Ciceroniana obiter carpta
Ciceroniana obiter carpta (SATIPS Classics Broadsheet, Autumn 2014)
Preamble
You must have seen one of those TV documentaries about railway workers or train drivers who, at the end of their shifts, return home and spend their spare time playing with their train sets – sorry, model railways. As some of you will know, Classics can hold the same fascination, so I must start with an apology for the fact that this article has nothing to do with prep school classical pedagogy, i.e. the sort of things we get up to ‘on shift’. I do hope however that it may be of interest to those who, like me, regard themselves not just as prep school Classics teachers but as enthusiastic armchair classicists and hobbyists who take a wider interest in their subject than is strictly demanded by the limited scope of Year 8 prep school syllabuses. Of course, much of what follows will be old hat to specialists.
I finished reading Cicero’s letters about a year ago. They fall into four collections: those to his intimate confidant, Atticus (ad Atticum); to his friends (ad Familiares); to his brother Quintus (ad Quintum fratrem); and to Marcus Brutus (ad Brutum). At Fam. 2.1 he refers to his prolific output in asking his correspondent quis est tam in scribendo impiger quam ego?; ‘Who is as energetic in writing as I am?’ It is a telling comment: the letters number over 800 and they took me a couple of years to get through, but I always like to have some Latin prose ‘on the go’ to keep my hand in, and I thought that his correspondence would provide some good indicators of colloquialisms and his own everyday Latin style, as opposed to the speeches and his philosophical and rhetorical treatises which were clearly intended for publication.
One of the fascinating aspects of Cicero’s correspondence is its wide-ranging content: from his domestic plumbing arrangements and his efforts to secure smart statues and reference books for his library, to his dealings with politicians of the day and cringeworthy cultivation of ‘the right people’, the letters open up fascinating windows into the life of the Roman we probably know better than any other. But it was Ciceronian everyday Latin that I, as an enthusiast rather than a serious scholar, wanted to become familiar with, so I made notes of points of linguistic interest as I travelled through his correspondence. It is a fascinating journey, especiaIly if one aspires to attaining something like a half-decent standard of Latin prose composition. Anyway, I hope that Broadsheet readers, particularly non-specialists, may find some of these obiter carpta of interest. (The English translations are my own, and are devoid of any literary merit. The canonical references, for those who want to check the contexts in detail, follow the abbreviations of the Oxford Latin Dictionary).
Some basics
A good place to start would be the word Cicero uses for ‘a letter’; more often than the word epistula it is the plural noun litterae. An interesting linguistic consequence of this is the paradoxical use of the word for ‘one’ in the plural. (Att. 7.9 unas litteras; Att. 14.18 et unis et alteris litteris; Fam. 10.31 unas…litteras; Fam. 13.24 unis… litteris; Fam. 16.5 unas litteras; Q. fr. 1.1 non unis, sed pluribus (sc. litteris).
The most obvious epistolatory convention, apparent throughout the correspondence, is the writer’s use of the imperfect tense where we would use the present. The writer looks at things from the recipient’s perspective, so where we would say ‘I am writing this letter whilst watching TV’, Cicero would say scribebam…, or whatever verb applies at the time of writing.
Some colloquialisms are reassuringly reminiscent of modern ones. So we have misceo used in the sense of ‘mixing/stirring it’ or ‘causing mischief’ (Q. fr. 3.9); exsilui gaudio (Fam. 16.16) ‘I jumped for joy’; di faxint ut… (Fam. 14.3) ‘God grant that…’; extra iocum (e.g. Fam. 7.32) and remoto ioco (Fam. 7.11) ‘joking aside …’; in eadem es navi (Fam. 2.5) ‘you’re in the same boat’; non sane quadrat (Att. 13.30) ‘that really doesn’t square’; scio… me asinum germanum fuisse’ (Att 4.5) ‘I know I’ve been a real ass’.
