A perfect woman; the marriage fixed in “super-glue”; the soldier who died in his chair; the curious incident of the dog which did not bark: read on, to meet them all, and more. Welcome to the people’s Latin verse. Many thousands wrote epigrams, and read them; good, bad, and indifferent, they are almost unavoidable. The elegiac couplet is by far the most popular form; others, such as the hendecasyllable, regularly appear. Martial, Catullus, the Greek Anthology are the principal models. It was always difficult to define an epigram precisely; you know one when you see it: a very short work, ideally making a quick, effective point. That most influential of commentators, Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558), took a broad view of the genre; it could include most topics and methods, with an attempt at argutia (“sharpness; wit”) being highly desirable (Beer, Enenkel, and Rijser 2009, 16–22). The Dutch scholar and theologian Gerardus Vossius (1577–1649) also discussed the matter. Brevity can be a limitation, too; even some of the most memorable ancient epigrams are open to objections (Money 2012, 45). Length can be stretched (how far? opinions differ), and there is obvious overlapping with, for example, the (longer) love elegy. The third of the Dutch poet Johannes Secundus’s famous Basia (Kisses, 1539) might well, at six lines, be called an epigram, and a very fine one, too. Liminary verses (poems “on the threshold,” introducing a book) are a significant sub-genre, “a characteristic and specific literary phenomenon of humanism” (Binns 1990, 165). They could preface all kinds of books—thus allowing poetry to intrude into the realms of prose—and place Latin alongside the vernacular.
Most of the big names of Renaissance poetry engaged with the genre, to varying degrees. Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) and Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503) were prolific in this, as in other forms. Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), revered in Norway and Denmark, was a keen epigram-writer, as well as Latin novelist and vernacular playwright. Thomas More’s Epigrammata (Epigrams, 1518) initially brought him more attention abroad than his Utopia; they were an important part of his self-promotion, an “inherently social” genre with addressees and audience a vital part of the process (McCutcheon 2003, 353); an antisocial one too, stirring up quarrels. Thomas More versus the French humanist Germain de Brie (1490–1538) was one such battle, but there were many others, from the start: “the fifteenth-century humanist was an irascible being, and the general run of Latin epigrams then written savor more of Martial than the Anthology” (Hutton 1935, 43). There was disagreement about obscenity: can a Christian follow the ancients there? Religious poets fought back in large numbers, pouring out verse on pious themes. Teachers strove to inculcate the less noxious forms of wit; Jesuit education on the Continent gave epigrams an honored role, as did large Protestant schools in England and elsewhere. Printed collections, such as Lusus Westmonasterienses (Westminster [School] Games, 1730–50), could showcase precocious skills. Numerous anthologies reprinted major poets of all nations. My intention here is to widen the focus, including some of the “little people” too, as representatives of a very widespread literary culture.
A typical epigram-book was a mixed bag. In one mid–seventeenth-century Catholic example, we can find some side-splitting casual sexism: woman (mulier), more mule than mollis (“gentle”), eh? Ho, ho. What is a heretic poet like? Obscaenus, tumidus, protervus, audax (“filthy, puffed-up, shameless, impudent”); and a grudging admission that Dutch Protestant poetry can be good, even if Batava fides (“Dutch faith”) is not (Lindanus 1656). Otherwise combative epigrammatists can also surprise readers with intensity of feeling: More’s collection ends with an unusually personal poem on his own marriages, indelicate perhaps, and perhaps profound (McCutcheon 2003, 359). Although, like all early modern Neo-Latin, writing epigrams was primarily a male activity, some learned women could and did participate as readers, writers, and recipients of praise. Sometimes the commendatory verses could outweigh the woman’s own work, as in an eighteenth-century edition of Tarquinia Molza, with four of her Latin epigrams (Molza 1750, 85–86), and a few Italian ones, alongside a flood of tributes (Molza 1750, 26–35, 87–92). An Englishwoman in Prague, Elizabeth Weston, was prolific in elegiacs herself, her skills celebrated by sympathetic male circles (Weston 2000, 376–437).
