From Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle:

First, Glaucon assumes that astronomy has been recommended because it is useful.
    Skill in perceiving the seasons, months and years is useful not only to agriculture and         navigation, but also just as much to the military art (527d).
But to this Socrates remarks:
    I am amused that you seem to be afraid lest the many suppose you to be recommending useless studies. (p.67)

tria kappa kaka

And then I finished The World of Saint Paul today:

It was a difficult field of actions because, as the proverb says, "The Kretans, the Kappadocians and the Kilikians [Cilicians] are the three worst K's, tria kappa kaka, in the [ancient] world." (p.190)

Anyone with the time to source the quote?

Finished Hannibal and Me: What History's Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failureyesterday.

From Benedict XVI's Saint Paul :

Evil does not come from the source of being itself, it is not equally primal. Evil comes from a freedom created, from a freedom abused. (p.93)

 That general audience  (Dec. 3, 2008) is worth reading in its entirety.

 His reflections on the mystery of darkness (from its illogicality) and mystery of light (from the suprarational) made me think of Caravaggio and St. Paul–even if the same painting were not on the cover of the book. Now there is a thought for any student of Caravaggio: the mystery of light is greater than that of the dark.

And in case we forget Benedict's intimacy with Greek:

Immediately afterwards, Paul thus defines this new way of living: "which is your spiritual worship". Commentators on this text well know that the Greek expression (ten logiken latreían) is not easy to translate. The Latin Bible translates it as: "rationabile obsequium". The actual word "rationabile" appears in the First Eucharistic Prayer of the Roman Canon: in it the faithful pray that God will accept this offering as "rationabile". The usual Italian translation "culto spirituale" [spiritual worship] does not reflect all the nuances of the Greek text (or of the Latin). In any case it is not a matter of less real worship or even worship that is only metaphorical but rather of a more concrete and realistic worship a worship in which the human being himself, in his totality as a being endowed with reason, becomes adoration, glorification of the living God. (p.106)

 What a shame that the current translation in the liturgy misses the connection with λογός.

A quick note that I finished Stephen E. Ambrose's Band of Brothers. It was around and we had started watching the miniseries. Is it snobbery or diligence to read the books on which everything you watch is based?

Wodehouse and Classics, yet again

From Jeeves And The Tie That Binds:

Precisely, sir. Carpe diem, the Roman poet Horace advised. The English poet Herrick expressed the same sentiment when he suggested that we should gather rosebuds while we may. Your elbow is in the butter, sir. (p.8)

"Know him?" I said. "You bet I know him. We were like...Jeeves!" "Sir?" "Who were those two fellows?" "Sir?" "Greek, if I remember correctly. Always mentioned when the subject of bosom pals comes up." "Would you be referring to Damon and Pythias, sir?" (p.18)

Florence Craye...but while it lasted I felt like one of those Ethiopian slaves Cleopatra used to push around, and I chafed more than somewhat. (p.22)

"Apparently he failed to wow the customers at the Chamber of Commerce lunch, where she had been counting on him being a regular–who was the Greek chap?" "Bertie if I wasn't afraid of waking Runkle, I'd strike you with a blunt instrument, if I had a blunt instrument. What Greek chap?" "That what I'm asking you. He chewed pebbles." "Do you mean Demosthenes?" "You may be right. I'll take it up later with Jeeves." (p.134-135)

"...A pity that Bingley is flourishing like a green what-is-it, but one can't have everything." "No, sir. Medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid in ipsis floribus angat." "I don't think I quite followed you there, Jeeves." "I was quoting from the Roman poet Lucretius, sir. A rough translation would be 'From the heart of this fountain of delights wells up some bitter taste to choke them even among the flowers.'" "Who did you say wrote that?" "Lucretius, sir, 99-55 B.C." "Gloomy sort of bird." "His outlook was perhaps somewhat somber, sir." (p.203-4)

American Cicero

From American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll:

Would it not be very odd for a man to know Greek and Latin and not be able to describe the Position of any Noted place or Kingdom, or to Add, Multiply, or Divide a Sum. - Charles Carroll of Annapolis, letter to Charles Carroll, Sept. 30, 1754

Religious persecution, I own, is bad, but civil persecution is still more irksome: the one is quite insupportable, the other is alleviated by superior motives which tho' they can not diminish the real evil, yet enable us to bear it with greater resignation. - Charles Carrol, letter to Charles Carroll of Annapolis, Feb. 30, 1760

 I find no conversation more agreable than that of a Horace's a Virgil's a Racine's &c, their company is instructive and at the same time agreable. - Charles Carroll, letter to parents, June 14, 1758

Daniel Webster and the Invasion of Canada

From Daniel Webster on the Draft: Text of a Speech delivered in Congress, December 9, 1814:

You may sing to them the song of Canada conquests in all its variety, but they will not be charmed out of the remembrance of their substantial interests and true happiness.

