HISTORIES OF POLYBIUS: CARTHAGINIAN BABEL. AND 17TH CENTURY TAPESTRY

Enjoying Robin Waterfield's translation of the Histories of Polybius. Writes a real riproaring batte scene, I must say. Also, a fun little historical anecdote of linguistic interest: he mentions the enormous variety of languages spoken by the mercenaries in the Carthaginian army during the First Punic War, which made direct commands impossible and, as Waterfield renders it, causes a "complete jumble of uncertainty, distrust, and failed communication." Something about B.C.-era cosmopolitanism has always fascinated me.

Besides cinematic battle descriptions, Polybius cultivates a certain drily understated tone. Vide "So the lemboi sailed back home and King Agron received his officer's report of the battle. It afforded him enormous pleasure to think that he had defeated the arrogantly self-assured Aetolians, and he gave himself over to celebration, with so much drinking that he contracted pleurisy and died just a few days later." (79)

I recently read and enjoyed Waterfield's translation of the Anabasis which prompting me to read this. So here we is.

✣

Neat post over at the Getty tumblr. It's oh so proto-rococo, no?

THOMAS ADAMS: A PREMATURE APPRAISAL

Thomas Adams (1583-1653) was an English clergyman about whom we know essentially nothing. His sermons are exhortatory in a rather dull, unimaginative and Christian-"lite" sort of way. He diligently toes the line from an exegetical and a political pt of view (exhibit a: constant and acidic references to the various evils of "Popery"). At the risk of being unfair to both parties, Adams strikes me as the seventeenth-century equivalent to a well-intentioned tent revivalist or TV-evangelist.

However, Adam's style is frankly astounding. His every word bursts with an irrepressible vigor, every clause betrays a keen sense of wit, and every prolonged simile or metaphor (even when they cross into quaintness for a modern ear) demonstrate a total passion for wordweaving. His imagery is bold and precise, and his sense of sound impeccable. The interplay between message and his means of communicating it (the content's plodding regularity versus the high flights and melodic meanderings of his words) lends the sermons a weird, almost contrapuntal quality. At times, of course, he tries a bit too hard and is a bit too clever and becomes wincingly strained, but the sheer fact that he's turning platitudes into poetry is worth at least a skimread. Not to mention puns in Latin.

He also has some real zingers. Taken from a single page selected at random: "A dangerous brood of Jesuits in foreign courts croaking like frogs" and "Harlots, scattering their stews, like the lice of Egypt, over all the world."

FABLE OF A MAN, A SERPENT, AN ASS, AN EAGLE, AND TWO STONES

This from Thomas Adam's complete works (see yesterday's post). This "pretty fable" deserves some kind of batty, stopmotion short-film treatment. Hope I'm not the only one that finds this amusing. The fact that I'm not cognizant of its origin reminds me that I should read Aesop at some point. Click to expand and enjoy cybervoid:

And here's a freebie: an aria from Caldara's Maddalena ai piedi di cristo.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: THOMAS ADAMS SMACKTALKS "FLING-BRAND FRATERNITY" PURITAN-STYLE

"Aristotle calls discretion virtutum normam et formam -- the eye of the soul, the soul of virtue. I would to God some amongst us had one dram of this grace mingled with their whole handfuls of zeal. it would a little cool the preternatural heat of the fling-brand fraternity, as one wittily calleth them."

The works of Thomas Adams : being the sum of his sermons, meditations, and other divine and moral discourses (1861), vol. I (p. 125).

"Fling-brand fraternity" is now my preferred term for basically everyone in or out of the news.

Saturday Links

Origin of dumbbells.