A Look at Ten Versions of Martial's Guide to the Good Life

 

 

 

Martial x 47

 

Vitam quae faciant beatiorem,

Iucundissime Martialis, haec sunt:

Res non parta labore, sed relicta;

Non ingratus ager, focus perennis;

Lis numquam, toga rara, mens quieta;

Vires ingenuae, salubre corpus;

Prudens simplicitas, pares amici;

Convictus facilis, sine arte mensa;

Nox non ebria, sed soluta curis;

Non tristis torus, et tamen pudicus;

Somnus, qui faciat breves tenebras:

Quod sis, esse velis nihilque malis;

Summum nec metuas diem nec optes.

 

 

     All translators agree that no translation can be altogether successful in reproducing a poem’s qualities in a new language.  Yet translations remain useful for two reasons.  They convey some portion of the original, allowing readers a view, though an imperfect one, of otherwise inaccessible writing.  Secondly, each translation may excel in different ways, so that the reader of a number of versions of a lyric will not only develop a fuller view of the source poem but also encounter new poems, some of which are worth reading in the target language.  Works like Chapman or Pope’s renderings of Homer, Fitzgerald’s Rubiayat, Pound’s Cathay, and Lowell’s Imitations are valuable in themselves as well as embodying, to varying degrees of accuracy, earlier literary works.

     This principle is illustrated by an examination of several of the many translations of Martial X, 47, a poem that owes much of its celebrity to its attractive moralizing theme.  The poem has been a favorite for centuries: one scholar has published an article with thirty-nine versions before 1750 (Stuart Gillespie, “Martial's Epigram 10.47: Thirty-Nine English Translations to 1750,” Translation and Literature, Volume 24, Number 1).  The attraction is doubtless largely due to the author’s recommendation of a rational and moderate enjoyment of life.  Martial’s theme here has been labeled an “Intellectually debased Epicureanism” as well as, more sympathetically, “a cultivated Epicurean conformist.”  (The former is the opinion of Alison Keith,  the latter phrase is J. P. Sullivan’s.  See Allison Keith, “Epicurean Principle and Poetic Program in Martial Epigrams 10.47–48,” Phoenix Vol. 72, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2018.)  For a modern pagan the recommendations remain as appealing as they did to the ancients.  This variety of philosophia perennis has been so attractive that this poem has been very frequently translated.  While another rendering is far from necessary to convey Martial’s ideas, each version possesses unique charms and weaknesses. 

     Martial seems to imagine himself being advised by a philosophic mentor on that central topic of Classical philosophy (though it plays little role for today’s academic philosophers), “the good life.”  Epicurus adapted  the old Delphic maxim “nothing in excess” (μηδὲν ἄγαν) recommending sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη) and taught that one must strive to eliminate or minimize pain, both physical pain (ἀπονία) and mental anxiety (ἀταραξία).  Avoiding suffering is surely a program most could accept as desirable.  Martial here not only resembles other Classical authors (for instance Horace in Epode 2), but he is also reminiscent of the long tradition of Chinese poets retiring to mountain retreats under the influence of Buddhist or Daoist quietism or the Confucian doctrine of the mean, zhōngyōng (中庸). 

 

 

A new translation of Martial x, 47

 

The things that make a happy life,

are these, my genial friend:

no work, but money one’s been left,

rich fields, a burning hearth,

no fights, rare togas, quiet mind,

with strength and fleshly health,

simplicity and well-matched friends,

good guests at rustic meals,

no drunken nights, but free of cares,

a joyful decent bed,

good sleep that makes the night slip by,

satisfied, with spite for none,

you’ll neither dread nor crave your final day.

 

 

     The long list of desiderata makes this a comparatively simple poem to translate.  I proceeded pretty much line by line.  This version uses iambs with tetrameters alternating with trimeters with a bit of syncopation in line twelve and a concluding pentameter to lend the last line a gnomic air.  I like the less-than-blank verse line for its casual, folksy cadence.  Even without the rhyme, the background beat is like a nursery rhyme or folk song.  (And a few of Surrey’s stumbles are enough to suggest why rhyme is a burden in this short lyric even in the most skilled hands.)  This does, of course truncate the lines somewhat, leading to such decisions as the omission of Martial’s own name in the second line.  (This detail struck me as distracting in any event, causing the reader to wonder fruitlessly who the speaker might be.)  We will assume, as others do, that “rare togas” sufficiently implies a minimum of formal business.

 

 

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1557)

 

Martial, the things that do attain

The happy life, be these, I find:

The riches left, not got with pain;

the fruitful ground, the quiet mind:

the equal friend, no grudge, no strife;

No charge of rule, nor governance;

Without disease, the healthful life;

The household of continuance:

The mean diet, no delicate fare;

True wisdom join'd with simpleness;

The night discharged of all care,

Where wine the wit may not oppress:

The faithful wife, without debate;

Such sleeps as may beguile the night.

Contented with thine own estate;

Ne wish for Death, ne Fear his might.

 

 

   Surrey uses smooth and polished four beat lines, though he does use three more than the Latin.  The interference of rhyme intrudes in such places as the slightly odd use of “attain” in the first line and the obscure “continuance” in line eight.  Surrey expands the reference to “rare toga-wearing” in line six as suggesting avoiding government office and then repeats the meaning to pad out the line.  In line thirteen the phrase “no debate,” absent in the original, calls up the convention of the termagant spouse, whereas the original simply implies passionate yet faithful.  Line fourteen is memorably strong.