Epigram writing spread wherever Latin did. In North America, the early colonist Peter Bulkeley (1583–1659) left short elegiac poems on an earthquake, on his birthday, on his old age, and an epitaph for John Cotton, Puritan divine, formerly vicar of Boston, England, and a founder of its American namesake (Kaiser 1984, 24–26). Michael Wigglesworth (1631–1705) wrote on his own misery with “simple and direct art”: Ira premit, peccata gravant, afflictio frangit / … Obruor adversis: succedunt imbribus imbres, / Meque simul feriunt ventus et unda minax (“Anger oppresses me, sins weigh me down, affliction breaks me … I am overwhelmed by adversities, rainstorms come one upon another, and the wind and menacing wave strike me together”; Kaiser 1984, 29–31): a bleak picture of a man dismayed by metaphorical, and no doubt also literal, hurricanes of misfortune. Its despairing nobility is reminiscent of Greek tragedy, as in the great chorus of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus (ll. 1211–48), with its comparison of man to a coast tormented by wind and wave. Samuel Sewall (1652–1730) was a judge at the notorious trials of alleged witches at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, a distinction he lived long enough to regret; his letterbook preserves scraps of Latin verse penned on numerous occasions, more impressive perhaps in quantity than quality, testimony to his facility in rapid composition, and the naturalness of the medium for him (Kaiser 1984, 38–39).
How should it be done? Liminary verses by Walter Hawghe to Bishop John Parkhurst’s Ludicra (Amusements, 1573) suggest some useful aims: use familiar vocabulary for clarity (perspicuum), seek to be amusing (facetum): virtus praecipua est in hoc voluptas (“pleasure is the chief virtue in this business”; Binns 1990, 32). This was not confined to books. Painted on a pillar of the south aisle in Norwich cathedral, near to the organ, is this distich in memory of an organist, William Inglott: Non digitis Inglotte tuis terrestria tangis / Tangis nunc digitis organa celsa poli (“Your fingers, Inglott, do not touch earthly things, you now touch with your fingers the high organs of heaven”). A visitor to most old churches will observe some Latin (and sometimes Neo-Latin verse), on brass or stone. At St. Bartholomew’s, Corsham, Wiltshire, is a plain tablet. The lettering, all capitals, neat but not fancy, suggests a local stonecutter: Quae per femineum sparsa est perfectio sexum / Lector in hac una tota sepulta iacet (“The perfection that is scattered through the female sex, reader, is all buried here in this one woman”). More lines would dilute the effect. How, exactly, was she perfect? Better not to know. The prose below fills twice the space, with necessary but dry information: Edw[ardus] Rede ar[miger] hoc distichon in memoriam Annae uxoris suae ex inclyta familia Baynardorum de Lecham oriundae hic incidi curavit, quae obiit August[i] 23 1615 (“Edward Rede, bearer of [a coat of] arms arranged for this couplet to be carved here in memory of his wife Anne, from the celebrated family of the Baynards of [Old] Lackham [House], who died on August 23, 1615”). Who cares for the Baynards now, except possibly their descendants? But Edward’s versified cry of pain can still pierce the heart.
How should one assess an epigram, judge its neatness? Interpretations can be very subjective. One may miss the point, or get it, but find it flat. A poem may work for you, but not for me. I would like to look in detail at an epigram which seems to me to work. It is very short: one elegiac couplet, eleven words. The author is a Frenchman in Rome, Joachim Du Bellay (1522–1560; McFarlane 1980, 34):
Latratu fures excepi, mutus amantes:
Sic placui domino, sic placui dominae.
I received thieves with barking, but lovers in silence; that’s how I pleased my master—and that’s how I pleased my mistress.
Neatness of form is the first thing to notice: besides the very obvious repetition in the second line, the first line has a carefully controlled economy of words, relying on the single verb in the center to be understood with both ends of the line, in subtly different senses. In the perfect tense, the verb excipio produces three long syllables, a weighty central word. Its meaning is fairly fluid. It can mean “catch” (appropriately for the thieves); but also “make an exception of,” as the dog seems to do in the case of lovers favored by its mistress. The five-word hexameter could seem quite heavy (latratu is three long syllables, like excepi; and fures, which is two longs), but gains a lightness of touch from this concision. And while, in a longer poem, the facility with which the pentameter can fall into two matching dactylic halves sometimes seems too facile a trick, it is ideally suited to so short an epigram. Each half of the line is virtually identical, differing only in the gender of the noun. But how much difference is there in the sense! Thoroughly correct canine behavior on the one paw; on the other, the silent dog is complicit in adultery.
