Eulogy versus History

To speak ill of a dead friend is hard.  Harder still is to speak ill of a dead friend who was also the Byzantine emperor.  When we commemorate the dead, we would like not to defile their reputation with tales of debauchery and deceit.  History and eulogy, however, are not compatible genres.  Historical accuracy requires recognition of the sordid details that spice up the sanitary content of panegyric.  Michael Psellus realizes this.  Michael Psellus agonizes over it.  Michael Psellus exults in his own literary abilities.

Michael Psellus, trans. E.R.A. Sewter, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers (Penguin, 1966):

I was most anxious to avoid imputing any blame to him.  I did not want to reveal by my words any actions not to his credit and things it is better to keep dark.  I was loath to put before the public a dishonest story, yet at the same time I was unwilling to defame the hero of my former eulogy.  In my opinion it was wrong to exercise literary talents, which I had perfected because of his encouragement, to do him harm.  (166)

What I would like, therefore, is either to commemorate him in a panegyric or to pass over in silence those actions in his life which did not spring from worthy motives. (167)

In the composition of a eulogy, in fact, my subject-matter is not chosen usually with complete indifference to good or bad: the latter I reject, the former I set on one side, afterwards putting it in proper order.  So a homogeneous pattern is worked out, a tapestry of the finest cloth.

Such is the method I have adopted in composing eulogies of Constantine, but now that I have undertaken to write a history, this plan becomes impossible, for I cannot bring myself to distort the facts of history, where truth is of more importance than anything else, in order to escape the reproaches of my contemporaries...Yet no one on earth is faultless, and we judge a man by the trait which chiefly distinguishes him form everyone else.  So why should I feel ashamed to declare openly whatever injustice or indiscretion this man, in common with the rest, may have committed? (168-9)

Naturally I would have wished that my favourite emperor had been perfect, even if such a compliment was impossible for all the others, but the events of history do not accommodate themselves to our desires.  So, divine soul, forgive me, and if sometimes in describing your reign I speak immoderately, concealing nothing and telling the truth, pardon me for it.  Not one of your nobler deeds shall be passed over in silence.  They shall all be revealed.  Likewise, whatever derives not from that same nobility, that too shall be made manifest in my history.  And there we must leave the matter and return to our narrative. (169-70)

Musing on mediocrity, sub Mensa

Lionel Trilling, introduction to Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (Harvest, 1980), x.

We admire geniuses, we love them, but they discourage us.  They are great concentrations of intellect and emotion, we feel that they have soaked up all the available power, monopolizing it and leaving none for us.  We feel that if we cannot be as they, we can be nothing.  Beside them we are so plain, so hopelessly threadbare.  How they glitter, and with what an imperious way they seem to deal with circumstance, even when they are wrong.  Lacking their patents of nobility, we might as well quit.  This is what democracy has done to us, alas -- told us that genius is available to anyone, that the grace of ultimate prestige may be had by anyone, that we may all be princes and potentates, or saints and visionaries and holy martyrs of the heart and mind.  And then when it turns out that we are no such thing, it permits us to think that we aren't much of anything at all.  In contrast with this cozening trick of democracy, how pleasant seems the old, reactionary Anglican phrase that used to drive people of democratic leanings quite wild with rage -- "My station and its duties."

Inferiority enervates the will as we indulge in self-pity, and the indulgence is never so piquant as when we contrast our own dimness with the brilliant example of a genius.  We are left to solve the labyrinth with our petty ball of string, while they invent a helicopter and mock us errant knaves from above.

I shake my fist at you, you genius in your helicopter.*

*Image taken from Leonardo 2.0, where Leonardo updates his blog, apparently.

Quo vadis

Quae nunc it per iter tenebricosum
illuc unde negant redire quemquam.


Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
  Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task has done,
  Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Shakespeare, Cymbeline (Act IV, Scene 2)

Marsyas, in the Flesh

Statue of Marsyas, Capitoline Museum

Silent Despair

Jacob Burckhardt, ed. Oswynn Murray, trans. Sheila Stern, The Greeks and Greek Civilization (St. Martin's Griffin, 1999) p. xliii.

And finally, never go beyond one volume and remember the silent despair with which you and I regard some new three-volume monograph or biography, whose spiritual and intellectual contribution could have been put in four or five pages.

Indignata. Quia iuvenis erat.

  Galata Morente, in the Capitoline Museum

Two accounts of near death experience in the Spanish Civil War this evening, each recollecting the feckless fury of the doomed young warrior.  Knox reflects on the timelessness of the theme, while Orwell pins a rational disclaimer to the end of his description.   It is an odd coincidence that both were shot in the neck while fighting the Fascists.

