γῆρας, ὅ τ' αἰσχρὸν ὁμῶς καὶ καλὸν ἄνδρα τιθεῖ

Τίς δὲ βὶος, τί δὲ τερπνὸν ἄτερ χρυσέης Ἀφροδίτης;
τεθναίην, ὅτε μοὶ μηχέτι ταῦτα μέλοι,
χρυπταδίη φιλότης καὶ μείλιχα δῶρα καὶ εὐνή.
ἄνθεα τῆς ἥβης γίγνεται ἁρπαλέα
ἀνδράσιν ἠδὲ γυναιξίν· ἐπὴν δ' ὀδυνηρὸν ἐπέλθῃ
γῆρας, ὅ τ' αἰσχρὸν ὁμῶς καὶ καλὸν ἄνδρα τιθεῖ.
αἰεὶ μὲν φρένας ἀμφὶ κακαὶ τείρουσι μέριμναι,
οὐδ' αὐγας προσορῶν τέρπεται ἠελίου,
ἀλλ' ἐχθρὸς μὲν παισίν, ἀτίμαστος δὲ γυναιξίν.
οὕτως ἀργαλέον γῆρας ἔθηκε θεός.

—Mimnermus (c. 625 BCE), first fragment

What life or delight exists without love?
Let me die when I've no more interest
in quiet trysts, tender gifts or the marriage bed.
These are the alluring blossom of youth
for men and women, but when arduous age approaches,
which makes a man ugly and useless,
awful anxieties wear always on his mind:
he takes no delight in sunlight;
to children he's abhorrent; by women, scorned.
How grievous a thing has god made old age.

(2010/01/21)

Das war... seltsam.

Before stumbling across page 115 of the German edition of the Lonely Planet travelling phrase book series today, I hadn't realized just how "lonely" the target audience apparently was. Suddenly, the title of these travel guides has taken on a very different meaning.

Wondering if all their books are like this, I took a tour through those of them that I could locate in Google Book Search, and it does look as if such a section appears in many of their titles.

Their Latin American Spanish Phrasebook has a section devoted to "el sexo" ("¡Vamos a la cama! ¡Así cariño, así!"). The Amharic (Ethiopian) phrasebook has a "romance" and "dating" section that seems largely limited to "Can I take you home?" (በት ላደርሰህ?) and "Let's use a condom!" (ኮንዶም አነጠቀም). The Greek Phrasebook is a bit more extensive on the same topic, including the apparently "charming" lines "Μ' αρεσει το στηθος σου / Μ' αρεσει ο κωλος σου... Do those actually work? The Portuguese Phrase Book moves from teaching "o sexo anal" to "Porque é que não te mudas para o meu apartamento?" ("Wanna move in?") in just a couple lines of text. While it doesn't seem to spend as much time on sex as the other titles, their phrase book for Costa Rican Spanish has a curious passage that introduces "¡Hijo de puta!", "¡No me jodas!", "¡Maldita sea!", "¡Mierda!", "¡Vete a la mierda!" and "¡Me cago en dios!" (!) followed by... "¡Que bruto!"—No shit, right?

The Vietnamese Phrasebook doesn't seem to have a chance to introduce a sex/romance section due to the pages expended on teaching you how to ask the location of the methodone clinic and how to enroll! (Seriously, on page 105 in "Social Issues", the same page that teaches you how to swear in the language.)

Strange. Suppose I'll have to keep an eye out for the rest of these; I've read a lot of travel guides over the years, but the LP series is, I think, the first I've encountered that offers sections on scoring drugs or one night stands in foreign lands.

Oration on the "Dignity" of Man—no, not that one

Inspired by an old post of the Laudator temporis acti which I ran across today, I thought I'd take a moment to share a bit of hope and cheerful optimism from the ancient world concerning the role and state of man.

Palladas, ever a charmer, left a bit of verse that's come down to us in the Greek Anthology (X, 45), known generally as "The Descent of Man". Frustrated by the vain puffings of fellow humans of his own time on the topic of the majesty of man, he sought to recall to mind a few details so often forgotten by them, or seemingly so:

Ἄν μνήμην, ἄνθρωπε, λάβῃς ὁ πατήρ σε τί ποιῶν     ἔσπειρεν, παύσῃ τῆς μεγαοφροσύνης. ἀλλ᾽ ὁ Πλάτων σοὶ τῦφον ὀνειρώσσων ἐνέφυσεν,     ἀθάνατόν σε λέγων καὶ φυτὸν οὐράνιον. ἐκ πηλοῦ γέγονας· τί φρονεῖς μέγα; τοῦτο μὲν οὕτως     εἶπ’ ἄν τις, κοσμῶν πλάσματι σεμνοτέρῳ. εἰ δὲ λόγον ζητεῖς τὸν ἀληθινόν, ἐξ ἀκολάστου     λαγνείας γέγονας καὶ μιαρᾶς ῥανίδος.