So the epigram is not so innocent or simple, not just a commemoration of a virtuous and useful creature. We feel that frisson of impropriety that is at the heart of so much of the best epigram writing. We are encouraged to enjoy it: to sympathize with the dog, to congratulate it for managing to satisfy all parties, except the unworthy thieves. But are not the lovers (plural) just as unworthy? Is it not a betrayal of his master to admit them so easily? The author appears to be taking rather a lax moral position, condoning the behavior of the dog, and by implication, also the mistress. But perhaps he is merely luring the reader into such a response, leaving us to question ourselves afterwards. Which of these participants do we really sympathize with? Is the master in fact only concerned with his wealth, in which case the dog is doing all the guarding required: and the master deserves an unfaithful wife? And how close is the poet to the action? Does he not only sympathize with the amantes, but become one of them, in a situation familiar to any reader of the ancient elegists? And, as the lover often has to placate a servant to get access to a mistress (as in Ovid, Amores 2.2, for example), so here he must convince the dog that he falls into the category of lover rather than thief. The mistress is domina in more than one sense.
In a situation rich with dramatic ambiguities, what do we really know from these two lines? We read that there are lovers, plural, which there do not have to be, for metrical reasons, as amantem (singular) would have fitted just as well. The plural makes a neater verbal parallel to fures (thieves). And it makes a difference, perhaps, to our attitude to the characters. The dog does not have to deal only with a single, long-term lover, but a whole sequence of them. One misplaced bark, and his mistress might be lost. What do we know of the dog? Is the dog male or female? Male, the masculine adjective mutus reveals; and this is required by the meter, if the line is to end with a word like amantes, starting with a vowel. Does this gender give the dog a special affinity with his mistress, as another, more innocent, amans; and a masculine rigor in standing up to intruders on his master’s behalf? Probably it is mainly a matter of the poet’s convenience, as making a female dog muta would create difficulties in choosing the right word to follow it. Mitis (“gentle”) might have done, though, and preserved another ambiguity (as that form could be either gender).
Are we so sure that we have the sense the right way around: the master’s money and the wife’s lovers? That would be the most obvious reading, certainly in a sixteenth-century context. But it is quite reasonable for a wife to fear thieves; and also for a master to have lovers creeping around the house (of either sex—and amantes is ambiguous in gender: the Latin is sufficiently flexible to be interpreted as “Thus [silently] I pleased the master, thus [barking] I pleased the mistress”), with added confusion for the dog. Some things a translator must probably pin down, but others can be left ambiguous; here is an English version of Du Bellay’s poem, printed in the collection Sales epigrammatum (The Wit of Epigrams, 1663) edited by James Wright (McFarlane 1980, 35): “The Lover I let passe, the Thief did seize; / So I both Master did, and Mistresse please.” This version in fact relies on a chiasmus, to get the more “obvious” reading, “Lover”/”Mistresse” and “Thief”/“Master”: if we read it without a chiasmus, we come away with the alternative interpretation. Excepi becomes two verbs in English here; and the order of the first line is inverted to allow the vigorous rhyme “seize”/“please.” An English line finds it more difficult to handle the repetition, and “did” may appear awkward. But perhaps it is worth making the reader wait for the word “please,” and making us think about whether the dog “did” really do so. The master is only pleased while he remains in ignorance of the full story.
The title of Wright’s anthology employs a key word for the epigram, sal (“salt,” literally, but “wit” in this sense), not quite definable, but recognizable when it is there, and when it is not, both in people and in poems (compare the mica salis—“grain of salt”—of a girl’s attractiveness in Catullus 86, l. 4). Judgements of both will differ: one person’s deliciously biting wit can be over-salted, to another’s taste, and virtually inedible. For me, at least, Du Bellay judges the salt just right in this little epigram. It is not only a matter of being clever, neat, and amusing: thought-provoking, too, and potentially problematic. Ambiguities intended by the author, or open to creation by a reader, are part of the problem, and of the charm. The more one looks, the more uncertainties there are. Are the dog’s master and mistress necessarily husband and wife? Some other family relationship, father and daughter, for example, or son and mother, would offer a different dynamic, without the tension of adultery, though with other reasons for dog and human to tread carefully. And the dog’s situation may not be enviable, in any scenario: the moment the master finds out that he has been letting in lovers, he is in for a beating, or removal as a guard dog; while as soon as he makes the mistake of barking at a lover and risking his mistress’s safety, he may find that poison in his food prevents recurring embarrassment. His successful pleasing, we may note, is in the perfect tense; the title of the epigram is Epitaphium cuiusdam canis (The Epitaph of a Certain [unnamed]Dog). What we do not know, may in fact be the crux of the story. Did the dog die of natural causes? Many Neo-Latin epitaphs were actually put up on tombs, or could have been. This, however, falls into the genre of the impossible epitaph: its writing condemns the master to ridicule, the mistress to worse. So only an enemy could propose its erection over the grave of a real dog. Most likely, of course, it was all a fiction; but the existence of possible realities adds depth to the reading of a poem that is extremely short, yet by no means as slight as it may at first appear.