Bernard Knox, "Premature Anti-Fascist"*

The order to withdraw soon came; we did so by sections, one covering the other with fire as it came back. As our section was moving back, dragging the gun, I felt a shocking blow and a burning pain through my neck and right shoulder and fell to the ground on my back with blood spurting up like a fountain. John came back, with David, our Oxford man who had been a medical student. I heard him say; "I can't do anything about that" and John bent down and said, "God bless you, Bernard" and left.

They had to go; they had to set up the gun and cover the withdrawal of our other crew. And they were sure that I was dying. So was I. As the blood continued to spout I could feel my consciousness slipping fast away.

I have since then read many accounts by people who, like me, were sure they were dying but survived. Many of them speak of a feeling of heavenly peace, others of visions of angels welcoming them to Heaven. I had no such feelings or visions; I was consumed with rage--furious, violent rage. Why me? I was just 21 and had barely begun living my life. Why should I have to die? It was unjust. And, as I felt my whole being sliding into nothingness, I cursed. I cursed God and the world and everyone in it as the darkness fell.

Many years later, when I returned to the study of the ancient classics, I found that my reaction was not abnormal. In Homer's Iliad, still the greatest of all war books, this is how young men die. Hector, for example, "went winging down to the House of Death/ wailing his fate, leaving his manhood far behind, his young and supple strength." And Virgil's Turnus goes the same road: vitaque cum gomitu fugit indignata sub umbras: 'his life with a groan fled angry to the shades below." "Indignata. Quia iuvenis erat," the great Virgilian commentator Servius explained. "Angry. Because he was young."

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Harvest, 1980), pp. 186-7:

Everything was very blurry.  There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed.  And that too was interesting -- I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time.  My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife.  My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well.  I had time to feel this very vividly.  The stupid mischance infuriated me.  The meaninglessness of it!  To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale corner of the trenches, thanks to a moment's carelessness!  I thought too, of the man who had shot me -- wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or a foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth.  I could not feel any resentment against him.  I reflected that as he was a fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting.  It may be, though, that if you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different.

*http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/scw/knox.htm

Laocoön Redux

I don't know who duplicated the famed statue in miniature, or when the scoundrel carried it out.  I do notice that Laocoön straightens his right arm to pull the snake away in this copy, while the Vatican displays the current construction with the elbow bent to reach behind himself.  (n.b. also of the precipitous decline in wang percentage)

Just a guy wearing a fig leaf, hanging out with his naked sons, being attacked by snakes.  Nothing to see here, move along folks.

The Anonymous Friend of the Crapulous Man

Plutarch, Antony 9.4

λέγεται γοῦν, ὡς ἐν Ἱππίου ποτὲ τοῦ μίμου γάμοις ἑστιαθεὶς καὶ πιὼν διὰ νυκτός, εἶτα πρωῒ τοῦ δήμου καλοῦντος εἰς ἀγορὰν προελθὼν ἔτι τροφῆς μεστὸς ἐμέσειε, τῶν φίλων τινὸς ὑποσχόντος τὸ ἱμάτιον.

They say that after feasting the matrimony of the mime Hippias and gorging himself on wine for the whole evening, he (Antony) was called to the forum early the next morning by the citizens.   He showed up, still stuffed with such 'nourishment', and puked as his friend held out his toga.

That is a true friend.

Virtues of a Balanced Breakfast

Shakespeare, Coriolanus (Act V, Scene 1):

The veins unfill'd, our blood is cold, and then
We pout upon the morning, are unapt
To give or to forgive; but when we have stuff'd
These pipes and these conveyances of our blood
With wine and feeding, we have suppler souls
Than in our priest-like fasts;

I usually skip breakfast.

Sympathy for the Devil

Ought one to break the law to punish a bad man?  To seek vengeance for the deaths of innocents?  To frustrate the denouement of some evil plot?  I don't know.  Wise men and sophists have argued each answer eloquently.  I do know that Robert Bolt's interpretation of Thomas More persuades me contrariwise.

Robert Bolt,  A Man for All Seasons (New York: Vintage International 1990), p. 66:

More:  And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

Roper:  So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

More:  Yes.  What would you do?  Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper:  I'd cut down every law in England to do that?

More: (Roused and excited)  Oh? (Advances on Roper)  And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you -- where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?  (He leaves him)  This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast -- man's laws, not God's -- and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?  (Quietly)  Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of the law, for my own safety's sake.

Otium

Otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
     perdidit urbes.

Catullus 51.13-16

Leisure, Catullus, is your vexation,
too enamored of procrastination;
Lords and lands past it has led
     to obliteration.