    Surrey’s is a polished craftsman whose translations were among his most memorable and influential work.  He pioneered the use of blank verse in his admirable translation of a portion  of the Aeneid, and these shorter, more intimate lines are equally effective.  The epigram form encourages the formulation of witty little packages of thought contained in a line or a half-line, almost every one of which delivers his thought direct without distractions.  The tendency toward sententiae is foreign to the modern sensibility, but it appears here to advantage. 

  

 

Ben Jonson (1640)

 

The Things that make the happier life, are these,

Most pleasant Martial; Substance got with ease,

Not labour'd for, but left thee by thy Sire;

A Soyle, not barren, a continewall fire;

Never at law; seldome in office gown'd;

A quiet mind; free powers; and body sound;

A wise simplicity; freindes alike-stated;

Thy table without art, and easy-rated:

Thy night not dronken, but from cares layd wast;

No sowre, or sollen bed-mate, yet a Chast;

Sleepe, that will make the darkest howres swift-pac't;

Will to bee, what thou art; and nothing more:

Nor feare thy latest day, nor wish therfore.

 

    

     Jonson, a close student of Martial and the expert author of many epigrams himself, employs pentameters.  “Gown’d” is a clever word for the phrase about togas. “Friends alike-stated” is clumsy and unclear, and its rhyme “easy-rated” is little better.  “Cares laid waste” is another casualty of the rhyme scheme, and the phrase itself suggests the opposite of temperance.  Simply saying one’s wife ought be neither sour nor sullen yet chaste seems rather too modest an aim.  The penultimate line is neatly crafted, but the final word seems weak enough to spoil the otherwise good effect of the whole. 

    Jonson is, as in all his work, professionally competent.  I find this piece, however, to contain  few delights.  Though in fact he uses a syllable less per line than Martial, his English sounds slightly loosened.  The rhymes for me come round with too great a regularity, promising a conclusion with every other line that does not always arrive (and which sometimes arrives at more inopportune points). 

 

 

Abraham Cowley (1656)

 

Since, dearest Friend! 'tis your desire to see

A true receipt of happiness from me;

These are the chief ingredients, if not all:

Take an estate neither too great, nor small

Which quantum sufficit the doctors call.

Let this estate from parents' care descend;

The getting it too much of life does spend.

Take such a ground, whose gratitude may be

A fair encouragement for industry.

Let constant fires the winter's fury take,

And let thy kitchen's be a vestal flame.

Thee to the town let never suit at law,

And rarely, very rarely, business draw.

They active mind in equal temper keep,

in undisturbed peace, yet not in sleep.

Let exercise a vigorous health maintain,

Without which all the composition's vain.

In the same weight prudence and innocence take;

And of each does the just mixture make.

But a few friendships wear, and let them be

By nature and by fortune fit for thee.

Instead of art and luxury in food,

Let mirth and freedom make thy table good.

If any cares into the daytime creep,

At night, without wine's opium, let them sleep,

Let rest, which nature does to darkness wed,

And not lust, recommend to thee thy bed.

Be satisfied, and pleas'd with what thou art;

Act cheerfully and well th' allotted part;

Enjoy the present hour, be thankful for the past,

And neither fear, nor wish th' approaches of the last.

 

 

     One first notices the length.  At thirty-one lines Cowley’s rendering is two and a half times as long as Martial’s.  In part this expansion is due to vestiges of the amplificatio characterizing much medieval rhetoric and Renaissance euphuism.  Thus the two words denoting “fertile soil” here become two lines on the ideal size for an estate, an attribute unmentioned in the original, including the clause “which quantum sufficit the doctors call,” words that seem rather like an altogether unnecessary footnote.  Though neglected at first the simple word “ingratus” had not been forgotten, as it bobs up a few lines later in “Take such a ground, whose gratitude may be/ A fair encouragement for industry.”  The four word recommendation for “prudens simplicitas” and “pares amici” becomes here four lines instead. 

     This relaxed unfolding of Martial’s laconic phrases has its own charm, however, as Cowley generates a tone of leisurely discursiveness, implying a persona at ease, whose unhurried portrait of the civilized life is exemplary of the peaceful ease he has achieved.  In spite of his expansions and deviations from the Latin Cowley’s poem has much to recommend it.  He sounds like a baronet with a glass of port by the fireside, not Martial perhaps, but appealing.  (Cowley’s poetry and essays are, is in my opinion, unjustly neglected.)

 

 

Sir Richard Fanshawe (c. 1660)

 

The things that make a life to please,

Sweetest Martial, they are these:

Estate inherited not got:

A thankful field, hearth always hot:

City seldom , lawsuits never:

Equal friends agreeing ever:

Health of body, peace of mind:

Sleeps that till the morning bind:

Wise simplicity, plain fare:

Not drunken nights, yet loos'd from care:

A sober, not a sullen spouse,

Clean strength , not such as his that plows:

Wish only what thou art, to be;

Death neither wish , nor fear to see.

 

    

     Fanshawe is notably concise, with each four-beat line a unit.  Tight expressions such as “estate inherited not got” are followed by satisfying rhymes, here “a thankful field, hearth always hot.”  Similarly

“city seldom , lawsuits never” admirably conveys the sense, completed by “equal friends agreeing ever” where the melody compensates for the phrase’s awkwardness.  As with many other translators, Fanshawe decorously minimizes the marital joy with “a sober, not a sullen spouse,” which implies nothing positive at  all.  The antepenultimate line “clean strength, not such as his that plows” seems to come from nowhere, owing little to the corresponding Latin “somnus, qui faciat breves tenebras.”  Was he desperate to rhyme “spouse”?  And why does its apparent closer translation “sleeps that till the morning bind” occur earlier?  The concluding couplet, on the other hand, is accurate, shapely, and sweet-sounding.