There is further artificiality in giving a voice to the dog, which cannot think and speak in quite this way, in any language, but which can indeed make a noise, or refrain from doing so, an ability central to this epigram. One may compare a tiny vernacular poem, from two centuries later, Alexander Pope’s Epigram: Engraved on the Collar of a Dog Which I Gave to His Royal Highness: “I am his Highness’ Dog at Kew; / Pray tell me Sir, whose Dog are you?” (Pope 1963, 826). If dogs could only speak and answer, this is a perfectly civil question, from one dog to another. When a human reads the collar, it becomes something very different, a sharp critique of the reader’s role in society: Whose dog, metaphorically speaking, am I, after all? Am I a supporter of the Prince of Wales (“His Highness”), who is on bad terms with the king? A balancing act as clever as that of Du Bellay’s dog may be required, in order to please everyone whose power can make or mar a career. Or is one, like the poet, perhaps, independent enough to be no one’s dog, just at the moment? Pope’s little couplet is suitable for a real collar, while Du Bellay’s is not fit for a real tomb; it can be enjoyed on a trivial level, and also seen to have political or philosophical implications. Du Bellay, too, may make us think about the behavior of humans in society: are courtiers a little like this dog, always trying to please, in a dangerous world of shifting and incompatible priorities?
We saw with Du Bellay’s dog that sexual matters can be raised in a fairly subtle way, becoming more shocking the more one considers the implications. But there is also a strong strain of crudity in the Neo-Latin epigram, following in the classical tradition and taking advantage of the freedom of a “learned” language to use obscenities (though, as we have seen, not without controversy). This can sometimes involve clever wordplay, as in an epigram of another sixteenth-century Frenchman, Théodore de Bèze, where a girlfriend responds to the poet’s various endearments, including the diminutive corculum (“little heart”), with a fresh diminutive of her own: Salve, inquit, mea mentula (“Hello, she said, my little mind”)—except that mentula, we know, is not a diminutive for “mind” but a popular obscenity indicating the penis (Summers 2001, 272). How clever of the girl to refer to him by the part that she really appreciates. Poems of this sort are better seen as literary jokes, than as a reflection of the real linguistic skills of poets’ girlfriends; one may speculate that most of the educated women of the time who were capable of getting the joke would not have liked it much. In his later life as a leading Protestant theologian, de Bèze found it necessary to defend such youthful exuberance (Summers 2001, xxviii–xxxiv). It is interesting to find the very same corculum/mentula joke in a Latin writer active into the twenty-first century (whether arrived at independently, or in conscious or unconscious echo of the earlier example), the Austrian Gerd Allesch; he makes quite neatly, in three lines of iambics, the point that de Bèze takes eight hendecasyllables to expound. Here is the modern poet (Allesch 2000, 43): Nuper saluto sic meam puellulam: / “sis salva, mens mea atque corculum meum!” / et illa: “have, meum cor atque mentula!” (“Here’s how I recently greeted my little girl, ‘hello, my mind and little heart’, and she replied ‘hi, my heart and little mind/penis’”): a simple chiasmus of the diminutives (cor/corculum; mens/mentula), and a nice little risqué joke.
