The Elkdog Men

This is what happens when you take JSTOR away from a Classics student

I was driving myself crazy last night because I remembered (or thought I remembered) an amusing wrinkle from Roman mythology: a race of thumb-sized men with penis heads who arose from the earth, perhaps after the ground was scattered with semen or blood or something else likely to cause spontaneous generation. I think I can be forgiven for assuming this was an indigenous Roman creation—it sounds like something they’d just go absolutely ape for, and paint hundreds of the little guys marching along the baseboards in their bedrooms. Or whatever creative penis-art ideas they could come up with.

So the result was that I was googling ALL WRONG. “Roman etruscan chthonic penis phallus head tiny thumb creatures -priapus” and so on.

I kept looking today with renewed vigour when I remembered the nagging problem, and finally found the answer on theoi.com. So it’s Greek, fine, fine, but I was right about the rest, wasn’t I? Problem: while Wikipedia is happy to call the Daktyloi “phallic”, none of the original sources quoted on Theoi do, although I found a paper willing to call them “ithyphallic” which is not the same (i.e. not nearly as funny) as literally having a penis for a head. Like, say, this hilarious Gallo-Roman creation.

I hoped that maybe the Romans had done some interpretatio romana on the Daktyloi and turned them into the penis fiesta that my faulty memory had created, but no—apparently they just boringly absorbed them into the already boring Penates. Native Roman deities basically come in two flavours: (1) vague and amorphous, probably involved with grain or something, and (2) penises a go-go. (I lie, the whole Roman system of household gods is fascinating but the things are lacking in personality. Having penis-heads would give them some ‘zazz.)

Also it seems they weren’t even tiny, that was just an addition my mind made from the association with fingers. Concluding my pointless story about how misremembered myths are the best kind, this graceful little sentence from Ovid:

nec loquor…
te quoque, nunc adamas, quondam fidissime parvo,
Celmi, Iovi largoque satos Curetas ab imbri…

Neither will I tell…how you too, Celmis, now changed to hardest steel, once were the most faithful friend of little Jupiter, and the Curetas sown from abundant pelting rain…

___________________

Not really done, because Romans are wonderful at writing about the rain. Rain in general is pluo, itself a wonderfully onomatopoeic word: pluere, pluit, pluvius. But a sudden, hard shower is imber, a word we know from the moon’s Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Rains. Derived from it is imbrex, a hollow roofing tile (the connection should be obvious there), and that word is also used in Suetonius to describe the sound of applause. Juvenal ends a harried description of a fire in an inner-city apartment building with this peaceful, Vergilian moment:

tu nescis; nam si gradibus trepidatur ab imis,
ultimus ardebit quem tegula sola tuetur
a pluvia, molles ubi reddunt ova columbae.

You have no idea; for if they’re panicking from the very bottom of the stairs,
the last man who will burn is guarded only by a roof-tile
from the rain, where eggs are laid by the gentle doves.

Ahhhh.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

This recording and post is because I wanted to read Vergil to my girlfriend, so that she’d know what it sounds like. I forgot to do it while she was actually here in person so here it is now. If you’ve never read Vergil, you can use this post to fake it a little.

When I was doing third-year Latin at Queen’s, my professor, Ross Kilpatrick, pointed out that balance was an important element of Latin poetic structure. The Romans established their military camps with a predictable road layout, so that as a soldier, no matter what country you were in you would know where things were and be ready for defence in an emergency. At the centre of the camp they kept the standard, the legion’s eagle. This heart of the camp, the main road, always ran north-south, and it was called the Cardo Maximus. Cardus literally means a hinge, and by extension it’s something on which all else turns. Cardinal in the sense of the four directions is derived from it.

