ranarum viscera numquam inspexi

After reading Juvenal's third satire, I have created a coat of arms for myself, with an appropriate sounding Latin motto true to the ancient dictum that quidquid Latine dicitur, altum videtur. I hope you like it. The motto comes from a passage in which Juvenal's friend explains that he is leaving Rome because he feels that Rome has been taken over by foreigners and those of lesser class and sophistication than himself, with no respect for the ancient history, customs and traditions of Rome. The relevant passage is below:

Quid Romae faciam? mentiri nescio; librum,
si malus est, nequeo laudare et poscere; motus
astrorum ignoro; funus promittere patris
nec volo nec possum; ranarum viscera numquam
inspexi.


What am I to do at Rome? I don't know how to lie. If a book is bad, I am unable to praise it and demand a copy for myself. I am ignorant of the motions of the stars. I neither want nor am able to promise the death of a father. I have never examined frogs' intestines.

(Juvenal Satire III.41-45)

Trivia

I enjoyed a lovely night last week with my senior Latin classes and others from all around Sydney at the annual Senior Classics Dinner (organised by the CLTA). The costumes were especially fabulous this year, and I am full of admiration for those of my students who embraced the spirit of the evening by dressing up (even if it was as grapes and Jedi).

The after-dinner trivia was slightly easier than in previous years, but there were still a few questions which left me scratching my head. See if you can work out the answers to these beauties.

Which Sydney suburbs are referred to below?

• terra australis
• ager cinis
• urbs cornus
• oppidum novum
• herbaria
• virilis
• collis aestivus
• tumuli septem
• filix rubra
• vallis viridis

Which sporting teams are referred to below?

• tigres
• cygni
• cornices
• tauricanes
• feles
• aquilae
• dracones
• leones

What was the nationality of the following people?

• Ulysses
• Hannibal
• Romulus and Remus
• Cleopatra
• Vercingetorix
• Boudicca

videmus*

I stumbled across some hilarious youtube videos the other of Eddie Izzard giving some reflections both on learning Latin and on Roman history more generally. I've never really seen much of his stuff before, but as well as being very funny, he seems to be pretty intelligent. He is also very rude (don't watch these videos if you're put off by swearing).

Anyway, you can find them here:

• Pliny
• Hannibal
• more Hannibal (good material, poor quality video)

*videmus is the correct Latin plural of video, right?

15 second Odyssey

Here's a fantastic video I came across on youtube the other day - The Odyssey in 15 seconds:

I especially like the sirens and the cyclops.

Pop Classics

I stumbled across a great blog the other day (to which I've added a link in the sidebar) called Pop Classics. It's a little bit scary how closely the author's taste and sense of humour mirrors my own; there are posts on Monty Python, Red Dwarf, Discworld, Buffy and many other things. Hours of enjoyment...

De Thesauro Litterisque Graecis

I've read two great posts over at laudator temporis acti recently, which appeal to my inner (ok, outer) nerd. The first is an Ode to a Thesaurus. Here's the first stanza, as a taste:

O precious codex, volume, tome,
Book, writing, compilation, work
Attend the while I pen a pome,
A jest, a jape, a quip, a quirk.

It reminds me of a non sequitur comic I once saw (and should have kept) entitled 'The Thesaurosaurus'. It showed a dinosaur walking around saying 'I die, expire, am made extinct.' Hilarious.

The second post is on The Noble Shapes of the Greek Letters. Again here's a taste:

Some letters catch the eye more than others: the perverse triple loop of Xi, the twin concavity of Omega, the bisected almond of Theta, Phi like a circle transfixed by a spear, Psi's curly trident and Gamma's two-pronged fork. As the argument kindles and voices wax louder, the lettering matriculates from italics to capitals and out like dangerous missiles whizz triangles and T-squares and gibbets and acute angles, pairs of Stonehenge megaliths with lintel stones, and half-open springs.

liber faciei

Someone very clever has made a mock facebook page for the Aeneid. Check it out.

(Thanks to eternally cool for bringing it to my attention)

derivations by association

The other day I was thinking about the word voracious, and how it comes from the Latin word voro (to devour), which is also the root of the word carnivorous; carnis is Latin for meat or flesh, and the source of the word carnival, which was originally a celebration to mark the beginning of Lent, a time when you didn't eat meat- since vale is Latin for good-bye, carnival is literally 'good-bye to meat'; similarly a valediction (see, for example, this poem) is a fancy word for a farewell (dico = to say), and a benediction is a blessing, bene being Latin for good/well- which we also see in the word benevolent, coming from the Latin word to want (volo), as does malevolent, which has the opposite meaning (malus = bad).