If you would recall, o man, just how your father sowed you, you'd bridle your vain pride. Yet the dreamer Plato's deception has taken root in you, calling you immortal, a heavenly plant. “You come from dirt; how are you proud?” So one might ask, arranging the figure more pompously. But if you seek the truth, you were begotten of unbridled lust and an unclean drop.

But he was hardly the first to say or think it. A couple of centuries or so before him, Aurelius (Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν, βιβλίον δʹ, μηʹ, δʹ; c. 174/180) quipped “ἀεὶ τὰ ἀνθρώπινα ὡς ἐφήμερα καὶ εὐτελῆ καὶ ἐχθὲς μὲν μυξάριον, αὔριον δὲ τάριχος ἢ τέφρα.” ("Human (lives) are always cheap and ephemeral: yesterday, a little ejaculate; tomorrow, embalming or ashes.") In roughly the same time period, a passage of similar nature appeared in the Mishnah tractate, Pirké Avot,

Akavya ben Mahalal'el used to say, “Reflect on three things and you will escape the hand of sin.” (1) Know where you came from; (2) know where you are going; and (3) know in whose presence you will have to make an accounting. Where do you come from? An unclean drop. Where are you going? To dust, worms and maggots. To whom shall you make a reckoning? To the King of the King of Kings, the Holy One, Blessed be He." (Pirké Avot, 3:1)

עקביא בן מהללאל אומר, “הסתכל בשלשה דברים ואין אתה בא לידי עברה.” (א) דע מאין באת, (ב) ולאן אתה הולך, (ג) ולפני מי אתה עתיד לתן דין וחשבון. מאין באת? מטפה סרוחה ולאן אתה הולך? למקום עפר רמה ותולעה ולפני מי אתה עתיד לתן דין וחשבון? לפני מלך מלכי המלכים הקדוש ברוך הוא (פרקי אבות, ג׃א)

---

Okay, fine; so maybe they weren't so cheerful after all.

"The figo for thee!": Humanity's favorite finger, 4000 years and going strong

[Extracted from a letter to a friend]

But now, as they say, for something completely different. Clicking on that link to your dreams tag, I ran across quite a few that I don't recall having read before—one of these days, I'm going to have to go back and read from the beginning: I seem to have missed quite a lot during my '04-'05 absence—but while I haven't had a chance to read all of them, one in particular did stand out to me. Not the dream part, so much, but the comment about the Bird in the ancient world. This, as my perverse nature would have it, is something I've investigated in the past, so I thought I'd close with a little ramble on the same. Hopefully it will lend itself more to humor than annoyance!

