Mimnermus on Old Age

 Greek texts follow my translations.

 

      I was long unsympathetic to the lanky elegaics of Mimnermus.  Of the bits that have survived the centuries, many lament the ills of old age with what even when I was young struck me as shameless and misleading agism.  Surely, thought an idealist wisp within, every age must have its own beauty and satisfaction.  I was not attracted by grumping about old age, though Shakespeare, of course, was as dark when he depicted the aged as “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

    Apart from this theme Mimnermus seems to have written a heroic piece in the Homeric style on Smyrna’s resistance to Gyges and the Lydians, and his fragments reveal a few aphoristic lines, while in antiquity his chief reputation was as a love poet.  His fellow elegist Propertius commented that “in amore” Mimnermus outdoes Homer. [1]  An entire book of love lyrics titled Nanno after a flute girl (or αὐλητρίς) of his acquaintance was known in antiquity.  Though the bulk of the poet’s work has vanished in the dust-bins of the past, what survives testifies, if only in contrast, to an intense love of life, a profoundly secular world-affirming attitude that makes the decay of the physical body all the more catastrophic.

     Today’s taste would have doubtless preferred those erotic verses, but due perhaps to an old-fashioned taste for moralizing, most for what we can read of Mimnermus’ extant remains reflects on the disaster of old age, the deteriorated state of the text now mirroring that of the aged.  Today we are cushioned from the ravages of our later years by eyeglasses, hearing aids, medication for cholesterol and hypertension, and our culture so emphasizes self-affirmation that the pains of aging are in part obscured until not long before the inevitable conclusion.  But the one who long avoids the direct gaze of what Mimnermus called “dread old age” is likely to be unprepared when the ambush marking one’s last chapter begins to unfold.  The poet’s words must surely strike me differently now as I move into the second half of my eighth decade than they would have done, had I translated him in my twenties, though just how I can scarcely tell. 

 

 

1.

Oh, where is life and joy sans golden Aphrodite?

I’d die if I no longer cared for love!

Romantic plots and tender gifts and then the bed!

Such things, the very bloom of youth, are fine

to men and women both.  Then comes on dread old age,

which places ugly evils on a man,

for always hateful cares do press about his heart

(nor can he still delight in warm sun’s rays).

He frightens little children, the women turn away.

For all god made old age a time of pain.

 

 

2. 

We’re like the leaves that sprout in flowery spring;

we see them spread so fast beneath the sun.

Like them our blossom-time is short,

we nothing know from gods of good or bad.

Dark doom is standing always at our side,

who offers on the one hand wretched age

and on the other death.  The fruit of youth

is brief as when sun warms once again

the earth, and when the prime has passed one by,

it’s better to be dead than to still live,

for many evils come to us, sometimes the family falls,

and one must suffer all the ills of want.

A man may long for children and have none.

His one desire denied, he goes below.

To everyone Zeus sends a swarm of pain. 

 

 

3. 

The onetime fairest when his time is past

gets neither love nor fame from his own sons. [2]

 

 

4.

Tithonus got from Zeus old age that will

not end, a fate more grievous far than death.

 

 

5. 

A flood of sudden sweat pours down my limbs

I shake to see my generation age.

Our youth – so sweet and fine – would it were long!

 But short-lived as a dream Is youth, and age

unsightly, painful, hangs above our heads.

Unloved, disgusting, old men  are forgot.

The old lack praise and beauty, soon they are unknown,

unhonored, vile, and soon forgot as well.  

The old will see both sight and thinking fade.

 

 

6.

