Urbis Romae viri inlustres

I. Romani imperii exordium

Proca, rex Albanorum, Numitorem et Amulium filios habuit. Numitori, qui natu maior erat, regnum reliquit; sed Amulius, pulso fratre, regnavit et, ut eum subole privaret, Rheam Silviam, eius filiam, Vestae sacerdotem fecit, quae tamen Romulum et Remum geminos edidit. Ea re cognita Amulius ipsam in vincula coniecit, parvulos alveo impositos abiecit in Tiberim, qui tunc forte super ripas erat effusus; sed, relabente flumine, eos aqua in sicco reliquit. Vastae tum in iis locis solitudines erant. Lupa, ut fama traditum est, ad vagitum accurrit, infantes lingua lambit, ubera eorum ori matremque se gessit.

Cum lupa saepius ad parvulos veluti ad catulos reverteretur, Faustulus, pastor regius, re animadversa eos tulit in casam et Accae Larentiae coniugi dedit educandos. Adulti deinde hi inter pastores primo ludicris certaminibus vires auxere, deinde venando saltus peragrare et latrones a rapina pecorum arcere coeperunt. Quare cum iis insidiati essent latrones, Remus captus est, Romulus vi se defendit. Tum Faustulus, necessitate compulsus, indicavit Romulo quis esset eorum avus, quae mater. Romulus statim armatis pastoribus Albam properavit.

Interea Remum latrones ad Amulium regem perduxerunt, eum accusantes, quasi Numitoris agros infestare solitus esset; itaque Remus a rege Numitori ad supplicium traditus est; at cum Numitor, adulescentis vultum considerans, aetatem minimeque servilem indolem compararet, haud procul erat quin nepotem agnosceret. Nam Remus oris lineamentis erat matri simillimus aetasque expositionis temporibus congruebat. Ea res dum Numitoris animum anxium tenet, repente Romulus supervenit, fratrem liberat, interempto Amulio avum Numitorem in regnum restituit.

Deinde Romulus et Remus urbem in iisdem locis, ubi expositi ubique educati erant, condiderunt; sed orta inter eos contentione, uter nomen novae urbi daret eamque imperio regeret, auspicia decreverunt adhibere. Remus prior sex vultures, Romulus postea duodecim vidit. Sic Romulus, victor augurio, urbem Romam vocavit. Ad novae urbis tutelam sufficere vallum videbatur. Cuius angustias inridens cum Remus saltu id traiecisset, eum iratus Romulus interfecit, his increpans verbis: “Sic deinde, quicumque alius transiliet moenia mea!” Ita solus potitus est imperio Romulus.

II. Romulus, Romanorum rex primus (753-715 ACN)

Romulus imaginem urbis magis quam urbem fecerat; incolae deerant. Erat in proximo lucus; hunc asylum fecit. Et statim eo mira vis latronum pastorumque confugit. Cum vero uxores ipse populusque non haberent, legatos circa vicinas gentes misit, qui societatem conubiumque novo populo peterent. Nusquam benigne audita legatio est; ludibrium etiam additum: “Cur non feminis quoque asylum aperuistis? Id enim compar foret conubium.” Romulus, aegritudinem animi dissimulans, ludos parat; indici deinde finitimis spectaculum iubet. Multi convenere studio etiam videndae novae urbis, maxime Sabini cum liberis et coniugibus. Ubi spectaculi tempus venit eoque conversae mentes cum oculis erant, tum signo dato iuvenes Romani discurrunt, virgines rapiunt.

Haec fuit statim causa belli. Sabini enim ob virgines raptas bellum adversus Romanos sumpserunt, et cum Romae appropinquarent, Tarpeiam virginem nacti sunt, quae aquam forte extra moenia petitum ierat. Huius pater Romanae praeerat arci. Titus Tatius, Sabinorum dux, Tarpeiae optionem muneris dedit, si exercitum suum in Capitolium perduxisset. Illa petiit quod Sabini in sinistris manibus gererent, videlicet aureos anulos et armillas. Quibus dolose promissis, Tarpeia Sabinos in arcem perduxit, ubi Tatius scutis eam obrui iussit; nam et ea in laevis habuerant. Sic impia proditio celeri poena vindicata est.

Deinde Romulus ad certamen processit, et in eo loco, ubi nunc Romanum Forum est, pugnam conseruit. Primo impetu vir inter Romanos insignis, nomine Hostilius, fortissime dimicans cecidit; cuius interitu consternati Romani fugere coeperunt. Iam Sabini clamitabant: “Vicimus perfidos hospites, imbelles hostes. Nunc sciunt longe aliud esse virgines rapere, aliud pugnare cum viris.” Tunc Romulus, arma ad caelum tollens, Iovi aedem vovit, et exercitus seu forte seu divinitus restitit. Itaque proelium redintegratur; sed raptae mulieres crinibus passis ausae sunt se inter tela volantia inferre et hinc patres, hinc viros orantes, pacem conciliarunt.

Romulus, foedere cum Tatio icto, et Sabinos in urbem recepit et regnum cum Tatio sociavit. Verum haud ita multo post, occiso Tatio, ad Romulum potentatus omnis recidit. Centum deinde ex senioribus elegit, quorum consilio omnia ageret, quos senatores nominavit propter senectutem. Tres equitum centurias constituit, populum in triginta curias distribuit. His ita ordinatis, cum ad exercitum lustrandum contionem in campo ad Caprae paludem haberet, subito coorta est tempestas cum magno fragore tonitribusque et Romulus e conspectu ablatus est. Ad deos transisse vulgo creditus est; cui rei fidem fecit Iulius Proculus, vir nobilis. Orta enim inter patres et plebem seditione, in contionem processit, iureiurando adfirmans visum a se Romulum augustiore forma, eundemque praecipere ut seditionibus abstinerent et rem militarem colerent; futurum ut omnium gentium domini exsisterent. Aedes in colle Quirinali Romulo constituta, ipse pro deo cultus et Quirinus est appellatus.

III. Numa Pompilius, Romanorum rex secundus (716-673 ACN)

Successit Romulo Numa Pompilius, vir inclita iustitia et religione. Is Curibus, ex oppido Sabinorum, accitus est. Qui cum Romam venisset, ut populum ferum religione mitigaret, sacra plurima instituit. Aram Vestae consecravit, et ignem in ara perpetuo alendum virginibus dedit. Flaminem Iovis sacerdotem creavit eumque insigni veste et curuli sella adornavit. Dicitur quondam ipsum Iovem e caelo elicuisse. Hic, ingentibus fulminibus in urbem demissis, descendit in nemus Aventinum, ubi Numam docuit quibus sacris fulmina essent procuranda, et praeterea imperii certa pignora populo Romano daturum se esse promisit. Numa laetus rem populo nuntiavit. Postridie omnes ad aedes regias convenerunt silentesque exspectabant quid futurum esset. Atque sole orto delabitur e caelo scisso scutum, quod ancile appellavit Numa. Id ne furto auferri posset, Mamurium fabrum undecim scuta eadem forma fabricare iussit. Duodecim autem Salios Martis sacerdotes legit, qui ancilia, secreta illa imperii pignora, custodirent et Kalendis Martiis per urbem canentes et rite saltantes ferrent. Annum in duodecim menses ad cursum lunae descripsit; nefastos fastosque dies fecit; portas Iano gemino aedificavit ut esset index pacis et belli; nam apertus, in armis esse civitatem, clausus, pacatos circa omnes populos, significabat.

Leges quoque plurimas et utiles tulit Numa. Ut vero maiorem institutis suis auctoritatem conciliaret, simulavit sibi cum dea Egeria esse conloquia nocturna eiusque monitu se omnia, quae ageret, facere. Lucus erat, quem medium fons perenni rigabat aqua; eo saepe Numa sine arbitris se inferebat, velut ad congressum deae; ita omnium animos ea pietate imbuit, ut fides ac iusiurandum non minus quam legum et poenarum metus cives contineret. Bellum quidem nullum gessit, sed non minus civitati profuit quam Romulus. Morbo exstinctus in Ianiculo monte sepultus est. Ita duo deinceps reges, ille bello, hic pace, civitatem auxerunt. Romulus septem et triginta regnavit annos, Numa tres et quadraginta.

IV. Tullus Hostilius, Romanorum rex tertius (673-641 ACN)

Mortuo Numa Tullus Hostilius rex creatus est. Hic non solum proximo regi dissimilis, sed ferocior etiam Romulo fuit. Eo regnante bellum inter Albanos et Romanos exortum est. Ducibus Hostilio et Fufetio placuit rem paucorum certamine finiri. Erant apud Romanos trigemini fratres Horatii, tres apud Albanos Curiatii. Cum eis agunt reges ut pro sua quisque patria dimicent ferro. Foedus ictum est ea lege, ut, unde victoria, ibi imperium esset.

Icto foedere trigemini arma capiunt et in medium inter duas acies procedunt. Consederant utrimque duo exercitus. Datur signum, infestique armis terni iuvenes, magnorum exercituum animos gerentes, concurrunt. Ut primo concursu increpuere arma micantesque fulsere gladii, horror ingens spectantes perstringit. Consertis deinde manibus, statim duo Romani alius super alium exspirantes ceciderunt; tres Albani vulnerati. Ad casum Romanorum conclamavit gaudio exercitus Albanus. Romanos iam spes tota deserebat. Unum Horatium tres Curiatii circumsteterant. Forte is integer fuit; sed quia tribus impar erat, ut distraheret hostes, fugam capessivit, singulos per intervalla secuturos esse ratus. Iam aliquantum spatii ex eo loco, ubi pugnatum est, aufugerat, cum respiciens videt unum e Curiatiis haud procul ab sese abesse. In eum magno impetu redit, et dum Albanus exercitus inclamat Curiatiis ut opem ferant fratri, iam Horatius eum occiderat. Alterum deinde, priusquam tertius posset consequi, interfecit.

Iam singuli supererant, sed nec spe nec viribus pares. Alter erat intactus ferro et geminata victoria ferox; alter fessum vulnere, fessum cursu trahebat corpus. Nec illud proelium fuit. Romanus exsultans male sustinentem arma Curiatium conficit, iacentem spoliat. Romani ovantes ac gratulantes Horatium accipiunt et domum deducunt. Princeps ibat Horatius, trium fratrum spolia prae se gerens. Cui obvia fuit soror, quae desponsa fuerat uni ex Curiatiis, visoque super umeros fratris paludamento sponsi, quod ipsa confecerat, flere et crines solvere coepit. Movet ferocis iuvenis animum comploratio sororis in tanto gaudio publico; itaque stricto gladio transfigit puellam, simul eam verbis increpans: “Abi hinc cum immaturo amore ad sponsum, oblita fratrum, oblita patriae. Sic eat, quaecumque Romana lugebit hostem.”

Atrox id visum est facinus patribus plebique; quare raptus est in ius Horatius et apud iudices condemnatus. Iam accesserat lictor iniciebatque laqueum. Tum Horatius ad populum provocavit. Interea pater Horatii senex proclamabat filiam suam iure caesam esse; et iuvenem amplexus spoliaque Curiatiorum ostentans, orabat populum ne se, quem paulo ante cum egregia stirpe conspexissent, orbum liberis faceret. Non tulit populus patris lacrimas iuvenemque absolvit admiratione magis virtutis quam iure causae. Ut tamen caedes manifesta expiaretur, pater quibusdam sacrificiis peractis transmisit per viam tigillum et filium capite adoperto velut sub iugum misit; quod tigillum Sororium appellatum est.

Non diu pax Albana mansit; nam Mettius Fufetius, dux Albanorum, cum se invidiosum apud cives videret, quod bellum uno paucorum certamine finisset, ut rem corrigeret, Veientes Fidenatesque adversus Romanos concitavit. Ipse, a Tullo in auxilium arcessitus, aciem in collem subduxit, ut fortunam belli exspectaret et sequeretur. Qua re Tullus intellecta magna voce ait suo illud iussu Mettium facere, ut hostes a tergo circumvenirentur. Quo audito hostes territi et victi sunt. Postero die Mettius cum ad gratulandum Tullo venisset, iussu illius quadrigis religatus et in diversa distractus est. Deinde Tullus Albam propter ducis perfidiam diruit et Albanos Romam transire iussit.

Roma interim crevit Albae ruinis; duplicatus est civium numerus; mons Caelius urbi additus et, quo frequentius habitaretur, eam sedem Tullus regiae cepit ibique deinde habitavit. Auctarum virium fiducia elatus bellum Sabinis indixit. Pestilentia insecuta est; nulla tamen ab armis quies dabatur. Credebat enim rex bellicosus salubriora militiae quam domi esse iuvenum corpora, sed ipse quoque diuturno morbo est implicitus. Tunc vero adeo fracti simul cum corpore sunt spiritus illi feroces, ut nulli rei posthac nisi sacris operam daret. Memorant Tullum fulmine ictum cum domo conflagrasse. Tullus magna gloria belli regnavit annos duos et triginta.

V. Ancus Marcius, Romanorum rex quartus (641-616 ACN)

Tullo mortuo Ancum Marcium regem populus creavit. Numae Pompilii nepos Ancus Marcius erat, aequitate et religione avo similis. Tunc Latini, cum quibus Tullo regnante ictum foedus erat, sustulerant animos, et incursionem in agrum Romanum fecerunt. Ancus, priusquam eis bellum indiceret, legatum misit, qui res repeteret, eumque morem posteri acceperunt. Id autem hoc modo fiebat. Legatus, ubi ad fines eorum venit a quibus res repetuntur, capite velato “Audi, Iuppiter,” inquit “audite, fines huius populi. Ego sum publicus nuntius populi Romani; verbis meis fides sit.” Deinde peragit postulata. Si non deduntur res quas exposcit, hastam in fines hostium emittit bellumque ita indicit. Legatus, qui ea de re mittitur, Fetialis ritusque belli indicendi Ius Fetiale appellatur.

Legato Romano res repetenti superbe responsum est a Latinis; quare bellum hoc modo eis indictum est. Ancus, exercitu conscripto, profectus Latinos fudit et compluribus oppidis deletis cives Romam traduxit. Cum autem in tanta hominum multitudine facinora clandestina fierent, Ancus carcerem in media urbe ad terrorem increscentis audaciae aedificavit. Idem nova moenia urbi circumdedit, Ianiculum montem ponte sublicio in Tiberi facto urbi coniunxit, in ore Tiberis Ostiam urbem condidit. Pluribus aliis rebus intra paucos annos confectis; immatura morte praereptus obiit.

VI. Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, Romanorum rex quintus (616-578 ACN)

Anco regnante Lucius Tarquinius, Tarquiniis, ex Etruriae urbe, profectus, cum coniuge et fortunis omnibus Romam commigravit. Additur haec fabula: advenienti aquila pilleum sustulit et super carpentum, cui Tarquinius insidebat, cum magno clangore volitans rursus capiti apte reposuit; inde sublimis abiit. Tanaquil coniux, caelestium prodigiorum perita, regnum ei portendi intellexit; itaque, virum complexa, excelsa et alta sperare eum iussit. Has spes cogitationesque secum portantes urbem ingressi sunt, domicilioque ibi comparato Tarquinius pecunia et industria dignitatem atque etiam Anci regis familiaritatem consecutus est; a quo tutor liberis relictus regnum intercepit et ita administravit, quasi iure adeptus esset.

Tarquinius Priscus Latinos bello domuit; Circum Maximum aedificavit; de Sabinis triumphavit; murum lapideum urbi circumdedit. Equitum centurias duplicavit, nomina mutare non potuit, deterritus, ut ferunt, Atti Navii auctoritate. Attus enim, ea tempestate augur inclitus, id fieri posse negabat, nisi aves addixissent; iratus rex in experimentum artis eum interrogavit, fierine posset quod ipse mente concepisset; Attus augurio acto fieri posse respondit. “Atqui hoc” inquit rex “agitabam, num cotem illam secare novacula possem.” “Potes ergo” inquit augur, et rex secuisse dicitur. Tarquinius filium tredecim annorum, quod in proelio hostem percussisset, praetexta bullaque donavit; unde haec ingenuorum puerorum insignia esse coeperunt.

Supererant duo Anci filii, qui, aegre ferentes se paterno regno fraudatos esse, regi insidias paraverunt. Ex pastoribus duos ferocissimos deligunt ad patrandum facinus. Ei simulata rixa in vestibulo regiae tumultuantur. Quorum clamor cum penitus in regiam pervenisset, vocati ad regem pergunt. Primo uterque vociferari coepit et certatim alter alteri obstrepere. Cum vero iussi essent in vicem dicere, unus ex composito rem orditur; dumque intentus in eum se rex totus avertit, alter elatam securim in eius caput deiecit, et relicto in vulnere telo ambo foras se proripiunt.

VII. Servius Tullius, Romanorum rex sextus (578-534 ACN)

Post hunc Servius Tullius suscepit imperium, genitus ex nobili femina, captiva tamen et famula. Qui cum in domo Tarquinii Prisci educaretur, ferunt prodigium visu eventuque mirabile accidisse. Flammae species pueri dormientis caput amplexa est. Hoc visu Tanaquil summam ei dignitatem portendi intellexit coniugique suasit ut eum haud secus ac suos liberos educaret. Is postquam adolevit, et fortitudine et consilio insignis fuit. In proelio quodam, in quo rex Tarquinius adversus Sabinos conflixit, militibus segnius dimicantibus, raptum signum in hostem misit. Cuius recipiendi gratia Romani tam acriter pugnaverunt, ut et signum et victoriam referrent. Quare a Tarquinio gener adsumptus est; et cum Tarquinius occisus esset, Tanaquil, Tarquinii uxor, mortem eius celavit, populumque ex superiore parte aedium adlocuta ait regem grave quidem, sed non letale vulnus accepisse, eumque petere, ut interim dum convalesceret, Servio Tullio dicto audientes essent. Sic Servius Tullius regnare coepit, sed recte imperium administravit. Sabinos subegit; montes tres, Quirinalem, Viminalem, Esquilinum urbi adiunxit; fossas circa murum duxit. Idem censum ordinavit, et populum in classes et centurias distribuit.

Servius Tullius aliquod urbi decus addere volebat. Iam tum inclitum erat Dianae Ephesiae fanum. Id communiter a civitatibus Asiae factum fama ferebat. Itaque Latinorum populis suasit ut et ipsi fanum Dianae cum populo Romano Romae in Aventino monte aedificarent. Quo facto, bos mirae magnitudinis cuidam Latino nata dicitur, et responsum somnio datum eum populum summam imperii habiturum, cuius civis bovem illam Dianae immolasset. Latinus bovem ad fanum Dianae egit et causam sacerdoti Romano exposuit. Ille callidus dixit prius eum vivo flumine manus abluere debere. Latinus dum ad Tiberim descendit, sacerdos bovem immolavit. Ita imperium civibus sibique gloriam adquisivit.

Servius Tullius filiam alteram ferocem, mitem alteram habens, cum Tarquinii filios pari esse animo videret, ferocem miti, mitem feroci in matrimonium dedit, ne duo violenta ingenia matrimonio iungerentur. Sed mites seu forte seu fraude perierunt; feroces morum similitudo coniunxit. Statim Tarquinius a Tullia incitatus advocato senatu regnum paternum repetere coepit. Qua re audita Servius dum ad Curiam contendit, iussu Tarquinii per gradus deiectus et domum refugiens interfectus est. Tullia carpento vecta in Forum properavit et coniugem e Curia evocatum prima regem salutavit; cuius iussu cum e turba ac tumultu decessisset domumque rediret, viso patris corpore, cunctantem et frena mulionem inhibentem super ipsum corpus carpentum agere iussit, unde vicus ille Sceleratus dictus est. Servius Tullius regnavit annos quattuor et quadraginta.

VIII. Tarquinius Superbus, Romanorum rex septimus et ultimus (534-510 ACN)

Tarquinius Superbus regnum sceleste occupavit. Tamen bello strenuus Latinos Sabinosque domuit. Urbem Gabios in potestatem redegit fraude Sexti filii. Is cum indigne ferret eam urbem a patre expugnari non posse, ad Gabinos se contulit, patris saevitiam in se conquerens. Benigne a Gabinis exceptus paulatim eorum benevolentiam consequitur, fictis blanditiis ita eos adliciens, ut apud omnes plurimum posset, et ad postremum dux belli eligeretur. Tum e suis unum ad patrem mittit sciscitatum quidnam se facere vellet. Pater nuntio filii nihil respondit, sed velut deliberabundus in hortum transiit ibique inambulans sequente nuntio altissima papaverum capita baculo decussit. Nuntius, fessus exspectando, rediit Gabios. Sextus, cognito silentio patris et facto, intellexit quid vellet pater. Primores civitatis interemit patrique urbem sine ulla dimicatione tradidit.

Postea rex Ardeam urbem obsidebat. Ibi cum in castris essent, Tarquinius Collatinus, sorore regis natus, forte cenabat apud Sextum Tarquinium cum iuvenibus regiis. Incidit de uxoribus mentio; cum suam unusquisque laudaret, placuit experiri. Itaque citatis equis Romam avolant; regias nurus in convivio et luxu deprehendunt. Pergunt inde Collatiam; Lucretiam, Collatini uxorem, inter ancillas lanae deditam inveniunt. Ea ergo ceteris praestare iudicatur. Paucis interiectis diebus Sextus Collatiam rediit et Lucretiae vim attulit. Illa postero die, advocatis patre et coniuge, rem exposuit et se cultro, quem sub veste abditum habebat, occidit. Conclamat vir paterque et in exitium regum coniurant. Tarquinio Romam redeunti clausae sunt urbis portae et exsilium indictum.

In antiquis annalibus memoriae haec sunt prodita. Anus hospita atque incognita ad Tarquinium quondam Superbum regem adiit, novem libros ferens, quos esse dicebat divina oracula: eos se velle venumdare. Tarquinius pretium percontatus est: mulier nimium atque immensum poposcit. Rex, quasi anus aetate desiperet, derisit. Tum illa foculum cum igni apponit et tres libros ex novem deurit; et, ecquid reliquos sex eodem pretio emere vellet, regem interrogavit. Sed Tarquinius id multo risit magis, dixitque anum iam procul dubio delirare. Mulier ibidem statim tres alios libros exussit; atque id ipsum denuo placide rogat, ut tres reliquos eodem illo pretio emat. Tarquinius ore iam serio atque attentiore animo fit; eam constantiam confidentiamque non neglegendam intellegit: libros tres reliquos mercatur nihilo minore pretio quam quod erat petitum pro omnibus. Sed eam mulierem tunc a Tarquinio digressam postea nusquam loci visam constitit. Libri tres in sacrario conditi Sibyllinique appellati. Ad eos, quasi ad oraculum, Quindecemviri adeunt, cum dii immortales publice consulendi sunt.


Featured: Combat of the Horatii and the Curiatii, by Giuseppe Cesari; painted ca. 1612-1613.