Boo this man.

A Great Eye

καὶ μὴν μέγας γ᾽ ὀφθαλμὸς οἱ πατρὸς τάφοι.
And indeed the tomb of your father is a great eye.  
Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 987

This line always cracks me up because of Emerson.*  It beats some stolidly smiling kouros.

*Image from:
Transcendentalism Overhead.  "Trancendentalism." http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/transcendentaloverhead.htm

The Sweetest Laugh

οὔκουν γέλως ἥδιστος εἰς ἐχθροὺς γελᾶν;
To laugh at enemies, is that not the sweetest laughter?

Sophocles Ajax 79.

Athena puts the question to Odysseus, but the Ithacan king refuses to embrace even a divinely endorsed schadenfreude.  One ought to admire Odysseus' restraint.  Other men have been less hesitant to rejoice in the misfortune of a rival, and most would gladly exact revenge themselves.

In Herodotus, Astyages' cannibalistic prank on Harpagus finds its recompense in the desertion of the Medes to Cyrus.  A great price to pay for a Thyestean Feast, though I think most people would judge Harpagus leniently. 

The menu for Achilles in his post-Patroclan world offers different fare.

Before then, for me at least, neither food nor drink
will travel down my throat, not with my friend dead,
there in my shelter, torn to shreds by the sharp bronze...
His feet turned to the door, stretched out for burial,
round him comrades mourning.
You talk of food?
I have no taste for food -- what I really crave
is slaughter and blood and the choking groans of men!

Homer, Iliad 19.209-214, (tr. Robert Fagles)

Delicious, but he'll just be hungry again in an hour.

Perhaps the example of William Poole is best.  He retaliates via the opposite orifice.

There was then William Poole, a nibbler at astrology, sometimes a gardener, an apparitor, a drawer of linen; as quoifs, handkerchiefs; a plaisterer and a bricklayer; he would brag many times he had been of seventeen professions; was very good company for drolling, as you yourself very well remember (most honoured Sir); he pretended to poetry; and that posterity may have a taste of it, you shall have here inserted two verses of his own making; the occasion of making them was thus. One Sir Thomas Jay, a Justice of the Peace in Rosemary-Lane, issued out his warrant for the apprehension of Poole, upon a pretended suggestion, that he was in company with some lewd people in a tavern, where a silver cup was lost, Anglice stolen. Poole, hearing of the warrant, packs up his little trunk of books, being all his library, and runs to Westminster; but hearing some months after that the Justice was dead and buried, he came and enquired where the grave was; and after the discharge of his belly upon the grave, left these two verses upon it, which he swore he made himself.

Here lieth buried Sir Thomas Jay, Knight,

Who being dead, I upon his grave did shite.

WILLIAM LILLY'S HISTORY OF HIS LIFE AND TIMES, FROM THE YEAR 1602 TO 1681

Maybe the real moral of this story is that the safest time for revenge is after one's foe has joined the majority.  It is impressive what six feet of earth can do for the bravery of a man.

Cui dono meum lepidum novum weblogum?

To you, my friend, and to me. This is my outlet, my sanctuary, my holy of holies. It won't be well researched, frequently updated, or intellectually stimulating, but I've lost my train of thought.

So here it is, inchoate but existent. Apologies are due as I meant to start writing here well before now. I intend to toss any entertaining bits of literature on here as I read them, and add any other insights of my own as I see fit. Quite omphalic, but it is my venue. (I briefly considered the profile name 'Onan the Barbarian'). Shakespeare, Latin Poetry, Umberto Eco, Homer -- I plod through them all, and you get to read about it. But enough introductory blathering, now for the topic of my first post. To honor the long delay in its inception, I'll inaugurate this blog with a few notable quotes on everyone's second-favorite pastime -- being lazy. Please enjoy.

Better is a handful with quietness, than both the hands full with travail and vexation of spirit.

Ecclesiastes 4

For Poesy! - no, - she has not a joy, -
At least for me, - so sweet as drowsy noons,
And evenings steep'd in honied indolence;
O, for an age so shelter'd from annoy,
That I may never know how change the moons,
Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!

Keats, Ode on Indolence

Why are we weigh'd upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?
All things have rest: why should we toil alone,
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan,
Still from one sorrow to another thrown:
Nor ever fold our wings,
And cease from wanderings,
Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm;
Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,
"There is no joy but calm!"
Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?

Tennyson, The Lotos-Eaters

Yea, I hated all my labor which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me.
...

For what hath man of all his labor, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath labored
under the sun?

For all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief: yea, his heart taketh not rest in the night.
This is also vanity.

There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labor...

Ecclesiastes 2