Umpteen
Readers with some Greek, and perhaps some without, will be aware that the Greek word for ‘countless’ is also the word for ‘ten thousand’, and the origin of the English ‘myriad’. In Greek however the distinction is indicated by a change in the accentuation: μύριοι for ‘ten thousand’ and μυρίοι for ‘countless’. I understand that the French may use the number trente-six in the same way, though my modern language colleagues are sceptical (see Harrap for examples). The Latins used sescenti, ‘six hundred’, and it appears regularly in the letters. So: ad annos DC (Att. 2.5, 2.17); innumerable dangers (Att. 2.19); sescenta alia scelera (Att. 7.11); sescentis… locis (Fam.10.31). I could go on, but you get the picture.
Chiasmus
A chiasmus, which takes its name from the Greek letter chi, is a symmetrical, mirror-like arrangement of words or phrases. The most familiar chiasmus in ‘popular culture’ is probably Bruce Forsyth’s tedious greeting, ‘Nice to see you; to see you, nice.’ Latin’s inflective nature lends itself well to this sort of thing, and English versions inevitably lose the snappiness of the original. Hence: neminem tibi anteponam, comparem paucos (Fam. 12.17); ‘I would rate no-one above you, and few your equal.’
nec honores sitio nec desidero gloriam (Q. fr. 3.6); ‘I don’t have a thirst for honours and don’t miss glory.’
Brutus erat in Neside etiam nunc, Neapoli Cassius (Att. 16.4); ‘Brutus is still in Nesis, Cassius is in Naples.’
[Cf. also: progressum praecipitem, inconstantem reditum (Att. 2.21); optas congressum, pacemque non desperas (Att. 8.15); obsoletum Bruto aut Balbo inchoatum (Att. 13.22); spe vincendi… certandi cupiditatem (Fam. 4.7); Timoleonti a Timaeo aut ab Herodoto Themistocli (Fam. 5.12); inimicum meum, tuum inimicum (Fam. 15.4); domi togati, armati foris (Fam. 15.5)]
Puns
I am a fan of puns; they are appreciated by prep school children but dismissed disdainfully by older teenagers who consider themselves too cool to laugh at this sort of humour. I was disappointed not to see more on this subject in Mary Beard’s latest offering, Laughter in Ancient Rome (2014). Rendering such puns into some kind of English equivalent is of course a nightmare for translators.
In the letters such puns as exist are usually based on the similarity of proper nouns to adjectives. This is the case with Brutus (brutus: heavy, dull) at Att. 14.14 and Lepidus (lepidus: charming, agreeable) at Att. 16.5.
At the end of Fam. 8.9 it is not Cicero but his correspondent Caelius who, writing about a legal case, puns on the similarity of a litigant’s name to the word for hot (calidus) and says: Calidius in defensione sua fuit disertissimus, in accusatione satis frigidus; ‘Calidius was very eloquent in his own defence, but pretty feeble in the prosecution’. ‘Fervid’ and ‘frigid’ have been suggested as possible English renderings.
In Att. 2.1 Cicero is talking about an uninspiring prosecution speech by one Favonius: dixit ita ut Rhodi videretur molis potius quam Moloni operam dedisse (Att. 2.1) ‘He spoke in such a way that he seemed to have paid more attention at Rhodes to the mills rather than to Molo’. (Molo was an eminent Rhodian philosopher). It loses something in the translation, doesn’t it?
At Q. fr. 1.3.3. Cicero refers to himself using an alliterative pun: ferus ac ferreus, ‘savage and hard-hearted’.