Flos Triticum

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Wheat Flower erat in villa mea pulcherrima puella. Alta, bene erecta, pulchroque sui fiducia gradiens, Clara risum splenduit campis, alta viarum Vendée secat silvas. Cum primis tepidis veris diebus albedo lactea cutis, lentigines sidere punctis

Rustici dicebant: Dominus bonus manipulum furfure in faciem proiecit.

Furfur et farina, ut videtur, nam facies eius sub radiis solis tam alba manebat ac si tritico oppessato pulvere inspergeretur. Hinc cognomen fortasse, vel rufis fortasse capillis Debebat, fulvis magis aequantibus ocellis. Dedit unam impressionem omnium pulcri auri-brunnei toni maturi tritici. Wheat Flower pulcher erat, et hoc sciebat, quia sic tota die narrabatur.

Vir agris non longe abhorret. Sensus eius estheticus non est idem cum nostro. Non linea, forma, gratia formae moventis movetur, sed colore afficitur potenter, sicut omnes quos humanitas non excoluit. Wheat Flower igitur est coloris animali, voluptatem igitur audiendi se pulchram praedicabat, et ad propulsandam lasciviam, interdum robustiores blanditias, virilis iuventutis usque ab Sainte Hermine in Chantonnay. Florem, ubi vis, ibi congregabuntur apes. Ubicumque occurristi pulchritudinis, videbis homines ad pabulandum venientes, oculis et manibus et labiis. Inter urbem et patriam est sola differentia occasus.

Cuius fama ultra pagi fines propagata, Wheat Flower habebat admirantium turbas quae in vicinia per multos dies non visa sunt. Superbia eius in oculis suis praestringitur, et si ad Cleopatram, in quem spectata mundi obtutus dicta esset, non esset certum, quod regina Aegyptia plus prodesse putasset. Rus ancilla. Quam ob rem laudo, quod multam adorantium enumerare stulte lusum est. Regina autem mortua erat et puella rustica: optimum omnium argumentum.

Fabulae iucunda pars est, Wheat Flower, dum se ab omnibus admirari, et invidisse omnibus foeminis, animum suum fidum amico, qui noverat conciliare, in quo egregie a Cleopatra differebat. Ille autem amicus, quoniam ad confessionem tandem veniendus est, nullus alius fuit quam humilis servus tuus. Condonari possim istius advocationis superbiam: Wheat Flower amavi, et Wheat Flower sentiebat de me, quod exhibere minime nolebat. Sequebam eam circa prata cum cane suo “Rubrum Udones,” sic dicta propter quatuor fulvos manus, et dum grex nimis inepte pascebatur ultra limitem ruris custodiae, narravi ei omnia de Nannetensi, ubi. hiemem habui. Obstupui ex libris meis fabulis, aut mecum de animalibus, quid egerunt, quid sentirent, mecum locuta est; quae mihi narravit extraordinarias fabulas. Proximae sibi erant animae nostrae, non eadem pectora nostra dicam, nam tristis amor nostri pars erat, heu, viginti sex vel septem, si starem in gradu. Hoc non difficile est, alterutrum tamen alterum amplecti. Postmodum intellexi meam fortunam.

Nostri optimi dies erant in tempore messis. Nondum rus invaserat fumus arenae machinae nefandus. Scibis adhuc in usu erat. Luce prima viri ac feminae in partes divisae areae circuire incipiebant, motusque eorum numeroso impetu lignei flagelli, humi stramentis obvoluti; pars quadrille sensim cederet, media pars paulatim procederet. Necessitas observandi, et conatus silere deiectos. Sed quam cachinnus et cantus motus cum pice lignea subiguntur, positis paleis! Aspiciet instratam messoribus meridiana torva solis humum, fallaxque timet rusticus umbram. Ad ictum campanae, sonorus concentus scloporum iterum undique aerem replebat.

Ad vesperum erant choreae et carmina in quibus Wheat Flower excellebat. Sciebat omnis regionis illius cantus, et nasi, indocta voce canebat, delectamentum rusticae auris, poemata ingenua, in quibus “Filius Regis”, “Luscinia” et “Ros” in phantasmatibus apparuerunt; laeta vel tristis. Vatem loci etiam de Wheat Flower, carmen liberioris et liberioris dialecti, fecerat, cuius cantilena florem triticum sub messe flagelli dedere segetem dicebat. Wheat Flower sine pudore falso cantu celebravit se, et erant denique iurgia, si quidam adulescentuli per iocum crederent in agendo abstinentiam ponere.

Serius vel serius, Wheat Flower sub messoris flagello tenebatur. Atque hic lectoris animum ad hanc fabulam voco, cuius meritum est omnium fabulae. Nullius enim maioris erroris scio, quam ut singula- rum rerum casus opinari soleant, quae faciunt vitam iucundam. Si quis inspiciat, reperietur vere mirabilia ea esse quae nobis cotidie accidunt, eaque duella, sica, etiam autocineta, odio comitante, invidia, proditione, amore, perfidia, re vera vulgaria eveniunt. In enorme vitae communis a nativitate ad mortem.

Ut sine ulla nostra voluntate ad huius mundi conscientiam adferamus, fatali concatenatione gaudiorum ac dolorum subiaceat fortunae periculo, et finem in tarda corruptione, quae nos ad antecedentem statum reducit. Nostri, nonne hoc summum casus est? Quid magis opus est ut miremur? Quidam, qui pessimistae vocantur, quodam murmure accipiunt. Alii, optimates existimati, tantam fortunam considerant, ut ad eam per consolationem studiose addant somnium coelestis adventus, quem quisque liberet exornare quantum libet.

Wheat Flower eius mentem non ullo ex hoc vexavit. Viginti erat illa, eo occupatior. Audivit vocem adulescentiae suae sicut praegressae feminae et quae sequuntur eam in terra. In campis, natura tam propinqua, homines minime impediti sunt conventionibus socialibus magis minusve phantasticis, quae humanas necessitudines moderari incipiunt inter duas creaturas, inter se esurientes et sitientes.

Peculiare genus placentae, quae “échaudé” dicitur, praecipuum est fructus industriae meae villae: placentam ex farina et ovis, delectabilem recentem e clibano, sed gravem et gravem sititatis causa, tempore procedente per bracchium usque ad Niortum, Rupellam seu Fontenay. Noctu vehitur vectura longis bigis ab equina trahentibus, cuius tarda et stabilis incessus saxa somnos agitatoris et mulieris comitantis praeesset ad vendendum placentas. Hae plostra terribilia internuntius sunt. Odor filicis periculi plenus est. Iacent duo somno pariter, sub dio. Non semper dormiunt, etiam post longum diem laborem. Forum oppidum procul abest. Inhumani censoresque moenibus suis quattuor inclusi sunt. Temptatio augetur per succussos qui unum contra alterum proiciunt. Quare resistendum est, cum tandem cedendum sit?

Wheat Flower, qui in his liba locupletis domestici mangonis elaboraverat, diem unum egregium ei “dominum” duxit, postquam ei dedit, nemine mirante, duo certa argumenta dociliorum ad gaudium ac munia maternitas. Proximi ruri narrabunt nihil esse extra ordinem in vita. Vir eius tantum diebus dominicis post vesperas, quando nimium biberat, eam verberavit, nec plus vindicavit in eum, quam necesse fuit ut extraneis ostenderet quod ultimum verbum non haberet.

Post aliquantum temporis spatium iterum eam vidi. Manipulus farinae et furfures adhuc erat ibi. Lustrabant oculi, crinemque tenus ardentibus alis tena ardent. Sed mihi visus eius aspectus acutior, iamque labiorum curva taedium prodidit vitae. Pulchellus adhuc nomen ei adhaesit, sed flos florem amiserat. Illa adhuc risit, sed iam non canebat. Ad eam Fortuna venerat, annuli fibulae, torques aureae testatae. Diebus dominicis gerebat pallium sericum et praecinctorium ad ecclesiam, et librum deauratum portabat, rem utilem etiam ab iis qui legere non possunt, cum eis satisfaciat ad excitandam invidiam proximi.

Visitatio mea ad pagum iam brevis et longe distans factus erat. Longe longe vixissemus, cum quadam die ei occurrisset, in una nostra alta via secat, ad pascuum ducentem vaccam. Senex, annosa, fracta, obsoleta mulier. Curabitur ut cessavimus. Mortuus est autem vir suus et reliquerat eam bonis, sed filii instarent ut omnia eis traderet. Dixeruntque “ad notarii” eius salarium se habituros.

“Debeo statuere animum ut faciam” finivit cum gemitu. “Credisne me heri verberare appropinquasse filium meum, eo quod nolui dicere necne?”

Decem amplius anni transierunt. Quodam die, cum per vicinum vicinum iret, mihi monstratum est gurgustium ruinae, et dicebatur “barbotte” ibi suos dies finire. Wheat Flower non fuit. Illa nunc erat “Barbotte” a nomine mariti sui Barbot.

Intravi. In media luce videre potui, sub reliquiis veteris pallii, caput quassans vetulae mulieris, facie siccante, retorrida membrana, oculis duobus flavis transfixis, in quibus obscurissima oculorum vestigia obdormierunt. Vicinus mihi narravit omnia de eo. Liberi non perstiterunt, quod nemo miratur. Res erat usitata. Aliquando, attulerunt ei frustum panis, interdum pulmentum, aut frusta ciborum die dominico, post missam. Anus infirma erat, et aegre se habebat. Putabatur autem servus semel in die venire et videre eam. Saepe oblitus est.

“Cur non querar?”, dixi inconsiderate.

“Dixit quodam die notarium mittere. Verberavit pro eo. Et quis vellet accipere nuntium suum? Nemo studet inimicis facere. Iam liberi eius nulli satis placebant ut quisquam intraret tuguriolum. Nolunt homines rebus suis miscere.”

Per hunc sermonem lacrimae lucebant in oculis nictantes flavo. “The Barbotte” me agnovit.

“Noli me turbari” dixit tenui voce timorem verberum prodidisse. “Nihil egeo. Pueri mei valde benigni sunt. Veniunt quotidie. Forsitan sis sicut ceteri, domine, putes me tempus grave in manibus meis invenire. Scisne quid agam, cum ego hic solus sum? Cano. In corde meo omnia carmina antiquitatis oblitus sum eorum et nunc revertuntur ad me tota die illa cantabo sine ullo sonitu et intus cano in medio eorum cum ego omnia complevi, iterum incipio. Est sicut grana mea narrans. Ridiculum est, annon?”

Et ridere conata.

“Monsieur le curé me obiurgat”, iterum sumpsit. “Vellet me dicere vota mea. Sed preces non prius institui quam carmina redire. Non possum. Meministine, nonne tu, Filius Regis?’ O filius regis! et ‘Luscinia?’ et ‘Rose?’ Tibi unum cantare volo, clare, pro meo animo. Quis? ‘Flos triticum!’ Flos triticeus! Ah… ” Cantare videbatur, sed inde fluens exclamavit: “Vexillum messoris venit. Frumentum sublatum est. Nihil restat nisi palea… et hoc male laeditur. Nimium trituratum est… Carissime domine, qui omnia nosti, potesne mihi dicere quare venimus in hunc mundum?

“Aliud dicam tibi, mi amice, cum iterum venero.”

Sed numquam recesserunt.

1920.


Featured: A Seated Peasant Woman, by Camille Pissarro; painted in 1885.


Scholarship Inferno—A Dantesque Meditation on Scholars in the Managerial Age

These thoughts were first delivered as an oration, the Third Stuart Saunders Memorial Lecture, given at the Auditorium of the Neuroscience Institute of the University of Cape Town, on May 22, 2023. This written version is considerably different.

“Lasciate ogni Speranza voi ch’ entrate,” said a placard outside the senior common room. A doctoral student must have posted it, in propitiation of a desired but improbable job given the “financial constraints,” I thought. I sat down and let my mind wander and wonder. What did that future jurist, or perhaps lawyer, mean? Why this gesture, this interpellation, this sorrow even? A moral claim, in any event. An occasion to reflect on scholarship?

In an age of universities and academics “ratings,” of Nespresso conferences offering quick and easy 15-minute presentations, and the vulgar business of journals held, in firm accountants’ hands, by international publishing groups, “sovereign” funds in disguise, in short a Hell university managers (and Presidents or Vice-Chancellors), refuse to consider, I took the grad student’s caveat literally, and I stepped forward, as it were, walking behind Dante, and Virgil.

This is no stroll up to the illuminating Ideas of the Table of Cebes, but a slow progress into the phantoms that inhabit scholarship’s morality. Mine is a tropological reading of Dante’s Inferno applied to the negative ethics of scholarship. It is not exhaustive. It is a rhetorical exercise in the very best sense of the word, clearing stuff that encumbers reason and argument—let us remember how at the very beginning of Rhetoric Aristotle calls for getting rid of rubbish, and opening a straight path. In this case, Iet us try and clear the rubbish indeed that stands in the way, the hodos, of a scholar’s progress.

Let us follow Dante.

1

In the first circle, Dante meets, in particular, ancient philosophers, Greek thinkers, such as Plato and Aristotle.

Why are scholars of ancient Greece, the source of all scholarly knowledge at the time, from physics to medicine, morals to logic? Why are they in Hell, and why at its most benign level? Reason is that they have perceived the truth of what it is to be a human being, be it in metaphysics or in physics, in ethics or in formal and informal reasoning. But they lacked a true concept of it.

Their scholarly endeavours lacked something fundamental. What French thought-libertines, such as La Mothe le Vayer called, with a bold oxymoron, “la Sagesse des Païens.” Wise, sage, indeed, but lacking a knowledge of divine truth, despite the aletheia-Revelation. Those words “wise, sage” were a trope for “knowing,” and to deny them the status of “doctors of the faith” which, undoubtedly, had they contemplated the Word made Flesh, and acceded to “knowledge” they would have earned (such was the tale which spared the French sceptics a dire fate).

However, ancient philosophy itself made a clear distinction between “knowing” and “knowledge,” aistheta kai noeta, to put it differently: “percepts” and “concepts.”

The wise ancients perceived a connection between human understanding and the human condition, but they lacked a concept of that relationship between what a human being can achieve, in a scholar’s case intellectually, and the purpose of the universe within which scholarly enterprise fits, which for Dante was its placement within a superior divine order. In this case, ancient scholars had a percept of the ultimate goal of scholarship, they did not have a true concept of it, that is of the truth of Nature. We know that the position of science regarding a divine scheme of Nature still rages on today.

A tropological, and moral, translation with regard to a scholar’s enterprise ensues: to be clever as a scientist or perceptive as a philosopher, to be intelligent and enterprising as a scholar, that is to follow the ways and uses of a given scholarly community, its properly named ethos, yet without a firm concept of truth, is advantageous, but fraudulent.

Often scholars stay there, and quite happily. They go through the moves, but remain at the level of percepts—cleverly constructed, persuasively presented as concepts, forcefully argued, but percepts, aistheta, none the less.

For instance, the so-called “robust” debates on climate change, the nasty controversies about the warring situation in Eastern Europe, and the opposing arguments about Covid, rest, among scholars (I am not talking here about the public), on a constant game between percepts and concepts, opinions presented by scholars as veracity, and established facts or arguments logically valid as well as exact.

When scholars behave like the public who is naturally swimming in the amniotic liquid of percepts, they fail being scholars.

I have tried that notion on some of my brighter graduates. They see the point, but they do not see what to do about it, and with it—as scholars. They often prefer to fall back on percepts. Many are “wise,” smart, perceptive, and that suffices to sustain an academic or professionally “learned” career. Scholars they are not.

2

In the second circle of Hell, Dante meets those who lead lives driven by passionate love. Love, human love, is supposed to be what people, especially in the Western mindset, are made to believe as being a superior feeling. Some cultures do without it and are none for the worse. Roland Barthes, a critic unorderly decried today, wrote A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments to debunk the narrative of human love—as just a narrative. By contrast, he had read Loyola closely, when the Jesuit saint’s Spiritual Exercises were a terra incognita to secular critics (but oddly he gets no credit for it). He had a clear idea that “love,” dispassionate, is a travail of the mind, an active arming of the mind, as the word exercitium says, and Barthes knew his Latin (and his Greek).

But how does “love” relate to scholarship?

Again, tropology: scholars are not supposed to fall in love with ideas, theirs or others’. They are not supposed to be in love with what they think. They must maintain a distance. Getting infatuated with a topic, a research theme, an author, an idea, is dangerous. One gets ensnared by the self-loving turns of a narrative about one’s own mind. Some of us get caught in the loving knots of libido sciendi.

Why? It has to do with fetishism.

There is often a fetishist approach to a scholar’s endeavours, just like love is in essence fetishist.

Now, what is a fetish? A fetish is a strategy of replacement. In it most serious form, someone who is deeply mentally disturbed will hallucinate that an object, any object, is reality; reality meaning the subject of desire—“love.” An object replaces a subject.

Benign example: Buying an expensive perfume or getting into debt for an expensive car are fetishist acts: you replace the lifestyle you cannot afford with a fetish of that lifestyle. You fulfil your desire, and hallucinate that which you cannot have (worse, is denied to you, and in full display—cruelly, hence feeding the narrative of endless dis-satisfaction).

In intellectual matters the desire, the passionate love for fetishes is a very strong “drive,” especially among younger scholars. “Drive” is correct, but placed here in-between inverted commas, because those who use it all the time are evidently ignorant of its true meaning: it is the Trieb of psychoanalysis—Eros and Thanatos at work. It coheres.

It is indeed a natural bend, exacerbated by the demands for “teamwork,” “collaborative research,” and the like. But it leads to repetitive research. One cannot let go and move on. One has found one’s object of desire, and one wants to stay with it. You can call it silo thinking if you wish. In reality, it is a fetish. Roland Barthes, him again, warned his students: do not fetishize your dissertation into a book.

That sort of fetishist behaviour is often encouraged by funding agencies and managers: many, not all, want to see how a scholar has a trajectory, follows a path, undertakes a “journey” even as some say, having read that book by Coelho, and, nail in the coffin of noeta: a track record. Funding outfits often look at deviations from the course as proof of a lack of focus. Of course, they would, since they think along managerial lines—and their own fetish.

What is their fetish?

The magic bullet of Management: POLC, plan, organize, lead, control. With it the panacea of “lean management,” where things have “got to” move fast and in one direction, and “produce” “deliverables.” Ideas do not “move fast.” When you hear “productive” about a scholar, hear the alarm bell ring. It is a red flag for managerial fetish. Thanatos, that fundamental Trieb, reigns.

That sort of intrusion in the life of scholars produces a poorer intellectual life indeed. Which does not mean a poorer academic life. Both lives need not coincide. It is an error to envision that colleges and universities are places for scholarship. They may be places of scholarship, where some scholars can follow their path. But they are not places for scholars. That is no longer their teleology, their final cause. Universities may be the efficient cause of scholarship, but it mostly is no more that—“efficient” is a concept naturally adopted by the managerial university.

3

The third circle is about gluttons. That is, figuratively, about those who instead of being satisfied with meeting basic, bodily, needs, always want more.

In other words, their body has replaced their life. They are not human beings but recipients for other bodies, meat, vegetables, fruits, drinks. They eat animal and vegetal life in order to augment their own bodily life. I often wondered if the disgust strong-minded vegans feel toward meat-eaters, does not come from the carnivorous image of bodies eating bodies.

What about scholars? When I read verses from Canto VI, and I look for a tropological meaning, I am reminded of the expression: body text. And then I think of bloated footnotes in research papers, or one word followed by a bracketed string of So-and-So, page such-and-such, sometimes running for an entire line.

A gluttony of so-called references. Swelling the body of an article with others’ scholarship without, usually, any sort of pointed, coherent explanation between this word, hopefully concept, referenced and that kebab of data on a skewer. One feeds on anything that comes close and within grasp.

Others’ ideas and “body of work” do not exist to merely being gorged on, and regurgitated, often half-digested.

It is an illness most perceptible in the social sciences, in their strained effort to pass for “sciences,” less in the pure humanities whose scholars still see themselves members of a club, the Republic of Letters; but scientific papers are far from exempt from a rhetoric of agglutination and precedence to tick the boxes of credits parsed down to the least intelligent lab gesture by X (fifth “author”).

There is also little value in demanding from students, in their apprentice-ship of scholarship, to chew on so-called literature reviews and methodology parading. What is the actual value of filling up two compulsory chapters of a dissertation with those pre-emptive strikes? Or inane preliminaries, in academic articles, reciting a litany of saints of a particular faith as a preamble to get on with the job? Yes, we know what Agamben said about emergency; spare us triteness, show us what you do with it. What I want to see at work, in the body of an analysis, is how sources are activated in the course of a dissertation, or a paper, how a methodology is put into action.

To refer to them is not a scholarly gesture.

To infer from them, is a scholarly gesture.

4

In Hell 4 Dante casts the misers and the spend-all.

First, why are they stuck together in Hell 4? Because, possibly, they are a living hell to one another, as in a Balzac’s novel.

Figuratively both are the two sides of the same delusion: either they indulge in material goods by accumulating them, in order not to share them. Or they indulge in throwing away everything without any regard to the value of each item, which is a way of not sharing, as sharing has to be discriminate in order to fit the purpose of generosity.

A tropological reading sheds yet another light on the threats to scholarship.

How does a scholar hoard? What is a miser-scholar, if I can coin that word?

A hoarder scholar indulges in never deviating from his, her primary hoarding, be it a doctoral dissertation or a book. Everything always goes back to it. Niches can be comfortable, but if you are alone in it, what is the value of being so specialized? You stay in your dog-pen (“niche”), chewing on your bone.

By contrast, the reverse indulgence is forever turning yourself into an open house, having an open table, laying out whatever you have developed in terms of ideas, percepts often, to everyone. Large conferences, select colloquia, new associations that spring up all the time—made worse since the virus emergency—workshops on this and that, training about x, y z, compounded now by the invasive remote attendance, are all perfect avenues for academic spendthrifts.

I have seen intelligent colleagues, smart and astute, erudite even, cast to the winds whatever they have achieved, just for the sake of being present at, being heard at, publishing in. Relentlessly.

Clearly, spending or hoarding has to do with value—whether you hoard or you give away by largesse, you do so because you believe (percept…) it is valuable.

To go one step further: in scholarship there is worth, and there is value.

A scholar may have great worth, and lesser value.

The difference between the two is the following: worth is intrinsic. It resides within the field and discipline in which the scholar creates ideas. Value is extrinsic. It is assigned from outside the field and discipline.

Worth? I remember a colleague who never wrote a single monograph. He/she wrote short notices in small journals independent from the publishing industry. She/he never thought it necessary to share beyond a small circle of like-minded scholars, nor to assemble notes in a book, not even in that ersatz of the academic economy: the edited volume. That colleague placed no value in doing it, but knew her/his worth. So did friends.