One of the biggest names in the culture of the early modern epigram was John Owen, or Audoenus (ca. 1563/4–1622?), a schoolmaster from Wales. He is arguably the most influential writer Wales has ever produced, though little known today. Unlike such other major figures as More, Erasmus, Secundus, or Poliziano, he concentrated solely on the epigram. He worked within a flourishing (Latin and vernacular) British tradition, but transcended it to achieve international popularity, foreign editions outnumbering British by three to one (Poole-Wilson 1989). His works traveled widely, under many aliases or variant spellings, and despite Catholic prohibitions: in Spanish translation even “Ivan Oven”—who sounds as if he ought to have presented a cookery show in the old Eastern bloc—or the rather more Hispanic “Juan Ouen.” Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, given the fondness of Neo-Latin for recycling and refashioning, one of Owen’s best-known lines, Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis (“Times are changed, and we are changed with them”) appears not to be original to him. Owen borrowed ideas, like almost everyone; his own impact on other, more local, epigram-writers was considerable. So prolific an author could not be consistent; he was admired and translated in Germany and France, some called him a second Martial, but perperam (“wrongly”), according to his scholarly French editor Renouard, multa enim profert aut mediocria, aut etiam lectu parum digna (“for he offers much that is mediocre or even not worth reading”; Owen 1794, v). Who does not, among epigrammatists of all ages? Still, it was worth his editor’s while to prepare the neat, fat little volume, signing his preface scribebam Parisiis, die 20 mensis florealis, anno reipublicae secundo (“written at Paris, 20 Floréal, Year Two of the Republic”; Owen 1794, xii). The Flowery month of spring, the Terror at its height: time could still be found for Owen.
Printed collections of epigrams could fit the pocket, or the gentleman’s study. They could get quite fat (even if in tiny print) as the “centuries” of short poems marched on, line by line, page by page, quip by clop. Some made a point of seeking relief, not only in short verses but in mini-volumes. Cum fieri soleant ingentes carminum acervi, / Miraris, quod sim tam brevis? opto legi (“Since poems usually come in great heaps, are you surprised I’m so short? I’d like to be read”): thus the little book to the reader, Libellus ad lectorem, speaking through the pupil of the Cologne Jesuit gymnasium, Arnold Birckman (Poemata varia 1631, 2). Conviva est lector (“the reader is a dinner-guest”), asserts his fellow-student Jacobus von Rottkirchen: Non omnes acidis gaudent, non dulcibus omnes, / Dulcia multa coci, multa coquunt acida (“not everyone likes sharp tastes, not everyone likes sweets; cooks prepare many sweets and many sour dishes”; Poemata varia 1631, 3). Small is beautiful, if that’s the sort of thing you like. And they do mean small: the volume of Various Poems (Poemata varia) is no bigger than twelve by seven centimeters, forty-eight pages, thin enough for any pocket, at about half a centimeter, even bound cheaply but neatly in marbled boards. The space is sufficient to show off many of the skills of Jesuit education, with anagrams and emblems to the fore.
As in the case of church monuments, emblem books combined the literary and the visual. The classic case is Andrea Alciati (or Alciato), Italian lawyer and poet (1492–1550), whose sometimes mysterious mixture of image, motto, and epigram fascinated readers throughout Europe. “Even if Alciato is not quite habitually unpointed, it is difficult sometimes to locate where the point is” (Cummings 2007, 206). That clearly did not matter much, and if one idea proved hard to grasp, it was easy to move on to the next. Emblem bibliographies emphasize Alciati’s bestseller status, among hundreds of other titles in a popular vernacular, as well as Neo-Latin, genre; in the Low Countries, for example, we have Antwerp editions in 1565, 1566, 1567, 1573, 1577, 1581, 1622, 1676, 1692; in Leiden in 1584, 1591 (twice), 1599, 1608, 1610 (Landwehr 1988, 42–47).
On November 15, 1616, the wedding bells rang out for Damian Botner, a Silesian pastor, and “the most chaste virgin” Barbara; the booklet of congratulatory poems was printed, with a blank space to be filled in by hand with a horoscope ad tempus aestimatum copulationis novorum coniugum (“at the estimated time of coupling of the newly-weds”; Foederi novo coniugiali 1616, A1v: it is duly completed in my copy). Eleven of the bride’s cousins and friends had contributed verses; there are chronograms, Greek elegiacs, extended anacreontics in Greek and Latin (Foederi novo coniugiali 1616, A2v–A3v, with Georg Ritter repeatedly using the word corculum that we met above in a different kind of epigram). No German vernacular, however; these are graduates of the University of Leipzig, after all. There is genuine affection and enthusiasm for the match, forcefully expressed by Johannes Zeidler, bachelor of philosophy: Coniugio melius nil; vita caelibe peius / Nil est (“nothing is better than marriage, nothing is worse than a bachelor’s life”; Foederi novo coniugiali, A4r): elsewhere, one might find that first nil, a monosyllable after the caesura, too awkward; here, its unexpected force perhaps serves to stress the point. Johannes’s relative, Michael Zeidler, calls on God to favor a pair: Quos castus firmo glutine iungit amor / … fac te duce tempore nullo / Cesset amor suavi languidus, oro, toro (“whom chaste love joins with strong glue … under your guidance may love never become languid and cease on their sweet bed, I pray”; Leipzig 1616, A2r). Zeidler’s lines might also possibly be read as “may languid love never cease,” if we take languidus in a less negative sense (“unhurried,” rather than “failing”), which creates an interesting erotic ambiguity. The tone is intimate, pious, passionate; though the wedding was naturally celebrated publicly in church, the poetry is essentially private, of interest to a small group of people in a limited locality. Yet it lasts rather well as a poignant example of what Neo-Latin can do.