     Sir Richard Fanshawe translated ably from Portuguese, Latin, and Italian.  This version of Martial has much to admire was well as several lapses.   

 

 

James Elphinston (1782)

 

Of things that heighten human bliss,

The sum, sweet Martial, may be this.

A freehold, not amast by care;

But dropt on a deserving heir:

A soil, that ev'ry culture pays,

A hearth, with never-dying blaze:

No contest, and but little court;

A quiet mind, her own support:

A gale, to fan ingenuous flame;

Exertion, to enforce the frame:

Simplicity, that wisdom blends;

Equality, the bond of friends:

An easy converse, artless board,

With all the little needfull stor'd:

A night not soaking, care effac'd;

A couch not dismal, always chaste:

Sleep stealing o'er the gloom so sweet,

That evening bids and morning meet.

content, which nought beyond aspires;

And death nor dreads, nor yet desires.

 

 

     Though Dr. Johnson’s friend James Elphinston was a considerable linguistics scholar, he seems to have been an indifferent poet.  Expanding the verse to twenty lines, he managed to include considerable extraneous material.  The meaning of “a soil, that ev'ry culture pays” is not immediately obvious; “enforce the frame” is awkward; and “not dismal, always chaste” hardly sounds positive.  A couplet like “Sleep stealing o'er the gloom so sweet,/ That evening bids and morning meet” has regular cadence and a neat rhyme but the syntax requires untangling.  “With all the little needful stor’d” comes out of nowhere and the meaning of “not soaking” is not clear at once.  Such difficulties are obstacles that the smooth metrics glide over.  His final line is tidy and effective, but perhaps more memorable than Elphinston’s translation is Burns’ epigrammatic reproach to its author.

 

 

To Mr E - on his translation of and commentaries on Martial

 

O Thou, whom Poesy abhors,

Whom Prose has turned out of doors;

Heards't thou yon groan? - proceed no further!

'Twas laurell'd Martial calling, Murther!

 

 

     While I would hardly imagine the shade of the Roman poet calling out for revenge, I do find Elphinston’s translation marred by awkward phrasing and shackled by rhyme. 

 

 

Rolfe Humphries (1963)

 

Here are the things, dear friend, which make

Life not impossible to take:

Riches bequeathed, not won by toil;

Fire on the hearth; responsive soil;

No law suits; seldom formal dress;

A frank but wise disarmingness;

A healthy body, and a mind

Alert, but peaceably inclined;

Congenial guests; a table set

Without excessive etiquette;

Nights free from exigence and worry,

But not too bleary or too blurry;

In bed, a wife not frigid nor

Too reminiscent of a whore;

Slumber, to make the shadows swift;

Contentment with your native gift;

And, without longing or dismay,

The prospect of your final day.

 

 

     Humhries is a professional, but his wit sometimes leads him beyond his original.  Lines like “life not impossible to take” are clever but misleading.   The rare term “disarmingness” is distracting.  “Bleary” and Blurry,” again, are ingenious but off-focus for tone.  “Exigence” is too formal a word for this usage, and “too reminiscent of a whore” is too inventive.

     In spite of these strictures, Humphries’ is an excellent version.  He is capable of juggling even the rhymes while staying on course. 

 

 

Peter Porter (1972)

 

Friend and namesake, genial Martial, life’s

happier when you know what happiness is:

money inherited, with no need to work,

property run by experts (yours or your wife’s),

Town House properly kitchened and no bus-

iness worries, family watchdogs, legal quirks.

Hardly ever required to wear a suit,

mind relaxed and body exercised

(nothing done that’s just seen to be done),

candour matched by tact; friends by repute

won and all guests good-natured -- wise

leavers and warm stayers like the sun;

food that isn’t smart or finicky,

not too often drunk or shaking off

dolorous dreams; your appetite for sex

moderate but inventive, nights like sea-

scapes under moonlight, never rough;

don’t scare yourself with formulae, like x

equals nought, the schizophrenic quest!

What else is there? Well, two points at least --

wishing change wastes both time and breath,

life's unfair and nothing's for the best,

but having started finish off the feats --

neither dread your last day nor long for death.

 

 

     Peter Porter called his 1972 collection After Martial since his intention was not to follow closely upon his original.  He stretches out Martial’s thirteen lines to twenty-four five-beat lines, allowing himself to introduce considerable new material.  His rationalization of the name in the first line (“friend and namesake”) serves a purpose, but the second half of line four is not only absent in the Latin but, more seriously, it adds nothing in the English.  Suspending the word ”business” at the end of line five only to complete it on line six is surely distracting and fussy to most peoples’ taste.  Breaking “seascapes” into two parts is less jarring due to its being a compound word and the whole phrase “seascapes under moonlight” is pretty enough to be satisfying though there is nothing in Martial to give it birth.  Lines seventeen and eighteen, though, run seriously awry with the peculiar formula “x equals nought” and the modern term “schizophrenic.”  Whatever it may mean to “finish off the feats,” the phrase enfeebles the conclusion here, though the final line is neatly crafted.  The “sneer” and “the poisoned sigh” are elaborations, vivid in English but absent in the original.