Naughty homophones
The topic of puns leads me on to homophones, or at least sequences of syllables which sound the same. At Fam. 9.22 Cicero mentions the avoidance of the juxtaposition of cum and nos in Latin because the assimilation of the m of cum to the n of nobis results in a sound reminiscent of part of the declension of the noun cunnus, an intimate part of the female anatomy. At least, Cicero alludes to this obliquely rather than specifically. This, in case you were wondering, is the reasoning behind the use of nobiscum (et al.) rather than cum nobis. For obvious reasons you won’t find this explanation in many grammar books. At de Oratore 154 (not Brutus, as erroneously appears in Wikipedia, s.v. Latin profanity) he is slightly more specific: quia si ita diceretur, obscaenius concurrerent litterae; ‘Because if it were said like that, the letters would merge in a rather rude way.’ (Similarly, in literary French, a redundant l is inserted in the sequence que l’on in order to avoid the homophone of con). The technical term for an ‘accidental’ running together of such sounds to arrive at a homophone of a naughty word is cacemphaton (plural: cacemphata). A second example, also at Fam. 9.22 is that of illam dicam / landica, the noun landica (female anatomy again) being so offensive to Roman sensibilities that even Catullus and Martial avoid it.
For those interested in pursuing this line of enquiry further the locus classicus is J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Duckworth, 1982), ‘a fundamental book in every sense’ (to quote the publisher’s blurb). Probably not a volume to recommend to your Year 8 scholars, at least if you want to keep your job, but it is actually a very thorough, learned and enlightening tome.
Frequentative verbs
These verbs are also referred to as iterative; they indicate repeated action, to ‘keep on doing’ something. They are based on the core verb’s supine, and are all first conjugation, irrespective of the conjugation of the core verb. At Att. 7.12 Cicero uses both the core verb and its frequentative version: ad me scribas velim vel potius scriptites; ‘I’d like you to write, or rather keep on writing, to me.’ It is interesting to note the frequentative form of eo at Fam. 9.24: te ad cenas itare desisse, moleste fero; ‘I’m annoyed that you’ve stopped going out to dinner.’ (the form cenitando occurs shortly afterwards). Other examples are: ventitet (Att. 1.1); venditavi (Att. 1.16); sciscitare (Att. 9.15); lectito (Att. 12.18); lectitasse (Fam. 9.25) factitatum (Fam. 12.21).
Greeks
Cicero’s attitude to Greeks is not always consistent. At Q. fr. 1.1.28 he attributes whatever intellectual skills he has to the ‘records and teachings of Greece’ (Graeciae monumenta disciplinaeque traditae), though his view of the race in general is less charitable: ingenia ad fallendum parata (Q. fr. 1.2); ‘their natures are inclined to deceit’. Lyso enim noster, vereor, ne neglegentior sit; primum, quia omnes Graeci; deinde, quod, cum a me litteras accepisset, mihi nullas remisit (Fam. 16.4); ‘For I fear that our dear Lyso is rather careless; firstly because all Greeks are; secondly because he didn’t reply after receiving a letter from me.’ non nimis exquiro a Graecis (Att. 7.18); ‘I don’t expect too much from Greeks’.
Bad Latin?
As you would expect in personal correspondence, the strict laws of grammar are sometimes stretched a bit, and Cicero indulges in some howlers for which our Year 8 scholars might find themselves being chastised. For example, at the end of Fam. 3.3 Cicero uses the verb utor with a nominative rather than an ablative: qui cum venerit, quae primum navigandi nobis facultas data erit, utemur: ‘When he arrives, I’ll make use of the first opportunity to set sail that is offered to me.’ At Q. fr. 3.2 a simple expected ne becomes ut… ne: opera datur ut iudicia ne fiant; ‘Trouble is being taken to avoid trials taking place.’ And he needs to revise his fear clauses at Fam. 12.19: verebar, ut redderentur (sc litterae) ‘I was afraid that it wouldn’t be delivered,’ ought really, by my reckoning, to be verebar ne non redderentur. Tsk.
Latin’s concision of expression is facilitated by ellipsis (the omission of key words which can be understood to apply in the context). Hence at Fam. 12.24 Cicero actually writes sed hac de re alias ad te pluribus, but what he means is ‘But I’ll write to you at greater length about this matter at another time.’ My favourite nugget is even more concise: plura otiosus (Fam. 12.20); ‘I’ll write in greater detail when I have the leisure time to do so.’
I’ve let you off lightly: many more jottings exist in my notebook, but I must not strain your editor’s good nature. Perhaps he will allow me in due course to offer further random thoughts on some of my favourite nuggets of Latin literature if he is not chastised too much for allowing this article to appear.
