Scribblers, Sculptors and Scribes

  Scribblers, Sculptors, and Scribes

  A Companion to Wheelock’s Latin and Other Introductory Textbooks

  Richard A. LaFleur

  Contents

  Introdvctio

  Maps

  Capita:

  I The ABC’s of Latin, Love, and Living Well

  II Grave Goods, Gomora, and Sage Moral Guidance

  III Lovers, a Laureate, and the Labyrinth

  IV The Glory of Profit, a Gladiator to Sigh for, and a Girl You’d Not Want to Kiss

  V Would-be Mayors, a Minor-Leaguer, and a Rebel without a Clue

  VI Mad Dogs, Bad Politicians, and More “Wisdom of the Ancients”

  VII All Hail to Sulla, Soothsayers, and the Sound of Mind and Body

  VIII Gladiators Who Win, “Meditators” Who Write, and Good Sons Who Read Good Books

  IX A Princely Patron, a Seller of Dung, and Loiterers All Forewarned

  X Love and Loathing, Electioneering, and the Hostile Advance of Death

  XI Looking for Love, Seizing the Day, and Wearing Your Hat in the Sun

  XII Men Who Deceive, the Heedless Dead, and Doctors in Novel Positions

  XIII An Exemplary Patron, an Imperial Parrot, and Pompeian Guys and Gals Hanging Out

  XIV Doomed Mayors, Magic Squares, and a Truly “Fishy” Menu

  XV Princes of Youth, Pricing a Bride, and Pompeii’s Got Talent!

  XVI Mushrooming Concerns, the Joys of Madness, and the Sweetheart Monarch of Pompeii

  XVII A Lost Meal, a Lost Love, and a Lost Revolution

  XVIII Winners and Losers, Rooms to Let, and Lads Who Risk “Losing” Their Butts

  XIX A Beast Hunt, Blind Lovers, and “In the Beginning”

  XX A Shared Bowl, Swords into Scythes, and “I’ll Scratch Your Back, You Scratch Mine”

  XXI Friends for Life, the Ideal Wife, and Taking Your Feast to the Grave

  XXII On Conquest, and Candles, and Keeping the Faith

  XXIII Politics, Prophecies, and Broken Promises

  XXIV Women in Love, Writing the Laws, and a Pertussive Toothless Wonder

  XXV Fifty Oysters, Eight Ways to Punish, and Burying Your Seven Men

  XXVI Sour Grapes, the Gift of Death, and Smart Ways of Looking Good

  XXVII On the Gods, Blind Love, and French Toast

  XXVIII Curses, Comestibles, and a Birthday Surprise

  XXIX Gladiators, Clothes Cleaners, and the Gospel of John

  XXX Campaigning, Counting Kisses, and a Cool Miss Named “Snow White”

  XXXI Bathing, and Baking, and Keeping the Peace

  XXXII Petty Thieves, a Plagiarist, and the Punic Avenger

  XXXIII Kitchen Tricks, a Sober King, and Carrying Coals to Newcastle

  XXXIV Constantine’s Arch, a Haunted House, and “Hanging” in Pompeii

  XXXV Fatality, the Fates, and a Father’s Grief

  XXXVI Romance, Rivalries, and Creating the World

  XXXVII Oracles, Oral Hygiene, and the Ides of March

  XXXVIII Aborigines, Busybodies, and Brits

  XXXIX A Time for Peace, a Time for Love, and a Time to Harvest the Day

  XL The Imperative to Love, Some of Life’s Celebrations, and the Augustan Legacy to Rome

  Svmmarivm Formarvm

  Bibliography and Suggested Readings

  Abbreviationes

  Vocabvla

  Mille Gratias…

  About the Author

  Other Books in the Wheelock’s Latin Series

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ALICIAE AMATISSIMAE AC LIBERIS NEPOTIBVSQVE CARISSIMIS

  View through the forum at Pompeii, looking north toward Vesuvius

  INTRODVCTIO

  A few years back, when I had just completed my last book and found myself perilously at leisure (think of the Roman poet Catullus, who once admonished himself that “leisure is your problem,” otium molestum est), I conceived the idea for this new undertaking. Though the implementation proved to be, if not molestum, then for sure NEGotium, the premise itself was uncomplicated. I wanted to gather and edit a collection of entirely authentic, unadapted, unsimplified classical Latin texts that beginning students, from the very first day of their introduction to what I ever reverently dub “The Mother Tongue,” could read, enjoy, and profit from and that would provide a wide range of insights into not just the minds of Rome’s movers and shakers—her politicians and generals, philosophers and great poets—but also into the daily lives of the Average Joe and Jane Roman.