Beginning, as I so often do, in the Bible, there's a line in Isaiah 58:9 that, though some modern translations (like, sadly, the JPS Tanakh) render it as a "menacing hand", Jerome translated "digitum extendere", and some have interpreted that extended finger to be the same "shameful" sign seemingly known throughout the world and history. Jerome himself, in one of the letters to Marcella (27), makes a remark about causing "everyone to point at me the finger of scorn" (admittedly, I'm using that popular translation for effect; literally, he only wrote "cunctorum digitis notor", which could just as easily mean he was being pointed out or talked about around town—though the context of both his letter and the City would support that they probably were giving him the gesture [and that Jerome goes on just a couple of sentences later to begin quoting Horace and referring to his "two-legged asses" (bipedes asellos), suggests, at least to me, that it's likely what he had in mind]). A browse through the literature will turn up several references to the digitus impudicus, digitus infamis, digitus lasciuus or digitus tribadis, among others. Juvenal, the tenth satire, lines 51–53 read "ridebat curas nec non et gaudia uolgi, | interdum et lacrimas, cum Fortunæ ipse minaci | mandaret laqueum mediumque ostenderet unguem."—"He would laugh at the cares and pleasures of the crowd, sometimes even at their tears, while for himself he gave ill-Fortune a noose and the finger." Martial opens II.28 with "rideto multum qui te, Sextille, cinædum | dixerit et digitum porrigito medium." ("Heartily mock who calls you catamite, Sextillus, and give them the finger.") Suetonius claimed that Augustus expelled the entertainer Pylades when the latter flipped off a heckler, and there's a tale in Gestures (Morris) that says Caligula got a kick out of making people kiss his digitus lasciuus. But these lads are far from the oldest references. The Greeks have a specific verb for giving the finger, σκιμᾱλίζω, which (who else) Aristophanes enjoyed (it appears in "Peace", alongside Hermes remarking on flatulence, for example). There's also the incident in "Clouds", between Strepsiades and Socrates, ll. 645–656 or so, where Socrates is trying to educate him on the matter of metre, and having mentioned the dactyl, is interrupted thus by Strep., "The dactyl? By god, I know that one!" (κατὰ δάκτυλον; νὴ τὸν Δί', ἀλλ' οἶδ'.) Soc., "Tell me, then." (εἰπὲ δή.) Strep., "What else but this? [showing a finger, Greek dactyl] | On the other hand, I've used this one [showing another] since a boy." (τίς ἄλλος ἀντὶ τουτουὶ τοῦ δακτύλου; | πρὸ τοῦ μέν, ἔτ' ἐμοῦ παιδὸς ὄντος, οὑτοσί.) Soc., "You're a stupid bore!" (ἀγρεῖος εἶ καὶ σκαιός.) [Oddly, given the terms used, Socrates could just as easily be calling him a left-handed farmer—I suppose that gives us an idea of what the Greeks thought of sinister rustics.] But going back to our Isaian passage, while it seems the thing to avoid even the hint of "vulgar" meaning in a "holy" passage, the language would seem to support it, and it's not unknown—the same word used here for "finger" is attested in Middle Hebrew, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Arabic, Ge'ez, Akkadian and possibly others: there's an old Babylonian passage even, including an occurrence in the Hammurapi code, úbanum eliša itariṣma (ú-ba-nu-um e-li-ša it-ta-ri-iṣ-ma), meaning to point or extend the finger in an insulting or accusatory way, with sexual connotations from the extant examples (in the Law Code it seems to have been an accusation of adultery), where úbanum is considered to be related to the Hebrew term used in Isaiah (אצבע). Apparently the Egyptians (from the Hebrew telling) thought this was equivalent to sending a plague of lice, since Exodus 8:19 has the pharaoh's magicians declaring "This is the finger of God!"

Thankfully, he'd mellowed out rather a lot by the time he gave Jesus the bird at his baptism.

You're right, I think, that it does sound like a great topic for a class. For the humanities, maybe, you could do a bit on The Role of Gestures in the Ancient World, and use it as an excuse to let the students know how you feel about them.

I imagine it would become an immensely popular thing—for instructors if not for students!

For sourceworks, de Jorio's Gesture in Classical Antiquity (HB or paper) touches on it (along with many other gestures, from friendly to foul), including citing another bit of Martial [VI:70, "ostendit digitum, sed impudicum"]; Corbeill's Gesture in Ancient Rome also touches on it, often conjoined to the ficus, where it can both be taken as a threat or insult as well as a means of warding off the evil eye ("fuck you, evil eye!"?) or chasing off unclean spirits ("a figo for thee, satan!"—alternatively, "PISTOL: Art thou his friend? HENRY V: And his kinsman too. PISTOL: The figo for thee, then! HENRY V: I thank you: God be with you!", Henry V, Act IV, scene I.) In Daniel Matt's edition of the Zohar (volumes I, II, III, IV, V), he discusses how tradition holds that when Moses raised his hands to defeat the Amalekites in Ex. 17.8-16, he was actually giving them the finger—"Take that, Amalekites!" If so, given that he held up his hand in that fashion, according to the passage, the whole day till the sun went down, even, after tiring, having Aaron and Hur hold up his arm for him, and given that the place was, on that account, named YHWH nissi, or the banner, or sign, of YHWH, does that mean that the YHWH nissi is actually the Finger, not the magen Dawid? That would be some national flag, wouldn't it?

QotD: Speak to Me In...

How many languages can you speak? Which languages can you read or understand?

Ξέρω καλά ελληνικά, λατινικά, κοπτικά, ιταλικά, ρουμανικά, ρωσικά, γαλλικά, γερμανικά, πολωνικά, ισπανικά, πορτογαλικά, εβραϊκά, ουγαριτικά, αραμαϊκά, αραβικά, ουγγρικά, νορβηγικά, κινέζικα, ιαπωνικα, ισλανδικά και λίγα αγγλικά.

Imported from VOX due to its closing.