by Ann Patty
Our text was to be Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri (The Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre). “This novella is a post-empire Roman romance, probably sixth century C.E. We think, like most of the Latin romances, that it’s based on a Greek original, but the original has never been identified, nor has the author,” Bert told us. “The story, however, has survived tenaciously. It was very popular in medieval times and is thought to be the first romance translated into Old English. Shakespeare freely borrowed from it for both his Pericles and Comedy of Errors.
“It’s not taught too often because most serious Latinist types deem such a romance unworthy of study,” he continued. “However, I don’t. We don’t always have to be so serious! Besides, the grammar and syntax in the novella are quite simple, and it will be easier for you to understand without having to endlessly consult a grammar. One of my goals for this class is for you to be able to reduce the number of books around you when you read Latin, or at least get rid of one of them.”
He did achieve that goal, but not for the reason he’d hoped. Instead Naftali shared his discovery of a Web site: the Latin Word Study Tool. Part of the Perseus Project sponsored by Tufts University, it was a pioneering site in the humanities that was news to me. And how happy I was to be introduced to it! It allowed you to type in a Latin word, and the English translation would pop up, complete with possible cases. There was, however, a rub: Perseus was not always reliable and did not distinguish between deponent and nondeponent verbs, so it would label a word passive even when it wasn’t. To get the full benefit of the Perseus Web site, you needed to proceed beyond the pop-up definitions and click on the full Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary entries. But I didn’t figure that out till the following year.
Deponent verbs are yet another of those dismaying aspects of Latin that seem to exist only to trouble students of the language. Deponent verbs are called such (de plus pono, put down) because they appear to have “put aside” their active forms. Though they exist in all four conjugations, they all have passive forms but active meanings. Such verbs include fateor (confess), conor (attempt), sequor (follow), morior (die), and experior (experience). If you can find the commonality that makes them deponent, you’re a better word analyst than I. To make things even more infuriating, there are also semideponent verbs, which are deponent only in the perfect system of tenses. So audeo (dare) always looks passive in the perfect tense (ausus sum) but active in the present. And to tie that knot even tighter, notice how similar it is to audio (hear).
Apollonius of Tyre was indeed many times easier than Catullus and utterly devoid of literary value. It was, essentially, The Perils of Pauline in Roman drag. It wasn’t even given the dignity of a bound scholarly paperback. Our textbook was a spiral-bound pamphlet in the “Bryn Mawr Latin Commentaries” series and included twenty-five pages of story and fifty-one pages of commentary. Obviously untouched by any designer, our text was barely worthy of being called a book. As many words as possible were crammed onto each page with narrow margins; the paragraphs were numbered with Roman numerals, each sentence with an Arabic numeral.
The story featured, in order: incest, childbirth, a kingdom won and lost, death at sea, mistaken identities, sudden chance rescues, shipwrecks, love at first sight, lust, greed, skullduggery, abduction by pirates, unwilling whoredom, a kingdom regained, and three different family members believed dead suddenly showing up alive. Happy ending!
It might have been a template for the sort of paperback original I edited when I worked at Dell Publishing in the mid-1970s, both in its lack of artful design and its focus on fast-moving plot.
After Maurice had finally gone totally bankrupt and was contemplating a move back to Paris, and Patrick O’Higgins, diagnosed with lung cancer, moved to Arizona, it was time for me to get a real job. I landed at Dell Publishing. My boss, Bill, had earned his editor-in-chief title by making up a new genre: “The Making of.” It consisted of paperback originals that chronicled the behind-the-scenes productions of popular movies. His debut publication was The Making of Jaws, and it was phenomenally successful. “Movie tie-ins,” novels back-written from film scripts, had already established themselves on mass-market best-seller lists, and Bill had figured out how to take that worthless genre even further. There followed The Making of The Man from Atlantis, The Making of The Other Side of Midnight, and The Making of The Bad News Bears, in every case, both movie and book equally forgettable.