Value? Clearly the prevailing ideology recoils at the worthy scholar. The industrialisation of academia discourages such scholarship. But scholars must have value for their institution as the vast majority of them usually belong to academia. Value is then assigned by outside processes—you know what they are: deans’ reports, funding agencies fantasies, internationally accredited “goals,” “visions” so-and-so, fabricated by overarching institutions. These are neither bad nor good; they are processes that reflect a current state of affairs in a managerial society. It is a fact. However, bending to extraneous facts uncritically is not what a scholar does.

Time lo leave Hell 4.

5

Secure in their frail skiff, Dante and Virgil now float on a stream of slime, and overboard they look at a slurry and at… the Dissatisfied.

A river of slime is a powerful image for those who see time and life pass them by, flow by irremediably, irretrievably, and fall into a deep dissatisfaction as they would do into sludge.

Being dissatisfied, especially when you are employed by a university, is quite common.

Among academics, dissatisfaction ranges from annoyance, to despondency, from hatred to self-hatred, from disdainful retreat to bilious withdrawal. In the classical theory of emotions, all these “passions” fall under one umbrella: anger.

It is one the strangest features of scholarly life in academia: a tendency to be fiercely angry, which befits sanguine characters, or to be bitterly morose, which befits more reserved ones. Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, which contains the first fully-fledged systematic theory of emotions and how they impact social life and are turned into public arguments, anger is the key emotion: anger surges forth when a feeling, a knowing (a percept) or a knowledge (a concept) of injustice, takes over.

For classical thought, anger is the driving force of politics, from subdued dissatisfaction to open rebellion, but it is always caused by a belief that an injustice has been done. The dissatisfied usually believe they have been treated unfairly. Academics do, as a rule.

The paradox is that, being intellectuals, scholars have all the means at their disposal to reflect on and analyze their own dissatisfaction. That is, to move beyond opinion to fact and argument. After all they spend their lives weighing hypotheses, testing results, refining conclusions. Their lives are immersed not in a slurry of bad ideas, but bathed in the clear waters of reason.

Presumably.

And yet a scholar, mildly or strongly dissatisfied, will channel one’s sense of injustice and dissatisfaction rarely along lines of reason, but along lines of opinion, mostly ideological lines.

Often a dissatisfied scholar will turn a personal grievance into an intellectual battle, will rally forces as must be necessary to show that it is not a personal grievance at root, but a case valid for a group.

Dissatisfaction and anger do produce results, in terms of power; it is doubtful they produce scholarship. It can pass for it. It rarely is.

Ideology is alienation as Marxist philosophy teaches us. An ideological scholar is alienated, on top of being angry.

Conversely a scholar who inflicts onto oneself the self-injury of withdrawing from confrontation, and turns anger inwards, becomes melancholiac. In the Renaissance it was deemed that melancholy was the right composure for a scholar. A scholar was supposed to brood over matters of the mind. Hence needs to retreat from too much intercourse, too much company, too many distractions. It is a pleasant melancholy; it is not dark, but the soft penumbra under the foliage of a grove-like retreat.

The irony of that fantasy could not be lost on Dante who wrote his masterpieces while being thrown out of his city, hounded, condemned to death and threatened to be burnt at the stake. He, a scholar, did not write in anger or melancholy—but in the quietening of fear.

He retreated.

Retreat is an idea which during a good millennium was central to the intellectual enterprise, and no longer is: it was called skhole. In the classical world, and that of Dante’s, a scholar lives in, and lives, skhole. The word “scholar” echoes it but it is a pale ectoplasm of the original concept. In the classical world skhole meant leisure, otium in Latin. The Augustinian tradition would call it, for its own ends of course, vita contemplativa. The application differs, but the concept is the same: skhole.

Leisure to what end? To provide a scholar with time and quiet to think without the pressures of negotium, life outside, social engagement, and working.

“School,” the word, copies skhole the idea, and indeed schools should provide the quiet time necessary to learn, without negotium interference. Children who attend school also should think about enslaved children who work in factories: they work, they don’t go to school.

Indeed skhole, peace and quiet to read and think, has always entertained a complex relationship with work. Real work. Backbreaking work.

It is interesting that in the 1950s a French socialist, Joffre Dumazedier, invented a new sociological notion which revived, in contraposition to working, the antique practice of skhole, with a new twist: “society of leisure.”

More than an idea it was an intellectual activism at the service of those who, actually, work: training and methods were set up and implemented to give workers “leisure,” time and space, that is skhole, in order to cultivate their minds, to learn how to argue and analyse; that is: how to reflect knowingly (noeta) on why being exploited made them so angry, or dissatisfied, and thus turn instinctive “knowing” (about the workers’ conditions) into an actual knowledge. The “society of leisure” was a form of scholarship. Leisure society was the humanist response to class struggle. A new skhole, to sum.

No longer today. Today “leisure” is quite the opposite: it is fabricated with consumer goods, in order to prevent workers from having time to think about their conditions, and make them hallucinate fetishes of the Good Life through more consumption. They are not afforded skhole but merchandise to be distracted from their condition, and from thinking, and to allow their masters to extract more work out of them.

Thus, when a scholar, who belongs to an institution, is dissatisfied, the first question to ask is: are you angry because you are a worker? Are you a worker? How do you define work? How do you retreat into leisure?

6

Dante and Virgil are now standing at the gates of the City of Hell.

In bolgia 6 are relegated heretics, religious dissenters, and partisans, political fanatics.

I am setting aside the religious aspect, but I retain Dante’s figurative intent: what to make of a scholar who holds partisan views within the scholarly enterprise? Not outside of it, as an individual engaged in society—many are not bothered, and often are not cleverer than the average citizen when it comes to politics—but what of those who, inside scholarly endeavours, activate partisanship as a part of, or even a drive for, their scholarship?

In intellectual intercourse scholars encounter, inside and outside academia, other intellectuals who are entirely devoted to defend a cause. That cause can be anything, but its function, when activated, is to override everything else.

Scholarship is then an expanding of personal prejudices, of firmly held percepts. Scholarship is put at the service of a set of opinions, a set of feelings, a set of values: it becomes secondary to reason. It is domesticated to serve a potent master that often suffers no contradiction.

Yet it is a choice. Or “heresy”: “heresy” is a not specifically religious, it means choice.

In matters of belief, it refers to an intellectual choice. Theologians called a heresy a “sententia humana,” a human statement—departing from the logos of the Scriptures. Today, outside the Christian frame, we could call a heresy a “personal choice.”

Scholars who allow themselves to push forward their “choice” of opinions, about politics mostly, over truth, have chosen a set of beliefs, percepts, as guidance for their erudite work. They have chosen to cast their scholarship into the mould, the chosen mould, of a knowing, not a knowledge.

They become partisans within their own fields of intellectual enquiry.

Some fields of enquiry are more fertile than others in allowing partisan choice to take over rational enquiry. Scholarship then often takes the public, publicized, claimed form of dissenting, in order to push forward the choice that drives it, and helps pass partisan opinion for reasoned scholarship. Grandstanding ensues. Intellectual “heresy” and partisanship are presented as more dignified, more important, more ethical, more useful to society than the prevalent scholarship. They claim the moral high ground. Some scholars build careers on their sententia humana—a personal choice driven like a nail into scholarship, and driving it.

However, those who really are in danger are young scholars.

For young scholars to declare upfront, “I believe that… I am passionate about” gives them an emotional drive, of course. But is it a scholarly approach?

When my MA or PhD students embark on a dissertation, and I have supervised for 40 years now, I always warn them: never begin your analysis by knowing what you want to prove. Do not have a conclusive opinion on the matter. Let the evidence lead you to what is the rightful, truthful conclusion. Never discard what goes against what you believe.

You may not like it, as it may not fit your belief, but then you have three choices.

First, you can review all the evidence and then lay it out in such a way that it will give you the result you wish, in line with your belief. You will side-line all that disproves your belief. What you will then perform is not scholarship, but an act of advocacy. It requires agility to do so.

As for me, I will be observing how smartly you do it, and possibly I will evaluate you on that skill, regardless of the veracity of the outcome. Nobel laureate in physics, Richard Feynman, famously called it “cargo cult science,” when he indicted funder-satisfying research. Long before Latour, he had, as a scientist, uncovered the inherent “rhetoric” of industrial, politically driven research: an exercise in advocacy, and in epideixis (orating on the “virtues” of an extraneous factor, be it political or industrial).

Or, second, you may not engage in that sort of selective work, and do a proper scholarly work. Confronted with an outcome that goes against your belief, you will ask yourself a moral question. That question will not be about the truth of the protocols you followed, since you have decided not to engage in cargo cult science, nor in epideixis (playing up to what funders want, in fawning obedience).

No, the question will be a moral question you will have to ask yourself: why was my initial belief so wrong? Yes, I was wrong but why did I believe in it? It takes courage to admit error in perceptions of reality, especially social, political. That is what a true scholar does.

But, third, if you lack that ethical courage—which can also be a professional safety mechanism in a hostile environment—then you have a third choice, a choice of pure partisanship: you retreat from rational scholarship back into belief, and say, well, yes, that is the correct outcome, but I don’t like it. It does not suit me. Very few have the perversity to do that in full awareness of the fact they are doing it. But it happens. And it is a violence against reason.

In short, in Circle 6, inside the City of Hell, Dante allows us to reflect on intellectual violence.

Which leads Dante to confront other forms of violence—against human nature.

7

Hell 7 is, indeed, the dwelling of the truly violent ones. Of perpetrators of violence against human nature, immersed in a river of boiling blood. Their crimes are not what we would today, in democratic societies, call violent crimes, such as rape. These crimes against nature are quite unique. And loaded with tropological meaning with regard to scholarship.

Dante speaks of the fraudsters, the corrupt, the suicides, the blasphemers and—the bankers.

Let us look at the apex of crimes laid out by Dante, leaving aside the fraudsters: suicide, blasphemy, lending money at profit.

What is the logic behind that sequence, not immediately obvious to our flat, linear way of reasoning? Tropologically, it tells a different story. Dante’s argument is about violence against human nature, and it is connected to the idea of giving.

Suicide? Today suicide has become a societal issue: bullied teenagers, workers harassed by managers, and also terminal patients, euthanasia.

Whatever the euphemism: to kill oneself or let oneself being killed is suicide.

In Dante’s time, suicide was an eminent crime, and for two reasons: first it is murder; second it is murder of the gift of life. In the Christian tradition, suicide is not laudable and honourable, and legal, as it was in ancient Greece and Roman stoicism, or still today in Shinto, but it is the violent, criminal refusal of the gift of life. This unique gift does not belong to the human individual, but to God alone.

Now, how does a scholar commit scholarly suicide? Or, to rephrase it, how does a scholar reject the gift of scholarship? It is a tough one, I admit, to read tropologically. Let us set it aside for now. But let us store the idea of gift.

Blasphemy? All major religions, of the Book or not, have some interdict against insulting the divine. That is, nature itself. The human shall not insult what is above human condition. The creature shall not insult the Creator. Still today in many societies that are, or close to being, theocratic, insulting God is a crime punished by death.

The reason why, in the religions of the Book, blasphemy is a violent crime issues from the fact God cannot retort in words: God cannot speak back; the one who utters a blasphemy arrogates language. Saint Augustine called it “operatio per linguam” (De Moribus manicheorum II, 10, 19).

That is why, already in Leviticus (24.16), the law, human law, responds in lieu of the divinity, by imposing legal sanctions. It is for human law to punish that crime against nature, blasphemy, as God is nature itself.

You will find the same network of ideas regarding “save the planet,” whereby daring to query “nature” as portrayed by “climate change-apologists,” is cast as a blasphemy against Nature—Nature that cannot speak back, hence needs human surrogates and legal rejoinders.

Where is the gift? In a religious vision of nature, God has given humanity the gift of speech, unique among living creatures, a gift now turned against the giver, God. A gift defiled.

Usury, money-lending at interest? Against nature?

That complex argument occupied scholars for some six centuries in Europe, in the distant wake of Roman jurisprudence on mutuum (loan), mediated by Christian theological interpretations, and may be boldly summed up as follows: the lender of money uses money as a measure to decide on interest rates, hence commits a moral fault. What is moral is charity. Natural justice wants you to give, not to lend at profit. Lending money at interest or expecting a refund is immoral. Charity is immeasurable.

Let us keep in stock the idea of a moral fault; that is a crime of violence against natural law, here charity—and again the idea of giving.

To sum we have, reading Hell 7, three crimes against Nature; all three bound to the idea of the gift. How does it relate to scholarship?

Suicide? For a scholar, suicide is not to realize that scholarly activity is bound by and to the “nature” in which a scholar lives, as we say without thinking seriously about what it implies: a natural environment.

If you are a scholar at a university, the university is your natural environment. It does not mean you agree, in private, with its diktats and arbitrary fancies; it means that you have fully understood what that “nature” requires of you.

Some institutions used to, some still do, require adherence to a set of explicit values, faith or ideologically based. That is their nature, and like in Dante’s world, the scholar who does not comply is perceived as committing a grave injustice, a moral fault, of violence against the nature for the university, refusing the gift of belonging to it.

The situation is perverse when the nature of the institution is not declared contractually: often, universities speak of their “values,” of their “vision,” of their “goals,” yet without having themselves (and their communication office) a clear idea of what it entails and what these words mean. In fact, they are creating a nature against which scholars can be held accountable for blasphemy, and may be led to commit, figuratively, suicide.

But what about usury, the third crime against nature? To recall the argument that it is the opposite of giving: Scholarship is in essence charitable. It is a gift. Some academics are scholars, many are not. And that is fine. It is part of the division of labour that makes up an academic workforce. But the gift of scholarship is generosity: sharing without expecting a return, a profit; and conversely accepting gracefully to be given knowledge.

There are two factors at play here: freedom and value.

Concerning a scholar’s freedom, a true scholar must retain the right to choose with whom scholarship should be shared, and thus be able to share it freely, and not under duress of “protocols” and what not. In order to make sharing it a real gift, an act of free choice. Giving under rules of obligation, thus for non-scholarly reasons, is not giving. It is not caritas. It is an economic transaction to satisfy “stake holders.”

Current college ideology is to push for Open Source, and indiscriminate sharing of research “products.” I suggest that it is not such a good scholarly practice. Scholarship requires to be selective. A scholar’s freedom is not to share everything with all and sundry, or with “partners” imposed by outside protocols; that is a false freedom. It is a usurpation.

A scholar’s freedom, that is to exercise one own’s freedom as a scholar, is to decide who is worthy of being given the fruits of scholarship. The Republic of Letters of pre-modern Europe was not a network of free loaders: it was a consciously aware and careful exchange of ideas. The current, and often fraudulent “peer-review” nonsense is a mendacious copy of the true peerage of scholars of the defunct respublica literaria.

This inane, and innate now, percept of “sharing” scholarship is perilous.

At a banal level, we know how the Internet can translate complex scholarly arguments into political propaganda, concepts into percepts, veracity into partisan opinions. My mentor in rhetoric, Marc Fumaroli, used to say, scholarship rests on “des têtes d’épingle” (on pinheads), meaning: it is hard to share ideas with those who do not wish to understand minute nuances, which make “all the difference,” and prefer to believe in brushstroke “knowing.” Popularized knowledge cannot care about decisive, often imperceptible, nuances, the media hardly, the Web2.0, that agglutinative mess, never.

That alone should guard us against placing scholarly knowledge within the reach of anyone and everyone.

At a deeper level, the Open Source managerial ideology, as it is one, is based on a fallacy regarding the rewards of scholarship for the natural environment in which a scholar operates.

Here is how: universities expect returns from sharing all scholarship. When I say “expect,” I do not imply any explicit strategy but, as all ideologies, it is an internalized mindset hardly ever brought out into full light. That expectation is based on the capitalist notion of value.

Or rather, surplus value.

Scholars create surplus value, that is wealth in excess of the work they perform, and the costs attached to it. Some colleges use the “cost of employment” method of calculation in order to avoid measuring value. This is why academic institutions that retain a faint sense that academia is somewhat different from the service industry, have developed a system of rewards, in cash, in privileges or in titulature. It is made to supplement salaries, materially or symbolically, out of a sense, perhaps moral, perhaps amoral, in any case practical, that surplus value should be recognized, without being admitted fully.

As we all know, workers have no control on surplus value, no more than scholars have control of the surplus value they create. What remains surprising is how meekly scholars, and academics, accept that the surplus value they create has, in reality, next to no value to them. In that respect alone academic scholars are workers.

And here, on this controversial note, we shall leave Dante and Virgil when they enter the fantastic and fiery world of Hell 8, with its 10 pits, and finally reach the frozen lake of Hell 9: there they will contemplate Evil Incarnate chewing the brains of three ultimate human evils, three traitors. This will demand another ten pages.

Some References

Blasphemy:
Irène Rosier-Catach. Le blasphème—Perspectives historiques, théoriques, comparatistes. Annuaire de l’École pratique des hautes études, section des sciences religieuses (2018-2019), 127, 2020, pp. 535-550.

Cargo cult science:
Richard P., Feynman. Surely you’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! New York: W. W. Norton, 1985.

Charity and self-love:
Jean-Robert Armogathe, “Conférences,” in Annuaire de l’École pratique des hautes études, section des sciences religieuses (2005-2006), 114, 2005, pp. 333-339.

Epideixis (of scholars):
Philippe-Joseph Salazar, “Nobel Rhetoric, Or Petrarch’s Pendulum,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 42(4), 2009, pp. 373-400.

Heresy:
Marie-Dominique Chenu, “Orthodoxie et hérésie. Le point de vue du théologien,” in Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations, 18(1), 1963, pp. 75-80.

Libido:
Antonio Calcagno, “Hannah Arendt and Augustine of Hippo : On the Pleasure of and Desire for Evil,” in Laval théologique et philosophique, 66(2), 2010, pp. 371-385.

Republic of Letters:
Marc Fumaroli. La République des Lettres. Paris: Gallimard, 2015.

Science as percepts:
Gustavo Bueno. ¿Qué es la ciencia? La respuesta de la teoría del cierre categorial. Oviedo: Pentalfa, 1995.

Skhole and work:
Elisabeth-Charlotte Welskopf, “Loisir et esclavage dans la Grèce antique,” in Actes du colloque 1973 sur l’esclavage, Actes du Groupe de Recherches sur l’Esclavage depuis l’Antiquité (1976), 4, pp. 159-178.

Society of leisure:
Joffre Dumazedier. “The Masses, Culture and Leisure.” Diogenes 11 (44), 1963, pp. 33-42.

Usury:
John T. Jr Noonan. The Scholastic Analysis of Usury, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957.

Vita contemplativa:
Christian Trottmann. “Vita activa, vita contemplativa : enjeux pour le Moyen Âge,” in Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen-Age, 117, n°1, 2005, pp. 7-25.

Wisdom of the Ancients:
François de La Mothe Le Vayer. De la patrie et des étrangers et autres petits traités sceptiques (first modern edition). Paris: Desjonquères, 2003.


French philosopher and essayist Philippe-Joseph Salazar writes on rhetoric as philosophy of power. Laureate of the Prix Bristol des Lumières in 2015 for his book on jihad (translated as, Words are Weapons. Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror, Yale UP). In 2022, the international community of rhetoricians honoured him with a Festschrift, The Incomprehensible: The Critical Rhetoric of Philippe-Joseph Salazar. He holds a Distinguished Professorship in Rhetoric and Humane Letters in the Law Faculty of the University of Cape Town, South Africa.


Featured: Chart of Hell, by Sandro Botticelli; painted ca. 1480-1490.

Paul Valéry, A Magnificent Jack-of-all-Trades

Paul Valéry (1871-1945) was a writer, poet and philosopher, elected to the Académie française in 1925. An eminent figure in the world of letters, he left a rich and varied body of work that is always worthy of interest. Here’s a brief overview.

Paul Valéry is unclassifiable. He eludes us all the time: neither quite novelist, nor philosopher, and really at ease in verse, given to ideas, epitomizing that last race of masters we call “men of letters.” When people try to give him credit for the arts or literature, Valéry shirks, dodges and sabotages. He hates history, loathes philosophy, reviles literature and reviles the novel. He excelled everywhere; prodigious, he cavorted with and surpassed everyone else by way of a single idea. Antiquarian, he mingled with the modern, foresaw, gifted with a talent for anticipation, like a soothsayer.

This illustrious writer, sometimes a Faustian scholar, sometimes a dandy, bow tie tied and ringed little finger, nicknamed the “civil servant of literature” by Paul Nizan, for his acts of resistance and his glory as a writer, was entitled to national homage in 1945. He was first and foremost a remarkable orator, whose speech in honor of Goethe, model “among all the Fathers of Thought and Doctors of Poetry, Pater aestheticus in aeternum,” is a perfect illustration of his talent. His eulogy for the “Jewish Bergson” is a measure of his courage under the Occupation, in 1941. This modern Bossuet, under the wings of the eagle of Meaux, paid tribute to his ancestor in Variété II (1930), praising his grandiose prose, the strength of his style, his talent for saying everything, his brilliant orations, monuments of what remains, in language, when the ideas of a time are outdated and men, distant from their tributes, end up unknown.

Valéry had no theorized philosophical system, unlike the dominant German thought. We find him somewhere between Descartes, rigorous in method, and Leonardo da Vinci, edified by the architecture of intelligence. Still inhabited by the Greeks, he used the form of dialogue, Eupalinos (1923) and L’idée fixe (1932), like Plato, and returned to the simple idea that philosophy is a quest: a quest for the absolute, for truth and purity. In his Cahiers (published, 1973-1974—Ed.), he writes: “I read philosophers badly and with boredom, as they are too long and their language is unsympathetic to me.” Sensitive to the sentence, the maxim, that make up the French charm of thought, he went everywhere, said what he wanted, constrained his free thought, meandered through ideas under the strict arches of art, in fragments and leaflets.

First there was that famous night in Genoa. On a night that resembled a crisis, he was converted. Thereafter, he devoted himself to intelligence, to the realm of the spirit, to the quest for precision. In 1896, at the age of twenty-five, this mystic of the Idea wrote La soirée avec Monsieur Teste, a strange novel-essay in which, through the intermediary of his double, Monsieur Teste himself, high priest of the Intellect, Valéry begins to think about the detachment of the soul and sensibility, in the wake of Méditations métaphysiques. And nothing but that.

Austere and Solemn?

Among the innumerable papers, texts and published thoughts, Valéry is, in Tel quel (1943) or in his Cahiers, haunted by the idea of a hidden God: “The search for God would be man’s most beautiful occupation.” The importance and quality of these notes show that a project to write a “Dialogue des choses divines” (“Dialogue of things divine”) preoccupied Valéry all his life. “Everyone keeps his own mysticism, which he jealously guards,” he insisted. Man finds himself only insofar as he finds his God.