  For years I have taught from (and become otherwise engaged with) that venerable classic, Wheelock’s Latin, whose cardinal virtue is that it introduces students to ancient authors from the very outset, through individual sententiae and then gradually longer and more complex prose and verse texts. As early as Wheelock’s second chapter there are sententiae antiquae extracted verbatim from such writers as Terence, Cicero, Propertius, Livy, Phaedrus, Seneca, Juvenal, Pliny, Publilius Syrus, Servius, and St. Jerome. Chapter five introduces the first “complete,” unadapted text, an epigram by the humorist Martial, many of whose lively little poems are sprinkled throughout the book’s forty chapters, which include other unsimplified, unaltered texts, mostly excerpts, from authors like Caesar, Catullus, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, and Petronius. The sampling from classics of Roman literature found in Wheelock’s Latin makes it unique among introductory Latin textbooks, and, along with its clear and orderly presentation of Latin grammar, has helped retain its place as one of the most widely used introductory texts for beginning students.

  Nevertheless the volume of readings is necessarily restricted, and very many of the selections are “adapted,” which is to say altered and simplified in one way or another, so that students who have learned only a limited amount of grammar at a given point in the text can still read passages that would otherwise be too complex. Other beginning textbooks have similar, in most cases considerably greater, limitations in their introduction of entirely “authentic” texts. Virtually every beginning Latin book could benefit from a companion text that gets students reading “real” and interesting Latin statim, “immediately!”

  SCRIBBLERS, SCVLPTORS, AND SCRIBES

  First…the Scribblers

  The challenge in producing such a companion reader was to identify authentic texts that were not only of sufficient interest, but also simple enough in terms of grammar and vocabulary to be read by students in the earliest stages of learning the language. The solution I came upon (and with some joyfully helpful advice from my uxor carissima, Alice!) is to be seen in the title, Scribblers, Scvlptors, and Scribes. The “Scribblers” you’ll encounter beginning in the first of the book’s forty chapters are those everyday Romans who had, as seems clear, an overwhelming passion for writing on walls—and doors, and storefronts, and columns, AND any and all available surfaces—about love and hate, friends and enemies, life and death, politicians and gladiators, and just about every other subject imaginable. They have left literally thousands of graffiti that afford us countless, sometimes intimate insights into their daily thoughts and activities. The book contains dozens of such graffiti, the vast majority of them from Pompeii, whose destruction in the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Vesuvius, in August, A.D. 79, at once captured and preserved for us the single largest corpus of wall-writings that survive from the ancient world—many of them dating to the years and months immediately preceding the catastrophe.

  Even more so than twenty-first-century Americans, the Pompeians scribbled everywhere, typically scratching their messages into plaster walls with a stilus or any sharp instrument that might be at hand; sometimes the texts were painted (and in that case called dipinti), oft
en in bright colors, especially in the case of the political campaign notices (programmata) and advertisements for gladiatorial games that were so common all around the city. Besides the insights these texts provide into aspects of daily life in a provincial town of the first century A.D.., they can teach us something too about Roman literacy; some studies have suggested a literacy rate of about twenty percent during the early Roman empire, but in a bustling, mercantile town like Pompeii, the level might have been much higher. We can be grateful, it might be added, that not all writers of graffiti were quite masters of the Latin language, as you will see from the selections in this book: just as in the case of modern graffiti you’ve seen in the bathroom down the hall, these ancient wall-writings often contain spelling errors, which at times provide important clues to how Romans pronounced their language, as well as grammatical mistakes, which can provide consolation to modern Latin students who sometimes repeat them!

  Scvlptors

  These graffiti, though many were quite artful, were typically written in “easy” Latin, and so too, for somewhat different reasons, were the more formal inscriptions that we find engraved or otherwise more or less permanently imprinted on buildings, arches, pottery, tableware, jewelry, and a wide variety of other ancient structures and artifacts. SCVLPTOR, as the early Romans wrote the word (in all CAPITALS and with the vowel V), or “sculptor” in its more familiar English form, is the Latin noun for a craftsman who not only produced “sculpture,” in the sense of statuary, but who also “sculpted,” i.e., carved or engraved, inscriptions on stone, metal, ceramicware, and other such durable materials that have survived in even greater numbers than graffiti. These texts were, for the most part, brief, for reasons of space, and syntactically simple, for ease of reading by the average viewer. The numerous inscriptions of this sort that you will find in nearly every chapter of the book are drawn from temples, triumphal arches, coins, pottery, mosaic floors, wooden tablets, rings, platters, slave collars, and especially tombstones and other funerary monuments; many are in contexts you will yourself certainly encounter, if you travel to Rome (who could miss that inscription over the porch of the marvelous Pantheon!) or simply pay a visit to a museum with a collection of Roman antiquities. All of the book’s inscriptions have been selected for the glimpses they provide into realities of the Roman world, and the epitaphs in particular yield insights into popular philosophy, attitudes toward death and the afterlife, and views of what constituted a good and worthy life.

  The volume’s graffiti and other inscriptions come from throughout the empire, but the majority are from Pompeii (and found chiefly in volume 4 of the monumental collection, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, abbreviated CIL 4) and the city of Rome and its environs (CIL 6). The ancient city of Pompeii has been divided by archaeologists into regions and blocks (regiones and insulae), and the locations of inscriptions from these sectors are conventionally further identified by street name and, when one has been assigned, the name of a building or other structure. This can all be far more complicated than necessary in a book of this kind, and so I typically identify locations in general terms, often giving the street name in Italian and sometimes, in English, the name of the house or other structure, such as the amphitheater or the Large Palaestra; capitalization practices, as you see in just these last two examples, vary as well, and I have followed what appear to be the commonest conventions for the various buildings.

