The title of this blog, 'Communis Locus', refers to the Latin name for the Commonplace book––a sort of Renaissance humanist's scrapbook, but even the origins of this are traceable to the rhetorical schools of antiquity. Originally, I had conceived of my blogging efforts as a 'book diary', dating when I had completed various books and appending quotations of interest. But the utility of a commonplace outweighed the mere curiosity of a journal, and so the project has taken its current form.
'Communis locus' is also a Latin euphemism for 'place of the dead'
. It can be found for example in the prologue to Plautus'
Casina v.19:
Ea tempestate flos poetarum fuit,
Qui nunc abierunt hinc in communem locum:
Sed tamen absentes prosunt pro praesentibus. | There was in that time the flowering of poets, who now have departed from here to the common place: And though departed, they may yet profit us the living. |
