“But no doubt men commonly have this defect, and we all generally err in this, that we hope much for our life, and measure our time broadly, while on the contrary we always fear for another’s, and are cautious and concerned about it, thinking it feeble and brief. For who is there who is so far gone, or who has his foot so close to the grave, who does not believe he must be able [2639] to live four or six years, and that everything favorable for that is not being prepared? Truly I believe that there is none among us; nor should it be surprising if we had this same hope for the old age of another, that we have for our own, and did not mock in another what we approve in ourselves.” Della Casa, second “Orazione per la Lega,” Lyon (Venice), Barthélémy Martin, undated, at the end of the 3rd tome of Della Casa’s Opere, Venice, Pasinelli, 1752, p. 41. Three pages from the end of the Oration.1 (13–14 Oct. 1822.)
I have said elsewhere [→Z 1806ff.] that a great number of the words that are called elegant in poetry and considered poetic are not, except in that they are no longer in common and familiar use, as they once were (or were certainly used by prose writers), and consequently in that they are old with respect to [2640] the modern language, although they are not obsolete. And that principally happens with words (or phrases) that are today exclusively poetic. I’ve said also that for that reason, since the early poets or prose writers in any language cannot have many old words and phrases to use in their writings, and hence lack a very abundant source of elegance, it was appropriate for them to keep for the most part to a familiar style, as Petrarch, etc., is very familiar, and they were incapable of Virgilian elegance.
I add now that in fact poetry, in those nations that have a properly poetic language, that is, distinct from the language of prose (and that was the case of Greek among the ancients, and among the moderns Italian and German, and perhaps also Spanish a little), is the preserver [2641] of the antiquity of the language, and hence of its purity, which two qualities are virtually the same, except that the first of these two words says something more. Poetic language, I repeat, is the preserver of antiquity, in words, in phrases, in forms, also in inflections or conjugations of verbs, and in other grammatical particularities. In all of which it preserves (or follows from time to time as it pleases) ancient usage, common to the early prose writers, and then banished from prose. And Perticari noted in the Treatise Degli scrittori del Trecento that though our spoken and written language has lately become so corrupted, poetic writing was preserved and is preserved pure.1 And up to a certain point, especially in versifiers [2642] who don’t have much claim to originality (like the Arcadians, the Frugonians, etc., unlike the Cesarottians, etc.),1 this is seen to be very true. So it was in the Greek language, where poetry was the great preserver of words, expressions, phrases, inflections, and ancient grammatical rules and usages. Whence it has a language that is completely different from its contemporary prose language. And this also happens (I mean preserving the antiquity and purity of the language), it also happens, I repeat, proportionately in poems that do not have a separate language, like French and maybe English. If nothing else, these poems are always purer than prose writing in such nations, as far as the language is concerned. (15 October 1822.)
Mania, smania, smaniare, and the Spanish mania, and the French manie, maniaque, etc., from the Greek μανία, μαίνομαι, etc., that is, furor, furere [fury, to rage], etc., furore frenesia [frenzy], etc. (22 Oct. 1822.)
[2643] Love of life increases almost like love of money, and, like love of money, increases in proportion as it should diminish. For youths despise and waste their life, although it is sweet, and much of it is ahead of them, and do not fear death, and the old fear death above all, and are very jealous of their own life, which is wretched, and they do not have much of it to save anyway. And so the youth squanders what he has, as if he were going to die in a few days’ time, and the old man accumulates and hoards and saves as if he had to provide for a very long life ahead. (24 Oct. 1822.)
Spanish cara, that is, face, and so cera, and chère in the same sense, come from the Greek. See Perticari, Apologia di Dante, part 2, ch. 5, note 1, p. 75. (28 Oct. 1822.)
It’s interesting to compare the passage from Cicero’s Pro Archia that I’ve cited elsewhere [→Z 240] on the geographic limits [2644] of the Latin language in his time, with the passage in Plutarch on its immense diffusion in Trajan’s time,1 which passage is cited by Perticari loc. cit. above, ch. 8, beginning, p. 88. (28 Oct. 1822.) See also Perticari, ibid., pp. 89 and 92‒94.2
Man hates other men by nature, and necessity, and so by nature, just like the other animals, he is inclined against the social system.3 And since nature can never be vanquished, so we see that no republic, no institution or form of government, no legislation, no order, no moral, political, philosophical means, no means of opinion, of force, of any circumstance, climate, etc., was ever enough or is enough or ever will be enough to make society function as we would like, or make mutual relations between men go according to the rules of what are called social rights, and the duties of man toward man.4 (2 Nov., All Souls’ Day, 1822.)