 

 

Peter Whigham (1984)

 

My carefree Namesake, this the art   

Shall lead thee to life's happier part:

A competence inherited, not won,

Productive acres and a constant home;

No courts, few formal days, your mind stable,

A native vigor in a healthy frame;

A tact in candor, friendships on a par,

Convivial courtesies, a plain table;

A night, not drunken, yet shall banish care,

A bed, not frigid, yet not one of shame;

A sleep that makes the dark hours shorter:

Prefer your state and hanker for none other,

Nor fear, nor seek to meet, your final hour.

 

 

     A follower of Pound, Whigham was capable of sounding like an eighteenth century neo-Classical poet at times, yet he has loosened his model to allow many half-rhymes in a pattern that will seem unpredictable at first reading.  His use of a pentameter line allows regular caesurae, and the whole proceeds most smoothly. 

     This is the best in my view of the modern translations. 

 

 

Brendan Kennelly (2008)

 

What constitutes a happy life?

Enough money to meet your needs

steady work

a comfortable fire

a clear distance from law

a minimum of city business

a peaceful mind and a healthy body

simple wisdom and firm friends

enjoyable dinners and plain living

nights free from care

a virtuous wife who's not a prude

enough sleep to make the darkness short

contentment with the life you have,

avoiding the sneer, the poisoned sigh;

no fear of death

and no desire to die.

 

 

     Kennelly is a talented modern poet whose version flouts the regularities of the original, preferring free verse with the line varying from three syllables to ten and little attention to rhyme or assonance.  Alliteration is allowed a subdued effect: the proximity of “money” and “meet” in line two, “”firm” and “friends” in  line eight, “sneer” and “sigh” in  eleven, and “desire” and “die” in thirteen.  This casual form and the lack of punctuation until the end supplies an appropriate off-hand tone that reinforces the theme.  M any of the lines are out so efficiently into English that, though Kennelly‘s version has three more lines than the Latin, many of the terms are expressed in fewer syllables.  “Steady work” deviates from his source which is closer to meaning no work at all, but perhaps this is a concession to modernity which frowns upon the idle aristocrat.  Like others, Kennelly neglects the positive term in describing the connubial bed.  “Make the darkness short” is both accurate and neatly phrased. 

     His rendering is smooth and natural in modern American usage and conveys the poem’s essential elements without asserting any translator’s peculiarities.  Its weakness arises from the same qualities: an offhand prosiness that, as it draws no attention to itself, run s the risk of sounding artless, though it is more successful than versions with distracting characteristics not found in the original.

The Belated Eroticism of Agathias Scholasticus

Numbers in parentheses refer to poems in Book 5 of the Greek Anthology. The Greek original and a new translation of 5.294 follow the discussion. 

     In the sixth century of the Christian era Agathias Scholasticus produced a new edition of the Greek Anthology, taking the editor’s privilege of including a generous share of his own epigrams. His period marked the transition from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages. During his lifetime the eastern emperor Justinian required citizens to profess Christianity, suppressed the pagan rhetors, and ended government support for the neo-Platonic Academy. Agathias himself was steeped in pre-Christian tradition; many readers suspect he had only a veneer of Christianity. He was a substantial historian, continuing Procopius’ History of Justinian, while practicing as well as a lawyer and civic activist. As pater civitatis he assumed the management of the renovation of the public latrines in Smyrna, inspiring him to write epigrams celebrating the salutary improvement he had brought, but also moralizing: “All the extravagance of mortals and their expensive dishes excreted here have lost their previous charm.” (GA 9.662 and 642) 

      The fifth book of the Anthology, titled "Amatory Epigrams” contains twenty-three poems by Agathias, virtually none of which expresses simple, straightforward passion. The poet himself problematizes his erotics in an epigram lamenting the unsuitability of each option for love object. (302) Every choice, he laments, is accompanied by inconvenience. Neither courtesans, nor virgins, nor wife, nor other men’s wives, nor widows, nor serving maids will do. One might as well, he concludes, imitate Diogenes and choose masturbation. 

      Though that conclusion hardly sounds romantic, Agathias is nonetheless capable of deploying certain familiar romantic tropes: the complaint of a watchful duenna (289), the lover’s subjugation by the beloved (299) or suffering a sleepless night and hoping for a dream, at least, of love. (237) 

      Other epigrams cover a surprisingly broad range. They include conversational pieces such as a graduate student’s letter home missing his girlfriend and male friend (292), a comment on the isolation of women (297), and a simple declaration of heterosexuality. (278) Though considering age in general the enemy of desire (273), he appreciates the sexiness of an old lady. (282) 

      A group of his epigrams depend upon word games and jeux d’esprit. In one (218) he describes what seems to be an adulterous intrigue using names adapted from contemporary drama, while in another he plays on the mythological associations of the name of Ariadne. (222) 

      Another group of Agathias’ poems testify to the power of symbolically displaced, or fetishized eroticism. For instance, in one (285) he kisses her “girdle” instead of her flesh, while in another he relishes the cup that has touched her lips. (261) In others he addresses the lamp that has overseen his amours (263), and describes the gift of a “coif” that can becomingly bind her midriff. (276) 

      In general the poets of the Anthology are as likely to speak of one night stands with prostitutes or men as of enduring affairs of the heart. Thus Agathias’ casual and worldly persona is likely less a reflection of his own emotional sensibility as of the norms of his age. In the proem to his edition of the collection as a whole he suggests that poetry is primarily a source if pleasure for the surfeited or jaded appetites of his listeners. This pose is explicit in the introductory verses which take the form of an address to his audience, a cultivated company headed by the leading local cavalry officer. They would have enjoyed a dinner as lavish as the host could make it. Wine was certainly flowing. Perhaps it was before the flute-girls that Agathias would have been asked to present some elegant epigrams, the best of earlier times mixed with a number of the new.  