  Scribes

  Finally, the “Scribes” of the book’s title (a term drawn from the same Latin word as “scribbler,” i.e., the verb scribere, “to write”) are those assiduous, and either more or less scholarly “clerks,” typically slaves in ancient times, and monks laboring in monasteries throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, who laboriously copied out by hand the countless literary texts that have survived to us from antiquity almost exclusively via manuscript tradition, up until the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. To these dutiful copyists are owed the selections included in the Proverbia et Dicta and Litteratura sections of this book, all of which—like the Inscriptiones—are drawn directly from ancient sources (the only exceptions being one or two personal favorites of mine, including Hugo of St. Victor’s memorable exhortation to us to “learn EVERYthing,” from the twelfth century, and several dicta drawn from the sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus, whose collection of “Adages,” however, derives chiefly from Greco-Roman sources).

  The ancient Romans and their language are known to many of us especially through their proverbs and countless “quotable quotes,” from which there is much to be learned, not only about Roman culture and thought, but about the Latin language itself, and which, because of their extraordinary economy of language, are made-to-order for students in a beginning course. The book’s “Proverbs and Sayings” represent a wide variety of ancient Roman authors, and the fuller selections in the “Literature” section that concludes each chapter are drawn from such important writers as Cicero, Catullus, Sallust, Horace, Sulpicia, Augustus, Seneca the Younger, Petronius, Martial, the younger Pliny, the emperor Trajan, Juvenal, and many others; selections from St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible are included as well, not as religious texts, but for their historical and literary interest, and for the relatively simple Latin that Jerome employed in his “Vulgate” edition to make the scriptures widely accessible to the vulgus, i.e., the common folk.

  The book’s early chapters contain none of these longer selections, only inscriptions and proverbs, because of the complexity of the “simplest” of classical literary texts vs. the limited morphology (forms) and syntax introduced in Wheelock’s opening chapters and in other beginning textbooks. The first actual literary passages introduced, beginning in Capvt IV, and many of those throughout the book, are poetry, first and foremost because the grammar and sentence structure are generally in fact easier than prose, and second—I’ll confess—because Latin verse has long been a passion of mine; but, rest assured, the length, complexity, and variety of readings, both prose and verse, complete works (like letters and poems) and unadapted excerpts, increase as you proceed through the chapters.

  Exact passage citations are provided along with each of the proverbs and adages, as well as with all the literary selections, so that readers can easily locate the originals for context or further reading (a useful online source for the purpose is the Latin Library, http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/). A single exception are the numerous dicta drawn from the first-century B.C. mime-writer Publilius Syrus, whose Sententiae, gems of popular philosophy that schoolboys were for centuries required to write out and memorize, were compiled, variously edited, jumbled, and recompiled in antiquity; no completely authoritative text exists today, and the individual Sententiae are differently numbered in the various editions, so I have culled favorites from varying sources and dispensed with any numbering of the selections.

  A final point I might make regarding the content of the reading selections: the voices of women from ancient Rome have in many textbooks been too infrequently heard, and for a variety of reasons. Certainly the education of women in ancient Rome was far more restricted than that of men, as was their direct involvement in politics and many other civic, religious, and social contexts, so that the roles they played were less public and less publicized. Nevertheless Roman women had a prominence that surpassed that of their counterparts in Greece and many other ancient cultures, and with the “democratization” of classical studies in American and European cultures over the past 50 years, both interest in, and our knowledge of, the diverse contributions made by women to Roman society have expanded considerably. This book offers glimpses of women in the roles of daughter, sister, wife, mother, friend, lover, prostitute, sports enthusiast, shopowner, political campaigner, client, author, and physician; and you will hear them speak through a variety of media, including graffiti, epitaphs (notably those composed by Cornelia Galla for her husband, and Terentia for her brother, both dactylic hexameter poems) and other inscriptions, actu
al handwritten letters, and formal literary works (in particular the elegies of the first-century B.C. elegist Sulpicia).

  THE BOOK’S DESIGN AND HOW TO USE IT

  Each chapter of Scribblers, Scvlptors, and Scribes opens with a very brief general introduction, simply highlighting some of the contents and mentioning newly introduced grammar, which is then followed by the Inscriptiones, Proverbia et Dicta, and, in Capita IV, VII, and XI–XL, the Litteratura selections. Each graffito, inscription, and literary text has its own short introductory commentary. All texts, including the proverbs, are provided with vocabulary glosses (more about this below) and other aids; technical terms for figures of speech, poetic and rhetorical devices, and many grammatical constructions are printed in SMALL CAPITALS like this, in order to focus your attention on terminology you ought to know in connection with your study of Latin (many are defined at their first occurrence, and you should research online or in a good dictionary any others with which you may be unfamiliar).