Preamble
You must have seen one of those TV documentaries about railway workers or train drivers who, at the end of their shifts, return home and spend their spare time playing with their train sets – sorry, model railways. As some of you will know, Classics can hold the same fascination, so I must start with an apology for the fact that this article has nothing to do with prep school classical pedagogy, i.e. the sort of things we get up to ‘on shift’. I do hope however that it may be of interest to those who, like me, regard themselves not just as prep school Classics teachers but as enthusiastic armchair classicists and hobbyists who take a wider interest in their subject than is strictly demanded by the limited scope of Year 8 prep school syllabuses. Of course, much of what follows will be old hat to specialists.
I finished reading Cicero’s letters about a year ago. They fall into four collections: those to his intimate confidant, Atticus (ad Atticum); to his friends (ad Familiares); to his brother Quintus (ad Quintum fratrem); and to Marcus Brutus (ad Brutum). At Fam. 2.1 he refers to his prolific output in asking his correspondent quis est tam in scribendo impiger quam ego?; ‘Who is as energetic in writing as I am?’ It is a telling comment: the letters number over 800 and they took me a couple of years to get through, but I always like to have some Latin prose ‘on the go’ to keep my hand in, and I thought that his correspondence would provide some good indicators of colloquialisms and his own everyday Latin style, as opposed to the speeches and his philosophical and rhetorical treatises which were clearly intended for publication.
One of the fascinating aspects of Cicero’s correspondence is its wide-ranging content: from his domestic plumbing arrangements and his efforts to secure smart statues and reference books for his library, to his dealings with politicians of the day and cringeworthy cultivation of ‘the right people’, the letters open up fascinating windows into the life of the Roman we probably know better than any other. But it was Ciceronian everyday Latin that I, as an enthusiast rather than a serious scholar, wanted to become familiar with, so I made notes of points of linguistic interest as I travelled through his correspondence. It is a fascinating journey, especiaIly if one aspires to attaining something like a half-decent standard of Latin prose composition. Anyway, I hope that Broadsheet readers, particularly non-specialists, may find some of these obiter carpta of interest. (The English translations are my own, and are devoid of any literary merit. The canonical references, for those who want to check the contexts in detail, follow the abbreviations of the Oxford Latin Dictionary).
Some basics
A good place to start would be the word Cicero uses for ‘a letter’; more often than the word epistula it is the plural noun litterae. An interesting linguistic consequence of this is the paradoxical use of the word for ‘one’ in the plural. (Att. 7.9 unas litteras; Att. 14.18 et unis et alteris litteris; Fam. 10.31 unas…litteras; Fam. 13.24 unis… litteris; Fam. 16.5 unas litteras; Q. fr. 1.1 non unis, sed pluribus (sc. litteris).
The most obvious epistolatory convention, apparent throughout the correspondence, is the writer’s use of the imperfect tense where we would use the present. The writer looks at things from the recipient’s perspective, so where we would say ‘I am writing this letter whilst watching TV’, Cicero would say scribebam…, or whatever verb applies at the time of writing.
Some colloquialisms are reassuringly reminiscent of modern ones. So we have misceo used in the sense of ‘mixing/stirring it’ or ‘causing mischief’ (Q. fr. 3.9); exsilui gaudio (Fam. 16.16) ‘I jumped for joy’; di faxint ut… (Fam. 14.3) ‘God grant that…’; extra iocum (e.g. Fam. 7.32) and remoto ioco (Fam. 7.11) ‘joking aside …’; in eadem es navi (Fam. 2.5) ‘you’re in the same boat’; non sane quadrat (Att. 13.30) ‘that really doesn’t square’; scio… me asinum germanum fuisse’ (Att 4.5) ‘I know I’ve been a real ass’.