[2645] “If man breaks out of his natural purity, then he sins. Keeping therefore our condition and virtue, let the natural ornament be sufficient to you, o man, and do not change the work of your Creator, since wanting to change it is to corrupt it.” Vite de’ Santi Padri, part 1, chapter 9, end, p. 25. Also what precedes these words is worth looking at.1 They are in the mouth of St. Anthony, and in his Life, whose original Greek text is by St. Athanasius. (Recanati-Rome, November 1822.)2
The histories of Greece, Rome, and the Jews contain reminiscences of the ideas acquired by each of us in our childhood. Each name and each event of these histories, and especially the main ones and the best known, recall ideas that are almost at the origins for us, and are in a certain sense connected to the history of each of our lives, and especially childhoods, [2646] and ideas and thoughts. Hence the interest that these histories inspire, and their parts, and everything that belongs to them, an interest unique of its kind, as Chateaubriand observed (Génie, etc.);1 an interest that could never be inspired in us by any other history, however much more beautiful, varied, great, and in itself more important than those mentioned above, however much more important it is to us, like the histories of nations. Those three are the most interesting because they are the best known, because they are the most intimate, familiar, practical, and almost close relatives of every civilized, cultured man, even if his homeland is very different from those three nations. And so they are the most, indeed uniquely, fertile in historical subjects that are truly proper to epic, tragedy, etc., [2647] and the interest of these subjects, especially in poetry, cannot be supplied in any way, or by any amount of hard work, by drawing subjects from the imagination or from other histories, even of one’s native land. To those three histories add that of the Trojan war, which is supremely interesting for the reasons given, in fact more than the other three, because the poems of Homer and Virgil have made it better known and more familiar to each of us than any other, and because, thanks to those poems, thanks to fables, etc., it is more closely connected to the memories of our childhood than Greek and Roman, even Jewish history are. All that is relative, and the interest of those histories does not specifically derive from their proper and intrinsic qualities but from the external circumstance of them being familiar [2648] to everyone from their childhood. If you took away that circumstance, which you easily could, for it depends on education, etc., this interest would either be mixed up with and equal to that of other histories, and historical subjects, or even be surpassed. (Rome, 25 Nov. 1822.)
“La formation d’une langue est l’oeuvre des grands écrivains; l’Italie en compte trop peu: plus de la moitié de l’esprit et du coeur humain n’a pas encore passé sous la plume des Italiens, et par conséquent dans leur langue” [“The formation of a language is the work of the great writers; Italy counts too few of them: more than half the human mind and heart has not yet been taken up by th
e pen of the Italians, and as a result has not entered their language”]. Lettres sur l’Italie by Dupaty, written in 1785, letter 41, tome 1, Genoa 1810, p. 185. Not only human mind and heart but not even half the knowledge of these matters they had in the time of Dupaty, and much less than they have at present. (30 Nov. 1822, Rome.)
[2649] On the dialects of the Latin language. Excerpt from an article: “Del Dialetto Veneto: Lettera di un Viaggiatore oltramontano” (English), which is in the Effemeridi letterarie di Roma, tome 2, pp. 58–70. (Jan. 1821.1) “The ancient language of these peoples (inhabitants of the Veneto) transpired in their Latin, as it’s easy to see from the inscriptions collected by Maffei:a and it’s likely that the original dialects of the various nations that established themselves in Italy are a distant cause of the variety of languages that are spoken there at present.