This ultimate hinge, a foundational turning point, is also present in literature. In Vergil it’s very easy to find. The Aeneid is composed of twelve books. Book Six, halfway through, describes Aeneas’s journey to the Underworld. In Book Six there are roughly 900 lines. So the dead centre of the Aeneid would be at line 450. This is the line:

inter quas Phoenissa recens a vulnere Dido

‘Among them, with wound still fresh, Phoenician Dido…’

Even the placement of Dido’s name in the line is at the very end, the moment of greatest emphasis and drama. The Aeneid is often described as a propaganda piece about the foundation of Rome, but because Vergil wrote it, he put Dido’s ghost at its heart. That’s not a coincidence. The hinge, the centre of the compass, the point on which the entire poem balances—and it’s about the cost of Rome, the loss, the human heartbreak that resulted from Aeneas and his divine mission. That was what mattered to Vergil. You can see it all through the entire epic, but even when you slice it up by the numbers this way you still find Dido there.

Here’s the section, lines 440-476, in Latin and then in H.R. Fairclough’s translation from the Loeb.

Other so-Vergil-it-hurts moments in this section:

- That wonderfully detailed simile of the moon rising, emphasizing not the spectral beauty of a moment like that but the uncertainty of not knowing whether you really see it or are just thinking/hoping that you do.

- He doesn’t explicitly take sides between Dido and Aeneas, and I think anybody else would. Even I was when I read it aloud because Aeneas’s explanation just sounds like such bullshit. “Oh man, I didn’t know you’d be that upset!” Seriously? But Vergil treats his shock and sadness as genuine just as much as Dido’s continuing rage, because Vergil doesn’t grind axes.

- And, of course, he’s right: Aeneas knew that he was hurting Dido by leaving, but there really was no way for him to know that she would commit suicide, and our inability to foresee things like that is scary and awful. He took the risk for the greater good as he perceived it, because he is pius Aeneas, and the worst-case scenario resulted, where any explanation he makes is going to be woefully insufficient.

- How often does Vergil call things or people cruel? And how often does our epic hero just break down and cry buckets of tears? A LOT is how often.

- Line 477, the last one I read, is the most Vergilian of all. After an encounter like that, crying his eyes out in hell as he watches the love of his life walk away without even looking at him, much less offering him forgiveness, Aeneas picks up and keeps walking. Toils along. Because, as he’s said, the gods are driving him along with their behests. Egere, driving him like livestock, sheep or cattle. Of course.

“ VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1864: Samius to Cornelius: go hang yourself!
VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1880: Lucius Istacidius, I regard as a stranger anyone who doesn’t invite me to dinner.
VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1880: The man I am having dinner with is a barbarian.
VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1881: Virgula to her friend Tertius: you are disgusting!
VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1882: The one who buggers a fire burns his penis
VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1904: O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not already collapsed in ruin.

—

Graffiti from Pompeii

Eternal wisdom. Don’t try to have anal sex with a fire, guys. You’ll only get hurt!

“ English is a half-Latin language, and we’ve done our best to absorb the Latin literature. But a Roman poet is much less intellectual than the Englishman, much less abstract. He’s nearer nature somehow—somewhat what we feel about a Frenchman but more so still. And yet he’s very sophisticated. He has his way of doing things, though the number of forms he explored is quite limited. The amount he could take from the Greeks and yet change is an extraordinary piece of firm discipline. Also, you take almost any really good Roman poet—Juvenal, or Virgil, or Propertius, Catullus—he’s much more raw and direct than anything in English, and yet he has this blocklike formality. The Roman frankness interests me. Until recently our literature hasn’t been as raw as the Roman, translations had to have stars. And their history has a terrible human frankness that isn’t customary with us—corrosive attacks on the establishment, comments on politics and the decay of morals, all felt terribly strongly, by poets as well as historians.

—

Robert Lowell

ETA: I don’t really agree with him about Latin frankness, when allusion and circumlocution are essential building blocks for Roman poets, but that may be another post in itself.

With that footnote, this may be the best first page of any Classics article. I’m peeved that my current college is too cheap to offer JSTOR access, since Queen’s finally cut me off at the tap. (I do, however, plan to hunt up that Thibault book.)

Interpretatio Graeca

“Dad, we’re sailing in Greece and you’re still talking about Neptune. Come on, don’t you know that the Romans were copycats. They stole the Greek Gods and renamed them, the sea God is really Poseidon.” My eight-year old daughter, Nari, fancies herself an expert on many subjects, including Greek mythology and she rarely misses an opportunity to correct her dear old dad. However, her point is valid, all sailors know that it never pays to irritate the gods…” (source)

Okay. This is not at all the point of the article in question, but I am really, really tired of seeing this meme around. It’s one of those things that is not exactly a “fact” but which the education system spreads around willy-nilly, and most people won’t learn the more accurate view unless (God help them) they decide to study Classics more seriously. I, however, am here to save you some money.

The Greeks pulled this trick on every foreign god they encountered. Osiris is basically Dionysus, right? They have so much in common! The Greeks had this tendency way back in Herodotus’s day, when Rome was still a republic. Latin authors called this the interpretatio graeca, and when they did it themselves they called it the interpretatio romana. It was a thing. There’s nothing wrong with being a culture prone to syncretism, because gods are not intellectual property.
As mentioned, the Romans were similar to their Greek neighbours in that when they encountered a new local religion, they interpreted it in the light of their own. Why so unoriginal, guys? Well, because there were highly influential Greek colonies in southern Italy of long-standing (like Cumae, the home of the Sibyl) and because Greeks dominated the culture scene. And by “dominated” I mean that well into the Empire, Romans felt like their own language wasn’t good enough or classy enough and they spoke Greek to one another instead. Have we seen this dynamic play itself out in history before?
Your average mythology textbook for high schoolers or first-year survey courses makes it sound like there was a 1:1 match between Greek and Roman pantheons, which makes me BANANAS. Jupiter and Mars are not exactly the same as Zeus and Ares, and identifying Saturn and Ops with Cronos and Rhea is to misunderstand a SHITLOAD about Roman culture. Also this approach just assumes that gods like Quirinus and Janus weren’t important at all, because they had no Greek counterparts, when in fact they were major symbols of Roman identity and the state.
Which is another thing. You don’t like state religions and neither do I. But if I was forced to live in a state that had one? The Roman religion was pretty easy to live with because of the syncretism from point 1. They were very willing to let people worship whatever, so long as the gods in question didn’t have the potential to break the whole system and/or society (see: Jesus, Cybele). Criticising Rome for having a state religion without acknowledging the relative freedom of religion (compared to, let’s say, England in the Middle Ages) is not very fair, but people do it all the time.
Who comes out the loser in this deal? It’s actually the Romans, who had fascinating native gods of their own, along with the remnants of Etruscan religion. Roman religion was very much its own weird little thing, in spite of the familiar faces wandering around, and as a result of the Greek absorption it’s not as well-documented or understood now. Look up the restrictions on the flamen dialis and tell me that sounds Greek.
The Aeneid is a whole ‘nother topic here but since it’s tangentially connected and the same sorts of people use it as evidence of PLAGIARISM FROM THE GREEKS, I’ll limit myself to saying that Homer and Vergil were trying to accomplish very different things. If you just think Vergil is boring that’s okay, you have a right to sucky opinions. If you think he was trying to be exactly like Homer and failing because he had no talent, though, you are just wrong. The Aeneid is an intricate, delicate work suffused with sorrow and I miss studying it.

The Romans did plenty of shitty things to the Greeks that I am not going to defend, but accusing them of stealing their gods is wrong in a number of ways. So there! Now you know how badly the public school system may have failed you.

ecrivaine:

Fair enough! I’m never going to be too much a fan of straight white guys, but I will say, I don’t really blame Ovid, as it’s not like he invented all the myths about the rapey gods, he just put them into a popular form. I guess I just, ignorantly, wasn’t expecting it!

I hear you, yeah. I wouldn’t apply modern labels of sexuality to ancient authors, of course, but (going only by comments in his works and letters) Ovid seems a little less bi than the average Roman. Obviously no author so far removed from our current culture is going to match up perfectly with our values and mores, but Ovid’s a special guy to me because he seems interested in women and in how they think and what they want. He allows them (enthusiastically!) to have sexual desires and with the Heroides he gives a close look at the thoughts and desires of women who were formerly just accessories/enemies/obstacles to the heroes. A man writing from the 1st-person POV of a woman in epistolary form was unique in Latin literature.

Here he is writing from Medea’s perspective, after Jason has fucked her over:

“There’s a wood, dark with pine and oak branches,
the sun’s rays can scarcely reach there:
in it, there is – or was for certain – a temple of Diana:
there a golden goddess stood made by barbarian hands.
Do you know it, or has the place been forgotten, along with me?
We came there: you began to speak first, with false words…
[…]
So I quickly became a girl captivated by your words.
And you yoked the brazen-footed steeds, your body un-scorched,
and split the solid earth with the plough, as you were ordered.
You filled the furrows with venomous teeth, instead of seed,
and warriors were born, armed with swords and shields.
I, who gave you the charms, sat there pale of face,
when I saw these men, suddenly born, take up arms,
until the earth-born brothers – marvellous happening! –
with drawn swords, joined battle amongst themselves.
Behold the sleepless guardian, coated with rattling scales,
hissed, and swept the ground with his writhing body.
Where was the rich dowry then? Where was the royal bride
for you then, and that Isthmus splitting the waters of twin seas?
I, the woman who has come to seem, at last, a barbarian to you,
who am now poor, who am now seen to be harmful,
subdued those burning eyes, with sleep-inducing drugs,
and safely gave you the fleece you carried away.
My father is betrayed, kingdom and country forsaken,
for which, it is right, my reward’s to suffer exile,
my virginity becomes the prize of a foreign thief,
my most dearly beloved sister, with my mother, lost.
[…]
You ask, where’s my dowry? I numbered it on that field
that was ploughed by you, in taking the fleece.
My dowry’s that golden ram known by its thick fleece,
that you’d deny me if I said to you: ‘Return it.’
My dowry is your safety: my dowry’s the youth of Greece.
Cruel man, go: compare this to the wealth of Corinth.
That you live, that you have a wife and powerful father-in-law,
that you can even be ungrateful, all that’s due to me.
Indeed, what’s on hand – but why should I be concerned to warn you
of your punishment? Great anger teems with threats.
I’ll follow where anger takes me. Perhaps I’ll regret my deeds:
I regret having been concerned for an unfaithful husband.
Let the god see to that, who now disturbs my heart.
Assuredly I do not know what moves my spirit most.”

Anyway, my point is that I think Ovid is bombass and your post made me feel like quoting from the Heroides.

(PS he named the fictional subject of his erotic poetry after the female poet Corinna, a teacher and rival to Pindar. Quoth Wiki: “Aelian said she defeated Pindar five times, and in response to these defeats, Pindar called her a sow.” I’m done now.)

(Source: invertsugar)

“ Rogo vos, quis potest sine offula vivere?

—

Suetonius, quoting emperor/gourmand Claudius as he passionately addressed the Roman curia with the question, “I ask you all, who is able to live without snacks?”

“Offula” is a diminutive of offa, which means “lump” usually in grain, such as a corn cake. From there it comes to mean “morsel”, a little bit of anything eatable. Juvenal uses the rustic form “ofella” once to refer to a small chop thieved from a kitchen by a serving boy, and “offa” to refer to the hunks discharged from a womb after an abortion. Hungry?

fuckyeahjohnnydepp:

with Iggy Pop at Cannes, May 1997

What an unsettlingly wholesome photo. They look like they’re at a picnic.

This is as good a time as any to note the fact that Iggy Pop is a fan of Roman history and therefore my homie for life:

In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dero Saunders, Penguin). The grandeur of the subject appealed to me, as did the cameo illustration of Edward Gibbon, the author, on the front cover. He looked like a heavy dude. Being in a political business, I had long made a habit of reading biographies of wilful characters - Hitler, Churchill, MacArthur, Brando - with large profiles, and I also enjoyed books on war and political intrigue, as I could relate the action to my own situation in the music business, which is not about music at all, but is a kind of religion-rental.

I would read with pleasure around 4 am, with my drugs and whisky in cheap motels, savouring the clash of beliefs, personalities and values, played out on antiquity’s stage by crowds of the vulgar, led by huge archetypal characters.

It’s actually a pretty fun defence-in-brief of Classical education. My school’s department should have printed it out for their sad hallway bulletin board of “no seriously though Latin is useful” articles.

ATM in Vatican City with instructions in Latin.