Before I’m struck with illness and with pain,

I hope at sixty death might catch me up. [3]

 

 

  

 

1.  “Plus in amore valet Mimnermi versus Homero/ carmina mansuetus lenia quaerit Amor.” Propertius 1.9 (11-12)

 

2.  Harsh as this sounds, Mimnermus could to point to today’s nursing homes as evidence of parental abandonment. 

 

3. Solon responded to this, proposing that eighty might be a better maximum age.  See Diogenes Laertius i. 60.

 

 

 

 

 

texts and sources:

 

 

1.  from Stobaues’ Anthology, CURFRAG.tlg-0255.1

 

τίς δὲ βίος, τί δὲ τερπνὸν ἄτερ χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης,

τεθναίην ὅτε μοι μηκέτι ταῦτα μέλοι,

κρυπταδίη φιλότης καὶ μείλιχα δῶρα καὶ εὐνή,

οἷ᾽ ἥβης ἄνθ εα γίγνεται ἁρπαλέα

5ἀνδράσιν ἠδὲ γυναιξίν: ἐπεὶ δ᾽ ὀδυνηρὸν ἐπέλθῃ

γῆρας, ὅ τ᾽ αἰσχρὸν ὁμῶς καὶ κακὸν ἄνδρα τιθεῖ,

αἰεί μιν φρένας ἀμφὶ κακαὶ τείρουσι μέριμναι,

οὐδ᾽ αὐγὰς προσορῶν τέρπεται ἠελίου,

ἀλλ᾽ ἐχθρὸς μὲν παισίν, ἀτίμαστος δὲ γυναιξίν,

10οὕτως ἄργαλέον γῆρας ἔθηκε θεός.

 

 

2.  from Stobaeus’ Anthology CURFRAG.tlg-0255.2

 

ἡμεῖς δ᾽ οἷά τε φύλλα φύει πολυανθέος ὥρῃ

ἔαρος, ὅτ᾽ αἶψ᾽ αὐγῇς αὔξεται ἠελίου,

τοῖς ἴκελοι πήχυιον ἐπὶ χρόνον ἄνθεσιν ἥβης

τερπόμεθα πρὸς θεῶν εἰδότες οὔτε κακὸν

5οὔτ᾽ ἀγαθόν: κῆρες δὲ παρεστήκασι μέλαιναι,

ἡ μὲν ἔχουσα τέλος γήραος ἀργαλέου,

ἡ δ᾽ ἑτέρη θανάτοιο: μίνυνθα δὲ γίγνεται ἥβης

καρπός, ὅσον τ᾽ ἐπὶ γῆν κίδναται ἠέλιος:

αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν δὴ τοῦτο τέλος παραμείψεται ὥρης,

10αὐτίκα δὴ τεθνάναι βέλτιον ἢ βίοτος:

πολλὰ γὰρ ἐν θυμῷ κακὰ γίγνεται: ἄλλοτε οἶκος

τρυχοῦται, πενίης δ᾽ ἔργ᾽ ὀδυνηρὰ πέλει:

ἄλλος δ᾽ αὖ παίδων ἐπιδεύεται, ὧν τε μάλιστα

ἱμείρων κατὰ γῆς ἔρχεται εἰς Ἀΐδην:

15ἄλλον νοῦσος ἔχει θυμοφθόρος: οὐδέ τίς ἐστιν

ἀνθρώπων ᾧ Ζεὺς μὴ κακὰ πολλὰ διδῷ.

 

 

3.  from Stobaeus’ Anthology CURFRAG.tlg-0255.3

 

τὸ πρὶν ἐὼν κάλλιστος, ἐπὴν παραμείψεται ὥρη,

οὐδὲ πατὴρ παισὶν τίμιος οὔτε φίλος.

 

 

4.  from Stobaeus’ Anthology CURFRAG.tlg-0255.4

 

Τιθωνῷ μὲν ἔδωκεν ἔχειν κακὸν ἄφθιτον ὁ Ζεὺς

γῆρας, ὃ καὶ θανάτου ῥίγιον ἀργαλέου.

 

 

5.  from Stobaeus’ Anthology CURFRAG.tlg-0255.5

 

[αὐτίκα μοι κατὰ μὲν χροιὴν ῥέει ἄσπετος ἱδρώς,

πτοιῶμαι δ᾽ ἐσορῶν ἄνθος ὁμηλικίης

τερπνὸν ὁμῶς καὶ καλόν, ἐπεὶ πλέον ὤφελεν εἶναι:

ἀλλ᾽ ὀλιγοχρόνιος γίγνεται ὥσπερ ὄναρ

5ἥβη τιμήεσσα: τὸ δ᾽ ἀργαλέον καὶ ἄμορφον

γῆρας ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς αὐτίχ᾽ ὑπερκρέμαται

ἐχθρὸν ὁμῶς καὶ ἄτιμον, ὅ τ᾽ ἄγνωστον τιθεῖ ἄνδρα,

βλάπτει δ᾽ ὀφθαλμοὺς καὶ νόον ἀμφιχυθέν.