     This dramatic setting is useful reinforcement to Agathias’ opening image. Agathias declares that he means to spread a verbal πανδαισία, for which Liddell and Scott offer the glorious if slightly mystifying definition “a complete banquet, a banquet at which nothing fails.” He fears that the guests may be already sated (ἐμπεπλησμένους) with literature, stuffed, indeed, to belching (τὰ σιτία προσκόρως ἐρυγγάνειν) with the magnificent and varied board of poetry already available from earlier eras. 

     The weight of the greatness of Greek tradition is evident in the poet’s heavy use of convention in metrics, imagery, and theme. Yet, after a rhetorical claim that he expects a reader to be indulgent toward his work out of courtesy alone, he promises to provide novelty. (l. 20) The poem has little to say about love itself and a good deal about barriers to love. While it is true that most love literature from all ages is concerned with overcoming such obstacles, their description is usually accompanied by considerable praise of the beloved. Agathias’ poem takes the passion for granted and speaks only of impediments.

    The poem appeals to me for its decadence. Reminiscent of the great Pervigilium Veneris, the poem implies a refined pleasure in simply contemplating the barriers to satisfaction, maintaining the lover’s sustained pre-orgasmic condition. I am reminded of the Daoist sexual regimen which eschewed completion of the sexual act in an effort to build qi. One might consider Agathias’ poem and others like it as the product of a hedonism for which simple love has gone flat or, whether alternatively or simultaneously, as a contemplative exercise, a kind of meditation on desire. 

translation note 

     Believing the modern ear to be deaf to the ancient meters, even apart from the change from quantitative to accentual/syllabic prosody, I have not attempted to duplicate the elegiac couplets characteristic of the epigram form. Instead the whole thing is basically in iambic hexameter, a rare choice in English. There is most often a line by line correspondence between Greek and English. An extra syllable hangs on the end like a prolonged sigh. 

Greek Anthology 5.294 

The envious old woman lay next to the young, 

fixed crosswise over all the broad expanse of bed, 

extended like a bastion to block invaders there. 

My lady’s veiled by ample folds of sheets and quilts. 

Her so conceited handmaid barred the entry door.

She lies asleep, weighed down with too much unmixed wine. 

Still unafraid, I reached out with my hand to lift 

 and open up the bar that latched the door. The draft 

from one quick wave of cloak then quenched each fiery torch. 

I slinked through crosswise softly through the room, 

Avoiding then the sleeping guard I pulled myself 

in further, underneath the bed frame, lying prone 

 I pulled myself up just a bit to lean against 

the wall and propped up there I then did face my love. 

Caressing both her breasts I lightly kissed her face. 

My lips played all about and felt her softness there. 

The only prize I captured was her lovely mouth.

The only sign I had of my advance that night 

I haven’t breached the walls of her virginity. 

That still remains untouched. For now I will not try. 

The ramparts will not stop me. Should all go my way, 

I’ll weave a wreath for you, o Cypris of love’s spoils. 

 ἡ γραῦς ἡ φθονερὴ παρεκέκλιτο γείτονι κούρῃ 

δόχμιον ἐν λέκτρῳ νῶτον ἐρεισαμένη, 

προβλὴς ὥς τις ἔπαλξις ἀνέμβατος: οἷα δὲ πύργος 

ἔσκεπε τὴν κούρην ἁπλοῒς ἐκταδίη: 

καὶ σοβαρὴ θεράπαινα πύλας σφίγξασα μελάθρου 

κεῖτο χαλικρήτῳ νάματι βριθομένη. 

ἔμπης οὔ μ᾽ ἐφόβησαν ἐπεὶ στρεπτῆρα θυρέτρου 

χερσὶν ἀδουπήτοις βαιὸν ἀειράμενος, 

φρυκτοὺς αἰθαλόεντας ἐμῆς ῥιπίσμασι λώπης 

ἔσβεσα: καὶ διαδὺς λέχριος ἐν θαλάμῳ 

τὴν φύλακα κνώσσουσαν ὑπέκφυγον ἦκα δὲ λέκτρου 

νέρθεν ὑπὸ σχοίνοις γαστέρι συρόμενος, 

ὠρθούμην κατὰ βαιόν, ὅπη βατὸν ἔπλετο τεῖχος: 

ἄγχι δὲ τῆς κούρης στέρνον ἐρεισάμενος, 

μαζοὺς μὲν κρατέεσκον: ὑπεθρύφθην δὲ προσώπῳ, 

μάστακα πιαίνων χείλεος εὐαφίῃ. 

ἦν δ᾽ ἄρα μοι τὰ λάφυρα καλὸν στόμα, καὶ τὸ φίλημα 

σύμβολον ἐννυχίης εἶχον ἀεθλοσύνης. 

οὔπω δ᾽ ἐξαλάπαξα φίλης πύργωμα κορείης, 

ἀλλ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἀδηρίτῳ σφίγγεται ἀμβολίῃ. 