All too quickly, Valéry’s austere, solemn character is attributed to his poetry, which is frozen and mumbling. What is taken for gelid is icy other than a classical demand taken to the heights. “Most men have such a vague idea of poetry that the very vagueness of their idea is for them the definition of poetry,” Valéry, obsessed with perfection, wanted this “holy language.” This quest, resolutely, detached him from the world of letters, novelists and journalism: “The writer-whore exists only to surrender himself. To this class belong those who claim to say what they are, think and feel;” and he adds in Tel quel: “There is always something fishy about literature—the consideration of an audience. So, there’s always a reserve of thought in which lies all the charlatanism of which every literary product is an impure product.” Then to finish off literature as if in the arena: “A novel is the height of crudeness. We’ll see one day. Those who look from the deep, rigorous side already see it.” So much for that.

Behind his reputation as a pure wit, Valéry was a great sensualist. His poetry is a perfect demonstration of this. The charm of bodies, the trance of music, long, delicate movements, the sign of the hand, the form of the dance, the praise of water—this is the Valéry universe. In Album des vers anciens (1920), inspired by Mallarmé, we find, under the appearance of a solid poetic arch, lascivious and moving, volatile and light figures and forms taking shape, as in “Baignée” (“Bathing”) which, through a play of periphrases, makes us guess a young woman in the water:

A fruit of flesh bathes in some youthful pool,
(Azure in trembling gardens) but out of water,
Singling curls with strength of the casque,
Gleams the golden head which a tomb slices at the nape.

Above the Fray

Later, Valéry wrote La Jeune Parque (1917). In this song of love and death, where life mingles with mythology, we can admire these lines: “island… summit that a fire fecundates barely intimidated, woods that will hum with beasts and ideas, with hymns of men filled by the just gift of ether.” These rhymes sound like onomatopoeia, making us believe for a moment that Valéry, a musician, is moving from the Académie to a jazz club.

At twilight, in Corona & Coronilla (published in 2008—Ed.), the old man writes a few poems to his young lover, Jeanne Voilier, whom he knows to be far from his arms:

You know it now, if you ever doubted
That I could die by the one I loved,
For you made my soul a leaf that trembles
Like that of the willow, alas, that yesterday together
We watched float before our eyes of love,
In the golden tenderness of the fall of the day.

This poem, written on May 22, 1945, two months before the poet’s death at the age of seventy-four, denotes a tenderness, a touching intimacy, not devoid of flowery lyricism. It’s a far, far cry from the night of Genoa.

Bruised by the horrors of war, Valéry descended from the clouds, returning inter homines, deluded by certain illusions. He no longer believed in history, as he wrote in Regards sur le monde actuel: “History justifies whatever one wants. It teaches rigorously nothing, because it contains everything, and gives examples of everything… The danger of letting ourselves be seduced by History is greater than ever.”

With History out of the way, Valéry seemed to turn to mathematics, as he murmured in his drafts: “Simple solutions, expedients, that’s all-human conduct, in politics, in love, in business, in poetry—expedients, and the rest is mathematics.” He confessed in 1944 in Le Figaro: “Politics is the maneuvering of the more by the less, of the immense number by the small number, of the real by images and words; in other words, it’s a mechanics of relays.”

Paul Valéry was above the fray. Neither stupidly left-wing, nor fatally right-wing. He was a circumspect observer of nations. He was an eminent member of intellectual Europe, like Rilke in Trieste, Zweig in Vienna or Verhaeren in Brussels. Like the others, Valéry saw the great Europe of letters and sovereign nations, shattered by the appalling world war. Did he already see the post-war era? “Europe will be punished for its policies; it aspires to be governed by an American commission”—that’s for sure.

Europe, according to Valéry, is inhabited by tradition. This Europe, saved from technocracy and finance, is a civilization, “Romanized and Christianized, subject to the disciplinary spirit of the Greeks,” starting from Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. The grandiose axis. Yet this remarkable Europe, shaped by a superior spirit, remains no less fragile. This is Valéry’s despairing assessment of a Europe whose ancient parapets have been overcome by technology, the mass of a fin de siècle: “We civilizations now know that we are mortal.”

This tension between the order of civilization went hand-in-hand with a defiant and suspicious view of governments. We owe him this simple, trenchant phrase, mingled with cynicism and raw lucidity: “War, a massacre of people who don’t know each other, for the benefit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.” Sounds like Bardamu at the start of Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night)! Who’d have thought Valéry an anarchist?


Nicolas Kinosky is at the Centres des Analyses des Rhétoriques Religieuses de l’Antiquité and teaches Latin. This articles appears through the very kind courtesy La Nef.


Featured: Portrait of Paul Valéry, by Georges d’Espagnat; painted in 1910.


Mirum-Vultus Homo

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Parvus vicus inter montes villae iacebat, ex qua quadriennio ad pugnam egressi sunt. Primo ierant optimi viri, deinde senes, deinde iuvenes, postremo pueri ludi. Videbitur neminem in villa remanere nisi pervetustis ac imbecillis corporis, qui mox exstinctus est, propter rei publicae belli rationem, ut pereat inutilis quo plus escae esset utilior.

Contigit autem omnibus hominibus praeterquam quod remanserant in tarta fame, pauci redierunt, pauci vero debiles et variis modis deformati. Iuvenis unus tantum partem faciei habebat, et pictam larvam stanneam induerat, sicut festus fabricator. Alius duo crura habebat sine bracchia, alius duo bracchia sed non crura. Vix unus a matre aspici poterat, exstinctis oculis de capite, donec instare morti aspiceret. Non bracchia, non crura, furens insuper aerumna, totumque diem in cunis velut infans iacebat. Erat autem ille senex admodum, qui nocte ac die strangulatus a veneni vapore; et alius juvenculus, qui, sicut folium in alto vento, a concharum concussione concussit, et ad sonum clamavit. Et ipse quoque manum et partem faciei amiserat, etsi non satis larvam ei sumptum ad warantizandum.

Hos omnes, praeterquam qui sui horrore extorres erant, ingeniosis adjumentis instructos, ut partim se sustentarent, et de tributis, quae victae genti onerabant, satis mereretur.

Ire per illum pagum post bellum erat quasi perambulans viculum vitae mediocris cum omnibus figuris mechanicis glomeratis et strepitantibus. Tantum pro figuris novis, hilaresque et bella, quassata et deridicula et inhumana.

Forent molendinum, et ferrariam, et domum publicam. Ordo casularum, villa, ecclesia, cataractae scintillantes, campi multicolores diffunduntur instar collium panniculorum, volucrum pompae, caprae et vaccae, etsi non multae postremae. Fuerunt mulieres, et cum eis aliqui pueri; perpaucae tamen, quia rationabiles feminae erant, et iam nollent habere filios, qui eis inermes ac furiosi aliquando remitti possent, in cunis gestari, fortasse multos annos.

Adhuc juniores, molliores impulsu, pepererunt aut duas. Horum unus, secundo belli anno natus, tribus admodum flavis et globulus scelestus fuit, truculento aere et piratico ingenio. Sed eae notae pueris satis teneris annis ineunt, et fuit quasi ludicra vicus, hic, illic, et ubique, in familiarissimis belli naufragiis, quod reipublicae gubernatio fecerat.

Ille in stagno quaesivit larvam et crus pistoris mechanicum ludebat, ita indulgens illi libidini suae; et saxum superflue oblectabat cunabula hominis, qui sine membris erat, et patrem.

In ac foras cucurrit, et flexis adsuevit. Alii amisisset filium, alii filium habere posset, si mundus aliter discessisset. Aliis brevis umbra futuri sine spe evasit; aliis tamen diversitas horae. Hoc maxime verum erat de caeco, qui ad fores suae veteris matris casae scopae ligaturae sedit. Praesentia pueri visa est ei sicut calidum solis radium per manum incidens, et eum ad morandum alliceret permittens tentare magnas caeruleas goggles quas in publico optime gestare invenit. Nulla tamen deformitas vel deformitas homunculi hominem terrere visus est. Haec ab infantia prima ludibria.

Quodam mane, mater, lotis vestibus occupata, eum solum reliquerat, confidens se mox aliquod fragmentum militis amicissimum quaesiturum, et usque ad meridiem et inedia se oblectaturum. Aliquando autem pueri habent notiones impares, et contrarium eorum quae quis supponit.

Hac aestate praeclaro mane puer solitariam vagari in ripa montis fluvii existimabat. Vage lacunam altius sursum petere voluit, et in eo lapides ejicere. Nunc in parvas valles, vel anates vias persequentes, lente errabat. Ante decem, quam virides nitentes spumeusque lacusque desuper adeptus erat, canae saxi delapsus in umbram, ter cui pinus in novo vertice plana flectitur aura. Sub illis, aspiciens puerum quasi nubem albam in viridi coelo, stabat juvenis pulcher, qui divei in meram ripam libratus. Vno momento ibi constitit umbra et sole obsita, proxime ita perite ediderat ut vix aquam circum se spargeret. Tum atro rorante caput constitit, micatque bracchia fixo navit ad litora. Alius divei scopulum conscendit. Has actiones in puro lusu et vitae laetitia repetivit toties ut spectatoris eius vertiginis excubiae fierent.

Tandem ille satis procubuit abiectis vestibus. Hos in occultiore loco gerebat, celeriter indutus, puer luscus et mirabundus, quippe qui multa in animo haberet.

Duo bracchia, duo crura habebat, totum vulto oculis, naso, os, mento, auribus, plenum. Videbat enim eum vestitum perstrinxisse. Loqui poterat, magna canebat. Audire poterat, nam cito ad stridorem columbarum alarum post se deflexerat. Pellis eius toto orbe teres erat, nusquam in eo atro coccineo tabulae, quas in brachiis, facie, et pectore exustis puer reperit. Non omne strangulavit pusillum, aut insano tremit, et ad sonum clamat. Vere inexplicabile, ideoque terribile.

Incipiente puero ad nutantem, tremefacit, matrem suam circumspectat, adulescens eum animadvertit.

“Bene!” avide clamabat, “si puer non est!”

Accessit per pontem peditem gratissimo risu, hoc enim primum illo die, quem puerum viderat, et mirum putabat, tam paucos natos esse in valle, ubi, cum haberet. Ante quinquennium ita fuerat, ut vix tot denarios invenire potuissent. Itaque “Salve,” inquit, “laete, et in loculos scrutatus est.”

At stupefactus puer flavos puerulus perterritus exclamavit in arma propere ad puellam confugit. Illa eum evidenti subsidio amplexa est, atque in eum modum objurgationis et deliciarum largiebatur, cum viator accessit, quasi laesus affectus.

“Mana mehercules,” inquit, “me modo filiolo tuo hos denarios dare voluisse.” Inspiciebat se admirationis. “Quid in terris est de me ut puerum terreat?” queritur quesiuit.

Utroque indulgens risit rustica virgo, ingemuitque puer, vultumque in oram abdidit, et in puero perplexum et formosum adulescentem.

“Est quia invenit Herr hospes tam inusitatus,” inquit, flectens. “Parvus est,” inquit, exiguitatem gestus ostendit, “et est primum totum hominem videri.”

(1917)


Featured: Untitled, by Gustav Wunderwald; painted ca. 1940s.

Iter et adventures baronis Trump et canis mirandus Bulger—III

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CAPUT IV

Quaestio, quae nunc animum patris occupavit ad exclusiones omnium aliarum cogitationum, hanc magnam pecuniae summam collocare erat, ut, cum pervenisset ad annum vigesimum primum, satis magno fructui ad habitandum Baroni provideretur. Praesertim cum ad tam celebrem familiam quam nostram pertineat.

Ita se res habet, pater, hanc quaestionem depraedari tranquillitate animi permisit in tantum, ut sensim carnem amitteret.

Mater quoque eius miserabilem condicionem videns usque adeo anxiari et laborare coepit, ut ipsa quoque valde macer fieret. In carne enim sua minuebantur naturaliter, et paulatim vel nullo cibo suppeditabatur; vel, certe, non plus quam satis erat satisfacere Bulgeris et meis necessariis.

Unde servi coeperunt amittere carnem et tectum et foris; cum magno animo esse intermisso, equi iumentaque exiguis frumento pasti, quo fit, ut celeriter etiam labi incipiant.

Itaque admodum gravis visio crevit, ut miserum patrem et matrem in meris pellibus et ossibus redactis, meris raedarii et peditis umbris circumacta patria, quatuor equis traheretur, quorum ossa sub pellibus cum essent satis crepitantia. Coactus fueris aut tunditur in curriculo piger.

Bulger et ego solus pinguedinem nostram et bonos spiritus retinuit. Tandem intervenire decrevi et celerem finem huic rei miserandae statui. Exegi a seniore Barone promissionem sponsionis, quod mandassemus se ad amussim, et non obiiciebamus, quantumvis ferae vel irrationabiles sibi vel matri meae viderentur.

Tunc precepit ei ut sumeret aliquod bonum et sucosum cibum, et primo secederet et caperet sibi iucundam diu somnum, salutavi eum reverenter et dixi:

Baron, usque ad crastinum diem.

Vix ientaculum finieram cum fores apertae et senior Baron in cubiculum ambulabat.

Refectus multum aspexit. Color in maxillam rediit, fulgor ad oculum.

Erat jam alius homo.

Ecce, domine clementissime, incepi ei pergamenum tradere, index omnium notissimorum Almanachorum in terra nostra. Colloquium cum illis statim habes et ab illis emptionem ius praebet ut tempestatum praesagitiones praebeant anni futuri!

Senior Baron coepit expostulare. “Baron!,” ego duriter inspexi manum, “Verus eques non habet unum verbum dare.”

Ille tacuit et me pergere annuit.

Ita sum secutus.

“Reuerende parens, cum ab utroque hoc iure obtinueris, ad me redi.”

Paucis diebus pater munus suum perfecit.

Et intravit cameram meam, et dedit in manus meas concessiones necessarias ab omni almanac factore prenotato in terra.

Iterum imperavi ei se ipsum refocillare, ut bonam noctis quietem caperet et mane me videret.

Cum Bulgerus et ego rediens a prandio, senior Baron senior se obtulit ad fores mansionum mearum.

Vidit fortis et bene. Vultus iterum impleverat et gressus pristinam elasticitatem recuperaverat.

Iterum in manibus suis librum pergameni posui et dixi ei.

Per singulas almanach istius membranae contenta aequaliter et copiose sparge in paginas devotas mensibus Novembris, Decembri, Ianuario, et Februario.

Respexit ad me percunctando, et movere labia coeperunt.

“Domine illustrissime!” inquam, antequam sonus ex ore eius emanasset, “In familia nostra semper milites sine timore et sine opprobrio fuistis.” Tacitus inflexit sublimem formamque recessit.

Fortasse lector aliquantulum curiositatis scire potest contenta voluminis pergameni, quam in manibus baronis maioris hac occasione posui.

Si brevitas sit animus ingenii, facetus. Si rotundus, vestis veri, verax fuit. Hoc ut esse libuerit, verba quae in illo volumine pergameno exaravi stylo meo, haec leguntur.

“Omnes signa demonstrant frigidissimo hiemali.” “Indicae sunt hiemem venientem dimidio saeculo gravissimam fore.” “Omnes idem praesagiunt responsum, eximiae longitudinis hyemem et frigora amara.” “Prognosticatores peritissimi concordant in praedicando gradum temperaturae humilis raro in his latitudinibus perventum.” “De hoc tempore expecto insolitum frigus.” “Protege plantas.” “Nunc vide bene herbas tuas hiemales.” “Conserva eos ab extremo gelu.” “Duplici copia brumalis cibus.” “Nunc saevas nives expectamus procellas.” “Exspecta frigoris amarum in toto hoc mense.” “Praeparate rarissimas grandines procellas.” “Cavete de repentinis ac penetrabilibus Aquilonibus ventos.” “Domus pecudes conlaudantes per totum hoc mensem.” “Cavete a lethalibus blizzardis, venient rabie ruenti.”
Paucis diebus absens pater meus domum rediit. Eius adventus mihi rite nuntiatus est a Bulgero, cui dixi: “Ite, bone Bulger, et baronem deduce ad cameram meam.”

Multis saltu et cortice ludibrio se circumscribit, et mox seniori barone cum iocunditate tam communi sibi serviendi more inauguravit.

Obedivi tibi, fili mi. Murmuravit senior baron cum grandi arcu in flexa.

“Salve!,” Respondi eum sedere rogans.

“Et nunc incertorum pedum meorum rector honorate, verba mea attende: negotium nostrum paene factum est. Paucis diebus confecta erit haec pecunia, quae tibi tantam sollicitudinem attulit, et cordis tui officia expilavit; atus, completus; et, quod melius est, tam feliciter investituram, ut patrem unius ditissimi filii in regno vocare valeas.

Audi, Baron. Ite nunc in primores mercatus terre et quemlibet furnum mercatorem sub stipulatione scriptionis ponite, ut tradat tibi in primo autumno omnes pelliculas, indutas, vestes, vel dorsa dominis, de quibus manutenebunt traditionem sub manibus eorum et sigillis.”

Vix labiis exciderant verba prius quam senior Baron e sella surrexerat meque ad pectus amore rapuit.

“Fili mi!” exclamavit permulsit frontem meam protuberans, “Dominum ictus est! Dignum est rectore provinciae. Cupio incipere bonum opus.

Permitte me hac nocte proficisci! “Exspecta Barone!” Dixi, ducens eum ad sellam suam et cogente leniter sedere. Exspecta, Baron; nonnihil tamen dicendum est. Cum perfeceris emptionem omnium pelliculorum, quae hoc anno exspectantur in Regnum, expende reliquam pecuniam in emendo omnibus lignis, carbo et gagatis invenis, non quod lucrum ex pauperis emolument. Graciles copia; sed ne alios iniquum in eum contrahendo, quod in prima tempestatum praedictione certe faciunt. “Ah, parve Baron!” pater, “quam cogitatione; non enim, ut dicis, pauperum humeris oneramus!

Tanta fuit diligentia qua pater meus consilia perfecit, ut uno mense totum opus macelli emissem ac vendidissem, parvo quidem progressu, sed satis amplo, ut me perquam pessime faceret dives.

Quod ita leniter et scite factum est, ut nemo callidam calliditatem umquam suspicaretur qua satis mihi ad iter faciendum divitias comparare potui, sicuti animus promptus erat, et scire me captum et teneri. Redemptis praedonibus avarissimis, nummulariis meis aurum satis esset ad redimendum me.

Post octavum annum expletum, inexstinguibili desiderio sum, ut statim ingrediendi ad perficienda diuturna consilia dilecta, longinquas terras, ab extraneis et curiosis hominibus habitatas, visitaret. Domus mea, lingua mea, populus meus multa me fœtebat, et circumdederat me.

In somnis ego navia pudens navigia pressi, iussa mea vociferans, placidum vela scopulum imminentem tempestatem creber. Transivi tempus meum a mane usque ad noctem, congruis articulis mercandi cum barbaris positis stipendiis, ut penetrare in interiora nunquam possem ab homine humano visitari, et ascendere flumina clausa a mundo incohata alatis nunciis. Mercatura et mercatura. Sed, quod mirum dictu, pater ad hoc adhortatus est, forte precibus matris meae, firmiter ac fortiter intendit in consilium abiturum domum.

Iuxta me destitutione fui. Oravi, obtestatus sum, minatus sum. Primum enim in vita mea—dolet enim me etiam nunc confiteri—cuiusdam incusavi autorum meorum contemptio.

Bulger, post aliquot dies res perspectata, conclusionem habuit seniorem Baronem aliquo modo infelicitatis meae causa, et postulabat interdum severissimo meo imperio eum a vitulis maioris dentes cohibere. Tibiis Baronis, ut ex mea diaetas post aliquod turbidum colloquium egrederetur.

“Quid!” exclamavi voce tremens maerorque, “Ego magna pereo munera, quibus me natura dedit, muris oppidi huius saeptus, cuius rixis fora amplissima sunt, quorum numquam homines testantur. Quid magnificentius quam regia turma equitum transitus? Non oportet, non erit. Tute dixisti, me non vulgarem esse puerum, ut pila et cacumine delectetur, et picturis excipiatur libris.

Sed senior Baron induraverat cor suum, et omnis oracio mea incassum erat.

Et tamen non desperavi in fine potiri.

Tandem aqua iugi stillicidio abstraxit petram. Constitui nunc animum meum Baronem seniorem movere ut acquiescendum in consilio meo relinquendi domum, conferendo ad rationem prorsus diversam. Dixi egomet mihi.

“Puer me esse vult: unus ero!” Statimque in oppido omni pernicioso scelesto amicos facere institui.

Non una iuvenilis curas meas ne-do-bene fugit.

Quo magis vehemens, strenuus et infatigabilis suae mali potentiae, eo arctius involvi affectibus meis.

Haec mihi de cinereis aurora roscida vesper Concurritur, comitesque mei comitantur in arcem. Me ducem colebant, et praeceptis meis obsequens obtemperabant, ac si alicuius dominii super eos haberem.

Senior Baron vidit glomeratam nubem et intendit caput quasi ad occurrendum tempestati meliori casu resistendi.

Ibi convivio accessit, electissima Burgundia subductus repertus est et utres communi claviculis referti. An senior Baron senior cum accipitribus amicis in campis ad iudicium venit, id solum deprehensos ita fuisse demersos ut cucullo remoto stolide placide sederent. Dicatur coquus hospites expectari et cavendum esse ut globuli pulmenti sui extra delicati, seniori Baronis horrori, in centro cuiusque globuli cerasi inveniretur.

Unus ex coadjutoribus meis satis ausum fuit cistam Baronis senioris surripiere et eam pipere implere. Consequens cogitari potest. Alius bene curavit ut omnes pyxides fomes infunderent aquam coram invitantibus ad fistulas. Cum a mensa surgere conaretur, passim queue dorsum cathedrae secure reperiretur alligata.

Una mearum rerum gestarum me in prima statione scalae constituo et, “Pontem teneo ut olim Horatius Cocles,” mea effera cohors duorum duodenarum iuvenum barbarorum per scalas ruentium clamoribus, clamoribus, vocibusque quae haberet. Cui umquam immanium verarum turbae fidem visitavi, dum ego, cum ligneo sabre, fustibus tundendo, interdum nimis audacter adolescentulus in articulos irruens, et ad calcem scalae Bulgeris infinito ludibrio mitto. Ut semper adsensum in acie esse et de virtute gloriantem.

Tandem cum magno gaudio meo animadverti, quod maior Baron maior deditionis signa ferebat.

Ego quasi prudens imperator omnes in ipsa acie impetum feci.

Futurum esse ut vulpes postridie venaretur. Unam ex meis legatis fidelissimis mandavi ut canes cibos omnes crudos deglutirent, circa horam ante initium.

Alios denos, velocissimos ac dicaces, decem principes medicos et chirurgos oppidi et vicinitatis eius domos misi, cum isdem mandatis, ut singulos, feminas, puer; violenter egrotante manerio fuerat, et maxime festinandum est ad uenturam cum medicinis pectoribus, ut pestilentia reprimatur.