 

 

6.  from Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers CURFRAG.tlg-0255.11

 

αἲ γὰρ ἄτερ νούσων τε καὶ ἀργαλέων μελεδωνῶν

ἑξηκονταέτη μοῖρα κίχοι θανάτου.

Two Brief Notes on Daphnis and Chloe

I quote from Moses Hadas’ translation in the old Doubleday Anchor paperback Three Greek Romances with its charming cover by Diana Klemin.

     Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe is the most popular of the Hellenistic romances and, in the opinion of many, the finest. The story, translated into French by Jacques Amyot in 1559, inititated a revival of the pastoral romance genre, influencing Honoré d'Urfé, Torquato Tasso, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In more recent times the work inspired paintings by Boucher in the 18th century, Gleyre in the 19th century, illustrations by Klimt and lithographs by Chagall in the 20th, as well as an opera by Offenbach and a ballet by Ravel.
     This interest and my own is founded on the narrative’s presentation of the powers of love. Under the mythological symbols of Eros, Pan, and the Nymphs, the intensity of human sexuality, what D. H. Lawrence much closer to our own age would have called its divinity, is presented with power and subtlety. Similar to the Pervigilium Veneris in its wonderful belated passion, the story is perhaps primarily a paean to life conceived as the reproductive power of nature. Yet at the same time as he recognizes the glorious but undifferentiated song of the creation’s renewal, the writer never slights the human element, with its burden of free will and an almost modern share of self-consciousness and self-contradiction.

1.
     The opening ekphrasis of a work of art supposedly displayed in the Lesbos grove of the Nymphs, a place itself of surpassing beauty, full of tree and flowers and watered by a fructifying stream. There, the author relates, he saw “fairest sight” he had ever seen, not the landscape but rather “the painted picture of a tale of love.” He claims that “an interpreter of the picture” detailed its story to him which he then set down. Thus, in a way, the supposed painting is an illustration of his narration; while in another his story is a partial depiction from a very human perspective, of the élan vital observable throughout the biological world.
     For the picture includes much more than a highly distilled version of the courtship of Daphnis and Chloe in its depiction of “young lovers pledging to one another.” The first image is of women in childbed and others tending infants, not ordinarily considered erotic situations, though they are rapidly enfolded in a grander scheme of fertility as sheep and shepherd are introduced until it is not entirely clear who is tending whom. All are united in a coherent mutually invigorating and passionately warm net of relationships.
     In front of the backdrop, though, in the human realm, one sees not only the lovers, but also “pirates” and “invaders.” These in fact are mentioned immediately before Longus assures the reader, “all these scenes spoke of love.” Intruders who impede the course of love are comparable to Catullus’ grumbling old men or the lauzengiers and gilos who out of jealousy or malice present obstacles to the troubadour’s affairs. Without conflict there can be no drama and therefore, from Greek New Comedy times through the most recent Hollywood romantic comedy, some force must separate the man and woman. When they overcome and can join together, the happy ending has arrived.
     Yet the figure of a pirate has a further significance in Longus. At the close of Book I Daphnis suffers the prolonged frustration of having admired Chloe’s naked body yet still not having sex with her. Far from a generalized Ovidian lovesickness, Daphnis is simply experiencing intrusively urgent sexual desire. He considers this state of suffering to be worse than the ordeal of his capture by pirates. “His soul,” one reads, “was still tarrying with the pirates,” who alarm him less than his beautiful beloved “for he was young, and a rustic, and so far ignorant of the piratical ways of love.”
     This final phrase, unique in the book, suggests not that he is dwelling on his adventure among the pirates, but rather that his experience of being on love is similar, that love is necessarily in some way piratical, which is to say selfish and domineering. The idea may seem out of place in a love story in which the leading characters are both impossibly naïve. Both are portrayed as child-like in their innocence and thus “pure” in their love. The primary view of love in Daphnis and Chloe is extravagantly unselfish; Daphnis, after all, recoils from initiating sexual intercourse for fear of hurting Chloe. Nature stands in the background, with its undoubtedly necessary, beautiful, and “right” drive to reproduce. This small dark grace note tempers the celebration of love, reminding readers that passion can make one miserable as well as elated and suggesting the many love relations which are less ideally mutual than Daphnis and Chloe’s in which one partner (or both) actually seeks to govern the other.
     The pirates in the story thus represent both the impediments love often encounters as well as the potential within love for a selfish desire to possess.