Umpteen
Readers with some Greek, and perhaps some without, will be aware that the Greek word for ‘countless’ is also the word for ‘ten thousand’, and the origin of the English ‘myriad’. In Greek however the distinction is indicated by a change in the accentuation: μύριοι for ‘ten thousand’ and μυρίοι for ‘countless’. I understand that the French may use the number trente-six in the same way, though my modern language colleagues are sceptical (see Harrap for examples). The Latins used sescenti, ‘six hundred’, and it appears regularly in the letters. So: ad annos DC (Att. 2.5, 2.17); innumerable dangers (Att. 2.19); sescenta alia scelera (Att. 7.11); sescentis… locis (Fam.10.31). I could go on, but you get the picture.
Chiasmus
A chiasmus, which takes its name from the Greek letter chi, is a symmetrical, mirror-like arrangement of words or phrases. The most familiar chiasmus in ‘popular culture’ is probably Bruce Forsyth’s tedious greeting, ‘Nice to see you; to see you, nice.’ Latin’s inflective nature lends itself well to this sort of thing, and English versions inevitably lose the snappiness of the original. Hence: neminem tibi anteponam, comparem paucos (Fam. 12.17); ‘I would rate no-one above you, and few your equal.’
nec honores sitio nec desidero gloriam (Q. fr. 3.6); ‘I don’t have a thirst for honours and don’t miss glory.’
Brutus erat in Neside etiam nunc, Neapoli Cassius (Att. 16.4); ‘Brutus is still in Nesis, Cassius is in Naples.’
[Cf. also: progressum praecipitem, inconstantem reditum (Att. 2.21); optas congressum, pacemque non desperas (Att. 8.15); obsoletum Bruto aut Balbo inchoatum (Att. 13.22); spe vincendi… certandi cupiditatem (Fam. 4.7); Timoleonti a Timaeo aut ab Herodoto Themistocli (Fam. 5.12); inimicum meum, tuum inimicum (Fam. 15.4); domi togati, armati foris (Fam. 15.5)]
Puns
I am a fan of puns; they are appreciated by prep school children but dismissed disdainfully by older teenagers who consider themselves too cool to laugh at this sort of humour. I was disappointed not to see more on this subject in Mary Beard’s latest offering, Laughter in Ancient Rome (2014). Rendering such puns into some kind of English equivalent is of course a nightmare for translators.
In the letters such puns as exist are usually based on the similarity of proper nouns to adjectives. This is the case with Brutus (brutus: heavy, dull) at Att. 14.14 and Lepidus (lepidus: charming, agreeable) at Att. 16.5.
At the end of Fam. 8.9 it is not Cicero but his correspondent Caelius who, writing about a legal case, puns on the similarity of a litigant’s name to the word for hot (calidus) and says: Calidius in defensione sua fuit disertissimus, in accusatione satis frigidus; ‘Calidius was very eloquent in his own defence, but pretty feeble in the prosecution’. ‘Fervid’ and ‘frigid’ have been suggested as possible English renderings.
In Att. 2.1 Cicero is talking about an uninspiring prosecution speech by one Favonius: dixit ita ut Rhodi videretur molis potius quam Moloni operam dedisse (Att. 2.1) ‘He spoke in such a way that he seemed to have paid more attention at Rhodes to the mills rather than to Molo’. (Molo was an eminent Rhodian philosopher). It loses something in the translation, doesn’t it?
At Q. fr. 1.3.3. Cicero refers to himself using an alliterative pun: ferus ac ferreus, ‘savage and hard-hearted’.
Naughty homophones
The topic of puns leads me on to homophones, or at least sequences of syllables which sound the same. At Fam. 9.22 Cicero mentions the avoidance of the juxtaposition of cum and nos in Latin because the assimilation of the m of cum to the n of nobis results in a sound reminiscent of part of the declension of the noun cunnus, an intimate part of the female anatomy. At least, Cicero alludes to this obliquely rather than specifically. This, in case you were wondering, is the reasoning behind the use of nobiscum (et al.) rather than cum nobis. For obvious reasons you won’t find this explanation in many grammar books. At de Oratore 154 (not Brutus, as erroneously appears in Wikipedia, s.v. Latin profanity) he is slightly more specific: quia si ita diceretur, obscaenius concurrerent litterae; ‘Because if it were said like that, the letters would merge in a rather rude way.’ (Similarly, in literary French, a redundant l is inserted in the sequence que l’on in order to avoid the homophone of con). The technical term for an ‘accidental’ running together of such sounds to arrive at a homophone of a naughty word is cacemphaton (plural: cacemphata). A second example, also at Fam. 9.22 is that of illam dicam / landica, the noun landica (female anatomy again) being so offensive to Roman sensibilities that even Catullus and Martial avoid it.