ἔμπης ἢν ἑτέροιο μόθου στήσωμεν ἀγῶνα, 

ναὶ τάχα πορθήσω τείχεα παρθενίης, 

οὐ δ᾽ ἔτι με σχήσουσιν ἐπάλξιες. ἢν δὲ τυχήσω, 

στέμματα σοὶ πλέξω, Κύπρι τροπαιοφόρε.

Rereading the Classics [Rochester]

I quote from The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth ( New Haven: Yale, 1968). Vieth modernizes spelling and punctuation for reasons that to me are unconvincing but that pose no problems for the understanding of the texts.


     The work of James Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, is perhaps less well-known than his reputation. This is unsurprising for an individual for whom, as for Wilde, life was itself a work of art. In his own day, while his poetry was highly regarded, his behavior attracted even more attention. He was on the one hand an exemplary wit whose company, even in his youth, delighted Charles II and those about him with his ability to extemporaneously compose ironic comment on courtly life even as it unfolded. At the same time, even in the licentious context of Restoration mores, he was considered a notorious rakehell who engaged in scandalous and riotous behavior time and again. A confessed libertine and likely atheist who experienced an apparent deathbed conversion, he was posthumously again an exemplary figure, though of an altogether different sort than he had been at the outset of his brief and spectacular career.
     In spite of the occasional character of much of his verse and the fact that it was circulated largely in manuscript, he was highly regarded in his own day. Marvell according to Aubrey “was wont to call him the best English satyrist,” and, though they later fell out [1], Dryden dedicated Marriage à l la Mode to Rochester in the most fulsome terms, referring to himself as the nobler man’s “slave” and thanking him for assistance in the play’s composition, suggesting further that Rochester could far outdo him in playwriting. Dryden describes himself as “of an inferior wit and quality to you” and lauds “the excellency of your natural parts.”
     Dr. Johnson in the following century is torn between acknowledging the excellence of his writing and denouncing the immorality – worse, the blasphemy – of his views. Though his writing displays “genius” and “splendor,” according to Johnson, he was led by “dissolute and vitious company” into corruption and depravity. Constrained by these extra-literary considerations, Johnson balances his every comment. Rochester, he says, had “an active and inquisitive mind” and had a reputation as “the greatest scholar of all the nobility,” but only when he was not in the throes of one of “his paroxysms of intemperance.” His writing Johnson finds “smooth and easy,” exhibiting “sprightliness and vigour” though his achievement is circumscribed by his “ostentatious contempt of regularity.” “In all his works, Johnson concludes, “may be found tokens of a mind, which study might have carried to excellence.” [2]
     The same tokens of ambivalence persist in the rhetoric of Hazlitt’s discussion of Rochester whose work he characterizes as “the poetry of wit combined with the love of pleasure, of thought with licentiousness.” Finding in the poet “passionate enthusiasm” and even a sort of “sublimity,” he attributes this afflatus to the “extravagant heedless levity” reflecting a “contempt for everything that others respect.” Hazlitt does allow that “his epigrams were the bitterest, the least laboured, and the truest, that ever were written” and, in the wary tones of one risking approval of a monster, allows that “his poem upon Nothing is itself no trifling work.” [3]
     It is worth noting, perhaps, that, though we may have shed much of the prescriptive morality and insistent orthodoxy that was meaningful to Dr. Johnson, even a twenty-first century judge is likely to find Rochester a bit of a rotter. We can perhaps accept his advocacy of free love, but we are likely to grimace when he goes on to encourage incest and confess rape. The question of whether he was being candid or merely provocative is fortunately irrelevant as the issue of whether Rochester was a good man is entirely separate from that of his value as a writer.
     He compels our attention because, apart from composing the most scabrous poems of his era, he wrote epigrams as good as Jonson’s, songs as light as Herrick’s, philosophical and satirical poems to rival Swift or Pope, and a few love elegies as tender as Cowley or Donne as well.
     The issue of obscenity might well be treated first with the intention that it detract as little as possible from other inquiries. Rochester had a double motive for his vernacular and explicit sexual themes. First, to him the imperatives of eros were so powerful that he felt compelled to use the strongest possible language to accurately portray his experience. Equally significant was the use of transgressive language to strike a generally counter-cultural stance, odd though the term may seem when describing a courtier enjoying the confidence of the crown. Breaking with the conventions of his day not in morality alone, but also in philosophy and religion, Rochester found the aggressive language of obscenity a powerful signifier of his dissent.
     Still, the reader of his most infamous composition Sodom is likely to find it tiresome once past the amusement of noting which vulgar terms have survived the centuries and which have vanished entirely has subsided. The best one can say of Sodom is that it is less obsessive than de Sade and less mechanical than Aretino. Turns of wit here and there keep the reader going, but it is not surprising that the play has only been performed only a very few times. [4]
     The “Song” beginning “My dear mistress has a heart” is an early piece, melodious enough for a musical setting with a texture of complaint and paradox familiar from many courtly love poems. The poet is the mistress’ slave, his love-service captured through her eyes, yet she remains in the verse’s alternately extreme and tender language “wild, and apt to wander.” Fearing separation, which apparently has not even occurred, he appreciates his own love-intoxication the more, feeling “melting joys,” and “killing pleasures, wounding blisses.” His compliments are grandly hyperbolic: angels listen when she speaks,” and she is “all mankind’s wonder.” Only in the quiet violence of the language – words like “wild,” “killing,” and “wounding” are used – does Rochester betray the intensity of his passion.