2.
     Only a few pages short of the end of Book I (1.30.6) is a scene in which Daphnis crosses a stream while escaping his pursuers. Not only are the pirates weighed down by their armor; Daphnis hitches a ride as “securely as if he were riding in a wagon” by seizing the horns of two cows heading across. This fanciful image is vivid and memorable in itself, but it also serves to introduce an odd digression.
     The author relates by the way as an interesting fact that cattle can swim better than people, but then in place of returning to his story, he continues to elaborate the point, conceding that waterfowl are even more at ease in the water and adding a second exception -- “and, of course, fish” – as though he were being scrupulous about facts in a natural history treatise. Not willing to drop the theme even at that, he notes that “an ox is never in danger of drowning, unless his hoofs become softened in the water and drop off.” This surely sounds as though it has roots in some ancient authority, though I have not traced it. With a flourish Longus then concludes the passage by noting that the animal’s swimming skills are proven by the many locations named Oxford (in Greek Βόσπορος) in the world.
     The passage stands out for its singularity but also because, though it has no relevance to the larger story, the author with a sort of lavish liberality not only raises the topic but then extends it. He possesses a sort of grand vision of the sort that tends to appear toward the end of an age in which every detail is worthy of examination since all are of equal significance. I am reminded of Athenaeus’ diners who never hesitate to spin off into a discussion of anything whatever, or of Robert Burton’s essays, or of the unpredictable, stream-like flow of conversation in a social group or of reminiscence on a page of Proust. Longus here is leisurely and learned and quaint, a collector of curious lore like a provincial Victorian cleric erudite in Greek and Latin but assigned a church among farmers, who keeps his erudition active by expounding as an amateur on local antiquities or butterflies or varieties of moss.
     I would be hard put to justify this passage in terms of the efficient design of the story’s aesthetic structure, but I, for one, welcome it as a reader. In the end it does contribute toward an understanding of the author’s sensibility, civilized and sophisticated, omnivorously curious, and friendly to all learning. I am reminded of a professor with whom I studied in graduate school who never prepared a lecture, but simply took off from the text under discussion and flew about with the freest of association from Sumer to situation comedies to Milton leaving some students nonplussed. It is because of him that my own advanced study, this note, for example, seemed to me plausible, yet he was not to everyone’s taste.

Rereading the Classics [Burton]

This is the first of what I expect to be a series of essays along the lines of Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited, originally a feature in the Saturday Review during the later sixties when intelligent literary comment could still find a page in a magazine of more or less general circulation. Rexroth said that he was not engaged in picking a top forty, his own version of Dr. Eliot’s five foot shelf, but merely talking about books he loved. He had a good-sized list of topics he never reached, and the reader can regret the lack of his pithy words about Water Margin, say, or the essay he projected grouping Kropotkin with Ruskin and William Morris. Having, like Rexroth and my topic in the piece below, spent a good share of time in reading, I, like them, speak perhaps most precisely about myself when speaking about books.