Eodem fere momento decem doctores in atrium incurrerunt, solum ut Seniorem Baronem et amicos suos in suggestu congreges invenirent, et de insolitis canum actionibus sibila consultatione tenentes. Irati Galeni discipuli pro animalibus pauperibus praescribere noluerunt, et bene repletis holsteriis in crura involaverunt.

Interea non eram otiosus.

Ad ungues scoriae vel plurium volatilium Baronum senioris ligavi quamdam fuzeam inventionis meae, ita inflammabilem, ut levissima frictio exardesceret, et tunc in campis et hortis adiacentis resolutos converti domus praetorium.

Tota aestas occupati erant et laetati sunt in spe boni temporis scabendi, inter folia arida et stipulam camporum patentium.

Per hoc tempus venatores canes nonnihil e stupore excitando successerant, cum clamor, “Ignis! Ignis!” Ascendit. Venaticus raptim desiluit et insana ruunt aqualis hydrias iunctaque ministris.

Sedebam placide in conclavi meo, cum Bulgerus ad latus meum, cum tumultus sublatus est.

Senior Baron in primis inclinabat in mentem, quod, licet mea opera manifesta esset in fabrica mali, quod in edacitate canum consistebat, et decem doctores ad manerium vocato in venatione anseris feri, igne tamen erumpente. In proximis hortis et agris nihil ad rem pertinens. Reditus vir venerabilis Dominici Galli senis, qui vel nimis imbellis vel nimis piger fuerat, ut fuzees unguibus adnexis exploderet, rem tamen confecit.

Maioris Baronis animus iam claruit quisnam facinus conceperit in quo tam ignari conscii eius miseris avibus facti sunt.

Illa nocte Bulger et levibus cordibus cubitum ivi.

Senior Baron tandem consensit, ut primo proficiscamur ad quaerendum peregrinos casus inter curiosos populos longinquarum terrarum.

Iter et adventures baronis Trump et canis mirandus Bulger—II

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CAPUT III.

Hic manus tremit, et stylo titubans atramentum fluit.

Quas res gestas profiteor, Lector mihi pro certo assentior, cum considerans maxime interesting meae vitae alienae ac variae. Forsitan mihi studium dicat; Nam, Lector benevole, unum ex his “quaedam eventa” supra citata non minoris momenti evenit quam nativitas mea in hunc magnificum et pulcherrimum mundum, quem mundum mirabilibus et mirabilioribus, sicut tu, plenum esse probavit. Videbunt ut ego pergam cum mea fabula.

Aestate natus sum. Nox erat tempus.

Milia per cunabula miselli Scintillata, parva, inops, argillae gleba; sed clarior omnibus, ut purpurea taeda in sethera flammea, Sirius, caniculae stella, super me effulsit!

Ad coelum aspiciens pater subridens, murmurat: «Parve peregrine, canum semper eris amator. Risus erit illis laetitia, musica verba tua, et in aliqua bestia quadrupedia generis sui, optimum, fidelissimum, amicum tuum invenies.

Quasi in verbis patris mei ipsum veritatis pressum poneret, eo ipso momento clamor matris canis in contiguo cubiculo auditus est et unus e regiae familiae Chew-lâ-â in meam praesentiam accurrit cum calatho parvo catuli. Pater meus viminea cunabula noviter advenientis familiae ridens rapuit eamque ad me clamabat;

Elige, parve baro, amicum et socium elige tibi. Manum meam parvulam porrigi parvulam et in una cum maximo capite recumbens. “Ha! ha!” risit pater, “Bone te, parve baro, elegisti, cui tu tantum cerebrum elegisti, ut bene torvum caput.”

Et cum ad luctandum cum illo verbo infantulus lingua mea venit, tortum est in “Bulger.” Sicque Bulger et eodem fere momento in vitae itinere profectus sum! Postera die pater patefecit aquas nocte recedere coepisse, et prospiciens ab excelso domicilio nostro, vidit in medio satis amplae insulae stetisse. Pater meus post prandium, secundum morem patriae, duos Chew-lô regi calceos ligneos ligneos, quibus omnes canorum scularium usos erant, in superficie molli luto movere conabantur, imposuit inundatio.

Hi calcei lignei perquam leves sunt, quamquam tam longi et tam lati quam calcei nivei sunt. Expolitione pedum, velatos perlabier in lutum, quod natura terrae est pinguissimum, eadem celeritate qua currit ad calceos nivis.

Post aliquot horarum excursus in montem et descendentem, pater meus cum hac mirae intelligentiae particula rediit, scilicet, quod proculdubio habitatio eorum, ante descensum aquarum in stagno posita; sed paulatim, cum recessissent aquae, factam esse insulam, quae paulo post in peninsulam fuerat, quae rursus adhuc demersa aquarum in verticem montis conversa erat. Leniter acclivis lateribus ut, referens matri meae, pereuntem diem neque dicere posset, si natus esset in lacu, in insula, in paeninsula, an in summo monte, factum esse. Quod eum gravissime angebat, nam, ut omnes eius familiae sodales, summa rerum memorandarum summa diligentia usque ad minutissimas rerum gestarum fastus summa cum diligentia sumpsit.

Dissimilis plerisque infantibus, qui primum dimidium annum transire contenti videntur, aut vitae suae edentes, dormientes et clamantes, ab ipso exordio praecocentiam mirabilem prae se ferunt.

Cum paucae tantum hebdomades, quamvis loqui non possem, sibilo tamen didicerant Bulgerum, cuius progressus in animo et corpore etiam gressum meam tenere visus est, et qui plurimam aetatem aspiciens in puerilem vultum transiit. Quod significat, “O, gaudebo, cum ista lingula soluta est, ut me vocas Bulgerum et iubeas me facere voluntatem tuam.”

Nec mora.

Illud unum, quod in hac aetate vitae meae mihi gratissimum gaudium dedit, lux erat.

Fui intus fores morosus, morosus, iracundus, sed sub divo semel emissus, tota natura mutatur. Bibi mollem et mollem acrem vigorem et oblectamentum patris mei delectantis. Facies mea clara est, oculi mei de valle ad collem, a summo usque ad celum gradiebantur.

In tantam ecstasim voluptatis me hoc conspectus mundi magni proiecit, quod mater mea anxia facta est, ne praevideret aliquod magnum malum mihi evenire.

Sed magnificus baro tantum risit. “Nihil timeas, uxor, solum significat quod intra caputculum illud miro modo activum animum prolis mensibus habitare.”

Quotiens Bulgerum dominum suum laetis vocibus ad aspectum mundi pulchri clamantis audiebat, certo vehemens latratu correptus erat, in quo circum me evagabatur cum asperrimis et profusissimis sympathiae manifestationibus.

Sine dubio mira inter nos fuit dilectionis vinculum.

Matris meae paene horrorem dixeram, ego quadam die cum mecum in brachiis suis in latis verandis ambularet, quae aedes Chewchewlô cingebat, me ex brachiis iactare conatus sum, Germanice clamans: Los! Los! Dimitte me! Sine me!

Habui usque ad id tempus, ut videtur, plus studii fuisse in lingua mea regiae nutricis Chewlae molli et canora, in qua facillime me intellegere potui. Circa hoc tempus accidit mihi, quod, licet non effecit, valde festinavit emissio parentis continentiam, tam ardenter desideratam, tam a Bulgero quam a me, nam ab ipso ingressu in hunc mundum aliquid mihi dixit me esse. Puer clarus debet esse, non mera et praecocia iuventus, qui a parentibus in coetu socialium adhibitus est ad portandos homines iam in pauperes spirituum, ascendendo super sellam vel mensam et versus declamando, parrotsos, cum dimidia duodecim lignea, hiulca gestus; sed verus heros, verus viator, non formidans tempestatem, feram, saevum, barbarum, ut faceret, quod vellet.

Solebat matris meae in auram diei sedere mecum in latis verandis, dum patris mei tibialia arridebat; Nam, licet generosa, ita consueverat, cum puella in omnibus rebus Germanicis parsimoniam exerceret, ut nunc, quamvis verae baronis uxor facta esset, non posset in illis bonis rebus agendarum delectationem praetermittere vias.

Sicque patrem meum multis pfennigibus servavit, quod vir bonus pauperibus dignis largitus est, et bonis onustus ad sepulchrum descendit.
Tali tempore subito Sternutatio matris rapuit, et infandum horrorem e manibus emisit. Decidi, decidi, lutum molle feriens, et visu evanescens.

Misera quasi plumbum ad solum cecidit.

Adstitit ei proceras ad pedes stabantque pedesque, fugitque virilem genae color.

Sed Chew-lô, qui ad patrem feliciter salutabat, risit.

“Agnus barbarus!” fremebat magnus baro, “Nisi despicis lachrymas patris, angorem matris? Ex te. Utinam nunquam regnum tuum intrassem in coelum! Chew-lô ne verbum quidem. Conversus imperioso more ac iure regio in turbam clientium manum quassat.

Citius quam cogitatio Sutulae canororum cohors ad calceos ligneos prosiluit.

Ite, procul, iaculantes sicut nigrae in ala vespertiliones.

Baro videbat in tremendo maerore emissum iudicium melius elabi, et vultu pallente caputque inclinatum stabat languida forma coniugis.

Sensit, sciebat, praesentiam suam apud Melodios Snutores hoc momento solum perturbare, impedire progressum, ac fortasse ita confundere, ut frustra omnis conatus esset. Illi ab infantia ita consueverunt ligneos illos calceos ingentes gestare, ut in hoc luto perfidiae versarentur, ut, si fieri posset, manus humanas filium ad bracchia restitueret, id facerent.

Itaque pauca adhortatus ad aurem matris fatur, et instar statuae stare pergit, voltu melodiae snuculorum longis scriniis defixit, dum circumvoluti cacumen montis locum obtineret, judicabant, interissem.

Luce lato, ligneo scopulo armato, armisque obscuris surrexerunt, et mira subtilitate ac constantia ceciderunt, notis musicis sternutationis commorantes; nunc mollis et humilis, nunc erumpens in modum truculenti ac putrefactus.

Descende! Descende! Descende!

Et tamen frustra elaboraverunt!

Nullum ibi erat indicium miserae moeroris aegrae.

Sed cor!

Quid est clamor iste?

Non est humanus!

Nullus; est enim cortex Bulgeri, vel potius latrantium Bulgeri est.

Spectaverat Sutulae canorae thiasos, ceu candida scopas, Omniaque incassum concidit, pergula pergula capite impulit.

Nemo satis erat mente et corde ad capiendum sensum illius miselli latrantis.

Chew-lô vidit suos stantem in scopis innixum, oculis dubiis et haesitationibus.

Rex tacuit.

Erat baro ille magnus, qui loquebatur;

“O ne des! Mea vita, opes, omnia tua sunt bona, bona Chew-Chew.

Sternumenta appellatio.

Iterum clamor Bulgerorum sublatus est, et hoc tempore rex eam exaudivit.

Famulus regis videns nutum, et festinans ad pedes canis ligneos calices ligandos, in superficie luto solutus est.
Quid est homo intelligentia gloriata?

Erant decem passus vel amplius ab eo loco ubi disparui.

Gannita, latratu, et ploro per vices, mi Bulger, properavit ad eum locum, quo evagatus odor narravit carissimum dominum suum descendisse.
Iterum canororum snuariorum cohors renovato vigore laboratur, scopae albae miro opere fulgentes contra atram caeni nigredinem.

Bulger eos magnis et laetis latratibus hortabatur.

Subito serenus, tinnitus, canorus “rumdere” aerem discidit.

Me viderant!

Rara providentia per unum mensem, una manu nares clauseram priusquam ad lutum perveniam, et sic pulmonem a repletione servaverim.
Sed quam inutilis fuisset haec cautio, nisi bulger meus fidelis subveniret!

Nunc gaudens modum non noverat.

Putabam me subridentem veteris baronis lacrimosa maxillam prehendi, dum puer ad verandam ferebatur, animati massae terrae magis quam alia re, nam me aerem recreaverat. Oculi mei non modo aperti erant, sed solum in toto corpore mundo.

Convulsa mater mea me pressit pectore pectus, et equidem caeno pressisse caput et ora, ora, ni latam suspectam vidissem baro palmam; dum matris cor se verbis effundit. Pelves paucae aquae calidae, et ego ipse iterum.

Imo numquam ipse iterum fui. Balneum meum in luto calido Lâ-aah-chew-lâ maximam mihi mutationem fecit; incrementum corporis mei compressit et omnes vires meas in caput et cerebrum convertit.

Caput meum in uno brevi mense fere magnitudine duplicatum.

Infans vultus vultusque meus recessit!

Et prius alia luna impleverat cornua sua: Crevi mirandum!

Non solum magnitudine capitis mei aliquid praeclarum fuit, sed etiam ex oculis mirificam intelligentiam eluxit.

Mulieres pauperculae de Lâ-aah-chew-lâ ante me oraverunt quasi ens essem ab alio mundo, et deinde frontibus percutientes matri meae appropinquaverunt et susurrabant:

“Gracissime Magnus Spiritus Chew-lâ-â-â-â-â-â erravit et duas animas ibi pro una posuit!”

Et tunc decora corpora inclinaverunt donec frontes matris meae tangebant pedes et recesserunt retro exeuntis sicut dominae curiae optimae, unusquisque digitum suum ad me adaequans et oculos suos per ianuam evanuit aperiens.

Tota res adeo deridiculo erat, ut in risus clamorem erumperet.

Quo audito, miserae bestiae inter se praecipites ruebant, insano conatu, ut extra domum exirent, stridentibus in summa vocibus;

“Serva nos! Salva nos! Llle nos fascinabit!

“Parvus baro!” Pater meus irae voce subsannans dixit, “Dominas regis Chew-chew-lô’s aulam non terrere!”

Chew-pa! Chew-pa! (Idiotae! Idiotae!) Respiciebam e tabula mea, in qua exemplum arithmeticae faciebam, nam figurarum valde cupiebam.
Nam pater meus iam me adiectionem docebat, ostendens mihi quam vilia globuli vitrei pro ebore pretioso mercari, et dividendo, auferendo nonaginta cents de quolibet dollario quod feci. Multo ante quam legere aut scribere potui, epistolas plurium linguarum noui nominatim, nec verbum ullum exarare potui, quod nullas in ea litteras taceret. Nemo miris artibus magis delectabatur quam Bulger.

Is suapte natura videbatur scire parvum dominum suum non esse vulgarem hominem, et eum honoratum esse. Nunc valedicere Landam La-aah-chew-lâ et Sut.

Rex Chew-chew-lô cum valida manu clientium nos ad suum fines comitatur, sylvas canoras masticando ruminando resonant. Super humeros baronum veterum stans, ultimum vale eos vibravi ad quod tam perfecto turbine Chew-chew-â responderunt quod Bulgerus satis jucunde ululaverat.

Quilibet praecipuus honor domino suo semper fuit ei materia personalis. Senior baro ulterius penetrare in cor Africae destinaverat; sed plane, tam mirabile mentis meae incrementum, ut a mane usque ad noctem animum suum occupaverit. Conatus est hoc a me celare; sed omnes inaniter.

Priusquam biennium essem, cerebrum meum adeo grave erat ut mater mea in plantas calceamentorum meorum suere plumbeos, ut me rectum finem sursum teneret, et tamen in hac cautione saepe stans inveniebam. Caput meum difficiles difficultates mathematicas operando utendo digitos meos, sicut Sinenses faciunt machinas numerandas.

Primum quod pater meus domum attigit, me ad phrenologum duceret ut chartulam capitis mei haberem.
Examen fuit unum mensem.

Tandem, chartula completa, repertum est me habere triginta duas labeculas distinctas.

Bene intellegitur etiam!

Statutum est igitur statim instituisse tutores duos et triginta doctos, ut quisque paedagogus habeat singulas personas gibba, et operam navare, ut si cornu sit crescat.

Pater meus decrevit nihil omittere, ut meae mentis vires usque ad ultimum evolveret. Nihil dixi aut ad consilium aut contra.

In uno brevi anno didici omnia, quae me docere possent triginta duos paedagogos, et, quod plus est, unumquodque eorum quinquaginta docuissem, quae ante non cognoveram, et quae peregrinando in exteris regionibus didiceram. cum parentibus meis.

Tutores triginta duos uno mane cum magna admiratione eorum totum functus sum.

Senior baro ad suggestionem meam nunc misit libellum cuilibet tutori pro servitiis sibi per me redditis.

Quisque tutor solvere noluit.

Senior baro, meo suggestione, nunc fecit processum juris unicuique eorum serviendum.

Curia, audito testimonio meo, sententiam reddidit, quae quinque millia paginarum chartarum legalium operiebat, et totam hebdomadem ad legendum requirebat, in qua singula, quae singulis triginta et duobus paedagogis docuerat, mirum in modum erat et peculiare, ut in oculo legis saltem centum dollariorum valebat. Qui rogationem cuiusque paedagogi fecit ad quinque milia dollariorum, vel omnium centum sexaginta milia dollariorum.

Curia deinde per annum dimittitur, omnes tres iudices mente et corpore ita fatigati ut duodecim mensibus reliquis egent antequam aliud negotium suscipiant.

Plures casus venire…

Lege pars I

Virtue as an Intensive Quantity in Aristotle

In much of my recent research, I have criticized modern philosophy for being un-philosophical, at least if, by the term “philosophy,” we mean the practice in which the Ancient Greeks engaged [See my Wisdom’s Odyssey from Philosophy to Transcendental Sophistry, Cartesian Nightmare: An Introduction to Transcendental Sophistry, and Masquerade of the Dream Walkers: Prophetic Theology from the Cartesians to Hegel]. At least two features essentially characterize ancient philosophy: (1) realism and (2) the problem of the one and the many. Much of my recent work has involved contrasting the essentially realist stance of the Ancient Greeks to the subjective idealist stance of modern thinkers. In this paper, I turn to a second mark of Ancient philosophy: the problem of the one and the many.

Many contemporary philosophers treat the problem of the one and the many as an isolated issue within Ancient Greek philosophy, as a puzzle that confounded early Greek physicists. In so doing, they display a severe misunderstanding of philosophy as the Ancient Greeks practiced it. This paper’s purpose is twofold: (1) to examine the way, in the Golden Age of Ancient Greek philosophy, Aristotle practiced philosophy in terms of relating a one to a many, and (2) to use this examination to throw light on Aristotle’s understanding of virtue.

While some contemporary thinkers might find my thesis shocking, glaring examples of the predominance of the notions of unity and multiplicity in the Ancient Greek mind fill the works of Plato and Aristotle. Consider, for example, how, in Plato’s Crito, Socrates disdains Criton’s suggestion that he consider what the “many” might think about whether or not he should leave prison. Socrates says his concern is not, and never has been, about the opinions of the many, but “of the wise, …of the one qualified person” (47B). Again, in the Meno, Socrates criticizes Menon for constantly giving him “many different” virtues in response to Socrates’ continued request that Menon tell him the “one” virtue that is in every act of virtue that makes a virtue a virtue [Meno, 72B-C, 74A-B, 79A-C]. In the Republic, Socrates criticizes Thrasymachos’ notion of power precisely because the supposedly powerful person that Thrasymachos describes lacks unity of mind, and is, in Socrates’ estimation, therefore, weak [Republic, Bk. I, 35IA-352B].

According to Socrates, single-mindedness makes an individual and a city strong [Bk. 2, 374B-D]. Hence, the healthy city for which he searches as the archetype in which to find justice is, as he says, one in which one man has one work because, he states, “it is impossible for one man to do the work of many arts well” [Republic, Bk. 4, 42lE-422E]. Socrates also tells us in the Republic that the healthy city, the only one of which we can “properly use the name,” is one city, not many. He adds, we must apply “a greater predication …to the others. For they are each one of them many cities, not a city” [Republic, 42lE-422E]. Finally, in the Gorgias, Socrates chastises Callicles, the sophistic politician, for loving the Athenian demos more than he loves the one universal human love to possess unity of soul. He states: “I think it better my good friend that my lyre should be discordant and out of tune, and any chorus I might train, and that the majority of mankind should disagree with and oppose me, rather than that I, who am but one man, should be out of tune with and contradict myself” [48lD-482C].

The case with Aristotle is the same. Aristotle considers philosophy to be identical with science. For him science consists of certain knowledge demonstrated through causes [Posterior Analytics, Bk. l, I, 7Ib8-30]. Science, or philosophy, studies a multitude of beings, a many, a genus, and seeks to demonstrate essential properties of the genus by reasoning according to necessary principles universal, or one, to the genus. For him causes are principles, and principles are starting points of being, becoming, or knowing [Bk. l, 41, 87a3I-bI7; Metaphysics, Bk. 5, I, IOI2b34.1013a23]. Aristotle, in turn, considers points to be ones, unities, or indivisibles. A point is a one or indivisible with position, principally spatial position or position in a continuum. A principle is, then, in some way, a one [Metaphysics, Bk. 3,4, IOOlbl-I002blO, Bk. 5,6, IOI6b18-32].

Aristotle further maintains that being and unity are convertible notions. In reality being and unity are identical. They differ only conceptually. We derive our concept of unity by adding to the concept of being the notion of indivisibility, just as we derive our notion of number from division of unity, of a continuum [Metaphysics, Bk. 4, 1,I003b22-34, Bk. 10, I, 1052aI5-1053b8, and 1053b23-24].

This Ancient Greek philosophical tendency to convert the notions of being and unity is crucial for understanding the nature of the Ancient Greek conception of philosophy and virtue. To recognize how crucial it is, we need only consider the extent to which Aristotle devoted attention to the notion of unity in his Metaphysics. Next to examining the notion of being, he devotes much of the latter part of his treatise to the notion of unity and its properties [Metaphysics, Bk. 10].

The crucial importance of the notions of unity and plurality in Aristotle’s philosophy also appears in his criticism of Plato’s notion of Forms and mathematical beings as “ones outside the many” that St. Thomas Aquinas says Plato used to protect the relation of demonstration to “eternal things.” In his Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle, Aquinas maintains that Aristotle understood demonstration to require that a one exist “in many and about many.” For Aristotle and Aquinas demonstration requires a middle term, a one that is the same in many, or a universal unequivocally predicable of a many. If no one something exists the same in a multitude, no universal exists unequivocally predicable of many beings. This makes demonstration, and philosophy, impossible [Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle, Bk. I, I. 19; Posterior Analytics, Bk. I, II, 77a5-9].

Aristotle’s division of the speculative sciences further supports my claim that we cannot understand his philosophy or Ancient Greek philosophy unless we understand all Ancient Greek philosophy as an extended reflection on the problem of the one and the many. Aristotle’s division of speculative philosophy is threefold: physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. Why? Aristotle was no Christian. He had no special affinity to a trinity. Why not seven speculative sciences, like the classical seven liberal arts? Or twelve? Or one hundred?