“Occasional” verse covers a wide range. Metrically, it embraces more forms than the epigram usually does; Horatian lyrics could be surprisingly popular—and indeed many of Horace’s great odes were addressed to friends on some occasion or other. Occasional verse was produced in immense quantities (CNLS 2:100–3, including a wedding at Tallinn in 1643). Some educational institutions seized every opportunity to showcase their collective talents. The scholars of Eton College, near to the royal residence of Windsor Castle, presented manuscript verses to Queen Elizabeth in 1560 and 1563; more poets contributed to the earlier volume, but the scope of their offerings is less ambitious (in no case exceeding twenty-eight lines). There is considerable metrical variety, and in 1563 the acrostic is a popular technique, deployed with great inventiveness to spell out phrases in Latin or English from letters at the beginning, middle, or ends of lines. In 1563 the word epigramma is used as a standard description for all poems, including one historical narrative based on Livy that extends to hundreds of lines. These “epigrams” may push the boundaries of the genre farther than is comfortable, and contain some errors born of youthful enthusiasm, but there is no doubting the commitment of the students and their teacher to Neo-Latin creativity (Nichols 2014).
Later in Elizabeth’s reign, these commemorative collections moved from manuscript to print at Oxford and Cambridge (England’s only two universities at the time), and began a tradition that was to last for about two hundred years, only petering out in the 1760s. As far as I know, this was a particularly English phenomenon: while many individuals and groups at Continental institutions poured out Neo-Latin during this period, I am not aware of such a formalized method, with regular volumes in a similar format, taking root elsewhere. Mostly, these books marked grand public occasions, royal births, marriages and funerals; less often, the deaths of people of more local significance to the universities. When a book was to be produced, a substantial proportion of the university’s senior and junior members would be involved, often working at great speed. The results are a good reflection of Neo-Latin occasional poetry as a whole: varied in form and quality, sometimes rising remarkably well to the challenge of writing on a set subject, sometimes not so well. I will examine in some more detail one of these books, Cambridge’s Threnodia (Song of Lament, 1670) on the death of General George Monck, Duke of Albemarle (b. 1608); Oxford also produced its Epicedia for Monck, and both universities also lamented Henrietta, Charles I’s daughter (b. 1644), in the same year, Henrietta Maria, his widow (b. 1609), in the previous year, and Anne, Duchess of York (b. 1637), in 1671: a sad but busy time for the composers. As the man chiefly responsible for the restoration of Charles II in 1660, Monck’s status in public life was very high; having fought for Charles I, then for Parliament, and for Cromwell, before seeking his own advantage and the nation’s in a restored monarchy. He had changed loyalties several times, rising from modest gentry origins to great wealth, and just avoided becoming a scapegoat for the various disasters of 1665–1667, which included the Fire of London (1666) and the Dutch raid up the River Medway (1667) during the second Anglo-Dutch War.
More than a hundred Cambridge poets wrote in Latin on Monck’s death; a few also in Greek, and fourteen in English at the end of the volume. Several note the curiosity of his dying not in bed, but in a chair; not in fact very heroic: it had been his habit since the winter of 1667–1668 to sleep propped up in a chair, unable to do so lying down. He expired from dropsy on January 3, 1670, aged sixty-one. So, for James Jackson, M.D. (d. 1686), fellow of Clare Hall (now Clare College), Non cecidit, per quem spes Carolina stetit (“he did not fall, through whom Charles’s hope stood firm”); and for Henry Paman, M.D. (1623–95), fellow of St John’s College, Nec tamen ignave occubuit, cum stare nequiret, / Acriter in cathedra dimicat, et moritur (“but he did not sink listlessly, when he could not stand: he strives keenly in his chair, and dies”; Musarum Cantabrigiensium Threnodia 1670, B4v). William Makernesse of Emmanuel College (d. 1680) does not stint in describing the ravages of disease, and also notes the seated demise, as a route straight to the stars absque soloecismo (“without solecism” [or impropriety?], a rather bold, if rather odd, piece of phrasing; Musarum Cantabrigiensium Threnodia 1670, G4v).