     Robert Burton, the British scholar and divine, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, enjoys something of a cult, which is only to say that, while he is not to the taste of many, his partisans feel immoderate affection for his book. What is more, his partisans include such contrasting sensibilities as Dr. Johnson and John Keats, as well as the ill-starred General Custer.
     During the same period when Burton chose to investigate the human psyche in his monumental work, sometimes called the earliest comprehensive text on psychiatry, Francis Bacon was pursuing truth in other realms of natural history. As a courtier (Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans and Lord Chancellor of England) Bacon wrote several accomplished if unimpressive poems in pious and classicizing veins. In his philosophic writing, however, he regularly emphasizes the fictive quality of poetry, calling it “feigned history.” Though “a part of learning,” poetry “being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things.” He cites “One of the fathers” who called “poesy vinum daemonum, because it fireth the imagination; and yet, it is but with the shadow of a lie.” Its only power was “to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things denies it.” [1]
     Burton might have argued in turn that all he knew was his own mind and thus to report this knowledge is the veriest direct observation. Surely, too, his pages contain the fruits of exhaustive research and a plenitude of cases for inductive analysis. And many a reader will testify to having found more than a “shadow of satisfaction” in their books. In the twenty-first century, we can scarcely avoid observing that Bacon’s descendants have immensely expanded the privileges of science and technology, though psychiatry has been reduced to diagnosing and prescribing, and humanistic studies have, especially in recent years, withered.
     A writer’s writer, Burton weighs each element of syntax and constructs dynamic and elegant mobiles of words. A scholar for whom Classical citations constitute a good share of discourse, he refers to authorities obscure even at Oxford with perfectly natural familiarity. Further, he is a true philosopher, in the old sense of Buddha and Socrates, for whom the primary question, the really important one, is how to find happiness in life. Finally, many readers through the years have found his Anatomy, the only book he wrote other than a satire in Latin, to be a most entertaining volume, suitable for taking up and putting down at any point. In this extraordinary book, while discussing the capacity of vicious spirits to bring melancholy, he manages to swerve into an inquest on the corporeality of spirits with prodigious batteries of experts testifying on either side, and he turns then to the natural question of whether, if they be bodily, they must then have excrement. [2] Other authorities, we hear, believe all spirits to be strictly spherical in shape. Burton exhibits the views of the learned; the reader may decide on the evidence.
     Though Burton provides a rigorous outline plan, his tendency always is to wander in what can approach stream of consciousness. Focusing on infirmities of the mind, he finds occasion to discuss human psychology in an all but unrestricted way. After all, according to Burton, all men are depressive. And for him the term melancholy is broad enough to take in mania as well as depression, as well as the derangements of every deadly sin, and countless other irregular forms of behavior. While he reviews the entire world (or at least a library reflecting the entire world), he tells his readers his motivation is intimately personal: “I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy.” [3] His true topic, though, goes beyond even psychology and tends toward the encyclopedic. Burton declares, “I had a great desire. . .to have some smattering in all, to be aliquis in omnibus, nullus in singulis.” Wishing to consume all knowledge, this “roving humour” has led to systemless study: “I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method. I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment.” Yet Burton’s mental life was teeming, and he found his academic seclusion, “a monastic life ipse mihi theatrum.” [4]
     The universal scope of his interests is consistent with his wandering style which moves from one thing to another naturally but unpredictably. Though never shy about expressing opinions on these multifarious issues, he tends, as real life does, to simply present the evidence and leave the contradictions for the reader to sort.
     Because of his desultory style and constant patchwork of quotation, Burton may be claimed by post-modernists as a bricoleur, pasting together as he does a tissue of others’ utterances Only perhaps in the pages of Athenaeus does the reader find a like delight in moving from one thing fluidly to another, engaging with all that is human, making an unmapped voyage of discovery by dead reckoning, and thus reproducing the quality of lived experience.
Burton’s ultimate contribution is his attitude, his convincing pose as the man who has researched the cosmos, and, familiar with the endless odd vagaries of the human mind, has become broadly tolerant, accepting, and moderate in all things. Sex, food, party politics, he is easy-going in most things. His intimate acquaintance with the past has brought him a sophisticated recognition of what never changes. The passions of our hearts – romantic, religious, and simply depressive -- are too familiar to dismiss lightly yet too absurd to take seriously. Like the Epicureans of late antiquity, has achieved a sort of weary acceptance, facing up to the terrible terms of existence with dignity and a redemptive style, spinning the most wonderful tapestries of words while waiting to die. He is, of course, nominally a Christian (indeed a vicar and a rector), and he asserts conventional Christian doctrine and Christian prejudices, but the reader may doubt that that role sufficiently characterizes his spirituality or what he offers to a modern.
     Frye, whose Anatomy of Criticism was a central text of my own early literary education, regards the anatomy as a subgenre of Menippean satire, and the spirit of Menippus the Cynic (and his teacher Leucippus) does inform Burton’s work. Yet, if Burton never cared to deflate the holy afflatus as his models Leucippus and Democritus had done, he did gaze at life with the same wide open eyes and then managed to so relish words that he built a fabulous monument of them, sometimes resembling Seneca, of whom he thought so much, and sometimes looking more like one of those weird and endless outsider art constructions like Cheval’s Palais Ideal or Henry Darger’s endless illustrations.
Democritus, whose character he assumes, was said to leave his retreat now and then to walk to the port and “laugh heartily at such variety of ridiculous objects, which there he saw.” As Juvenal tells us, Democritus “found food for laughter at every meeting with his kind: his wisdom shows us that men of high distinction and destined to set great examples may be born in a dullard air, and in the land of mutton-heads.” [5] In the same way, when Burton’s depression weighed upon him, unrelieved by either his beloved books or his eloquent pen, he would walk to the Bridge-foot in Oxford and his spirits would rise as he listened to the barge-men scolding and storming and swearing at each other. There must have been a grand edge to that laughter, and we know from his book that Burton would have found the very king’s court equally ridiculous.