That's all really...

Holiday fun

If you're bored during the holidays, why not make your very own model colosseum.

Related Posts

• chocolate colosseum
• Holidays
• gladiatores

Balderdash

As an end of term activity with my year nine class today we played a bit of Balderdash. The girls were given a Latin word, for which they had to invent a definition. Then their definitions were pooled together, and they had to try to choose which one was correct. Here are some of the words, and their definitions; can you tell which one is correct?

vermino, are, avi, atus:

• to have worms
• to walk with great pride
• to be truthful, to tell the truth

olfactoriolum, i (nt):

• a factory used for making wine in Roman times
• a lazy person
• a little perfume bottle

mansuetarius, i (m):

• a complex sewerage system made for a large city
• a bull that is used for agricultural purposes
• a tamer of wild beasts

stomachor, ari, atus:

• to be irritated, annoyed
• to put up with a difficult situation
• to make extremely loud sounds, like the trumpeting of an elephant

catillo, nis (m):

• a porch, outdoor patio
• someone who licks plates
• a public place for women to bathe

How to turn a lion into a mouse

Can you change leo to mus in five steps, changing one letter at a time to form a new Latin word?

Related Posts

• Latin word games
• word ladders
• Lewis Carroll

Gladiatores

My year 8 class have been looking at gladiators recently, so I've put together a few sites for them to look at this afternoon.

• You Wouldn't Want to be a Roman Gladiator is a fun site that follows the fate of a Gaul captured by Roman soldiers, sold as a slave and trained as a gladiator.

• Roman Gladiatorial Games is not as fun, but has lots of good information

• This BBC site is also pretty good, and has a cool game to play (dress your gladiator correctly to help him win in the arena).

• Finally have a look at the Cambridge Site to do some vocab revision and grammar games.

Virgil and the West Wing

If Catullus is like Seinfeld, Virgil must be like the West Wing. The writing is sharp and richly dense, issues are rarely black and white, and it deals with contemporary politics, complex characters and the human condition.

[Disclaimer: I have never actually seen an episode of the West Wing either, but sometimes it feels like everybody I know watches it- this post is based on their opinions]

Catullus and Seinfeld

The other day while marking some year 12 essays I had a revelation. It struck me that Catullus’ poetry is a lot like the TV show Seinfeld, while Horace’s is more like Sex and the City. Let me explain.

Seinfeld was a show which claimed to be about nothing, but in fact was about lots of stuff- based around the everyday lives and relationships of four friends. Sex and the City on the over hand claimed to be revolutionary television, but when you stripped away the rhetoric it too was about the everyday lives and relationships of four friends.

Catullus claims in his introductory poem that his poetry is also about nothing when he calls his poems mere trifles (‘nugas’). What I think he means is that his poetry doesn’t deal with any of the subjects which were considered in his time to be serious and important; subjects like mythology, gods, heroes, wars, history and even philosophy. Rather his poems are (generally) about his everyday life and relationships. Catullus was not the first to write this kind of poetry, he was heavily influenced by the Alexandrian poets of 200 or so years before (especially Callimachus)

On the other hand, Horace (in Ode III.30, a kind of epilogue, reflecting on his own poetic achievements) claims to have completed in his poetry a monument more lasting than bronze (‘aere perennius’) which will ensure his immortality as long as Rome exists. His boast rests on the assertion that he was the first (‘princeps’) to bring Greek poetry to Rome – though this is not strictly accurate. Catullus and the other poetae novi (whose work is for the most part sadly lost) also experimented with Greek themes, forms, meters and conventions in the same way that Horace did.

So, like Seinfeld, Catullus claims that his poems are nothing, when really they are something, and Horace, like Sex and the City, claims that his poems are revolutionary, when really they are heavily indebted to what has gone before.

[Disclaimer: I have never actually watched an episode of Sex and the City - this is just the impression I get of the show]

palindromes

Over at LatinLanguage.us there's a palindrome challenge: how many five letter Latin palindromes can you think of? Even my year 8 class should be able to think of one, if not two, present tense verbs; the others are a little more obscure. Here are the answers.