     A number of other songs combine courtly elements with their antithesis, a deflating comic physicality bearing hints of vulnerability, mortality, and despair. The fact that pastoral heroines were rural does not lessen the surprise of an opening line like “Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay.” More shockingly, while pastourelles sometimes described what looks very much like rape, the treatment was typically aestheticized, artificial, and muted. Rochester is willfully outlandish. Roused to “rescue your bosom pig from fate” at the Freudian entrance to Flora’s cave, Chloris is graphically taken: “Now piercéd is her virgin zone.” Unsatisfied with this lurid account, the poet pushes his possibilities. Chloris wakes to find that her rape was a dream. Aroused, she masturbates and at the end with “her own thumb between her legs,/ She’s innocent and pleased.” Lying among the grunting animals, she finds that sexual satisfaction has restored a sort of Edenic purity and joy. Rochester has shamelessly repackaged sexual assault as a female fantasy. If we are disturbed, we are likely responding as the author wished.
     The poet excelled in epigrammatic improvisations, virtually all of which are sharply satiric .[5] He ridicules the translators of the Psalms in “Spoken Extempore to a Country Clerk after Having Hears Him Sing Psalms,” Louis XIV in “Impromptu on Louis XIV,” Charles’s mistresses in “On Cary Frazier,” and “On Mrs. Willis,” and the king himself in the “Impromptu on Charles II” that says the king “never said a foolish thing,/ Nor ever did a wise one.” Often by implication, and explicitly in “Rochester Extempore,” he includes himself as a target, declaring himself a “rascal.”
     Among the best of Rochester’s longer satirical pieces is “A Ramble in St. James’s Park,” a location which, the poet says, while St. James “has the honor on’t,” “tis consecrate to prick and cunt.” The landscape is dream-like: “rows of mandrakes tall did rise,/ Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies.” As though in a seventies bathhouse, he describes dark figures representing all levels of society passing intent on sexual encounters. Suddenly he sees his beloved Corinna cruising, receptive to the advances of three men at once. Claiming that he is indifferent to her seeking sexual pleasure but only disapproves of her becoming “a passive pot for men to spend in” and wishes she would seek out a worthier replacement for him. He concludes by cursing her in words of disgusted vituperation: “May stinking vapors choke your womb.”
     “Tunbridge Wells” is equally fierce and more universal in its indictment finding of man that “in all his shapes he is ridiculous” with our vaunted reason in fact “humanity’s worst disease.” In contrast the author’s horse “doing things fit for his nature,/ Did seem to me by far the wiser creature.” Among his other longer comic pieces “Signior Dildo” is outstanding for its sustained wit, developing one variation after another of the ladies’ affection for the eponymous object.
     “A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind” was probably Rochester’s most widely circulated poem during his lifetime and it has maintained its prominence perhaps because of its weight and wit, but its ambitious and provocative title is sufficiently intriguing to attract attention. As the skill of manipulating symbols is the definitive characteristic of humanity the poem promises to condemn itself doubly. A man attacking mankind, using reasons to condemn reason promises to be an ingenious paradox, if nothing else, though wit and not logic is the real attraction. After parenthetically identifying himself as “one of those strange, prodigious creatures, man,” he supports both adjectives by saying he would prefer to be anything but a man. It is certainly odd to reject oneself, yet the very seriousness, the honesty, even, of the impulse is an impressive assumption of responsibility, even noble.
     In heroic couplets, carved as though of stone, yet sounding like the table talk of a raconteur, Rochester places himself squarely among the skeptics by describing reason as an illusion, in one of the poem’s memorable metaphors, an “ignis fatuus” of the mind. This false light leads the persona through “error’s fenny bogs” only to come at last to the indeterminacy of “doubt’s boundless sea” where he paddles about until defeated by mortality, finally realizing that “all his life he has been in the wrong,” and that “his wisdom did his happiness destroy.” “Wit” (meaning not cleverness but ratiocination) turns out to have been a mere “frivolous pretence.”
     Should a stern superego, with “some formal band and beard,” scold him with pious commonplaces, arguing that man’s reason is evidence of divinity, giving “the world true grounds of hope and fear,” Rochester responds that it is specifically this delusion that he “despise[s],” , that “each heavy sot can pierce/ The limits of the boundless universe.” Though one would expect Rochester the skeptic to be very close to cynicism, he makes Diogenes the image of a fool, taking to his tub and to asceticism. The only person who would spend his time in thought must surely be he who has “nought to do.”
     In fact the sole use of thought is to determine action, and “our sphere of action is life’s happiness,/ And he who thinks beyond, thinks like an ass.” On the other hand, reason employed to make choices based on sense impressions is useful, “right reason.” Humankind, however, remains for him detestable, far less efficient than beasts at knowing and attaining their proper ends. Humans are perverse, vicious for no good reason, excelling only at “wantonness.”
     The evils of people arise out of their fear and confusion, a thought in curious harmony with Buddhist ethics, though Rochester goes on to declare that, in this moral wasteland, one has no choice but to be unscrupulous. “Men must be knaves, ‘tis in their own defence;” therefore, life amounts to a grand competition to be “the greatest knave.”
     The poem concludes with a final turn of wit. There is unlikely to be a single exception to the rule that people act out of fear and ignorance. Every individual in court is jostling for personal advantage, and every churchman a hypocrite. Should there, however, be such a prodigy as an honest man, it would be the exception that proves the rule, demonstrating only that “man differs more from man, than man from beast.”
     Even more metaphysically daring, “Upon Nothing” [6] begins with familiar notions but builds into a grand contemplation of its extraordinary subject, interrogating every duality in the height of the empyrean before returning to the phenomenal world in a satiric conclusion. The triplets of the verse generally present a problem in the first two lines, resolved in the third, while the consistent rhyme in each stanza reinforces the sense of order, of something within nothing.
     The opening stanza names the topic and implies the motive for the inquiry by noting that only nothing is “not afraid” of mortality. The next triplet paraphrases the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, saying “all proceeded from a great united What.” His customary ambivalence toward the world of lived experience is evident in his rather Gnostic reference to matter as “the wicked’st offspring of thy race.” He suggests that in the mystery of nothingness “the truth in private lies.” People are “blind” before the “great Negative.”
     Here he engages the heart of duality.