1. The Advancement of Learning. Bacon refers to Augustine in Contra Academicas (386). In light of these views, it is amusing to recall the faction over the centuries that has maintained that Bacon, a “concealed poet,” was the true source of Shakespeare’s plays.

2. These topics are covered in one small section of Pt. I, Sec. 2, Mem. I, subs. 2.

3. 20 in the 1932 Everyman edition.

4. 17-18

5. This translation by G. G. Ramsay.

A Garland of Greek Professors

I have altered a few details and, regrettably, the names, though the originals seem to convey wonderfully apt impressions of their bearers. In spite of what may seem a corrupt taste for oddity, I have no wish to discomfit these men should they go innocently googling themselves. I respected them all for their learning and I owe to them any modest competence of my own. The most unlikely name, though, that of Prof. Oliver, is genuine and has long been on the public record.


     I studied Greek in college with the intention of reading the ancient poets, but along the way I also came to know the extraordinary world of classical scholars. Departments of Greek and Latin Classics are now out-of-the-way corners of academia, yet the surviving programs maintain rigorous standards nonetheless and a blissful conviction that historical philology is a promising route to enlightenment. Students of the history of higher education will know that, whereas Latin and Greek constituted for centuries the central core of the European curriculum, such studies are rapidly vanishing from even some first-rate universities. The textbook I used – Allen’s from 1916 – was the first American beginning Ancient Greek book for college students. The introduction bemoans the fact that, “regrettable as it may seem,” increasing numbers of students come to university without any Greek whatever.
     My first Greek professor, J. R. H. Ayckbourn, was a sober man. His sole eccentricity consisted in buttoning only the lowest button of his suit jacket. Since he had an exceedingly tall and slender figure with a billiard ball head, this lent him the appearance of always falling forward, but in fact he managed to remain upright better than some colleagues.
     Another professor in the University of Illinois Classics Department was Revilo Oliver, whose name is a palindrome. Despite this peculiarity, Oliver had a distinguished early career, including a dissertation on a Sanskrit text and a Guggenheim fellowship, but he then came out as what can fairly be called a Nazi. A founder of the John Birch Society (though he was later expelled, probably the only person the group ever found too reactionary), along with his scholarly work, he produced dozens of polemical books with titles like Our Jewdicial System. During my freshman year he embarrassed the university by expressing satisfaction at Kennedy’s assassination, thus obliging civil libertarians to support him in the cause of academic freedom when critics called for his dismissal.
     In those days, the department at Illinois also included Prof. Scheetz whose taste for gay s/m activities led a student who frequented the same social circles to retail the following anecdote: “You know that wild thunderstorm the other night, lightning flashing, high winds, a real downpour. Right in the middle of it I ran into Prof. Scheetz, dashing down the street in his bare feet. I said, ‘Sir, whatever are you doing out on a night like this?’ He gazed back with wild enthusiasm: ‘Looking for a downed wire.’”
     Prof. Seneca Biblonides who later directed my studies was an enormous albino, maybe 6’6” and 300 pounds, who paced about holding his Greek text an inch from his face as he taught. It was Prof. Biblonides who, when I gave him some of my Sappho translations to review, told me that he really had neither interest nor knowledge about literature. I could only contemplate the lifelong dedication to the study of Greek and Latin by one with so little curiosity about what was actually written in those languages.
     Henri “Bobo” Laurent with whom I studied for years with one other scholar, went through mysterious phases in which he would gain and lose hundreds of pounds. When he was relatively thin, he would park his Harley outside and come to class in black t-shirts and jeans; when he was heavy, he invariably appeared in suit and tie. When not engaged in research -- Laurent had a book about classical influences on Jerry Siegel, the writer of Superman comics -- he liked to paint lovingly detailed pictures of Superman in full regalia.
     The students, too, were a colorful crew, though with no place here, apart from what this account, I suppose, implies of at least one whimsical temperament.

