Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  For p. 2717. I maintain that French is much wealthier than Italian in words that are not synonyms. I am referring here to nouns and verbs. In the other parts of speech our wealth is incomparable not only in relation to French, but also Latin, and perhaps every living language. This wealth is useful, and brings to our language an immense, inexhaustible fecundity of expressions [2756] and forms, and to the Italian writer the faculty of always being able to coin new ones, which conform not only to the character and property of the language, but which do not even appear new (perhaps not even to the writer himself), because they are born as if by themselves, from the depths of the language, for those who know them well and how to plumb them, and they flow from its nature. From this derives an incredible variety. But the substantial and necessary wealth of a language cannot consist of particles, etc., though it could arise from them, if they were to be applied to the composition of words, as is the case in Greek, which is very rich in nouns and verbs (the substance and principal wealth of any form of spoken language) for no other reason mainly than the extreme abundance of prepositions and particles of every sort, and the very wide use it makes of them in the composition of every manner of words. (5 June, octave of Corpus Christi, 1823.)

  [2757] Ritenere for ricordarsi or tenere a mente [to remember] (see the Crusca under ritenere, § 7) whence ritenitiva and retentiva for memoria, comes from the Latin. See Forcellini under Retinere, end. Add Cassiodorus, De artibus ac disciplinis liberalium litterarum, Ch. 5, that is “De musica,” in Cassiodorus, Opera, Venice 1729, tome 2, p. 557, col. 2 (the said work is more commonly entitled De septem disciplinis): “Apud Latinos autem magnificus vir Albinus librum de hac re” (de Musica), “compendiosa brevitate conscripsit; quem in bibliotheca Romae nos habuisse, atque studiose legisse retinemus” [“Among the Latins, however, the celebrated Albinus wrote with profitable brevity a book on this subject” (on music); “which we remember having in our library in Rome, and reading diligently”]. See again Forcellini under Retinentia. The Glossary has nothing relevant about it. (6 June 1823.)

  It is a property of our language to contract the participles of verbs of the first conjugation, removing from their desinence in -ato, the first two letters, that is at. Such contracted participles both preserve their value as participles, being used indeed in the conjugation of their verbs with the auxiliary, and very often pass on to carry out the function of [2758] adjectives, and very simple adjectives in our language are no more than participles contracted in this way either of Italian verbs originating from Latin or from elsewhere, or of verbs which are indeed Latin, etc. See Bartoli, Il torto e ’l diritto del non si può, chapter 137, and pp. 3060–61, 3035–36, etc. Now this same practice of contracting in this same way participles in -atus of the first conjugation, by removing from them the two letters at characteristic of the desinence, can be seen to have existed among the Latins too, among whom Virgil and others formed inopinus for inopinatus [unexpected], and from necopinatus, necopinus [unexpected], and so from other participles, or adjectives formed in this way, of many of which the first origin and form of participles in -atus is no longer recognized perhaps, since they are missing their characteristic at. Odorus for odoratus [odorous]. And all the more must we assume that this sort of contraction, which is very familiar to us, was even more familiar to the Latin populace than to writers, inasmuch as the people always like contractions and shortenings. (10 June 1823.)

  [2759] I heard a countryman who, because of his profession, was used to thinking of the downpours of the elements as disasters and calamities, talking about the effects of an inundation he had witnessed shortly before, and talking about these effects as very damaging, and complaining about them, but adding nevertheless that it had been a wonderful and enjoyable thing to see and hear the size and power of the flood because of its force and roar. It is indeed true that man is inclined by nature to life, and that all strong and intense feelings, when they do not bring pain to the body, and are not accompanied by the harm or the actual danger of the person experiencing them, are by their very force and intensity enjoyable, even though because of all their other qualities and effects they are still unpleasant and terrible.1 (10 June 1823.)