The answer lies in the fact that, for Aristotle, we take demonstrative principles from their subject, to which necessary, or per se, principles essentially belong. Aristotle maintains that science requires per se. predication. Per se principles consist of the principles of proximate substance and its essential accidents, accidents that have their cause in a proximate subject and necessarily and always inhere in the subject [Posterior Analytics, Bk. I, II, 75aI8-37. See Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle, Bk. 1, I. 14].

Because science, or philosophy, studies the many different ways many things relate to one proximate subject, it studies the way many things, more or less, share in the unity of a primary subject. Every science, not just metaphysics, chiefly and analogously studies the principles and causes of substances to understand the properties of the many species of which we predicate a genus [Metaphysics, Bk. 12, I, I069aI8-1069b32, Posterior Analytics, Bk. 2, 2, 90bI4-16]. Aristotle, in fact, tells us that ”there are as many parts of philosophy as there are kinds of substance” [Metaphysics, Bk. 4, 2, I004a2-3]. As Aquinas notes, “demonstration is concerned with things which are per se in something” [Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle, Bk. 2, I. 2].

For Aristotle, science chiefly studies the principles and causes of its proximate substance and its per se accidents, not just any substance and any accidents [Posterior Analytics, Bk. 2, 2, 90bI4-16]. Through these principles we come to know the proper accidents, or properties, of all the species that belong to the genus. For this reason, Aristotle maintains that no science investigates accidents as such. Take, for example, the art of home building. A completed house can have an infinite number of accidents related to it. It can be pleasant to some people, painful to others, helpful to some, harmful to others, and so on. The builder’s art bears only on those accidents that are essential properties of a house, such as its intrinsic shape and size [Metaphysics, Bk. 6, I, I026bl-25]. Hence, for Aristotle, the definition of a per se accident, like odd or even, mentions in its definition its specific subject, for example, number, which is essentially odd or even, while a non-per se accident, like the color white, makes no mention of an animal because animals are not essentially color specific [Posterior Analytics, Bk. 1,6, 75aI8-37].

Aristotle conceives the speculative sciences to be three in number precisely because only substance and its two intrinsic accidents, quantity and quality, can operate as per se principles. Quantity and quality actually inhere in substance and remain with a substance for the duration of its existence. All other accidents relate to substance through their relation to a substance’s quantity or quality. Hence, in some way, both these intrinsic accidents account for different ways in which a substance can be actually and intrinsically one, the different ways we can know substance to be per se, and, apart from substance, can know the different proximate subjects of science.

For Aristotle, then, in some way, the whole of philosophy and every science involves coming to know how a multiplicity is essentially one. As Aquinas notes, every science studies many things referred to one primary thing, a substance, with which it is chiefly concerned. It considers this thing analogously, that is, according to the same formal aspect and, also, according to different relationships, ‘just,” as he says, “it is clear that one science, medicine, considers all health-giving things” [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 4, I. 1, n. 544. See Annand A. Maurer (ed.), Commentary on the de Trinitate of Boethius, Questions V and VI. St. Thomas Aquinas: The Division and Methods of the Sciences, q. 6, a. 3, c., footnote 15].

Aristotle maintains as many species of being exist as species of unity exist, and that one science, metaphysics, has the job to study these species of unity, namely, ”the same and the similar and the other concepts of this sort” [Metaphysics, Bk. 4, 3, I003b36-37, Bk. 10, I, 1053b23-I04aI9]. Just as being is analogously predicable of all genera, since being and unity are convertible notions, Aristotle considers unity to be analogously predicable of all the different genera. Hence, he states that we may refer almost all contraries to unity as to their starting point [Metaphysics, Bk. 4, 3, I003b36-37, Bk. 10, I, 1053b23-I04aI9]. Aquinas explains Aristotle’s position in this way:

since being and unity signify the same thing …there must be as many species of being as there are species of unity, and they must correspond to each other. For just as the parts of being are substance, quantity, quality, and so on, in a similar way the parts of unity are sameness, equality and likeness. For things are the same when they are one in substance, equal when they are one in quantity, and like when they are one in quality. And the other parts of unity could be taken from the other parts of being, if they were given names. And just as it is the office of one science [first] philosophy to consider all the parts of being, in a similar way it is the office of this same science to consider all the parts of unity, i.e., sameness, likeness, and so forth [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 4, I. 2, n. 56 I].

No science considers just any parts of being, however. Nor does it consider them in just any way. It considers a genus, an order of species. And it considers the genus relative to contrary opposites that compose it and to a first proximate substance to which, in different, relatively close and distant, ways, analogous ways, the members of the genus relate. Each science chiefly studies this substance.

Aristotle maintains that a genus is a kind of whole, one which, for philosophy, or science, primarily refers to the immediate, proximate, first, or proper subject of different per se accidents, or unities, within the genus [Metaphysics, Bk. 5,24, I023a26-32, and 26, I024a29-1024b4]. Aquinas explains that this sense of genus is different from the sense of genus as signifying the essence of a species. He says:

This sense of genus is not the one that signifies the essence of a species, as animal is the genus of man, but the one that is the proper subject in the species of different accidents. For surface is the subject of all plane figures. And it bears some likeness to a genus, because the proper subject is given in the definition of an accident just as a genus is given in the definition of its species. Hence the proper subject of an accident is predicated like a genus [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5, I. 22, n. 1121].

Surface is the immediate subject of all colors and plane figures. As such, it is the referential source of intelligibility of all surface bodies. All such figures are subjectified in substance by being proximately subjectified, and quantitatively unified, in a surface. Hence, when geometricians predicate surface of different plane (surface) figures they predicate surface analogously. In so doing, analogously they resemble logicians. When both geometricians and logicians predicate a genus, they include the genus in the species’ definition. Hence, geometricians also predicate in a way analogous to the way logicians predicate the genus that signifies the essence of a species. In both cases the definition of the species refers to its subject genus, its substance, for its intelligibility. But the substance of the geometrician is a surface body, not the essential definition of the logician.

Aristotle further maintains that one proximate subject cannot be reducible to another. Those things are generically diverse “whose proximate substratum is different, and which are not analyzed the one into the other nor both into the same thing (e. g., form and matter are different in genus)” [Metaphysics, Bk. 5,28, 1024bIO-I3]. Aquinas explains Aristotle’s meaning by referring the notion of proximate subject to subjectifying, or common, matters. Thus, he states: “[A] solid is in a sense reducible to surfaces, and therefore solid figures and plane figures do not belong to diverse genera, … but celestial bodies and lower bodies are diverse in genus inasmuch as they do not have a common matter” [Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5, I. 22, n. 1125]. He adds, “In another sense those things are said to be diverse in genus which are predicated ‘according to a different figure of the category of being,’ i.e., of the predication of being [Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5, I. 22, n. 1126]. He immediately notes, however, that the natural scientist and metaphysician consider a genus as the first subject of accidents, not as what is said of different categories of being, which is the way a logician considers generic diversity:

Now it is clear, from what has been said, that some things are contained under one category and are in one genus in this second sense, although they are diverse in genus in the first sense. Examples of these are the celestial bodies, and colors and flavors. The first way in which things are diverse in genus is considered rather by the natural scientist and also by the philosopher [that is, the metaphysician], because it is more real. But the second way in which things are diverse in a genus is considered by the logician, because it is conceptual [Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5, I. 22, n. 1127. Bracketed material is my addition].

Within a different context, Armand A. Maurer explains Aquinas’s distinction between the way logicians conceive of a genus and the way natural philosophers and metaphysicians do:

From the point of view of the logician, material and immaterial things can be brought under the same genus (for example, substance), because he considers them only as concepts in the mind. From the point of view of the natural philosopher or metaphysician they do not come under the same genus because these philosophers consider the natures of things as they actually exist in reality, and in actual existence the substance of material things is not the same as that of immaterial things. Hence from a logical point of view, the genus of substance is predicated univocally of all substances; but from the point of view of the natural philosopher and the . metaphysician it is predicated analogically [Commentary on the de Trinitate ofBoethius, Questions Vand VI. St. Thomas Aquinas: The Division and Methods of the Sciences, q.6, a. 3, C., footnote 15].

Inasmuch as philosophy studies real being, or substance, as the proximate cause of per se accidents within a multiplicity of beings, or a genus, Aristotle maintains that every science studies opposites and first principles. That every science studies opposites is evident. Medicine, for example, studies disease and health. Grammar studies disagreement and agreement. Politics studies war and peace. Every science studies opposites because every science studies a multiplicity of differences according to a principle of unity.

Every science concerns itself with opposition, negation, completeness, and privation precisely because it studies substances through a principle: unity, and because opposition, negation, completeness, and privation are essentially connected to the concept of unity, or of being one. What is one is undivided, is not possessed of, is deprived of, division, and is the opposite of division or plurality. As Aquinas notes, we derive the concept of unity from the notion “of order or lack of division’ [Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 4, I. 2, n. 553]: The concept of unity entails, depends on, negation and privation, both of which are species of opposition. What is one is undivided, deprived of, and opposed to, division, or plurality. Our concept of “unity,” he tells us, includes an implied privation, “a negation in a subject,” like blindness in a human being [Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 4, I. 3, no. 564-566].

Some people might disagree with Aristotle and Aquinas, and maintain that we derive our awareness of plurality from a positive concept of unity. Aristotle himself claims that the one is the principle by which we know number [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 9, 10, 1052bI9-22]. Still, Aristotle replies to such an objection that the starting point of all of our knowledge, even our knowledge of notions like unity, cause, and principle, is our senses [Aristotle, Physics, Bk. I, I, 184aI7-2 I]. Our first perception is of composite things, a many, confusedly grasped as a one. Hence, we derive our concepts, definitions, and first awarenesses of first principles by negations of the way we sensibly perceive them as composite beings. Unity is the most primary privation, consisting of negation in a subject. Plurality stems from unity, and causes diversity, difference, and contrariety. Hence, we know first principles negatively in reference to the way we perceive their contraries [Aristotle, Physics, Bk. I, I, 184aI7-2 I. See also Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 4, I. 2, n. 553].

Indeed, Aristotle maintains that “all things are contraries or composed of contraries, and unity and plurality are the starting points of all contraries” [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 4, 2, 1005a3-5]. The reason for this is that contraries are differences, extreme differences that exist within a genus that relate as most complete and most deprived possession of a form. As such, contrariety is a kind of plurality, because difference is a pluralization of unity, and an opposition between possession and privation. Contrariety thus consists in the greatest distance of difference between extremes of species within a genus. The crucial points to note are that contraries are differences, that what is different is what is not the same, or not one, is multiple, and that differences involve opposition between possession and privation [Aristotle, Metaphysics, I004b27-1 005a13b, Bk. 10,3, 1055a32-39. See also Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 4, I. 4, no. 582-587].

For Aristotle, then, all otherness derives from pluralizing, unequalizing, unity. Unity, or what is undivided, in tum, is the ground of all sameness, equality, and similarity. Indeed, Aristotle thinks that sameness, equality, and similarity are analogous extensions and the proper accidents of unity. As such, they are the ground of all plurality, which, in tum, is the ground of all difference. For Aristotle, difference is plurality of unity, and the opposite of unity. The analogous extensions and properties of unity, however, are unities. To be the same, equal, or similar, therefore, is, analogously, to be one [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 4, I, I004a34-1 005a18. See also Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 4, I. 4, no. 582-587].

This means that to be different, unequal, or dissimilar is to be many, to be a plurality of unity. But the one and the many are opposed, are, indeed, together with being and privated being, the ground of all opposition and contrariety and are the primary contraries into we reduce all other contraries [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10,3, 1055a33-1055b39. See also Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. Bk. 10, I. 6, n. 2058].

This being so, the principles of sameness, equality, and similarity and their opposites and contraries (difference, inequality, and dissimilarity) are the ground of all per se accidents and of the relative first principles of all the sciences. This must be so because they are the most fundamental oppositions between unity and plurality, the opposition which grounds all other oppositions and into which all others are reduced. And science studies the principles of opposition within a genus [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10,3, I054a20-1 055b39. See also Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 10, I. 4, no. I998-2022, 2035].

A main reason, then, that Aristotle divides the speculative sciences into three classes is because he maintains that three pairs of specifically distinct kinds of unity, plurality, and opposition exist (sameness/difference, equality/inequality, and similarity/dissimilarity) that serve as the ground of per se accidents and of principles of contrariety for understanding the proximate subjects of science, these proximate subjects being constituted by distinctive kinds of common matter.

Aristotle tells us that two of these common matters are sensible. The third is “immovable and imperceptible” [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 12, I, I069a30-I069b3]. The two classes of sensible substance consist of perishable substances like animals and plants, and imperishable substances, like the movers of the celestial bodies, which physics investigates. The third class consists of objects with intelligible matter, that is, the objects of mathematics, and separate substances, that is, beings that can, do, or can be considered to exist apart from any and all matter [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 12, I. 2, nn. 2425-2426]. Hence, Aquinas maintains that “as many parts of philosophy” exist “as there are parts of substance, of which being and unity are predicated and of which it is the principle intention or aim of this science to treat” [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 4, I. 2, n. 563].

What makes these common matters proper subjects of science is more than the fact that they are common to a multiplicity: they comprise the matter of a proximate subject containing a specific principle of unity that grounds the per se differences and principles of opposition and contrariety within the limits of a proximate-subject genus.

Hence, as Aquinas says, “geometry speculates about a triangle being a figure having ‘two right angles,’ i.e., having its three angles equal to two right angles; but it does not speculate about anything else, such as wood or something of the sort because these things pertain to a triangle accidentally.” The reason geometry speculates about its subject genus in this way, through the principle of equality, and does not speculate about other sorts of likenesses or differences is because, as Aquinas adds, “science studies those things which are beings in a real sense, …and each thing is a being insofar as it is one” [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 6, I. 2, n. 1176]. That is, the proximate subject of geometry, its common matter, is not material substance, but quantified material substance, is not body, but surface body. This body makes a substantial body to be a geometrical body. And equality is the quantitative principle of unity by which we grasp all the samenesses and differences that relate to a body as a continuum body, such as having three angles quantitatively the same as two right angles. In short, due to the relation they have to different common matters, sameness, equality, and similarity are the formal objects through which we conceive all the different sciences.

To put all this in another way, an assumption about proximate material substance underlies Aristotle’s notion of philosophy, and an assumption about unity underlies his philosophy of proximate substance. Beings that belong to the same genus share a common matter and a common unit measure through which we know them to be one [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10, 4, I055a4-1 055a32. Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 10, I. 5, no. 2024-2026]. Indeed, Aristotle holds that, like the properties of sameness, equality. and similarity, ”to be a measure” is a property of unity [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 5, 6, 1016b4-32. Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5, I. 8, n. 432].

Aristotle maintains, further, that unity is the measure of all things [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10, I, I052bI5-19]. Aquinas comments that the reason Aristotle makes this claim is because unity terminates division. That which is undivided brings division to an end, is that beyond which no further division exists [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 10, I. 2, n. 195 I]. Aristotle explains that we know those principles that constitute each thing’s substance by dividing or resolving a whole into its component parts, whether these parts are quantitative or specific (like matter, form, or elements of compounds). He says: “Thus, then, the one is the measure of all things, because we come to know the elements in the substance by dividing the things either in respect of quantity or in respect of kind” [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10, I, 1053a24-27].

Analogously, we can call knowledge and perception “measures” of things. Aristotle maintains that we can speak this way because we know something by knowledge and perception. “[A]s a matter of fact,” he claims, “they are measured rather than measure other things.” And he immediately adds that thinkers like Protagoras “say nothing… while they appear to say something remarkable, when they say “‘man is the measure of all things” [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10, I, I053a32-I053b3].

According to Aristotle, a measure is the means by which we know a thing’s quantity. That is, a measure is a unit, number, or limit [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10, I, I052b20-27]. He adds that we first derive the notion of measure from the genus of quantity. From this we analogously transfer this notion to other genera. Hence, in a way, unity and quantity are the means by which we even know substance, knowledge, and quality. Hence, he states:

Evidently, then, unity in the strictest sense, if we define it according to the meaning of the word, is a measure, and most properly of quantity, and secondly of quality. And some things will be one if they are indivisible in quantity, and others if they are indivisible in quality; and so that which is one is indivisible, either absolutely or qua one [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10, I, I053b4-9].

Aquinas comments that we find indivisibility in things in different, not the same, ways. Some things, like the natural unit which is the principle of number, or the natural length which is the principle of measured length, are definite and totally indivisible. Other things, like an artificial and arbitrary measure, “are not altogether indivisible but only to the senses, according to the authority of those who instituted such a measure wished to consider something as a measure” [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 10, I. 2, n. 1953].

For Aristotle a natural body has per se unifying principles that differentiate it from a quantified body, and a quantified body has per se differentiating principles, per se formal objects, that differentiate it from a qualified body. Each of these bodies differs from the other according to a distinctive kind of unity that grounds distinctive kinds of contrariety and opposition based upon a distinctive kind of common matter.

The unity of a natural body is one composed of opposites, of matter and form that constitute a natural body as a material nature and as a substantial nature in the genus of substance. This body is not the same as a quantum body, the body which is in the genus of quantity, or as a qualified body. The natural body acts as the subject of the quantum body just as the quantum body acts as the subject of the qualified body.

Three properties of unity allow us to conceive of a natural body in this way: sameness, equality, and likeness (or similarity). These properties, in tum, give us a threefold division of speculative philosophy, based upon unity’s properties. Hence, Aquinas says that we distinguish the parts of philosophy “in reference to the parts of being and unity.” He maintains that, according to Aristotle, “there are as many parts of philosophy as there are parts of substance, of which being and unity chiefly are predicated, and of which it is the principle intention or aim of this science [that is, metaphysics] to treat.” According to Aquinas, “the parts of being are substance, quantity, quality, and so on.” In a similar way, he adds:

The parts of unity are sameness, equality and likeness. For things are the same when they are one in substance, equal when they are one in quantity, and like when they are one in quality. And the other parts of unity could be taken from the other parts of being, if they were given names.

That is, we divide philosophy according to the order of proximate natural subjects and the property of unity that constitute the necessary and sufficient condition for a proximate subject’s ability to be.

For example, Aristotle thinks that a substantial body emanates in three magnitudinal directions from its matter as a natural body. These dimensions are extensions, divisions, and arrangements of the natural body within terminal parts in different directions in place. They divide the natural body into parts that have a positional relation to each other and to bodies around them because position is contained within the notion of quantity [Aquinas, Commentary on the de Trinitate of Boethius, Questions V and Vi. St. Thomas Aquinas: The Division and Methods of the Sciences, q. 5, a. 3]. These emanations quantify a natural body as a magnitudinal, extended, quantum, or continuum body. “This extension occurs both intrinsically to a body inasmuch as it places limits upon it within terminal parts internal to its substantial matter and externally inasmuch as it places limits upon the substantial body in the way it relates to its surrounding place.” [Redpath, “Prescript,” in Crowley, Aristotelian-Thomistic Philosophy of Measure and the International System of Units (SI), p. xiii].

When a material substance extends in one direction it becomes a magnitudinal body terminated by a point, that is, a linear body reaching from one point to another point. When the substance extends in two directions, that is from one point to another and one line to another, the substantial body becomes a surface, or wide, body stretching from one line to another. When the substantial body stretches from one surface to another surface, it becomes a solid, or deep, body and has depth. In this way, a quantum bodily substance has three natural intrinsic unit measures and termini (a point, line, and surface) that constitute it as a quantum subject, a substance with a quantum, the extended spatial unity of which we call a quantum “equal.”

As Aquinas notes, three kinds of magnitude exist:

if magnitude is divisible into continuous part in one dimension only, it will be length; if into two, width; and if into three, depth. Again, when plurality or multitude is limited, it is called number. And a limited length is called a line; a limited width, surface; and a limited depth, body. For if multitude were unlimited, number would not exist, because what is unlimited cannot be numbered. Similarly, if length were unlimited, a line would not exist, because a line is a measurable length (and this is why it is stated in the definition of a line that its extremities are two points). The same things hold true of surface and of body [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5, I. IS, n. 978].

Aristotle maintains that we derive our notion of measure from sensation, primarily from our sense awareness of number which arises from cutting a continuum. By cutting a continuum body, we divide it into a plurality of units. The unit that terminates the division is the limit of the division, an indivisible. Hence, it formally constitutes the division as a one and a number, an ordered plurality. A number is a limited plurality, a one, and a measure. Indeed, it is a measure precisely because it is a one, and therefore; is an indivisible and a limit. Hence Aristotle says, ”the one is the measure of all things” [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10, I, 1052b32-1053a23].

Since a measure is a one, just as unity is an analogous notion with accidental properties, which include being a measure, so, too, are continuous and discrete quantity. Aristotle contends that the common properties of continuous quantity are large, or big, and small. Of number, they are much, many, and large and little, few, small, and less. Of magnitude, they are, of length, or of a long body, long and short. Of a surface, or wide body, they are narrow and wide. Of a solid, or deep, body, they are high or deep, and low or shallow. Of quality, heavy and light, hot and cold. All these are relative unit measures, ways by which we comprehend an extended or qualified substance to be limited and one, and hence knowable [Bk. 5,12, 1020aI8-1020bI2. Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5,1. I5, n. 981, and 1.16, n. 998].

Of all the accidents, Aquinas maintains that “quantity is the closest to substance” [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5, I. I5, n. 982]. Hence, of all the accidents, it is most per se. Quantity is a per se accident of a material body because it inheres in and emanates from the body’s natural matter. A quantum body can thus be the proper subject of philosophical speculation for the geometrician as a proximate subject of accidents proper to a point, line, and surface.

All the above points being true, someone might wonder what all this has to do with Aristotle’s notion of virtue? Its connection is simple. In a similar fashion to the way in which dimensive quantity causes a material body to emanate extensively through its matter to natural intrinsic unit measures and limits, Aristotle thinks that a body emanates intensively through its form to natural intensive magnitudinal unit measures and limits of ability, positionally related to each other. In this way, form constitutes a natural body as a qualified body, or a body with qualities, with limited and ordered abilities to act with more or less perfection, the proximate subject about which the Ancient physicist, metaphysician, and ethician can speculate, depending upon whether the matter in question is corruptible or incorruptible, or human possessed of the faculty of free choice.

Aquinas, following Aristotle, maintains that we can understand the term “perfect” in several senses. In one sense, a thing is internally perfect when it “lacks no part of the dimensive quantity which it is naturally determined to have.” In a second sense, we can understand the term internally to refer to ”the fact that a thing lacks no part of the quantity of power which it is naturally determined to have.” In still another sense, we can use the term teleologically to refer to external perfection, as, for example, when we say that ”those things are said to be perfect ‘which have attained their end, but only if the end is ‘worth seeking’ or good” [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, L.18, nn. 1038-1039. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 5,16, 10212bI2-1022a3].

