This winter I decided to reread Horace’s Sermones, which, not entirely to my satisfaction, is translated Satires. The root meaning of sermones is “conversations,” so even on my fourth reading of these saucy poems, I am rebellious about labeling them satires. Consult the dictionary and you will see that sermo (the singular of sermones) means talk: conversation, discussion, discourse, utterance, dispute, conversation by correspondence, rumor, and so on.
Three-fourths of the way through the entry we see that it can mean conversational verse or satire. And finally everything clicks: some of the poems are satires, while others are much more like conversations.
We are dictionary sleuths: no one reads Latin without constant recourse to the dictionary. It is a great pleasure to browse among known and unknown words. And Latinists quickly learn that the Latin vocabulary was economical, or perhaps limited, so that the same words are used and reused and used yet again with a startling variety of unexpected meanings.
Take the word iaceo: to lie, be recumbent, be prostrate,. lie at rest, to lie ill, to be dead, to tarry, linger, stop, lie low, be flat, lie in runs, be cast down, be refuted, etc.
Above: The dictionary entry for iaceo
When I read the following phrase from Sermones I.VI, “ad quartum iaceo,”I assume it means “I lie down till the fourth hour (three hours after sunrise.).”
But then I consult the note in the commentary in the back of my Horace book and read of iaceo: “Not necessarily sleeping but perhaps reading or meditating.”
This gives me a different picture of Horace. He is not sleeping ; he is preparing for his day; perhaps he is sitting there reading poetry. But none of the definitions for iaceo in the dictionary indicate anything like this. And that is why we need commentaries. The commentary is based on a scholar’s years of experience and study of texts. And the commentary is a necessary apparatus to reading Latin poetry and prose.
After the fourth hour, Horace continues:
…post hanc vagor; aut ego, lecto
aut scripto, quod me tacitum iuvet, unguor olivo,
non quo fraudatis immundus Natta lucernis,
“I meditate or read till the fourth hour; after this I wander; or, after reading or writing, because it pleases me while silent, I am massaged with olive oil — not the olil filthy Natta steals from the lamps.”
And so, with the back-up of dictionary and commentary, we happily read Horace’s witty poems. Without the apparatus of commentaries we could not draw on scholars’ experience, comparison of different texts, and readings of the nuances of the poetry.
Think of John Stuart Mills, learning Greek (and later Latin) from his father at age three before there were Greek and Latin dictionaries. The languages were passed down from person to person, from generation to generation. Mills was expected to keep lists of words. Sometimes he had to interrupt his father for the meaning of a word.
The Latin dictionaries and commentaries are our life blood : we enter an alien world when we read Roman literature. Sixty percent of English words are derived from Latin, but Roman culture had little in common with ours.
Horace, my love, do I have to have this conversation every time I read you? I do, because what you say is so far from what we know and from the way we say it in English.
I will always love you for the following joyous expression:
