CLASSICAL CORNER
“Every man with a bellyful of classics is an enemy to the human race” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)
A sequel to FT345:15, inspired by, and
indebted to, Matthew Parris’s SCORN: The Wittiest and Wickedest Insults in Human History (2016). Parris includes a smattering of classical authors. Apart from some political and sexual rants from Aristophanes, too long to quote and partly covered in FT349:15, and a typically Catullus (Poems 99, v20) jab (“You foul saliva of a pissed-over whore”), they are – albeit witty – surprisingly tame; for stronger stuff, see Amy Richlin, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humour (1983).
His ‘Ancients, Primitives, and FolkLore’ round-up offers richer (i.e. nastier) pickings, ranging from ancient Egypt via Greece and Rome to mediaeval England and multitudinous other countries, both graffiti (predictable) and literary (Martial neck-and-neck with Catullus).
An Egyptian tomb’s (c. 2300 BC) “Come Here, You Fucker”, is commonly thought the world’s earliest recorded insult, just as ‘Roger Fuck By The Navel ’( official outlaw’ s nickname, 1310) seems the first English use of the now ubiquitous F-word.
Graffiti (many from Pompeii) are modern looking sexual crudities, notable alike for their tone and illiteracy – “Sabina, you give no-good blow-jobs” exemplifies both. They needed the Latin lesson given by John Cleese in Life of Brian, though might have responded like Sigismund (1433-7): “I am the Roman emperor and am above grammar.”
For a rival example of (im)polite English discourse, compare AA Gill’s letter to Taki (Spectator, 30 July 1999): “Go fuck yourself, you smelly dago lesbian.” Mind you, Taki partly brought this on himself, unlike outstanding ubiquitous English classicist Mary Beard, recipient of the vilest trolling – I disdain to give examples, and MB is quite capable of looking after herself.
Aristophanes (Women of Parliament,
vv1169-74) invented the longest word in Greek, indeed in any language – Guinness Book of Records:
Lo pa do te machos se lac hog a leo kranioleipsa nod rim hypo trim ma to sil phi o para mel itoka take chyme no kic hi epikossyphoph at toper is t era lek tryonoptekephalliokiglopeiolagoiosiraio lob aphetrr ag an op yeryg on.
(PHEW!)
YouTube has someone galloping through this 172-word monster in 35 seconds. Though as rich in compounds as German, modern Greek doesn’t come close. It means a multi-ingredient salad. Though not a full-blown troll, in context it is somewhat disparaging, perhaps the ancestor of shorter cognates such as “You are ugly as a salad” (Bulgarian), Kastravec
(Albanian = ‘Gourd’; cf. Valley Girl-speak “Out of your Gourd”), or (my favourite) “You Out-of-Focus-Eggplant” (Japanese). Plautus (The Persian, vv703-5) offers stiff Roman competition with:
Vaniloqu id or usvirgi ne sven don ides nugio pi loqu ides argent um ext erebr on ides te dig niloqu ides nu did esp al po ni de squods em el ar rip ides nunquameripides.
Boiling down to: “Lying Speaker us Girl Seller inksy Trifling great Talk er Silver Squeeze router Coin Wheedle router What you have once Grabbed Stein never LetitgoBerg”.
The last part of this is reproduced from Paul Nixon’s 1917 Loeb translation, betraying the casual antisemitism endemic in those times.
This sesquipedalian style has a long innings. Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes (12th-century) called one rival “Bull-father, moonstruck son of a goat,” while another is dismissed as “Ghostly Presence, Scabbed with camel-disease, cat-faced, anchovyeyed, with the voice of a weeping eunuch.” Makes modern academic spite look insipid. As does Constantine the Rhodian’s compound accusation (occupies 34 lines in P Matranga’s Anecdota Graeca, Rome, 1850, p624-5) of politician Leo Choerosphactes for every conceivable (and inconceivable) form of vice.
Renaissance scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger – there’s a name for you – dubbed the English “Perfidious, haughty, savage,
LEFT: Aristophanes, among other things the inventor of the longest word in Greek. disdainful, stupid, slothful, inhospitable, inhuman.” Approved East German abuse of the English (1953) ran to: “Paralytic sycophants, effete betrayers of humanity, carrion-eating servile imitators, arch-cowards and collaborators, gang of women-murderers, degenerate rabble, parasitic traditionalists, playboy soldiers, conceited dandies.”
Edward Lear (1856) castigated the monks of Mt Athos as: “Muttering, miserable, mutton-hating, man-avoiding, misogynic, morose, merriment-marring, mono-toning, many mule-making, mocking, mournful, minced fish, marmalade masticating Monx .”
Quite puts Trump’s “Bad!” tweets in the shade.
Parris quotes a fellow don’s description of AE Housman: “Descended from a long line of maiden aunts.” That perfectly suits his public persona. But, when it came to dishing out abuse against fellow classicists, he had no equal. The vituperative gems may be found in the Prefaces to his editions of Roman poets Juvenal, Lucan, and Manilius. A typical example runs: “Stoeber’s mind, though that is no name to call it by, was one which turned as unswervingly to the false, the meaningless, the unmetrical, and the ungrammatical, as the needle to the pole.”
Or:
“Not only had Jacob no sense for grammar, no sense for coherency, no sense for sense, but being himself possessed by a passion for the clumsy and the hispid, he imputed this disgusting taste to all the authors whom he edited.”
Classy, classical carping, several cuts above our homegrown trollers.
For concluding ancient-modern link, step forward Theodore Roosevelt who (1914) wrote off Woodrow Wilson as “a Byzantine logothete, supported by all the flub dubs, mollycoddles, and flapdoodle pacifists.”
How many of our politicos would have the faintest idea what a Byzantine logothete was?
“Dear me – once upon a time, I enjoyed a sense of amusement and superiority toward ‘cranks’. And now, here am I, a ‘crank’ myself. Take care, oh, reader, with whom you are amused, unless you enjoy laughing at yourself.” – Fort, Books, p895.