In Defense of a Useless Higher Education

SUNY Albany just closed their Classics Department. Where is solidarity? Professorial protest? Student objections? I'm afraid that most Americans have lost sight of the unique role of higher education.


      I judge universities by the strength of their Classics departments, and the list of institutions in the running is shrinking yearly as the field that dominated European high education until the twentieth century is altogether dropped by one school after another. I would argue that mine is a just evaluative method, not because of my own affection for Greek and Roman literature, but because Classics provides a test case of whether a school is pursuing the true role of higher education: the cultivation of knowledge for its own sake. The undergraduate studies to learn how to think: how to take in information, process it, and generate original ideas. On the graduate and professional levels, the very same activity continues on the level of research, the production of new knowledge.
     Intellectual work is surely the definitive capability of our species, and a person thinking hard resembles a cat about to pounce. Each practices the skills perfected by the evolution of the codes of eons of DNA. The observer can scarcely doubt that the cat enjoys the hunt even if it prefers to dine on pelleted cat food, and, for humans, the value of using the brain is likewise dependent on no practical ends.
     Research of various sorts is conducted in a number of contemporary institutions, most of them large corporations, but nowhere except in the university is it viable for its own sake. Experiments that might result in a lucrative and patentable discovery can always find funding; pure research has only one home. It is true but irrelevant that often discoveries by “pure” scientific researchers have proven useful. It is unlikely that the Classicist’s findings will be influential outside his professional circles, yet they possess nonetheless a share in the grand unfolding project of human knowledge that is nurtured only at universities.
     The unfortunate fact is, of course, that research in higher education is less and less independent. America’s romance with capitalism and today’s budget crises have combine to lead colleges and universities to seek ever more “alliances’ with big money, tailoring their programs not to the professors’ own interests, but to the ends that will attract money. The call of these sirens is inaudible, of course, to the Classicist, whose field, rigorous though it be, is unlikely ever to draw much cash.
     The modern university is increasingly a vocational school. The notion that a liberal education will prepare the student for any sort of problem-solving has faded before the unashamed advance of training for jobs. It is true that historically, universities have sometimes included courses in preparation for “the learned professions” of medicine, law, and the church (though many doctors, lawyers, and clergy prior to this century had no college training). Few people practicing these professions ever do research (professors in the fields do), but these historic exceptions have been overwhelmed by endless explicitly vocational programs of no scholarly or scientific pretensions, boasting instead graduate hiring rates and starting salaries and creating an environment completely inimical to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Even soi-disant friends of higher education think they can make their apologetics only by pointing to economic advantage, though by its very nature state-sponsored research properly belongs only to those intellectuals whose work would not be supported by the market. Money-making is a different game altogether.
     These ideas are entirely out of step with the thinking of politicians and the populace today; indeed, they would find little acceptance even among academicians. The church controlled European higher education for many years. Then, after a brief period of secularism and at least a facade of ideals beyond the dollar, corporations have come to dominate, and learning cannot fail to be the loser. The question is simply whether we want to trust the progress of the species to those seeking to produce new knowledge or those pursuing personal wealth. Which is likely to better serve humanity?