Having finally put aside Wallace's 400 page history of Canada, I decided to pick up a shorter read during lunch with this speech of Daniel Webster, little realizing how much it touched upon a major part in that history.

All government, like Gaul, is divided into three parts.

From A History of the Canadian People:

He [Champlain] set out up the Ottawa with two canoes. He took with him also his surveying instruments; and, in crossing one of the numerous portages on the Ottawa, he lost his astrolabe, the instrument which he used for determining longitude and latitude. It is interesting to know that over two hundred and fifty years later, in 1867, this astrolabe was turned up by a farmer who was ploughing some new land near the town of Renfrew...

The Champlain astrolabe (pictured above) is now in the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

On Bishop Laval (p.79):

He fought persistently against the sale of spirituous liquors to the Indians; and though he failed in this fight, since it was felt that to deny French brandy to the Indians was merely to drive them "to English rum and Prostestantism"...

 

You're one of those guys who can make a party just by leaving it.

From Wodehouse's The Girl in Blue(p.35):

'...How well do you know your Chaucer?'
'My what?'
'The father of English poetry.'
'Oh, that Chaucer?'

Later (p.55) a neat summary from mother to child on how to catch a man:

a man who writes little poems can't have any sales resistance.

The little dialogue from which this is snatched is interesting as a sort of female-version of the ars amatoria.

Later (p.70) a reference to Roman eating habits:

Jerry had abandoned his original idea of making the sort of lunch that would have appealed to the Roman emperor Vitellius,...

[Above: The rather heavy 8th emperor of Rome in question]

Later still (p.90) we find Vitellius' contemporary Pliny the Elder:

 How true is the old saying, attributed to Pliny the Elder, that a man who lets himself get above himself is simply asking for it, for it is just when things seem to be running as smooth as treacle out of a jug that he finds Fate waiting fr him round the corner with the stuffed eelskin. 

I try, and too often fail, to work according to the Pomodoro technique. In the breaks between my work today I decided to have a crack at a book lying on a shelf as I entered the library: Roman Britain: A Very Short Introduction. I have a whole box of books on Roman Britain and read one or two many years ago, but I never have the time to invest in the others. I myself am as fascinated as the Victorians were with the ambiguous relationship between Britain and Rome. On the one hand, there is the claim to be the last of the Romans, true heirs of law, architecture, civilization, etc. manifest, for example, in their adoption of Constantine as a Romano-Brit (see Evelyn Waugh's Helena ); on the other hand, there is the pride in the unconquered Pict or Boudica (one thinks of Caesar, primeval forests, and chariots or Cymbeline). There are those attempts to resolve the paradoxical identity of the British in Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth.

Alas, I must read things like this,

The once-popular belief that Britain was largely covered with forest until cleared by the Anglo-Saxons is now discredited. By the Roman Conquest, although there was still a great deal of natural forest, the population had already grown to something of the order it reached under the Romans, two or three times greater than during the reign of William the Conqueror... (p.5)

that bring all those feelings of guilt that I prefer in some way the sparsely inhabited and thick forests I imagined when first reading Caesar and Tacitus than scientific truth.

Apparently, the Romano-British also liked their share of black magic,

 ...excavation of a temple at Uley in Gloucestershire has approximately doubled the total of curse-bearing tablets known form the entire Roman world. (p.35)

To the Victor...

What a pleasant surprise when arriving at the in-law's house for the summer that I had not 1, but 2, boxes of books from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute waiting for me.

The first was a large haul of Russell Kirk, including: Redeeming the Time,  The Essential Russell Kirk,  Eliot and His Age, The Politics of Prudence, Roots Of American Order, and The American Cause.

The second had a more literary theme for the U. of Dallas grad: The Great Tradition, The Great Books, and A Student's Guide to Literature.

Just a continuing benefit of winning one of their graduate student fellowships a couple years ago...