Aquinas explains that we can say a thing is perfect in relation to this or that particular ability because:

[E]ach thing is perfect when no part of the natural magnitude which belongs to it according to the form of its proper ability is missing. Moreover, just as each natural being has a definite measure of natural magnitude in continuous quantity, as is stated in Book II of The Soul, so too each thing has a definite amount of its own natural ability. For example, a horse has by nature a definite dimensive quantity, within certain limits; for there is both a maximum quantity and minimum quantity beyond which no horse can go in size. And in a similar way the quantity of active power in a horse which is not in fact surpassed in any horse; and similarly there is some minimum which never fails to be attained [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5, I. 18, n. 1037].

Hence, we can analogously transpose all the concepts of measure that we derive from our awareness of being as dimensively quantified and one to measure and comprehend quality and other accidents as well, such as place and time [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10, I, 1020315-33. Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5, I. I5, n. 984]. For example, we can speak of a color’s magnitude because of the intensity of its brightness, the magnitude of a sin because of the greatness of its offense to God, the quantity of perfection of an animal’s ability to see, hear, or run, or the extent of perfection of a person’s happiness, or one animal being higher or lower in its genus or species.

To grasp Aristotle’s view of philosophy more completely and to grasp how it more specifically applies to virtue and ethics, we need to recognize a basic distinction he makes metaphysically between two types of quantity. Many philosophers are familiar with Aristotle’s distinction between continuous and discrete quantity, continuous quantity being the proper subject of the geometrician and discrete quantity being the proper subject of the arithmetician. Metaphysically, he makes a more basic distinction between dimensive (molis) quantity and virtual (virtutis) quantity.

Continuous and discrete quantity are species of dimensive, or bulk, quantity. They result in a substantial body from the emanation of a natural substance’s matter to become a body divisible in one, two, or three magnitudinal limits or directions: length, width, or depth. Virtual quantity is a species of quantity that emanates from a natural substance’s form, not its matter. It emanates intensively, not extensively. And the accidental form “quality,” not dimensive “quantity,” produces it. Aquinas describes the distinction between these two forms of quantity as follows: “Quantity is twofold. One is called bulk (molis) quantity or dimensive (dimensiva) quantity, which is the only kind of quantity in bodily things…. The other is virtual (virtutis) quantity, which occurs according to the perfection of some nature or form.” He adds that this sort of quantity is also called “spiritual greatness just as heat is called great because of its intensity and perfection [St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, q. 1, a. 42, ad 1. See also, Iallae, q. 52, a. I, c. For a more extensive treatment of the notion of virtual quantity in Aristotle and Aquinas, see Crowley, Aristotelian-Thomistic Philosophy of Measure and the International System of Units (SI), pp. 25-47, 249-260].

For Aristotle, in other words, forms and qualities have their own kind of quantity and magnitudinal limit, one that consists in the greater or less intrinsic perfection, completeness, or quantity of form, not in the extension of matter throughout parts within a spatial continuum. This quantum property of form enables the existence within a subject and a genus of the opposition between privation and possession that grounds all contrariety. Privation requires the disposition to have a form and the absence, in a definite subject at a definite time, of the form to which one is disposed [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5, I. 14 nn. 962-965]. The basis of contrariety is the opposition between privation and possession [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10, 14 1055a33-1055bI8]. Hence, quality, or intensive quantity, as the foundation of all opposition and contrariety is, in a way, the ground of all science.

Furthermore, for Aristotle, virtues are qualities and qualities are of basically two kinds: (1) essential difference and (2) differences, or alterations, of bodies capable of motion, like hot and cold, heavy and light, black and white. This second sense refers to the way we generally use the term “quality” “of virtue and vice, and, in general, of evil and good [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 5, 14 I020a33-1020b25. Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5, I. 16, nn. 987-999]. Aristotle considers quality in this sense to be an accident related to motion, an intensive quantitative modification of something moved inasmuch as it is moved. Hence, regarding virtue and vice, he says:

Virtue and vice fall among these modifications; for they indicate differentiae of the movement or activity, according to which the things in motion act or are acted upon well or badly; for that which can be moved or act in one way is good and that which can do so in another (the contrary) way is vicious. Good and evil indicate quality especially in living things, and among these especially in those which have purpose [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 5, 14 1020bI8-25].

Aquinas comments upon Aristotle’s reference to virtues and vices enabling us to move well or badly that the terms “well” and “badly” chiefly relate to living things and “especially” to those possessed of “choice. ” The reason Aquinas gives for this is that living things particularly act for an end and “rational beings, in whom alone choice exists know both the end and the proportion of the means to the end” [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5, I. 16, n. 998].

Part of Aquinas’s point in the above passage is that quality modifies a motion or action in the sense that it places it within bounds and, in a way, gives it order and proportion, especially in connection to acting for an end. This point is crucial to understand in connection to the study of ethics as a science because, as a science, ethics must study a genus in relation to opposition between contrary members of a species, an opposition, like all oppositions, grounded in possession, privation, and limits.

Recall that Aristotle thinks that science studies one thing chiefly, a primary thing to which it analogously relates other things according to different relationships, that is, unequal relationships of possession and privation. Hence, the medical scientist chiefly studies health and its contrary opposite, disease, plus other things differently related, by greater and less distance, to health and disease, like diet, exercise, operating procedures, medical instruments, and so on. Analogous study of anything involves relating things using a common concept, or meaning, predicated according to greater and less distance to a common term, or numerically one nature, that is, according to more and less, excess and defect (all of which, in some way, are not equal, and, hence not one) to some one definite thing. No science, then, can proceed without considering the proportionate and unequal relationship of possession and privation that a multiplicity has to a chief proximate subject, to the maximum in a species, to a one to which other things are related as numerically one end [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 4, 1, I003b 11-19. Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 5, I. 1, nn. 534- 544].

One reason this last claim is true is that Aristotle tells us substance is part of the subject of every science, not just of metaphysics. He also tells us that quantity is that by which we know substance, that a measure is that by which we know a thing’s quantity, that we first find unity as a measure in the discrete quantity, which is number, and that, from this category, we transfer the notion of a measure to other categories, like quality, time, place, and so on [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10, I, 1052b 19-1053b8. Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 10, I. 2, no. 1937-1960].

In the case of quality, Aristotle maintains that we first perceive the notion of measure by comparing one thing to another and by noticing that one thing exceeds another in a specific quality, by noticing larger and smaller or more and less, which are inequalities and, as such, pluralities of unity. For example, we notice that one thing exceeds another in weight or heat [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10, I, 1052b 19-1053b8. Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 10, I. 2, no. 1937-1960]. For Aristotle, however, equality and inequality are first and foremost divisions of numeral proportions [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 5, 14, I020b26-1 021 al 4. Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 10, I. 2, n. 1008]. Inequality is of two kinds: larger and smaller (or excessive and defective) and more and less. As inequalities, we cannot understand excessive and defective, larger and smaller, and more and less apart from reference to equality. Equality, however, is the measure of inequality, the means by which we know inequality [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 5, 14, I020b26-1 021 al 4. Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 10, I. 2, n. 1008].

Furthermore, in the case of quality, Aquinas maintains that we are incapable of directly comparing any two qualities. Quality as quality only directly relates to the subject in which exists. Its being is a referential being to its subject. We can only relate it to another quality (I) by referring one quality to the other as an active or passive potency of the other, as being a principle or source of acting or being acted upon (like heating and being heated) or (2) by referring one quality to another through reference to quantity or something related quantity, as, for example, when we say that one thing is hotter than another because its quality of heat is more intense [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 10, I. 2, n. 1008].

Aristotle’s teaching on contraries throws light on how we can compare two qualities quantitatively. For Aristotle contrariety is. a kind of opposition, one of the four kinds of opposition: (1) contradiction, (2) contrariety, (3) privation, and (4) relation [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10,4, 10555a33-1055b3]. Contraries are forms, extreme differences, or specific extremes or limits, within the same genus between which a mean, middle, or intermediary can exist. This mean or middle relates to both extremes as a one, intermediate, or midpoint between possession and privation. It is neither extreme, relates to both, and is opposed to both by an opposition of privative negation, not of contrariety, just as, for example, the midpoint between the extremely hot and extremely cold is neither hot nor cold but can become both or a morally neutral person is neither morally good nor bad but can become both [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 10,4, 1056a10-30].

Furthermore, passage from one extreme to another involves an order of change, a necessary passage through the midpoint, which stands in a condition of equality in relation to both extremes, just as passage from the great to the small and the fast to the slow must be through what is equidistant from both. Hence, because the equal stands as a mean or midpoint between extremes of possession and deprivation of a form within a genus, we can use the equal as a measure for knowing both extremes [Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Bk. 10, I. 7, nn. 2059-2074. For extensive analysis of the way contemporary physical scientists use the equal as a measure, see Crowley, Aristotelian-Thomistic Philosophy of Measure and the International System of Units (SI)].

In relationship to the equal, which is a one, two opposites exist, comprising the unequal (in this case, excess and defect of some form). Analogously speaking, these inequalities are multiplicities or pluralities. This means that we can measure qualitative differences, or difference of intensity in possession of a quality, by comparing excessive and deprived possession to possession of equal intensity. We can compare one quality to another by relating both the qualities we wish to compare to a third quality that stands midway between them in intensity, much like we can compare the heaviness of two different bodies through use of a balance scale that compares their weight relative to a state of equilibrium. This qualitative state becomes the measure of the other two and the principle by which we know them.

In the case of Aristotle’s teaching about virtue and ethics we can easily see how Aristotle applies his teaching about the one and the many. Like all sciences ethics studies a genus of being grounded on a specific kind of matter: moral matter. Moral matter is qualified matter, matter modified by active and passive potencies. Specifically, it consists of opposing habits of human choice. Ethics studies a many, the many possible opposing acts open to human choice, to try to comprehend the qualitative potentialities and properties that constitute human choice, to comprehend the powers of the soul as motive principles that can act well or badly. This science seeks to understand what is human choice to comprehend choice as the principle and cause of the many free acts that human beings perform and to enable the person of moral experience to act better. To engage in this study the ethician must examine a multiplicity of human acts because we can only comprehend power and potentiality in relation to actuality.

According to Aristotle, all science seeks to understand its subject matter in terms of its principles and causes. He also says that the first, or maximum, in any genus is the cause and measure of all that is in the genus. This means that every genus contains a species that has a form existing in its most complete state. In this species we find the form most glaringly present, present in its maximum of intensive quantity. Hence, all science seeks to find this species of its genus to use our understanding of its powers and properties as a means for knowing the powers and properties of its more deprived members.

In the case of moral science, the maximum in the genus, the starting point of moral reasoning, lies in the habits of the prudent person and in reason’s general certainty that a greatest intensive quantity of qualified act exists for beings that possess the human form. The prudent person is the rule or measure of all moral science. As the contrary opposite of the imprudent person, the prudent person is the maximum in the genus of moral choice that we have to use to comprehend goodness about human action. As the privative opposite of the extremes of moral excess within the same genus, the prudent person is the intermediate, the equal, in the same genus, who acts Iike a balance scale to compare and contrast moral viciousness [Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, Bk. 2,5, II06b36-1 10731, Bk. 3, 4, 1113a31-33. See, also, Joseph Owens, “The Grounds of Ethical Universality in Aristotle,” in Aristotle: The Collected Papers of Joseph Owens, pp. 148-164, and Richard P. Geraghty, The Object of Moral Philosophy According to St. Thomas Aquinas, pp. 56-61]. In this person we find (I) the quality of active human powers exercised with their maximum of intensive quantity, or completeness of form, human goodness, and (2) the balance, or equal state, between extremes of too much and too little intensive quantity of chosen action. For Aristotle, in short, moral science starts from the evidently accepted principle that all human beings by nature have a greatest or maximum human desire: to live well and a multiplicity of contrary and opposing habits of actions that moral science studies to find the principles for living well, the maximum of which we find achieved in the actions and habits of the prudent person.

“Virtue,” Aristotle tells us, “is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.” As a mean between two vices, virtue is an intermediate, equal, or right state, or state of intermediary intensive quantity, standing between, and opposed by an opposition of privative negation, not of contrariety, to two contrary vicious opposites of excess and defect of right measure in action and being acted upon [Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. 2, 6, 1107al-8].

Hence, the courageous person is the intermediate between the reckless person and the timid. And a person who seeks to hit the mean between contrary vices must proceed toward the mean, toward the right measure, which is a specific intensive quantity of action that equals the best state of exercising our faculty of choice in the here and now [Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. 2,8, 11109al-36]. Habituation of the good person determines the right answer in moral choice, the answer equal to the situation and an agent’s natural and habituated powers, precisely because this person has experience of virtue, of the equal in matters open to inequality, or plurality, of action [Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. 1,2, 1095al-12, Bk. 1,8, 1099a13-24, Bk. 2, 6, 1106b36-1107a2].

This is not to say that moral science only studies the behavior of the prudent person. As Aquinas notes, Aristotle holds that every science chiefly studies one subject present, with different degrees of intensive quantity, in a multiplicity of different, opposite, and contrary beings. Secondarily and analogously it studies a multiplicity of other things that relate in varying degrees to this one subject. In the case of moral science, the one subject is human action as we find this extremely opposed in virtue and vice. But Aristotle thinks that the moral philosopher must also take into account and evaluate moral education and culture:

Paideia, meaning education and culture, is what equips the individual to make the right choice in each case and to grasp the ethical principles in a way that will allow them to function as premises from which conclusions may be drawn in the manner of an authentic science. Hence the importance of correct habituation from earliest childhood on [Owens, “The Grounds of Ethical Universality in Aristotle,” pp. 156-157].

In so doing, however, the ethician can never lose sight of the fact that (1) the chief object of moral science is a proper subject whose per se principles this science seeks to grasp, and (2) we can grasp no per se principle without reference to the notion of unity and intensive quantity.

In a similar fashion, without an understanding of the notion of intensive quantity, none of us can adequately grasp Aristotle’s notion of virtue and of philosophy, or the notion of virtue held by Socrates or Plato for that matter. If we modern thinkers wish abandon our tendency to confound philosophy with logic or with one or another brand of sophistry, if we wish to return to the practice of doing philosophy that the Ancient Greeks passed on to posterity, a practice we have largely, if not entirely, lost, we, too, will have to return to the Ancient Greek habit of thinking about the beings around us in terms of the problem of the one and the many and recover a better understanding of the role intensive quantity plays in comprehending the nature of this most perplexing puzzle.


Peter Redpath was Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University. He is the author/editor of 17 philosophical books and dozens of articles and book reviews. He has given over 200 invited guest lectures nationally and internationally, and headed many prestigious organizations. He is the only non-Polish scholar to hold the Laudatio Achievement Award for attainment of intellectual and organizational wisdom, from the Department of Philosophy, Culture, and Art at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, in Poland. More information is found at his website. [Portions of this essay were originally published in the International Journal of World Peace, Vol, 18. No. 1 (March 2001).


Featured: “Seven Virtues and Seven Liberal Arts,” by Francesco Pesellino; painted ca. 1450.

Iter et adventures baronis Trump et canis mirandus Bulger—I

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Praefatio

The following stories hail from the pen of Ingersoll Lockwood (1841—1918), an American barrister of the late 19th Century. These travels and adventures were published right in the middle of a remarkable period of English letters. For a generation before the 1889 release of Lockwood’s first Trump installment, and continuing from strength to strength for another generation afterwards, these stories were part of the burgeoning collections of children’s and fantasy fiction which was received with such interest at the time.

But time and fame are fickle, and poor Baron Trump was soon forgotten, despite all his marvelous journeys. It was not until there was a real Barron Trump living lately in the White House that Lockwood’s stories were rediscovered. (Fickle, it turns out, is not always a bad thing!)

And while the coincidences between the fleshly Barron Trump and his inky double gave rise to all sorts of jabber about time traveling orange tycoons (perhaps playing 5D chess in transit), we have an even better time travel for you: journey with little Baron Trump in Latin! No matter how old it is, literature is always a living thing. It is a delight to welcome back into the imagination not only young Mr. Trump and Bulger, but also to contribute to the growing corpus of new and republished Latin literature.

John Coleman

CAPUT I.

Brevis relatio cuiusdam parvi baronum maiorum celeberrimi, qui “Eques Inermem (literally, armless)” vocatur. Mira eius fortitudo et fortitudo. Quam secutus est Cordis Leonis ad Orientem. Res egregie gestae in campo sub Ioppe moenibus. Eius matrimonium in praesentia Saladini et Cordis Leonis.

Venio ex una ex vetustissimis et honestissimis Germaniae septentrionalibus familiis, virtute et amore periculi clarus.

Unus antecessorum meorum, cum viginti intrasset, uno mane audiverat in mensa patris sui, magnum regem Angliae Cœur de Lion exercitum contra infideles ducturum esse.

“Miserere parens,” adulescens e sede evigilans, oculi ardentes, genae ardentes, “Adiungam Peregrinus et auxilium in hostium sanctae religionis interitum?” “Heu miser puer!” respondit pater, miserata iuventutis intuitu, qui per novum quendam naturae lusum sine armis natus, « non es destinatus ad gravissimas pugnas, quales exspectant patruelem nostrum Cœur de Leonem. Omnia ensem gerendi ratio detinet, lancea cubile.

“Oportet homicidium deponere corpus tuum inermum ante cimeterium miserorum Moslemi elevatum! Fili carissime, ab animo talia cogita, et te ad poemata et philosophiam converte, novo generi nomen tuum eruditione addes. “Immo vero clemens parens, exaudi me!” diserto iuvenem ocello hortatus est: “Vera, arma mihi natura negavit, at illa non fuit tam crudelis quam credi posset, in ima membro vires gigas ad recompensationem dedit.

Non meministi quo tandem mense aprum uno ictu e planta venantis percussi? “Faciam,” subridens truci sene baro, “sed—” “Ignosce pater egregius iuveni interruptio venit, “Ibo in pugnam duplicem armatum, cuivis enim strepitori figam ensem et vae Mussulmano, qui me in acie audet occurrere.

“Ite ergo, fili mi!” Clamavit senex baro, ut lachrymae pictae manant genae, “Ite, iunge patruelem nostrum Cœur de Lion, et si tu inermis resistas incredulorum furorem, adjicietur alia gloria BUCINUM nomine; et in hac avita sede pendebit effigiem equitis inermi, cui mirantibus ocellis in aevum recumbent amatores fortium factorum.

Gaudium proavi mei nullum modum cognovi.

Vix moratus, ut ad iter opus faciendum appararet, cum nonnullis fidelibus stipatoribus, ab castelli navale plausibus evectus inter millia pulchrarum virginum, quae ex vicina civitate convenerant, ad Deum inermem equitem properat.

Non nisi egregium illud sub Ioppe moenibus dimicatum est, quod antecessor meus occasionem praebendae fortitudinis, eximiae virtutis, et impetus impetus inexsuperabilis.

Non unus, non quinque, non decem miles gregarius ausi sunt armati equitis.

Totae turmae expavescebant ante hunc arcanum ultorem iniuriarum Christianae, qui sine manibus Moslemi milites perculit, ut granum ante flatum cadit.

Iterum atque iterum, Saladinus florem suorum misit inermem equitem, cuius iam vires ac virtus nomen suum terrori militi superstitioso fecerat. Parum terribilem fatum illum exspectantem animadvertens,

Mahometanorum belligerem sublato cimeterium antecessorem meum rueret, cum uno ense armato ictu arma equitis inermis equi ferire pectus, deinde infideles proterere. morte provolutus humi.

Iam meridies erat.

In edito loco Saladinus, aestum pugnae spectans, ingentis exercitus florem stragem anxius oculis horrendam vidit.

Iam nomen, ordo, et natio iuvenum antecessoris mei Moslemi ducis innotuerunt.

“La, il la! Mahomed ul Becullah!” clamavit barbam gerens. Beatus vir qui potest vocare Christianum militem suum filium. Quot prophetae infantes hodie occiderunt?

“Sexcentesimo quinquagesimo nono!” responsum datum.

“Sexcenti et quinquaginta novem” Saladinus resonavit, “et meridies est!” Cum nox accessisset, numerus ad mille et septem auctus fuerat.

Audito diro diei opere “Inermem equitis” Saladini magnum cor fudit, et tamen admirationem tantae sollertiae et fortitudinis retinere non potuit.

“Ite!” Clamavit magnanimus infidelis dux, “Ite, e familia formosae Kohilat ancillae meae, eam orbibus nigredinis nigris, florem gratiae ac florem reginae venustatis. Duc eam ad eques inermem, Saladino cum regia salutatione; virtus facit fratrem meum, Giaour, licet sit! Discedite!”

Cum speciosus Kohilât in conspectum adulescentis antecessoris mei ductus est, eique denuntiatum est Saladinum ei munera misisse, “Eques impotens,” salutationis regiae in signum reverentiae tam iuvenis. Et tamen tantae fortitudinis prima Christianae iuventutis cogitatio indignationem suam ab eius praesentia iactaret.

In illo autem momento, Kohilât oculos suos magnos et splendidos elevavit eosque plenos in facie adulescentis defixit.

Plus erat quam cor hominis stare posset.

Mota comitate ut de tentorio suo processit ad eam partem cum honore, et dixit:

“Kohilat, aliena te fata ad me misit. Magnus Saladinus nuntius mihi impertit scientiam bonitatis tuae, amabilitatis tuae, et mentis doctae, quae in suo thesauro jucundissimas imagines et utiles scientias continet. Docet me stas in directa propagine ab illa inclyta reginae terrae tuae Scheherezada, quae per mille et una noctes cogitationum Soldani Indiarum ita teneri ludibrio praeclari phantasiae tenuit. avertite eum a gravi ultionis consilio. Putasne, Kohilat, te posse oblivisci falsi dei tui et solum verum amare?”

“Ita, domine,” murmuravit mitis Kohilat, “Si ita est dominus meus.”

Risus increbruit formosam faciem juvenis antecessoris mei. Magis repugnare cupiebat in convertendo pulchram infidelem ad veram fidem, sed quamvis speciosam faciem diu et cuilibet subtilitatis signo scrutaretur, non tamen vidit.

Bene, Kohilat, dixit, et nunc responde mihi, et ex corde tuo loquere. Vis fieri uxor mea secundum ritus Ecclesiae Christianae et leges patriae meae?

Iterum pulcher Kohilât respondit:

“Ita, domine mi; si sic placet.”

Sequenti die induciae indictae sunt, et coram duobus magnis ducibus exercitus, Cœur de Lion et Saladino, ambo gloriosissimo comitatu circumventi, juvenis antecessor meus et princeps Kohilat in virum et uxorem conjuncti sunt. a regii confessoris “eques inerme,” supra circumfusam multitudinem eminens in lorica sua fulgenti loricae instar columnae argenti politae. Cum obviam prodiret lusca sponsa, anulo inter labra connubio obtentus, ingens ab utroque exercitu clamor ortus est.

Saladinus barbam permulsit. Cœur de Lion fecit signum crucis. Brevi semihora duces in castra redierant, bellumque atrociter exitio reparaverat.