It was a quick education in popular culture. I hadn’t owned a television since I’d moved out of my parents’ house seven years earlier. Secret Storm was well educated and tended to avoid anything that might be popluar and American. He looked at life as if through the lens of a Godard film. Lacking any strong culture of my own, I adopted his. We frequented European and Asian films, documentaries, modern art, and performances. We eschewed TV.
Nevertheless, Bill soon figured out that I was quick and willing and gave me one of his paperback originals to edit: My First 500, by Babe Bethany, a Los Angeles dame who couldn’t write a proper sentence. The three-hundred-page book chronicled her experiences as a swinger (it was 1976, Plato’s Retreat was in full advance). The men were numbered and the women lettered—the men reached 500, the women 36 (double J). Many of her sentences ended thus: “we had a very satisfactory orgasm together.”
Though I was often plagued by a crisis of meaning and values at work, I knew I was progressing and was finally rewarded with a promotion to assistant editor (though not a raise). I managed to liberate a broom closet and made it my office. The legendary Seymour Lawrence with his eponymous imprint used to stand before my office, which stood alone, windowless, in a long hallway and stare at me, as if my office were a TV set and I were a Charlie’s Angel. When I insisted that if he wanted to stare, he also had to talk to me, we became friends, and he became the model for my new ambition: to have my own imprint someday. He also took me out to lunch with Kurt Vonnegut for my birthday, which almost made up for cash twice being stolen from my isolated office, a major catastrophe since I was bringing home only seventy dollars a week.
Soon I was editing most of Bill’s paperback original novels. Editing those novels made me an expert on the syntax and tropes of character, plot, and pacing in commercial fiction, much as a story like Apollonius of Tyre was perfect for practicing the syntax and tropes of Latin, not to mention the tastes of the mass market of Rome. Perhaps because Apollonius of Tyre so lacked style, it was perfect for a refresher course in grammar. The Roman romancers, like those of the seventies, wanted to keep the plot moving rather than stopping a reader with an elegant turn of phrase. At I:4, for example, the ablative absolute and the defining genitive appeared: cogente iniqua cupiditate, because an evil passion compelled him (ablative absolute); flamma concupiscentiae, a flame of lust (defining genitive); incidit in amorem filiae suae, he fell into love for his own daughter. Harold Robbins couldn’t have said it better.
We learned that nothing was better at keeping a plot moving with a quick transition than the ablative absolute, which compressed a transition sentence or paragraph into two or three words. The unknown author of Apollonius of Tyre threw in an ablative absolute as if slapping the dust of the past off his hands and proceeding on to the next storm at sea, mistaken identity, or abduction, without wasting a sentence.
If only Babe Bethany had known the form: gaudiis cognitis, she might have written, rather than “we had a very satisfactory orgasm together,” “and then on to the next screw.”
As we had learned the different intensities of kisses the semester before, we now learned the different levels of crime, all of which were generously dramatized in Apollonius of Tyre: in order of decreasing seriousness: nefas (a crime against nature or the gods), facinus (robbery, murder, the sort of crime tried in court), fraus (cheating or fraud), and scelus (an evil deed).
Now, after three or four times reading through a paragraph, and the commentary on it, I could sight-translate when my turn came around i
n class. The six of us were all at about the same level, except for Roger, poor dear Roger. Inevitably, he stumbled through his translations and mixed up the cases. Often Bert would ask, “What case is this?” and Roger would have to guess each case in turn before he finally hit upon the right one by the process of elimination. Once, as we were waiting for him to stumble onto the dative plural, I had to stifle upwelling laughter—the sort that third graders emit when the dumb kid makes a blooper. Had study turned me back into a child? Was the senex the most sophomoric in a classroom comprising three sophomores, a freshman, and one senior?