[2650] “But whatever the elements of their” (the early inhabitants of the Veneto) “language may be, it is well known that they had one of their own, however it was composed; like those of all the aboriginal Italians, it was later absorbed into Latin; and many proofs could be adduced to demonstrate that such a language (as happened with that of the Gauls, etc.) tinged with its own colors the mass that it was mixed with” (the Latin language) “and the lapidary Inscriptions collected by Maffei in the territory of the Veneto allow us to see the same ancient provincialism (although of a different type) that characterizes those of the Gaulish colonies; and we recognize there the same exchange of letters that is very frequent in the current dialect of the Veneto. Cicero in his Letters to Friends mentions [2651] certain terms that were in vogue in those provinces” (of the Veneto) “and unknown in Rome. Titus Livy was accused of Patavinity or Paduanism (whatever is supposed to be meant by that expression): it was also said of Catullus that he introduced certain new forms of speaking into the Latin Language: and some proofs could be adduced of these Veronisms of his. One of them may be the noun Pronus by which he calls a stream: I am not aware that the term is used by anyone else. Nor can we suppose that this is merely one of the ordinary and adapted epithets substituted for the substantive. For Pronio in the province of Verona retains even at present the meaning of Stream. I have already made known the opinion I hold that what I seek to demonstrate [2652] relative to the States of the Veneto” (the very ancient origin of those elements and properties of its dialect that do not come from Latin, and are not shared by Italian; and their derivation from the language of the Veneto before the Latinization of that province, whatever that language was) “can probably be applied to all Italy. In confirmation of that opinion it helps to remember that Algarotti cites, I know not where, a letter from Varus to Virgil, in which, commenting on a certain epigram, he criticizes the word putus, stating that it is not Latin. I think, however, that at present the word Putto, although naturalized into Italian, is used familiarly only by the Mantuans, and in the neighboring towns, and that it would not be understood by the people of Tuscany.” Pp. 62–63. (3 Dec. 1822.)
[2653] From rullus, that is, circulator [peddler], comes roule, rouler [roll, wheel], etc. (8 Dec. 1822, Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.)
For p. 2441. Lucian in the Dialogue Χάρων ἢ ἐπισκοποῦντɛς [“Charon or the Inspectors”], after two-thirds of the Dialogue, in Charon’s voice says: “῾Ορῶ ποικίλην τινὰ τύρβην, καὶ μɛστὸν ταραχῆς τὸν βίον, καὶ τὰς πόλɛις γɛ αὐτῶν” (ἀνθρώπων) “ἐοικυίας τοῖς σμήνɛσιν, ἐν οἷς ἅπας μὲν ἰδιόν τι κέντρον ἔχɛι, καὶ τὸν πλησίον κɛντɛῖ. ὀλίγοι δέ τινɛς, ὥσπɛρ σφῆκɛς, ἄγουσι και φέρουσι τὸν ὑποδɛέστɛρον” [“I see a great variety of occupations, a great bustle in life, and their cities” (of men) “similar to beehives, where each has his own stinger and stings his neighbor, while some few, like wasps, rob the weaker”].1 (Rome, 13 Dec. 1822.)
The true is certainly not beautiful, but still it, too, satisfies or, if nothing else, affects the soul in some way, and without doubt pleasure in the truth and knowledge of the true exists, and reaching it man is still pleased and content, even if this truth is ugly and miserable and terrible.2 But the worst thing in the world, and man’s greatest unhappiness, is to find himself deprived of the beautiful and the true, to deal with, to live with what is neither beautiful nor true. Such is the fate of those who live in the great cities, where everything is false, and this falseness is not beautiful, [2654] but very ugly.1 (Rome, 13 Dec. 1822.)
*“The orthography of the codex” (containing Cicero’s De re publica, in the Vatican) “presents an unbelievable number of variants and is not constant. This is indeed the destiny of Latin writing and pronunciation, something that is demonstrated by its many disparate rules and the endless questions raised by the grammarians. For that reason Cassiodorus (Institutiones, preface) rightly states that ‘orthographia apud graecos plerumque sine ambiguitate probatur expressa; inter Latinos vero sub ardua difficultate relicta monstratur; unde etiam modo studium magnum lectoris inquirit’ [‘the spelling of the Greeks is normally expressed unambiguously; with the Latins, however, it appears to be neglected because of its great difficulty, which is why still today it requires considerable commitment on the part of the reader’]. For example, labdacism” (lambdacism perhaps, but no codices with this form have been indicated) “was normal in African writers, as indeed was the practice of writing colloquium instead of conloquium, as is testified by Isidore (Etymologiae 1, 32). What else is there to say? Is it not perhaps the case that the Latin language, as Jerome observed (Prologue to the commentary on Galatians, bk. 2)” (that is to St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians), “changed every day in the different countries and also over time? And above all, after a great number of barbarous words were absorbed by the Roman Empire, a language of a fourth kind began to exist which Isidore (Etymologiae 9, 1) calls mixed.”* Mai. M. Tulli Ciceronis De re publica quae supersunt, [2655] edited by Angelo Mai, prefect of the Vatican Library, Rome, in Collegio Urbano, published by Bourlié 1822, preface, ch. 13, p. XXXVII.1 (Rome, 16 Dec. 1822.)