There are a few examples in the 1670 Cambridge volume of the irregular inscription, an interesting Neo-Latin genre in itself; a sort of prose-poetry, modelled on the epitaphs that might grace a real tomb, but often more expansive. Joseph Carr (bap. 1650/1), commoner (student) of St John’s College, offers a vigorous Carmen lapidarium (Lapidary Poem, alluding to inscribing on stone) for the hero: Cuius virtute resurrectionem vidimus / regiminis monarchici: / sanctus Georgius, Hercules Anglicanus, / Hydram fanaticam, / Beluam multorum capitum / Interfecit, obtruncavit (“through whose courage we saw the resurrection of monarchical rule; a St. George, an English Hercules who killed and beheaded the fanatic hydra, many-headed beast”); following it with a fascinating explanation in more conventional verse (twelve elegiac lines), Carminis soluti apologeticum (Defense of Free Verse; Musarum Cantabrigiensium Threnodia 1670, H4v–I1r):
Forma meos neglecta decet (dux magne) dolores,
Agnoscit nullos nenia nostra modos.
Intumuit flumen, toto spatiatur in agro:
Cum norunt suetas flumina parva vias…
Aestuat infelix angusto limite Musa,
Compedibus metri dum iacet implicita.
Neglected form befits my grief, great duke; my dirge recognizes no meters. The river has swollen and spreads over the whole countryside, when little streams knew their accustomed ways … My muse “rages unhappily in a narrow limit” while it lies bound in the restrictions of meter.
In his use of italics (here, roman type), Carr calls our attention to his borrowing from Juvenal’s Satire 10.169, on Alexander the Great (a compliment to the general’s career, a greater leader even than Monck), who aestuat … limite mundi, famously “rages at the world’s narrow limits,” with nothing left worth conquering. This is proverbial arrogance, and all too soon he must be content with a narrow sarcophagus. Monck may not have been an Alexander, but he was better aware of human limitations, and played his cards very astutely. The young poet can thus comment neatly on his own creative ambitions, temporarily released from the meter (which he can naturally handle as well as most), as well as the fates of great men. Juvenal’s moralizing is savage: just before Alexander, Hannibal is also dismissed as a madman, whose Alpine endeavors are merely ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias (“to please boys and make yourself a stock topic for rhetoric”; l. 167). If Monck, too, becomes a subject for future student exercises, as he well might, they will probably be in a more sympathetic vein.
Another apology ends the Latin part of the collection. James Duport (1606–79), vice-chancellor, Master of Magdalene College, and dean of Peterborough Cathedral, explains that sickness at Cambridge has hindered the preparation of the book (Musarum Cantabrigiensium Threnodia 1670, S1r):
Conflictata diu est letali Academia morbo,
Abstulit illustrem cum mala Parca ducem.
Senserat infelix tanti praeludia fati,
Tum quasi patrono commoritura suo.
Necdum convaluit geminato vulnere mater,
Et morbo simul et funere pressa gravi.
Ignoscas ergo, petimus, si divite vena
Nec fluit, et genium non habet iste liber.
Aegra manus calamum regit, et penus arida vatum,
Et repit tardo languida Musa pede.
The university was long struck with a deadly plague, when evil fate took away the illustrious duke. It had felt unhappily the prelude of so great a death, being almost about to die alongside its patron. Nor had the mother (alma mater: the university) recovered from the double wound, oppressed by disease and the painful funeral at the same time. Therefore, we ask forgiveness, if the book has not flowed from a rich vein, and lacks genius. A sick hand guides the pen, and a meagre store of poets, and the muse creeps sluggishly on slow feet.
One might think there was no need for apology: Duport’s own contribution was far from sluggish: twenty-three Greek hexameters and a further twenty-six lines of Latin elegiacs at the end of the volume, not to mention his opening fanfare comprising six Latin poems (five elegiac, one iambic) spread over five pages. There is little evidence of weakness elsewhere, among fellows or students, though doubtless even more contributions were indeed prevented in that unhealthy Fenland winter. What is notable is that Duport and his colleagues cared very much about the quality of what they were doing—whether the king himself read as far as the end is another matter. Neo-Latin occasional poetry mattered to the university: it was an important part of its collective public image, and the self-presentation of individual members as loyal and learned citizens. Duport himself was one of the leading Latin and Greek poets of the age, a master of biblical paraphrase; much of his output could be described as epigrams or occasional verse, including three books (almost 400 pages) of Sylvae, miscellaneous poems, besides those allocated to the specific categories of congratulation, lament, university ceremonies, or sacred epigrams; not just a young man’s amusement, but a lifelong passion: Nec res mira tamen senex poeta (“an old man writing poetry is no surprise”; Duport 1676, 22).