Is, or Is Not, the two great ends of Fate,
And True or False, the subject of debate,
That perfect or destroy the vast designs of state—


     In his third line, as though triggered by the word debate (and Rochester did take part in debates in the House of Lords), his philosophic superstructure gives way and, from questioning the nature of reality, he satisfies himself with the simpler task of making fun of Parliament. This social critique then expands to cover governments and nobility more generally and to touch on a series of national stereotypes before equating gratitude, kings’ promises, and whores’ vows all as equally empty. [7] It is as though the text dramatically enacts before the reader’s eyes the dizzying unsustainable heights of skepticism only to take refuge the easier targets available on every side in a fallen world.
     “The Mistress” strikes me as wholly earnest, a love poem to set beside Propertius and Tibullus, suggesting no shock but rather tender, attached, slightly melancholy reflection. The opening indicates the equally irresistible power of love and the passage of time.


An age in her embraces passed
Would seem a winter’s day,
Where life and love with envious haste
Are torn and snatched away


     The joys of his mistress are clearly ambivalent: his soul is “the living tomb” of love, “lovesick,” he feels her “wounding eyes.” He and she “sigh and lament, com plain and grieve.” Their passion is invested in “fantastic fancies,” and “frail joys;” he is in a sense dead, “:no more a soul, but shade.” The conclusion is one of these “fancies,” as the poet hopes for an affection “fixed and dear” “to make us blest at last.” To him his agony is nothing but “love raised to an extreme.” He hopes yet to be “blest at last,” to experience a felicity which can only arrive with love, but which seems always in practice elusive.
     The hedonist Rochester, in search of the highest pleasure, the perfect orgasm, the most ravishing beauty, writes most commonly of imperfect love. He can imagine in “The Fall” a prelapsarian sexual paradise free of frustration, but he cannot find it. Wishing always to “raise pleasure to the top” (“To a Lady in a Letter”), he writes of impotence (“The Imperfect Enjoyment”),near-impotence (“A Satyr on Charles II”), and voyeurism (“The Disabled Debauchee”). Even successful completion of a sexual act can bring only indifference in its train (“The Platonic Lady”). Several poems suggest a homosexual preference (“Upon His Drinking a Bowl”) or that the persona would prefer alcoholic intoxication to sex (Song “How happy, Chloris, were they free”).
     The slide into disgust with sexuality and the body that has appeared already in “Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay” and “A Ramble in St. James’s Park” is reinforced by numerous other negative archetypes of the feminine such as the superannuated slut with “old blear eyes” in “Timon” and Mrs. Willis (“On Mrs. Willis”) whose “belly is a bag of turds,/ And her cunt a common shore,” yet “ballocks” make men her slaves. Only Swift, whose poetic line was sometimes similar, was equally receptive to the flesh and horrified by it.
     Thus for Rochester wit becomes a fall-back position. If humans find themselves in an intolerable existential void, they are able yet to generate sparks of wit containing sufficient bright genius to maintain balance while illuminating the tragedy of life. The suddenness and surprise of wit exercises to the full humankind’s prodigious cognitive powers (which Rochester finds more often a handicap than an advantage), flinging a sort of desperate joy in the face of circumstance.
     Perhaps the most poignant expression of his undying desire to seize a beautiful moment from the passing parade of vanities is the lyric “Love and Life.” After noting that one possesses neither the past nor the future, and that even the present flows rapidly by, he takes refuge in the sincerest love, committing that moment to his beloved. “Talk not of inconstancy,/ False hearts, and broken vows,” he says, since “all that heaven allows” is “this livelong minute,” but that can itself be “a miracle.” Rochester’s oeuvre is centered on his path through the absurd spectacles her saw all about him, beckoned always onward by that vision of paradise promised by the notoriously transitory bliss of sexual pleasure.



1. Indeed, their hostility reached such a point that Rochester seems to have been guilty of arranging with thugs to waylay and beat Dryden.

2. Lives of the English Poets.

3. In Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, “On Dryden and Pope.”

4. Some dispute the authorship of the play. It was performed in 1986 at Broom Street Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1999 by the Dysfunctional Theatre Company in New York, and 2011 by the Movement Theatre Company for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Portions are performed in the 2004 movie The Libertine.

5. “To My More Than Meritorious Wife” is an exception. The abandoned libertine seems to have been a devoted husband at the same time.

6. Cf. William IX’s poem on nothing in which unreturned love is the decentering energy.

7. The reader will be reminded of Donne’s Song “Goe and catch a falling star.”