And what was that laughter about? Was it cruelty, or was it relief that it was someone other than I looking dumb? I was appalled at myself. How could I laugh at poor Roger, my best friend in the class? Who knows what made him so bad at Latin: perhaps it was Freudian, a rebellion again the father’s forcing him to take two years of Latin, forcing and failing to make his son love what he loved. Perhaps his father was a transplant from the East Coast Establishment, hoping to keep his culture alive on the prairie.
After spring break, we raced through the end of Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri, reading the remaining seven pages aloud in only three classes, with questions and commentary on the grammar. That gave Bert time to talk more about some specific words and concepts. In Latin, many abstract nouns such as amor (love), dolor (grief), and sapientia (wisdom) were derived from verbs. In English it’s become common, and annoying, to do it the other way around: viz., those hideous neologisms “to impact” and “to journal” and “to author,” and the equally annoying academic jargon “to problematize,” not to mention the Latinist phrase “to disambiguate.”
Which leads me to a fifty-dollar English word, animadversion, which comes from animadverto (I turn my mind to)—from animus (mind, reason, consciousness) and adverto (to turn to). Apollonius used animadverto as a transition between the hero’s concerns. He would finish one episode then “turn his mind” to the next catastrophe that awaited him. Why the word came to take on a negative connotation, in Latin as well as in English, even Bert, who knows a lot, couldn’t say. The chastising definition is the third listed in Lewis & Short, but the only one that survives into English (NB: Most English dictionaries arrange definitions in order of importance; Latin dictionaries arrange them beginning with the most literal definition and ending with the most figurative). And why did the surviving animus, a neutral, if not positive, noun, take on the aspect of enmity in English? Would I be able to answer these perplexing questions, if, as I had planned before New York utterly seduced me, I’d become a linguist?
That semester I learned that I would have to expand my focus from suffixes to include prefixes if I were ever to master the vocabulary. All the prefixes used in Latin exist in English. Even my House of Ids included one: “perfervid,” with “per” meaning thoroughly and “fervid” meaning burning, i.e., impassioned. All the prefixes below also exist as independent words in Latin, as adverbs, prepositions, or both:
a, ab—from, away from
ad—to, toward, against
ante—before
circum—around
cum—together, completely
de—down from, utterly
e, ex—out, away
in—in, on, against
inter—between
ob—toward, against
per—through
post—after
prae—in front
praeter—past, beyond
pro—forward, in front of
sub—under, somewhat
super—over, above
trans—across
A few exist only as prefixes:
dis—apart
in—not
juxta—next to
re—back, again
se—apart
I rebuilt and expanded the house from my textbook to include those words that did double duty, in what you see is a very crowded house. In does triple duty as a prefix, a preposition, and a negating prefix, both in Latin and in English. In had caused me problems.
They began with another of Patrick’s e-mails. He was moving apartments in New York and sent the following: “Radicitus tollere est insomnium magnum, or should it be radicitus tollere insomnium magnum est, please advise.”
Such a question would inevitably send me off on a quest to nail down the translation. Only after exhausting all my own ideas would I allow myself to google it. I loved such challenges and the opportunity for a bit of pedantry. I wrote back:
“As far as I can tell, the word order in Latin can be any damn way you wish, though I prefer the second example for clarity. Insomnia/insomniae is feminine, so I think it would be: radicitus tollere insomnia magna est, because insomnia is a predicate nominative.
“Since Latin always prefers gerunds and gerundives to infinitives, I think it would prefer you to say ‘uprooting myself brings me great insomnia,’ which would use the gerundive: me tollendus redicitus magna insomnia mihi affert.
“Or perhaps better, me radicitus tollens, magna insomnia est mihi (the causal participle, with the dative of possessive), probably the best Latin, and my chance to show off!”
Patrick wrote back that he would study my response. “But just on vocabulary, when I looked up nightmare in my Cassell’s New Latin Dictionary, I got insomnia. Can this be right? Having a nightmare is almost the opposite of having insomnia. The French is cauchemar, but I don’t have the derivation. But it sounds like a Latin-based word (not Greek, anyway).”
