Et tu, Brute? by Harry Mount

Author:Harry Mount
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781399400992
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

The five orders of architecture: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite.

The Greek influence on Latin was enormous, too. Lots of words you think are Latin are really Greek. Nausea (sickness, as in ad nauseam) comes from the Greek word naus, meaning ‘ship’; and so it originally meant seasickness.

Greece was conquered by the Roman Republic in the Battle of Corinth in 146 bc. But, still, 200 years later, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian (35–96 ad) was, like Horace, acknowledging Greek supremacy in the arts. Of satire, one of the few art forms the Greeks didn’t invent, he said:

Satura quidem tota nostra est.

Satire is indeed entirely our own.

Incidentally, it’s thanks to Quintilian that we have the text message, too. In his book on speeches, Quintilian said that, after you have chosen your words, they must be woven into a fine and delicate fabric – and the Latin for fabric is textum.

Quintilian’s word has clung on for 2,000 years. We still weave stories together, embroider them and try never to lose the thread of the story. Later classical writers took up ‘text’ to mean any short passage in a book. More recently, we started using ‘text’ to mean anything that was written down; and then somebody invented the SMS message, borrowing Quintilian’s metaphor in the process.

Homer also remained the supreme poet to Romans, as well as Greeks. It’s this line from Horace that produces our expression, ‘Even Homer nods’ or ‘Even Homer sleeps’ – i.e. even Homer makes mistakes:

Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.

Yet I also take it amiss whenever the excellent Homer dozes off.

Horace, Ars Poetica, 359

As the first emperor, Augustus had his lofty position buttressed by Virgil, a genius poet and his propagandist-in-chief. In Virgil’s Aeneid, the sovereign god Jupiter assures his troubled daughter, Venus, that her son Aeneas will triumph in the end – and lay the foundations of an imperium, or empire, on which the sun will never set.

In the Aeneid, Rome’s task is laid out by Anchises, Aeneas’s dead father, who takes him on a tour of the Underworld, pointing out the Roman heroes yet to come. He also declares to his son the purpose of the Roman empire in the future:

Romane, memento . . .

Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

Remember, Roman, to spare those who’ve submitted and subdue the arrogant.

Aeneid, 6.847

It’s also in Book 6 in the Underworld that Virgil describes the dead yearning to be ferried across the River Acheron:

Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.

They reached out their hands in longing for the further shore.

Aeneid, 6.313

This line is often used to sum up a general feeling of longing. In the same way, this Aeneid line sums up the general sadness of life, as Aeneas weeps at a picture of the Trojan War in a Carthaginian temple:

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

Tears are shed for things even here and mortal things touch the heart.

Aeneid, 1.462

Seamus Heaney translated the famous first three words as ‘There are tears at the heart of things.’

The two mournful lines came together in 2011 at the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War.

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