loose ends

(Alan Moir, Feb. 18)

I mentioned last week that Sydney Uni was getting rid of its Latin motto from its new look logo. There were a couple of follow up items in the paper that I thought worth mentioning here too:

sidere mens eadem mutato

My alma mater was in the news yesterday over plans to drop the Latin motto from its publicity materials.

AFTER 150 years the University of Sydney has abandoned its status quo, dropping the Latin motto from its redesigned coat of arms and logo...

The motto - most commonly translated as ''the constellation is changed, the disposition is the same'' - has been part of the university's coat of arms since 1857. As a first-time astronaut, Greg Chamitoff, a former university staff member, even took a patch of the crest into space on the shuttle Discovery in 2008.

Marian Theobald, the university's external relations executive director, said market research, overseen by the Chicago-based firm Lipman Hearne, had found the university relied too heavily on its sandstone heritage and something ''bolder, more energetic and more modern'' was needed...

''The motto will still be used by the university and will be maintained for more formal purposes, such as on testamurs....''

Emily Matters, president of the Classical Language Teachers Association, said the removal was hugely disappointing.

''I think this goes against everything what universities stand for where one generation hands over its culture to the next,'' she said.

Anthony Alexander, president of the Classical Association of NSW, who also teaches Greek and Latin at the University of Sydney, said the deletion was far from a dumbing down of the university or a denigration of Latin.

''What matters is what we teach, what we actually do in the classrooms,'' he said. ''I don't think it compromises Latin, which is stronger than ever.''

Horace the Satirist and Sarmentus the 'Scurra'

In a couple of weeks time a friend of mine (who's now doing a PhD in classics at Columbia University in New York) will be giving a talk at Sydney Uni, entitled "Horace the Satirist and Sarmentus the 'Scurra': Literary and Political Competition in Satires 1.5". That doesn't mean a lot to me, but James is a very clever guy and a very engaging speaker, and I am sure his talk will be well worth going to. For more info, visit this page.

As a bit of a taster, here's a brief excerpt of a talk he gave a couple of years ago now on Roman love elegy:

Last Thursday, at 4am in the morning, on a dirty grey pavement in Paddington, as I stood there outside her door amongst the significantly abandoned McDonalds wrappers and discarded casks of Lambrusco (ours), I was, ceremoniously, dumped by my long-term partner (of two weeks). It had been a whirlwind two weeks – or, at least, it had been for me: two weeks of over-excited displays of public affection, incessant dropping of the words ‘my girlfriend’ in conversation, long hours staring at a mobile phone screen awaiting SMS’s. And most of all, it was two weeks of that exhilarating insecurity which we romantics call ‘love’...

Back on that pavement, though, as I was wandering away from her cruelly closed door, it was a line from Ovid’s Amores, from poem 19 of book 2, which immediately came to mind: Nil ego, quod nullo tempore laedat, amo – ‘I don’t love anything which never hurts me’. It struck me at that moment how well this line worked as, simultaneously, both a witty comment on the overplayed nature of a tired literary convention and a sympathetic motto for the perpetually screwed around. As I will argue throughout this lecture, the most sympathetic reader of Ovid’s love poetry, the lover, may find emotional resonance even in the most parodic of Ovid’s literary manoeuvres, and he or she might relate exactly to feeling love of an entirely disproportionate nature, or even argue that the disproportionate nature of emotions when in love is, well, entirely the point.

[James Uden, The Development of Roman Love Elegy and What it Means for You, lecture delivered 17/6/05]

Nicholson Museum

My year 9 class visited the Nicholson Museum at Sydney Uni yesterday. Their collection focuses more on Egypt and Greece than on Rome, but they have a lot of interesting things there (including a great collection of mummies). Their hands-on program for students is particularly good. They take you down in to the depths of the museum and give you a tray of objects such as coins, bits of pottery, canopic jars, oil lamps, votive statues and tools, and you get to play at being a real archaeologist. They get you to do a quick sketch of an object, then to think about what it’s made of, what it might have been used for, who might have used, and what can it tell us about life in the ancient world.

The museum also has a few interesting Latin inscriptions. Here’s one of them:

DEPOSSIO HILARES QVE
VIXIT ANNUS VII M VNO D
XIII DEPOSITA DIAE VII IDUS
SEPT RICOMEDE ET CLYARCO CONS

This means something like:

The burial of Hilary, who lived 7 years, one month, 13 days, buried on the 7th day before the Ides of September, during the Consulship of Ricomedes and Clearchus.
It’s an interesting inscription for a few reasons. Firstly it doesn’t start as most grave inscriptions do with a dedication to the spirits of the underworld (DM for DIS MANIBUS). This seems to be because the family were Christians. We know this not only from the lack of dedication, but also because the gravestone includes a chi-rho, and a picture of a dove (a common Christian symbol). The words depossio and deposita (from which we get the English word ‘deposit’) also imply the Christian belief that the body has been laid aside for safe keeping until the resurrection. Secondly it gives a precise date (7th September AD 384- when Ricomedes and Clearchus were consuls), which is not all that common, and thirdly, it’s got a couple of spelling mistakes in it (QVE for QVAE and DIAE for DIE), showing that it's not only school students who sometimes get their endings wrong.

Sydney Uni Latin Summer School

This week I recieved some brochures for the Sydney Uni Latin Summer School. The summer school is held every year, for people of all different ages and levels of Latin ability. I taught the beginners class at the beginning of this year (which was a lot of fun) and had a whole range of different people in my class- a year 7 student whose big brother was there and who wanted to come along as well, a couple of uni students doing ancient history who needed to learn a bit of Latin for their studies, a mum who wanted to find out a bit about this wierd language her daughter was learning, and an older couple who wanted something to stimulate their brains in retirement.

It's a great thing to attend if you're planning on doing Latin for the HSC, as you get a bit of grammar revision, but more importantly you get to read a wider range of texts than we would normally have time to do in school. The selections for level 3A (about the level you would be at if you're currently in year 11/12) look particularly good this year- they'll be reading bits out of Aeneid book 5, Metamorphoses book 1 and Catullus 64.