  Anyone who wishes to see clearly the difference between the times of Homer and those of Virgil, with regard to customs, civilization, and the opinions which [2760] they held about virtue and heroism, as too with regard to the mutual links between nations, the rights and method of war, the relationship between enemy and enemy, and anyone who wishes to note the complete diversity which exists between the character and idea of heroic virtue which those two poets formed, and which one expressed in Achilles and the other in Aeneas,1 let him consider that passage in the Aeneid (10, ll. 521–36) where Aeneas having attacked Mago who, throwing himself to the ground and embracing his knees, abjectly begged him to spare his life and take him captive, replies that with Pallas dead there is no place for any mercy or any treaty 2 with the Rutuli, and mercilessly grabbing him by the helmet buried his sword in his neck up to the hilt. This scene and this thought is taken entirely from Homer, who introduces Menelaus on the point of allowing himself to be moved by similar prayers, but is reproved by Agamemnon, and kills the already defeated and suppliant Trojan without pity.3

  [2761] But anyone who examines this carefully will see that as this scene proves to be most natural and fitting in Homer, so it seems extremely forced and out of place in Virgil, and is at odds with the idea which the reader had formed both of the character of Aeneas and of heroic virtue in general, following in the footsteps of that poem. Even more, I will also say, is it at odds with the idea of it which Virgil himself had formed. And the whole of that passage in his tenth book, where Aeneas acts the pitiless and terrible, can be recognized straightaway as having been taken from somewhere else (that is from the imitation of Homer, and from the Homeric-heroic character), as alien to the nature of the poem and its hero, alien to Virgil’s own idea of the matter: so much so that what is called inhumanity seems to be affected by Aeneas in that passage, and not proper to him, and almost feigned and it appears that he is unpracticed in it and incapable of exercising it. Whereas in Homer’s heroes [2762] it appears genuine and proper and to come to them naturally.

  The reason for this is that Homer and all those of his time conceived inhumanity toward one’s enemies as belonging to heroic virtue, as a part, a due element of that virtue, and so far were they from holding it to be a fault or excess, that on the contrary they considered it a quality and a worthy and proper attribute of the hero. And they meant it as praise for the one to whom they attributed it, and they attributed and exaggerated it, meaning it as praise, even for one who did not possess it or did not possess it to that degree, as panegyrists do about every kind of virtue. Whereas Virgil thought of it, in accordance with the more civilized ideas of his time, as a vice, something to be condemned, while he thought of benignity and humanity toward one’s enemies as virtue, something estimable, which would have been ridiculous and absurd in Homer’s times, as it would be today among [2763] savages, and he established this humanity as an essential and outstanding part of heroic virtue, and expressed it in his Aeneas, indeed he attributed it to him as a characteristic and principal quality of his temperament. And he never took or drew these traits of inhumanity from the form of heroism which he had in mind, nor from the form of Aeneas’s character which he had composed, but from the poem which people had and had always had as a model for heroic poems, and in which it was universally considered that the true idea of the heroic character was portrayed. And he took them from it almost against his will; or more realistically, he did not realize that this idea in his day, in this regard, had changed and that it was not, from this point of view, his idea nor that of his contemporaries and that it was, in this regard, very different from the concept of his Aeneas which he had formed and expressed. Hence he did not see that those traits, although proper to [2764] heroic virtue in Homer, and belonging to the character of those heroes, had no place in
his poem. But he attributed them to Aeneas because he thought that so far in his poem he had expressed and was continuing to express a hero like one of Homer’s, and a heroic character like the heroism expressed by Homer, in which he was mistaken, and because he thought too that heroism was the same for his times as it had been in Homer’s, in which he was also mistaken. So that he was again mistaken when thinking that he had created a hero who could have existed in those times in which he supposed him to exist, or if he had existed, that he could have been considered a hero by his contemporaries. Because in fact Virgil, in forming the character of Aeneas, did not preserve verisimilitude with respect to the times in which this hero lived, and he was guilty of much worse anachronism in this character than in the Dido episode. [2765] As Chateaubriand was guilty of very serious anachronism in the Martyrs, when he supposed that the religious beliefs, devoutness, and superstitions of Homer’s times, applied to Lucian’s.1