For some more Latin palindromes and other word games see this related post.

hospites Romani

If you could have dinner with three Romans, who would you invite? I was thinking about this the other day, and here is my guest list:

Cicero was my first choice. I suspect that he was a bit of an arrogant git, but there’s no doubt that the man was a genius. From humble(ish) origins he rose to become one of the most influential men in Rome. He was consul in 63 BC, and Julius Caesar invited him to join the first triumvirate (Cicero refused because he hated Caesar, but that’s another story). He had a sense of humour and a bitterly sharp wit, and was incredibly educated- he studied oratory in Athens, and in his later years when he was effectively side-lined from politics he spent his spare time translating Greek philosophy into Latin. He also lived in one of the most interesting periods of time in Roman history- the final years of the republic- and knew lots of fascinating people- not only Caesar, but Antony, Octavian, Cleopatra, Catullus (and Lesbia/Clodia). He didn’t like most of them, but that only makes him a more entertaining guest.

It would be tempting to invite some of Cicero’s acquaintances (perhaps Catullus and Lesbia?) just to watch the fireworks, but in the interest of variety my next guest would be Agrippina, mother of the emperor Nero. Agrippina was one of the last of the fascinating, but troubled, Julio-Claudian family. Her brother was the emperor Caligula, and her uncle (later also her husband) was the emperor Claudius. Caligula didn’t like her much (he sent her into exile) but she had considerable influence over Claudius, and when Nero came to power she was for a time effectively co-emperor. Later Nero grew to resent her, and eventually had her killed. Such a powerful and ambitious woman so closely connected to three different emperors would undoubtedly have a few good stories to tell, though you’d probably need to watch the food closely (she was said to have poisoned Claudius).

I can imagine the conversation at my dinner party getting pretty heavy with those two, and can think of no one better to liven the mood than the poet Ovid. Whereas Cicero’s humour was (I suspect) bitter and vicious, Ovid comes across in his poetry as fun-loving, warm and generous, if sometimes a bit vulgar. At times he is completely over the top and it seems like he has trouble taking anything seriously, though he was by no means a light-weight- in addition to his love poems and manuals he wrote mythological poems (not just the light-hearted Metamorphoses, but the Heroides as well), a kind of historical calendar (the Fasti) and a version of Medea, sadly lost to us. As part of the literary circle of Maecenas he knew many of the other eminent poets of his day (Propertius, Tibullus and Horace for example), and probably Augustus himself. Whether he knew Augustus personally or not he certainly did something to upset him (we don’t know exactly what- it’s one of the things I would ask him if I had the chance), and he was banished from Rome in AD 17 never to return.

That’s my list, who would you invite?

onomatopoiea

My learned language teaching colleagues and I were discussing onomatopoeia over lunch today, particularly the noises made by animals in different cultures. Did you know, for example, that although dogs say 'woof' or 'bow wow' in English speaking countries, in Germany they say 'wau wau', in France the say 'ouah ouah' and in Japan 'wun wun'?

I'm not sure what dogs said in ancient Rome, but many of the latin verbs which describe the sounds animals make have an onomatopoeiaic quality. Can you guess which animals are most commonly associated with these latin verbs ?

• balo
• baubo
• coaxo
• maumo
• mugio
• pipio
• ululo
• vagio

While we're at it, there's a famous play by the Greek comedian Aristophanes, in which the chorus dances around singing 'brek-kek-kek-kek koax koax, brek-kek-kek-kek koax'. Which animal are they imitating (it's also the name of the play)?

• Related post: Cats and Dogs

hic et illic

Here are a few posts from other people's blogs which I've been enjoying lately:

• A useful post on homographs from LatinLanguage.us
• Gifts for the god who has everything from Eternally Cool
• Pilcrows and Octothorps and rare plants and their Latin names from Laudator Temporis Acti
• Finally a post on grammar which is definitely not about me

eternally cool

I discovered (thanks to rogue classicum) a funky new site the other day. It's a collection of lots of random but cool things to do with Rome- in the present as well as the past. Recent posts include Romans of the past as lego figures (see here for more), a chocolate coliseum and a pair of cons painted in the style of a Greek vase.

10 points if you can identify the mythological character depicted above- no cheating!

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)