For those interested in pursuing this line of enquiry further the locus classicus is J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Duckworth, 1982), ‘a fundamental book in every sense’ (to quote the publisher’s blurb). Probably not a volume to recommend to your Year 8 scholars, at least if you want to keep your job, but it is actually a very thorough, learned and enlightening tome.
Frequentative verbs
These verbs are also referred to as iterative; they indicate repeated action, to ‘keep on doing’ something. They are based on the core verb’s supine, and are all first conjugation, irrespective of the conjugation of the core verb. At Att. 7.12 Cicero uses both the core verb and its frequentative version: ad me scribas velim vel potius scriptites; ‘I’d like you to write, or rather keep on writing, to me.’ It is interesting to note the frequentative form of eo at Fam. 9.24: te ad cenas itare desisse, moleste fero; ‘I’m annoyed that you’ve stopped going out to dinner.’ (the form cenitando occurs shortly afterwards). Other examples are: ventitet (Att. 1.1); venditavi (Att. 1.16); sciscitare (Att. 9.15); lectito (Att. 12.18); lectitasse (Fam. 9.25) factitatum (Fam. 12.21).
Greeks
Cicero’s attitude to Greeks is not always consistent. At Q. fr. 1.1.28 he attributes whatever intellectual skills he has to the ‘records and teachings of Greece’ (Graeciae monumenta disciplinaeque traditae), though his view of the race in general is less charitable: ingenia ad fallendum parata (Q. fr. 1.2); ‘their natures are inclined to deceit’. Lyso enim noster, vereor, ne neglegentior sit; primum, quia omnes Graeci; deinde, quod, cum a me litteras accepisset, mihi nullas remisit (Fam. 16.4); ‘For I fear that our dear Lyso is rather careless; firstly because all Greeks are; secondly because he didn’t reply after receiving a letter from me.’ non nimis exquiro a Graecis (Att. 7.18); ‘I don’t expect too much from Greeks’.
Bad Latin?
As you would expect in personal correspondence, the strict laws of grammar are sometimes stretched a bit, and Cicero indulges in some howlers for which our Year 8 scholars might find themselves being chastised. For example, at the end of Fam. 3.3 Cicero uses the verb utor with a nominative rather than an ablative: qui cum venerit, quae primum navigandi nobis facultas data erit, utemur: ‘When he arrives, I’ll make use of the first opportunity to set sail that is offered to me.’ At Q. fr. 3.2 a simple expected ne becomes ut… ne: opera datur ut iudicia ne fiant; ‘Trouble is being taken to avoid trials taking place.’ And he needs to revise his fear clauses at Fam. 12.19: verebar, ut redderentur (sc litterae) ‘I was afraid that it wouldn’t be delivered,’ ought really, by my reckoning, to be verebar ne non redderentur. Tsk.
Latin’s concision of expression is facilitated by ellipsis (the omission of key words which can be understood to apply in the context). Hence at Fam. 12.24 Cicero actually writes sed hac de re alias ad te pluribus, but what he means is ‘But I’ll write to you at greater length about this matter at another time.’ My favourite nugget is even more concise: plura otiosus (Fam. 12.20); ‘I’ll write in greater detail when I have the leisure time to do so.’
I’ve let you off lightly: many more jottings exist in my notebook, but I must not strain your editor’s good nature. Perhaps he will allow me in due course to offer further random thoughts on some of my favourite nuggets of Latin literature if he is not chastised too much for allowing this article to appear.