  Inhumanity toward one’s enemies was not blameworthy in Homer’s times, because enemies were not considered as men, or as part of the body to which their adversary belonged. The ancients (and savages likewise) were very far from considering the human race to be a family, and even further from considering enemies to be their fellows and brothers. Fellows and brothers were for the ancients, and are for savages, only the individuals of their same society or nation or citizen body or army, whatever we want to call it and however we want to consider it. I have spoken about this elsewhere [→Z 877ff., 1710–11, 2252–55, 2305–306]. Therefore to be inhuman toward one’s enemies was the same for the ancients as being inhuman toward wolves or other animals which are not [2766] of the human race, indeed are harmful to it. As indeed enemies harmed or tried to harm that society, within whose limits was contained the whole of that human family to which the ancients deemed themselves to belong. And just as for anyone who took up the defense or vengeance of his society against harmful animals it would be praiseworthy not to spare them in any fashion, but to exterminate them all as far as was in his power, so for the ancients inhumanity toward one’s enemies was the object of praise, since they were not thought to have any right to humanity, not being deemed to have anything of the human about them, that is nothing in common with those men who fought against them. And the excess or highest degree of this inhumanity was judged entirely proper for the hero. Especially as all strong passions or actions were deemed among the ancients to be much more worthy, or certainly more heroic than weak ones. And therefore pitilessness toward anyone who had no claim to clemency, as they deemed [2767] their enemies, was believed to be much more heroic than compassion, an emotion which was gentle, soft, and thought of as feminine. Revenge was believed much more heroic than pardon, since grievance over injuries was judged far more worthy of man than endurance of them, this being never disjoined from a reputation and repudiation of cowardice and worthlessness.

  When Homer brings Priam to the feet of Achilles,1 when he moves us to the depth of our souls with the bitter spectacle of such greatness reduced to such wretchedness, when he seems to employ every artifice, to pile up every circumstance needed to awaken in us the keenest compassion, and at the same time he presents to us Achilles, the protagonist of his poem, the model of heroic virtue as conceived by him, so resistant, so reluctant to allow himself to be swayed, weeping over the head of Priam, not for the misfortunes of Priam, but for his own and for his old father, and for his Patroclus, for whose death [2768] Priam himself has come in a way to beg pardon, when finally this does not persuade him to grant the suppliant and most unhappy king what he asked, except in view of the express order received from Jove through the agency of Thetis, without which he shows and lets it be understood quite clearly that neither the prayers nor the tears nor the suffering nor the whole wretched display of that defeated king prostrate before him, would have won him over: to us it seems that this Achilles is almost a monster, and that a secondary or even minimal virtue, let alone a primary one (as his is portrayed in that poem), even one more seriously offended, even one less savagely avenged, even one with fewer reasons to be affected by pity, would have had to have been quickly moved, and deeply, to grant much sooner than he does, the supplicant’s plea, and even to grant a great deal more, since he could [2769] do it, and do it of his own free will. But Homer judged that at that point he should portray Achilles as he did. And let it not be thought that in doing this he only had in view the preservation of the semblance of the ferocious character of Achilles, expressed by him up to that moment, and not making him a different personage from the one he had created. Homer looks to saving his hero from the charge of compassion, that is of softness, and of easily allowing himself to be moved, and of tenderness of heart,1 as we would look (and as in fact more modern epic poets, etc., looked) to save him from the charge of harshness, insensitivity, cruelty to his enemy, and to win him the praise of having been compassionate toward his enemy, as a magnanimous thing, etc. Homer not only has consideration for Achilles as he has made him, but also for heroic virtue as it was then understood. He introduces that compassionate episode because of the high interest and the great contrast of emotions to which it gives room. But he makes sure that Achilles does not in any way offend against the laws of heroism, that he does not show himself fickle, accommodating, pardoning too easily, that he cannot be reproved with having been human toward the [2770] enemies of his nation and himself.