Huic praeclari antecessoris mei, equitis inermi, cum Mahometani ancilla, possessionem meam prope Orientales phantasiae tribuo.

CAPUT II.

Senior baro incertus de loco certo nativitatis meae. Causae cur postea dabuntur. Parentes mei hoc tempore in Africam iter fecerunt. Senior Baronis mirabilis ascensus Montium Lunae. Miracula fugae nebulonis impenetrabilis. Ut efficitur. In terra Sut. Omnia quae ibi contigerunt. Qualiter canororum rex Snutores parentes meos in magno honore ad palatium suum deduxerunt, et quomodo ab eo habiti sunt.

Dum in mea potestate est, ut curiositati legentium indulgeam, in qua parte mundi sit, in qua tenebras primum vidi, nocte enim natus sum, tamen, quantum ad naturam statim in qua eram natus, nam dolor, possum plura facere quam verba patris mei hac de re interrogati repetere.

“Fili mi, si essem in lecto meo, tantum dicere possem te aut in medio genitum esse in magno lacu, aut in insula, aut in paeninsula, aut in summo monte altissimo, sicut saepe saepius. Explicavit tibi.“

Sufficiat ergo, lector benevole, in praesentia tibi certiorem facere, quod tempore nativitatis meae in Africa parentes mei proficiscerentur; Pater meus unum de mirabilibus gestis in monte ascensu, scilicet ascensu celsissimi Lunæ Montium, feliciter perfecit; duces eius cum maxime periculoso loco in ascensu deseruissent; sed sine illis profugisse, et post aliquot dies terribilem inopiam et famem et sitim adsumere; proprium aeris aliquantum altitudinis emensum, quod os faucesque musculi resoluti sunt. Infelix viator vel fame vel siti perit, ipso praesente fructu dulci et aqua frigida et limpida.

Ita materna, quae cum eo usque in montis partem instructa et certissima pedis steterat, iter facere perrexerunt, ut putabant, in vallem, de qua primogenita habebant, iter facere profectus.

Impetrabilis iam nebula eos claudit, et mox inermes et inermes vagantes se reperit.

Mane diei tertiae caligo etiam in crassitudine creverat, circum eas quasi pallium claudens, lucem diei fere praecluserat.

Palpando pater meus cum duobus iumentis quae sibi in ascensu partibus facilioribus ministraverant conveniebat. Quiete et incuriosi dulces et teneros frutices carpebant, quae in latere montis nascebantur.

Subito cogitatus ad patrem venit. Natum est ex ea desperatione quae hominem longum putat et durum antequam moriatur.

Sic enim cogitabat: Si haec animalia, si quando appetitus exigunt, saturitatem suam edant, ubinam sint, maximeque ubi se circumventum reperiant tam excellentibus pascuis, et, praeter ea, satis levantur ab omni labore. Sentiant tamen famem stimuli, vel potius dentem famis in visceribus suis, et cogitationes eorum statim revertantur ad domos, dominos, pabulos, et non perdent tempus profectionis ad villam ubi pertinent. Ad desperationis vigorem, pater raptim os suum osculum prensabat, ut nec pasci nec bibere posset, et eventus experimenti sui expectabat, anhelitus, propter lacrimas et gemitus miserae matris, cuius vis erat. Perculit ipsae animae refluxum ieiunium.

Post paucas horas animalia ad pedes stabant et valde laborabant, et in alia hora adeo invaluerat fames, ut cibos insanas molirentur, ut facile pater ex insidiosa linea, quam diligenter curaverat, cognosceret capitibus suis apponere.

Post horam quartam longum silentium fuit, per quod quidnam sequerentur, deliberare videbantur.

Quinta hora venit.

Mater infirma et lassa in ulnis patris quieverat. Subito constringebatur acies. Pater meus sensim dormientem excitavit, pauca susurrans solatii verba.

Iterum lineae contractae sunt.

Parentes mei iam pedibus erant in profundis inpenetrabilis nebulae prospiciens, quae eos circumvolvit et inter se etiam invisibiles fecit.

Hist! Bestiae iterum moventur! Subito impetu, quasi tandem rem aliquam, quae per aliquot horas mentes eorum solverant, bestiae, vehementibus narium stimulis, obnixi e vestigio, per virgulta coniciebant, et parentes obversabantur.

Constat plane inter conclusiones ingenio vel instinctu perductas, non enim semel distrahuntur aut subsistunt, nisi a patre cohibitus. Sicque cari parentes mei servati sunt! Totis eo die ac parte proximi premebantur.

Nebula tandem elevata est, et patuit illico patri meo quod, quamvis animalia ad habitacula humana ea regerent, tamen terra in cacumine montis iter profecturus non erat. Semita nunc tam perspicua facta est ut pater meus a duobus animalibus capistras tumultuosos removit eosque famem suam expleret, quod cum summa voluptate ageret, permisit. Mater adeo fessa fuit ut inertem procumberet. Reficiensque eam haustu fontis aquae et suco agrestis uvae, praeparato propere cubile mollia fronde, in quo tam longo fessumque cornipetu se iactare gaudebant.

Mox in altum et jucundissimum somnum inciderunt. Quamdiu in lecto frondoso iacebant, somno reficiendo involuti, nesciebant.

Longa certe hora fuit; nam cum evigilarent, stomachus fames rodebat. Libet statim colligere fructus, nisi auribus insolitis crepitibus repente salutares fuissent. Oculos terebant et se mutuo circumspiciebant, reputantes se ludibrium jucundi asini somnii.

Sed non; erant vigilantes et in plena possessione sensuum. Iterum audiuntur insoliti soni et hoc tempore propiores et clariores.

Oritur et lapsus, tumor et dein intermissio.

Soni sunt hinnuli et snappy sicut et in eis musica singularis est.

Propius propiusque veniunt. Maiore ac maiore crescunt. “Ferae?” susurrabant matrem meam medium inquirendo.

“Immo!” de ore patris mei cadit. “Non nisi homines ita ferae sint ut bestiarum nomen mereatur.”

“Hark iterum!” murmuravit mater mea.

Soni iam nullus error erat; nam, ut concentus plurium vocum, argutae et fistulae, altae et murmurantes, molles et canorae, asperae et gutturales, omnia tamen inconditam et agrestem quandam harmoniam, uno modo magnoque miscentes. Nunc demissa ac vix audita, nunc erumpente atrox ac velut ingruente vigore, cantores, ululatores, quidnamque essent, in vallem infra nos ferocem ac semianimem inordinate prosilire.

Homines erant habitu barbato, facies et fustibus pictis leviter per humeros tortis. Sive intermissa sive progressa, adhuc suum cantum incultum et arcanum, vertices, hiulcas et snappy pro toto orbe servaverunt sicut mille homines, qui ex mille capsulis emunctas modo hauserant.

“Serva me, vir!” exclamavit vultu pallida mater. “Ab his feris liberis silvae plectemur diris cruciatibus.” Risus tam mitis, et tamen tam placidus, ut lenitatem patris mei diffundi non possit.

“Numquam timete!” “scio,” inquit, “Quos quaesivi! Quod viator fortius et audacius quam me multis negatum est, sodali Trump familiae miro modo donatum est. Cum omnem Monarcham in Europam redimus, omnis erudita societas, numisma in pectore meo ligare festinabit, nam, cara uxor, vir tuus primus albus est in terram ingrediendi— “

“Ille—?” reboabat mater mea procumbens et apprehendens brachium viri sui.

“Melodious Sneezers!”

“Melodious Sneezers?” identidem mater aperitur ocello, et in omni sedet ludibrio pluma.

“Melo—“

Ipsa nihil sed porro. Infinito gaudio patris mei vehementissime sternutatio cecidit. In tam celeri successione fluit sternutatio, ut perquam minutivi machinam sub praeceps sonaret.

Tandem idoneum visum est transisse. Melo—, sed frustra; secundam syllabam attingere non poterat.

Et nunc ille vicissim, pater profectus est, lentus primo, sed ocius et ociusiens.

Mirum dictu sternutamentum mox cepit vias agrestium permixtasque penitus capere, invito conatu arcendo tempus coercere.

“Cogite ergo, cara uxor,” exclamat pater anhelans cum decuit, “Hos homines alienigenas in herbam inferiorem extensos esse “Snutores canoros”; eos non modo innoxios, sed modestos, mansuetosque ac placidos esse. Ne timeas eos! Fustibus suis solum ad ludum.” “Sed quid?” caute matrem meam rogat ne alius idoneus accipiat eam.

Responsum est, “Intelligo te.” “Audi. Scito, quod in hac valle et in majoribus infra, semper aerem myriadibus impletum super myriadibus insectorum infinitae magnitudinis; Solus microscopio validissimus probationem praebere potest ad conspectum eorum exsistentiae suae. Hic enim titillari sensus quos tu et ego innumeros aetatibus isti pacifici barbari subiectae sunt.

Rursum miserae parens meus cecidit sternutatio regularis et canorae clausulae, sursum et deorsum, altae et argutae, nunc celeriter et ocius, nunc tardus et tardius usque ad silentium.

“Sicut expertus sum,” inquit pater, “dum sternutationis tam facilem quam respirationem reddidit, ususque eventus, quos vitari non posse mox cernebant, non segniter deponere solitae naturae liberi erant. loquela et littera loqui per sternutatio “

“Sternumentum est apud eos tot intonationes, tot inflexiones, ut omnes necessarios sensus sensusque exprimendi difficultatem habeant, saltem necessaria in simplici vita, sicut postea videbis.”

Volebat miseranda mater hic transitum exprimere, Mirari non audebat os suum. “Age, coniux charissime, pater hilariter clamavit.

“Confortamini! Descendamus in hanc pulchram vallem, nam adhuc tantum in terminis “terrae canorum Sutinorum” in molli et canora lingua Lâ-aah-chew-lâ vocati sumus.

Pronunciatio huius verbi iterum parentes miseros in perfecta turbine sternumenta proiecit; sed nihil perterriti obviam ierunt, qui prima facie prostratus in uultu, per aliquot momenta sternutationis stridore humilem demissa, naribus in gramen detrusit.

Paulatim tamen pater adfirmans se haudquaquam pacatum fuisse.

Unde canororum snuetrorum tripudium singularissimum ac gratiosissimum gaudium peragebant, pedes eorum pertinuo tempore cum sternutationis choro servabant.

Chorus, ut postea pater didicit, immensam gratiam suis spiritibus albis exprimere, quod vivos non edisset.

Iter domum iam ingressus est, pater meus ambulans in manu cum rege Chew-chew-lô, et mater mea comitante nomine uxorum vel plurium, domus regiae deliciarum nomine Chew-lâ-â-. â-â- et quisque successivus, prout minus editum locum occupabat in affectibus regis nomine breviore, donec tandem Chew-lâ paulo melius quam ancilla serviens significabat.

Pater meus invenit villas Melodiorum Sutinorum ob frequentiam et vim inundationum a retis fluminum, quae penitus in terra eorum inclusa erant, domibus vel habitationibus in arboribus vel in altis acervis constructis constabat.

Ipse et mater in una commodissima domorum regiarum habitae, tot servi ac servi ad curam rerum suarum deputati, ut parum aut nullus locus movendi esset.

Pater magno cum dolore magno cum dolore aliquot centenis emisit, ut matri meae satis sine holloaing colloqui posset, ac deinde ad regem Chew-chew-lô mandavit ut tam ipse quam mater saltem hebdomade opus esset. Perfectae quietis et requies ad sanitatem et fortitudinem recuperandam post horribiles cruciatus suos in Lunae Montosis.

Plures casus venire…

My Friend Paul Veyne

Paul Veyne (1930-2022) passed away on September 29. Honorary professor at the Collège de France, he was one of our most knowledgeable scholars of ancient Rome. A tribute.


“Dear colleague, I have read your letter. You are right, the state of Latin is getting worse and worse.” Ten years ago, when I was entering the first year of my studies, I received, by way of reply, this letter from Paul Veyne, so touching, so personal and so pleasant. Imagine the effect it had on a young greenhorn lad who was destined for literature. Imagine today my emotions at the announcement of the death of this professor, and myself, still as green as ever, now a Latin teacher.

“Am I going to follow in the footsteps of my elders? Yes, but I allow myself to choose my own path,” recalled Seneca in a letter to Lucilius. Veyne shared very different ideas from mine. Some would perhaps regard them bitterly. Veyne was a man of the left; rather relativistic, it is true; neither patriotic nor anti-patriotic; a Communist in his youth; a Gaullist in 1969; then a liberal and progressive. He had very early broken with Catholic practice, which he judged to be ancient folklore, and remained suffused with the memory of the war, the collaboration, and the anti-Semitism that he pinned on the old France of his parents. Paul Veyne did not accept any absolutes. “Nihil amirari“: everything passes away: human rights, ideas, Christianity, the Roman Empire and the American Empire. Everything passes away, yes, but everything makes sense in the course of history where nothing is lost, nothing is created but everything is transformed.

For all that Paul Veyne was an atypical gentleman, who has written a classic on the history of Rome. While I was talking to him with admiration about his work, he raised his arms heavenward, cursing his fate: “What I have written is particularly bad, confused and really only slog-work. I have no work. What I have written will be replaced in fifty years by others and will be unusable.” When you read his books from a long and general view, you realize with interest that they oscillate between a clear lesson and a light and exquisite exposé—unlike at times his unreadable peers, whose books are heavy as elephants, tangled in jargon, twisted like Lacan’s language.

There are so many Marmorean figures of Latin letters in France and yet Veyne easily stands out among them. Men such as Pierre Boyancé, Pierre Grimal or Jérôme Carcopino who was a minister under Vichy and the writer of a life of Julius Caesar which is still a milestone. All this has the odor of good black ink in school notebooks. The tireless music of rosa, rosae always sends us back to the same bed of roses. Grimal touched ancient Rome with white gloves. As for Paul Veyne, he was part of the serious avant-garde.

Belles-lettres shook precisely when historians, at the beginning of the 1950s, coming from the Annales school, wanted to take a complex look at history. They no longer sought to produce books that went date-by-date, event-by-event, and by conventional biographies. They found refuge under the aegis of Fernand Braudel who, in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, expounded his ideas: the layering of temporalities, the longue durée, or even material civilization as prisms through which the historian observes the world and goes far beyond traditional history by opening up to sciences such as geography, economics, ethnology, sociology, or archaeology.

Paul Veyne had his sight on all Latin literature, from Appius Claudius Caecus to Boethius, including also the inscriptions and epitaphs of Romanity, for which he combed the manuals and syllogi of the great libraries. Such certainly was the master’s background and backroom work for half a century. This was also the influence of the archivism of ideas that the obscure and marginal Michel Foucauld defended as intangible proof of the real and the concrete. But before going over to Harald Fuchs, Veyne attended sociology classes at the Collège de France taught by Raymond Aron and applied the theories of the humanities and economics, oriented towards liberalism, from Simmel to Schumpeter, to Roman society, at a time when the class struggle was foolishly plastered onto history by the passive Trostko-Maoist bourgeoisie.

Veyne had a talent for unfolding phenomena, trying methodically, with a strong lucidity close to skepticism, to understand appearances, types, behaviors in Roman society. This rigorous observation went hand-in-hand with a keen sense of historical narrative. In Comment on écrit l’histoire (How We Write History), Veyne did not consider his discipline as a raw and crude science but as “a true novel.” A novel exposes reality, takes refuge in Danton’s phrase in The Red and the Black, “the truth, the bitter truth,” and, at the same time, hits you in the gut, touches you, makes you sensitive, agitates you, fascinates you. In his writing, so many such comparisons and analogies have been carried out with seriousness and accuracy while denoting much originality.

Veyne did not try to tell us that the Romans were superior to us, exotic or grandiose. He did not sigh with ecstasy at the mere name of Rome. He demythologized and even demystified the Romans, placing them in the spotlight. He stopped admiring them, and instead wanted to understand them. Roman society was its own organism, had its own special functioning, its principles, its totems and its taboos. The role of the historian is to deconstruct the strata of society. At the term “deconstruct,” one might gladly take out his magnum 44, ready to do some serious damage. But it is best to put it away, and out this term to use in the same way that Lévi-Strauss did— by understanding that it is not a question of deconstructing our own society but to undertake a disassembling of an ancient society, to disentangle what is complexus-entangled—in order to understand its mechanics; to detach the cogs of the machine, and to observe (as one would take out an organ from a body) the specific purpose of this ancient society.

In Bread and Circuses (1976), Veyne brought out the little-known and crucial role of the euergetes in that complex mechanism present in Roman society. The euergetes was the notable par excellence who, in his city, financed the games, the theater, the baths, with a view to social cohesion—a symbol of Romanity in the face of the barbarians: “imagine a city where the big bourgeois in the corner finances the cinema, the theater, the casino and offers you an aperitif as a bonus, and well, that’s how Roman cities functioned.” One must read the articles in L’empire gréco-romain (The Greco-Roman Empire) [2005] to understand the full complexity of the ancients in relation to their tastes, religion, the idea of faith, entertainment, economics and social class differences. Veyne enlightened us on the status of the gladiator, on the intellectual preoccupations of an intelligent pagan like Plutarch, the splendor of Palmyra, the morality of the couple in the second century even before the advent of Christianity, the existence of a middle class in Rome, between the great families and the plebs sordida. The chapter on Trimalchio in Roman Society (1991) is a true painting of the parvenu, embodied by the degenerate nouveau riche of Petronius’ The Satyricon, who rises by cunning, gets rich by speculating on land, and shows off his flashy wealth.

Veyne was interested in literature. We owe him some splendid pages full of pragmatism on Seneca. We owe him the L’Elégie érotique romaine (Roman Erotic Elegy) [1983], a book in which he explains that ancient poets, such as Tibullus, Catullus, Propertius, are not romantics before the term was invented, or even beatniks, but poets who only seek to play with the codes and conventions of their society, formulating love stories invented from scratch. In the last years of his life, a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid crowned a remarkable work in which one can savor the Swan of Mantua as one would listen to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. A freshness of air, a gracefulness, a precious accuracy that buries the unhealthy translation of Jacques Perret of the Belles-lettres.

It will certainly become necessary to write a beautiful book on the life of Paul Veyne. Of all the men I have known, Veyne was the gentlest, the most generous. Not a word against any other. Treat others as equals and call the woman you love with “vouvoie.” Veyne was concerned with the little people until the end of his old age. A local celebrity in Bédoin, at the foot of Mont Ventoux, not far from the friendly monks of Le Barroux, he was among his own people. He was not imperious in any way, always very polite, replying with, “Thank you, master” to anyone who called him by the same title. He did not play the role of the wise old man, scowling and lecturing, and never quick to play the role of the intellectual for women readers on holidays. He always shirked merits and honors without ever refusing them. There was a great humility to the man.

What impressions do I have of him? I see him offering his housekeeper champagne to congratulate her on an ethereal dessert. I still see him offering a glass of whisky to his dog, Clover; making the sign of the cross while talking about General Leclerc; driving a two-wheeler at night while reciting Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the original. I still admire him telling me, at eighty-seven years old, the “Voyage to Cythera” at the dinner table, the living room caught in the sunset like a beetle in amber, with a glass of red wine resting on his cheek: “What is this sad and black island? It is Cythera, we are told, a country famous in songs, a banal Eldorado for all old bachelors. Look at it. It is a miserable land after all…” I always imagine him in his office, a great clutter, manuscripts on the floor; on the shelves, broken-backed books, volumes of poems, and a parade of trinkets that ranged from a postcard of Santa Maria Maggiore to a plastic woman’s leg that lay in front of Augustine and Cyprian of Carthage, a Mongolian knife and a photograph of his late son.

Veyne was a friend of Michel Piccoli, whom he met during a conference in Tunis. The actor knocked on the door of his room, the professor opened: “Mr. Veyne, excuse me. You know, I did not study. I am a little ashamed to appear next to you.” And Veyne replied: “You know, you create; through your performance, you participate in works. I do not create anything. I am unable to. I try to understand what guys more or less like you have done in a distant era. I have no merit.”

The master of Bédoin was a lover. When he received the Femina prize for his memoirs, I congratulated him, saying. “I imagine that you don’t care.” And he replied, “Of course I don’t care, but it pleases my wife, and if it pleases her, then it pleases me too.” That was pure Veyne. There was in this small, cramped, hunchbacked man, a sensual temperament. “Since you write love poems,” he wrote to me, “we can be on familiar terms.” He loved women, he who was ugly as a louse, because of a facial deformity. He loved the arts, the poetry of René Char who sometimes succumbed to an ecstasy on the telephone and sometimes to a tantrum; the paintings of Pignon-Ernst and Paul Jenkins, his contemporaries. He loved Italy, Stendhal and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, which he could recite by heart, and all the art of which Italy is capable—Giotto in Assisi, the Basilica of San Zeno in Verona, the Parmigianino Madonna of the Long Neck, Piero della Francesca and his Flagellation, Jupiter and Io by Correggio, the Seven Works of Mercy by Caravaggio in Naples.

Paul Veyne was not like other academics, who are often full of vinegar and proud. He was not prim and proper. He had this crazy side that made him eccentric and unpredictable, always ready to play a prank, a dare, a joke. At the University of Aix, he used to hang out on the tenth floor of the building during breaks, to prepare for his passion—mountaineering. He knew the summits of Europe, felt the vertigo of the crevasse, the shortness of breath of the altitude, the illusion of the snow and the perfume of the ice. He knew also the summits of his institution, the Collège de France, plus all the honors that the Americans, the English, the Italians and even the Turks gave him.

And how Veyne suffered in a stoic silence at seeing the people die around him—his son, who committed suicide, his son-in-law who died of AIDS. His marriages were long agonies, recounted in his memoirs—the abortion by his first wife; the hysteria of a Hellenist, daughter of a specialist in Plutarch; a notable village woman, suffering from dementia and depression, the love of his life; and a last marriage, three years ago, cut short because of the cancer of his wife. Beneath the appearance of a grandfather with a singing accent, kind and gentle, there must have been torments, storms and regrets that in ten years of friendship I was never able to pierce. Perhaps a liver sickened by the libertarian intoxication of post-1968.

My old and faithful friend is now on the other side. One morning, at breakfast, with coffee and foie gras, we talked about eternity. Veyne did not believe in God and was sorry not to believe in Him. He wanted to, but could not. For a long time, he had thought of suicide, as a practical exercise in getting all in a tizzy. But he would end up an old man. Eternity, the passage between the world of the living and a filled nothingness, inhabited or not, titillated his mind. It took courage, then, to cross the great cold without hope, with his eyes on death. May the Lord welcome him into His wide-open arms. Last Thursday, he joined Virgil, Seneca and Damien, his son. He will not be bored.


Nicolas Kinosky is at the Centres des Analyses des Rhétoriques Religieuses de l’Antiquité and teaches Latin. This articles appears through the very kind courtesy La Nef.