I responded that my Chambers Murray Latin-English Dictionary gives the following: somnus, i, m., for sleep, somnium, i, n., for dream, and insomnia, ae, f., for sleeplessness. (Why is sleep masculine, insomnia feminine, and dream neuter?) It also gives insomnia, i, n., as a bad dream. (And why is that neuter??) Ecce insomnium! (What a nightmare!)
I learned another lesson: Never think you understand any Latin word until you’ve looked it up, and even then, know that it can trick you. Eheu! (Alas!) Not to mention, when I double-checked my syntax, I discovered that my suggestion that he use a gerundive was a cat’s cradle of errors. Patrick was right in the first place: radicitus tollere insomnium magnum est (pulling up from the roots is a big nightmare), and I had wasted an hour being a show-off Latinist.
I was awarded, a few days later, with a perfect word to describe myself: “ultracrepidarian,” which means “one who states opinions above one’s area of expertise.” It was the daily word from the wonderful Web site Wordsmith.org. The word translates literally from the Latin as “beyond the shoemaker.” Pliny the Elder told the story of an ancient Greek painter named Apelles. While viewing one of his paintings, a cobbler pointed out that the sole of the shoe had not been properly depicted. When the cobbler continued to offer comments about other aspects of the painting, Apelles angrily gave the order that the shoemaker should not judge above the sandal: Ne supra crepidam sutor iudicaret. Somehow that command was shortened to come down to us in English as ultracrepidarian.
I retreated to the comfort of English and constructed two columns from the many prefixes affixed to the word “pose”: not enough for a house, but enough to make elegant pillars.
appose
compose
expose
dispose
impose
interpose
juxtapose
oppose
propose
repose
superimpose
transpose
Apollonius of Tyre also gave Bert the opportunity to explain the Roman system of keeping time when we came upon this expression: hora noctis silentissima tertia (the most silent third hour of the night).
&nbs
p; The Roman day was divided into twelve daylight hours of unequal duration, depending on the season. A summer hour might last seventy-five minutes, a winter hour only forty-five. The night hours were not divided into hours but into four watches (vigilia noctis):
1. media noctis inclinatio (in the midst of the bending of the night), also known as solis occasus (setting sun)
2. conticinium (beginning of the evening)
3. gallicinium (cockcrow)
4. diluculum (dawn)
Like the Romans, George lived and worked by the sun. As spring arrived, more eager than last year to bestow its glories on our corner of the world, and with it the coming of daylight savings time, George’s rhythms of sleep and work began to change. He awakened earlier, dawdled about the house longer, and left for work later. Where in winter his workday began around 1:00 P.M. and ended at dark, by the end of summer it sometimes didn’t begin until 5:00 P.M. and stopped at 9:00 P.M. George’s days were dictated by the sun, with winter days short, summer days long. While I wondered how timekeeping affected language, George demonstrated the usefulness of the old Roman way.
After our meat-and-potato semester-long meal of Apollonius of Tyre, Bert treated us to a brief dessert of Ovid, who would become my favorite Roman poet. But he will have to wait for his own, later, chapter.
CHAPTER 7
Difficile est tenere quae acceperis nisi exerceas.
It is difficult to retain what you have learned unless you practice it.
—Pliny the Younger
Class ended the first of May and, with no outside structure, no reason to leave the house, an excessively long nonfiction book to cut by two-thirds, and another to rewrite, I was at my computer for hours most days, with breaks for walks and weed pulling. I didn’t even have to leave my desk to indulge in my new addiction: online Scrabble. You might think my Latin studies would have made me great, or at least good at Scrabble, but no: I lost almost every game. I’d begun playing with accomplished Scrabblists, and soon I was ranked thirty-second among my Facebook “friends”—twenty notches lower than those who had never even played. It was humiliating. One of my friends even refused to play with me again, because the one time she lost a game to me, I sent her rating down ten notches.