  Such were the times of Homer, and much more those which he depicts, and we must think of them as such if we want properly to understand and evaluate the supreme imitative art of that great mind, even in the most difficult situations. For this was indeed much more difficult for him, given the considerations mentioned above, than it would be for us. In which art the more he may appear to us to have erred, and the more he moves away from our opinion, and disappoints and étonne [astounds] our expectations, the greater his art is, the truer his imitation, the more constant his observation and preservation of characters, of times, of personages, and the more marvelous his success, and the felicity with which he extricates himself from the enormous difficulties of this passage. And likewise how much greater were those difficulties and how much more they should be valued. (11 June 1823.)

  [2771] We say fumo [smoke] for pride, pomp, vanity, empty honors, or the pride which is born of them, and the vaunting others make of them: in short we apply in many ways and occasions that word to mean pride and the things which belong to it. See Caro, letter 20, vol. 1, beginning.1 The Greeks do exactly the same with the word τύφος (whose real meaning is fumo [smoke]), and its derivatives and compounds. As we do likewise with fumoso [smoky], and fumosità [smokiness]. (12 June 1823.)

  Should Matto [mad] not come from μάτην [randomly, without reason], μάταιος [vain, foolish], and mattia that is mattezza from ματία [folly]? (12 June 1823.)

  How Latin has preserved antiquity more than Greek, is also shown by these considerations. (1) Latin preserves stems or other regular parts of verbs in the common usage of its classical times and the ones that come after (not just the ones that went before), which among the Greeks, although they have the same roots as in Latin, but are defective or anomalous, do not preserve their first stems or those same regular parts, or only use them very rarely, [2772] or in such a way that those stems and parts are only found in very ancient authors, or only in poets, who in any language which has distinct poetic speech, always preserve a great part of antiquity for the reasons I have mentioned elsewhere [→Z 2639ff.]. Whereas Latin uses those stems and parts universally in prose as well as verse, and uses them in periods when the language was already formed and complete, and likewise uses them not because they are rare, nor what you might call liberties or archaisms, but all the time and regularly as stems and parts which are right and proper to the verbs they belong to. For example the verb do [to give], is indeed the stem of δίδωμι [to give] (and note that this verb in Greek is not even anomalous or defective, but its use has changed completely from its first state, differently from th
e Latin verb do). This stem is preserved in Latin in all the compounds of that verb, such as credo, edo, trado, addo, subdo, prodo, vendo, perdo, indo, condo, reddo, dedo, etc. (in which through extraordinary anomaly the conjugation of do has changed from the first to the third conjugation: not the same with circumdo as, venundo as, pessundo as, etc.). But in no compound of the verb δίδωμι does its true stem appear in Greek. ῎Εδω [to eat], part and stem of an anomalous or defective verb, will not be found, [2773] I think, in Greek except in the poets, but among Latin writers edo and its compound comedo are parts and verbs in every century and every period of writing. Eo [to go] ἔω, a stem from which come so many verbs in Greek, is not found in Greek poets nor in the prose writers, but it is common and proper to Latin writers, and from it comes a very widely used verb, with its compounds, all of which preserve the stem intact and likewise preserve perfectly the whole of its conjugation, redeo, abeo, exeo, ineo, subeo, coeo, adeo, circumeo, pereo, intereo, obeo, prodeo, introeo, veneo, praetereo, transeo, etc. No Greek compound preserves the stem ἔω. Lateo [to lie hidden] is the same as λήθω [to be unseen], a word and tense that are very rare in Greek writers, and a defective verb in Greek, but a common and widely used stem, and an almost perfect regular verb in Latin. The stem λήθω is found specifically in Xenophon, Symposium, ch. 4, § 48. The Dorians and Aeolians probably used to say λάθω. Patior [to support, to suffer], which takes the place of the active patio (which indeed is found in ancient Latin writing), is nearer to πήθω [to suffer] (Doric and Aeolic πάθω), unattested in Greek, which is not the normal πάσχω [to suffer]. Compounds, per-petior [to bear steadfastly], etc. The verb fero [to bear], if I am not mistaken, has more words in Latin than in Greek. Concerning the stem sto equivalent to the unattested στάω, elsewhere [→Z 2142].