We read ed instead of et [and] in the very old Vatican palimpsest Codex of Cicero’s De re publica, bk. 1, ch. 3, p. 10 of the edition cited above, ed disertos; and ch. 15, p. 43 ed ipse, as Mai points out in the notes, although in the text he substitutes et. (17 Dec. 1822.) Indeed, ibid., bk. 3, ch. 2, p. 218 where the edition has et ut the copyist wrote in the codex e ut, and the ancient emender wrote ed ut, perhaps to avoid the concurrence of the two similar syllables et, ut.2
*“Indeed in his De finibus 1, 3 Cicero dared to say that the Latin language was richer than the Greek, which he states he has often discussed. But Cicero himself is rightly the first to speak against this in Tusculanae 2, 15, and also Augustine, Contra academicos 2, 26, then Lucretius 1, 140, 831; Fronto in Gellius 2, 26.”* Mai, in Cicero, De re publica, p. 67, note. (18 Dec. 1822.)
*“Concerning Greek laws and literature in Marseilles, and its threefold language, that is, Greek, Latin, and Gaulish, see Varro in Isidorus, Etymologiae 15, 1, 63 and Jerome in the Prologue to the commentary on Galatians, bk. 2” (that is to St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians). “See also Caesar, Bellum Civile 2, 12; Tacitus Agricola, 4; Silius 15, 169. In the Venetian scholia the Homer edition, that is, the Marseilles recension, [2656] is renowned for its excellence.”* Mai, loc. cit. above, p. 75, note 1.1 (18 Dec. 1822.)
“Quod quantae fuerit utilitati post videro” [“How useful this has been I shall see afterward”] (videro used entirely for videbo). Cicero, De re publica, bk. 2, ch. 9, Rome 1822, p. 142, last line.2 A passage to add to those I’ve cited elsewhere [→Z 1970–73] in order to demonstrate the ancient use of the future optative instead of the future indicative, a usage in which all the futures of all the Italian, French, and Spanish verbs originate—futures in which the r is always distinctive and characteristic. (19 Dec. 1822.)
In Cicero, De re publica 2,
10, p. 143, last line where one reads septem,3 Mai the editor’s note c: *“Codex has septe. Sometimes certainly the final m in the ancient manuscripts was omitted. Or is that septe from popular language? Certainly now the Italians commonly speak like that.”* (19 Dec. 1822.) In the Conspectus orthographiae codicis Vaticani added by Niebuhr to this edition, one reads p. 352, col. 2: *“septe (II, 10) and mortus (II, 18) taken from a language tending toward the colloquial”*4 The final syllables am em, etc., are elided in verse. Therefore the m was not in fact pronounced. See my thoughts on synizesis. See p. 2658.
“Καὶ τῷ ὄντι τὸ ἄγαν τὶ ποιɛῖν, μɛγάλην φιλɛῖ ɛἰς τοὐναντίον μɛταβολὴν ἀνταποδιδόναι, ἐν ὥραις τɛ καὶ ἐν φυτοῖς καὶ ἐν σώμασι, καὶ δὴ καὶ ἐν πολιτɛίαις οὐχ ἥκιστα” [“And truly excess brings about a great transformation in the opposite direction, not only in the seasons, in the plants, in bodies but also above all in governments”]. Plato, De re publica, bk. 8, p. 563. That passage is cited by Cicero, De re publica, bk. 44, pp. 111–125 (the name of Plato is cited [2657] from the preceding chapter p. 107), who expresses it freely thus: “Sic omnia nimia, cum vel in tempestate vel in agris vel in corporibus laetiora fuerunt, in contraria fere convertuntur, maximeque” (suppl. cum Maio, id) “in rebus publicis evenit” [“Thus all excesses, when either in the season or in the fields or in bodies they become greater, are usually turned into the contrary, and this happens especially in governments”]. These opinions back up my own, that excess is the father of nothingness.1 In fact, as Cicero and Plato go on to say, slavery, that is, they say, the opposite of freedom, originates in too much freedom, and I say the nothingness of freedom, that is, the end, the lack of freedom. (19 Dec. 1822.)
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