelve months and 365 1/4 day years; three days in our week hark back to three Roman days—Moonday, Saturnday and Sunday; and though we now use the Roman number system (i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi...) only occasionally, we use their 26-letter alphabet constantly.

Despite their power and might, another lesson about the Roman Empire forces itself upon us: how it’s all gone. The Romans reigned far and wide for centuries but now their empire has vanished entirely. A Roman today is simply someone who lives in Rome, a city that is beautiful because of its clutter of ruins. Such has been the fate of all empires: the Roman, the Ottoman, the British, the Soviet, to name only a few European empires. Which will be the next empire to fall, the next to rise?

[Thanks to rogueclassicum for bringing this to my attention]

The keys to inner calm...

A read a great little book towards the end of my holidays, called Dating Aphrodite: Modern Adventures in the Ancient World, by Australian Luke Slattery. It's a collection of short reflections on the influence of the Classical world on our times and on the author himself, and some very insightful thoughts on what we can learn from the Greeks and Romans today.

One of the most interesting chapters was called The Good Life, where Slattery discusses Stoic, Epicurean and Sceptic philosophy in a really accessible way. Here's a short taste:

The symptoms of anxiety are too common to categorise, yet they manage to sustain the psychiatric profession, the pharmaceutical industry, and perhaps late capitalism itself. Where would the market be without consumer therapy? Many seek answers in the New Age: in Eastern religions, Celtic earth worship, dubious gurus, dietary fads, crystals self-help manuals, spas, colonic irrigation. In reality the keys to inner calm are where they have always been- hanging by the door to Western Civilisation.

Stoicism and Epicureanism are worthy of re-examinationand rehabilitation in our restive anxious age. These two antagonistic creeds - an argument between body and soul, pleasure and virtue - are not easily reconciled. Nevertheless, it is possible to negotiate between them a pact that meets concrete human needs... The unfettered energies of Scepticism give us the confidence to put such famously antagonistic creeds to work in a united cause. After all, a truly therapeutic philosophy of life has first to align itself with the vicissitudes of life.

Epicureanism is a philosophical shelter which nourishes the fraternal bonds between men and women, because friendship, in the words of Epicurus, 'dances around the world, announcing to us all that we should bestir ourselves for the enjoyment of happiness'. The Stoic, on the other hand, has no need of a physical sanctuary; for the wise, the tranquil self is retreat enough. The aim of Stoic meditation, though Marcus Aurelius, was to 'send you back without repugnance' to life. Armed with the shield of Stoicism we advance upon life; lured by Epicureanism we retreat and repair. Zeno and Epicurus may have been opponents in the ancient world, but to me they are the most companionable of rivals: encountered long ago at a time of illness, I think of them as physicians of the soul.

Horace Online

Here are a bunch of sites which I hope my year 12 class will find useful as we read some of Horace's Odes.

You can of course find the Horace’s complete works at the Latin Library .Translations of all of Horace’s poems can be found at Perseus (with notes) or at about.com. Unfortunately some of their translations can be a bit hard to follow. These three sites (with notes) have better translations but only offer a selection of poems.

Wikipedia of course has information about Horace's life as well as a separate page on the Odes. Here you will find some other useful links for both Horace and Catullus, and this site has some hard core information on Horatian meters in case anyone is interested.

Horace

For my year 12 students, who have just started reading some the Odes, here is a bit of information about Horace:

Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65-8 B.C.) was the son of a freedman of Venusia on the Aufidus in S. Italy, a Latin colony which had joined the rebellion of 90 B.C. and had then been granted the citizenship. It has been conjectured that the name Horatius was taken by his father from the Horatian tribe, in which Venusia was included. He was five years younger than Virgil. His father was a coactor exactionum, a collector of payments at auctions, and had acquired a small estate. He gave his son the best education obtainable, first at Rome under Orbillius, and later at Athens. The Civil War broke out while Horace was in Greece; he recieved a commission as tribune in the army of M. Brutus and fought (and, he says, ran away) at Phillipi (42 B.C.) Thereafter he returned to Italy and made his submission.