The works of Anthony Alsop (ca. 1669/70–1726), born within a few days of the death of General Monck, provide many examples of the use of Horatian lyrics for occasional poetry, both public and private. Numerous odes addressed to friends are full of gently humorous, and sometimes sharply pointed, comment on events in their lives. When a slightly younger friend, the lawyer Joseph Taylor, sought to enter Parliament in 1722, he was warned that the election process could be dirty and expensive (Money 1998, 196–97, 320–21):
Sed per immensum oceanum et liquores
Mille sulcanda est via; multa fumi
Nubila erumpent fluitansque rivo
Alla perenni.
But you must cleave your way through a great ocean of liquor, many clouds of smoke must pour out, and a perpetual river of ale must flow.
That year, Taylor withdrew from the contest. A much younger Alsop, in 1695, had celebrated the wedding of his Scottish friend David Gregory, Oxford professor of astronomy, in a poem that is open to very different readings, in different manuscript versions. In abbreviated form, it concentrates on what marriage will mean for a scientist, in mildly risqué fashion: Mox qua mamillarum via lactea / Ducit, pererras improbula manu (“Soon you wander with your wicked little hand where her breasts’ milky way leads on”). But additional stanzas in some manuscripts focus on the political hopes shared by poet and bridegroom, for the restoration of the Stuart dynasty, once again exiled: En! tempus instat, en! veniet dies, / Cum rursus in Coelum caput efferet / Nomen Stuartorum (“Look, the time is at hand, look, the day will come, when the name of Stuart will again raise its head to heaven”; Money 1998, 135–42, 284–6). Queen Mary had just died; William’s throne looked uncertain—these seditious thoughts were widely shared, appeared realistic, and while obviously unpublishable, even half a century later, they must have circulated among Latinate sympathizers. Neo-Latin reflected modern life, and political divides, like religious ones, could produce impassioned verse. Latin appealed to educated people on all sides; it found favor with many Jacobites (supporters of the exiled James II and his descendants) as a means of private expression. A master of the Jacobite political epigram was the Scottish poet and doctor Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713), unrelenting in his hatred for William, who died in 1702: Occidit Imperii Populatrix hydra Britanni (“The hydra that laid waste the British Empire has fallen”; Pitcairne 2009, 225–27). Alsop’s private occasional poetry, like Pitcairne’s, could reach a wider audience than his own circle, whether through manuscripts or the occasional broadsheet: his satirical exposé of a pair of Oxford busybodies was printed (with or without his permission), taken up in someone else’s book, and imitated in English (Money 1998, 106–34). Jokes about foolish individuals, in the early modern period just as in ancient epigrams, cannot always be fully appreciated by later readers. But enough often remains to reimagine a world in which Neo-Latin wit flowed back and forth as the rivers of ale were consumed.
As the century was ending, a Croatian in Rome, Rajmund Kunić (1719–1794), prolific epigrammatist, was translating Theocritus into Latin; for comparison, and for the epigrams he failed to complete, Kunić’s editor supplied versions by Hugo Grotius and Daniel Heinsius (Kunić 1799). The genre was still alive, incorporating old and new. Indeed, it was one of the forms of Neo-Latin that lasted best into the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, individually the slightest, but collectively perhaps the largest. Fascinating and frustrating, easy to attempt, hard to perfect, epigrams could never satisfy everyone. Sometimes, though, they made their mark.
On epigrams in general, see Beer, Enenkel, and Rijser (2009); Laurens (1989). Useful general anthologies, with good numbers of epigrams are Perosa and Sparrow (1979); McFarlane (1980). Thorough lists of poets (for Italy, France, Netherlands), focusing on Greek models are Hutton (1935 and 1946). On English university collections: Binns (1990, 34–45); Money (1998, 229–49); Money (2009). For some other British case-studies, see Houghton and Manuwald (2012). For other work related to the contents of this chapter, see Fara and Money (2004), Money (2006), and Money (2008).
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