He obtained a clerical post in the civil service (he was one of the scribae quaestiorii or quaestor's clerks), but his estate was forfeited and poverty drove him to write verses. About 38 B.C. he was introduced by Virgil to Maecenas, who after some delay took him under his protection, admitted him to the circle of Augustan poets, and about 33 B.C., gave him the Sabine Farm (near Tibur, in the valley of the Digentia, now the Licenza) which was to be the source of much hapiness to Horace and the inspiration of some beautiful passages in his writings.

About 35 B.C. he had issued the first Book of his Satires. It was followed about 30 B.C., after Actium, by the second Book of the Satires and the Epodes (which include some of his earliest poems). The first three Books of the Odes, composed gradually in the course of some ten years and reflecting the political events of 33-23 B.C., were published in 23; the first Book of the Epistles about 20. The Carmen Saeculare appeared in 17, Book IV of the Odes about 15 B.C. There remain three literary essays, two of which form Book II of the Epistles, while the third is known as the Epistle to the Pisos, or more usually as the Ars Poetica. These are generally assigned to the last years of the poet's life; but the question of their date is undecided. The second epistle of Book II and the Ars Poetica are placed by some authorities as early as 19 B.C.

Horace died in 8 B.C., a few months after Maecenas, with whom he had maintained a friendship of thirty years. He was never married. We have a life of Horace by Suetonius, who describes him as short and stout. Horace speaks of himself as prematurely grey.

Horace's position as one of the greatest of Roman poets rests on the perfection of his form, the sincerity and frankness of his self-portaiture, his patriotism, his urbanity, humour, and good sense. His poems give a vivid picture of the Roman society, high and low, of his day. He has endowed literature with a multitude of happy phrases. If surpassed by Catullus in passion and force and by Lucretius in grandeur, he in turn surpasses both in the breadth of his interests, and Catullus in moral dignity. Quintilian calls him 'felicissime audax' ['most happily bold'], and Petronius refers to his 'curiosa felicitas' or 'studied felicity'.

Horace has been so universally read and admired that his influence on English poetry, both Lyrical and satirical, is almost all pervading. Of direct imitations the most famous and successful are Pope's adaptions of certain of the Satires and Epistles (1733-8). Milton translated his Ode to Pyrrha (I.5).

[From The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. Sir Paul Harvey]

multilingualism

When I tell people that I studied Latin and German (and a bit of Classical Greek) at uni they often think it must be a really difficult and confusing thing to learn more than one language at the same time. I think that attitude comes partly from the fact that not many people (especially native speakers of English) bother to learn languages any more, and so to them it seems like a difficult thing. Not so long ago languages were at the core of a liberal education, and to speak several languages was not so unusual.

In Europe it’s still fairly common to speak more than one language; I spent six months on exchange in Vienna during uni and made friends with Bulgarians fluent in German, Russian and English, as well as people from Hungary, China, Spain, Turkey and Poland also fluent in at least German and English, and often other languages besides. One of my good friends there grew up in the French speaking part of Switzerland, with an Italian dad and an Austrian mum, had studied Russian at school, lived in Greece for a year, and picked up English in her spare time by talking to American exchange students. She was pretty fluent (as far as I could tell) in all of them.

James Murray, the most important editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, had an even more remarkable ability with languages. Applying for a job at the British Museum in 1867, Murray wrote the following:

I have to state that philology, both Comparative and Special, has been my favourite pursuit during the whole of my life, and that I possess a general acquaintance with the languages & literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes- not indeed to say that I am familiar with all or nearly all of these, but that I possess that general lexical and structural knowledge which makes the intimate knowledge only a matter of a little application. With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a less degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provencal and various dialects. In the Teutonic branch I am tolerably familiar with Dutch (having at my place of business correspondence to read in Dutch, German, French and occasionally other languages), Flemish, German, Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer, I having prepared some works for publication upon these languages. I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engaged with the Sclavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of the Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician to the point where it is left by Genesius.

At the time Murray was thirty and working as a bank clerk, having left school at the age of fourteen. He didn’t get the job.

[cited in The Surgeon of Crowthorne, Simon Winchester, p 34]