H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: MEMMIO

 M.: Shropshire, read the lines and translate them without that air of martyrdom by which schoolboys hope to soften grammar. Shropshire: Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas... M.: Continue. Shropshire: ...te sociam studeo scribendis versibus esse quos ego de rerum natura pangere conor Memmiadae nostro... M.: Very well. Now translate. Shropshire: Mother of the sons of Aeneas, delight of men and gods... M.: Better “of gods and men,” if only to preserve the old decencies. Shropshire: Yes, sir. Mother of the sons of Aeneas, delight of gods and men, I strive that you be my companion in writing these verses which I try to compose on the nature of things for our Memmiad. M.: Our what? Shropshire: Our Memmiad, sir. M.: You say it with a straight face, which is already more than the word deserves. G.: It sounds like a family-sized edition of Memmius. Shropshire: Exactly, sir. That is my difficulty. Why not simply Memmio? Or Memmio nostro, if one must be affectionate? M.: Because, Shropshire, poets are not always content to leave a Roman in one piece. G.: They improve him metrically first. Shropshire: It has too many syllables, sir. Or one too many, at least in my moral sense. M.: Not in Lucretius’ metrical sense, unhappily for your morals. G.: Mem-mi-a-dae. It stretches, but not unlawfully. Shropshire: It still feels like calling you Griceiad, Grice. G.: I should regard it as an outrage against both friendship and quantity. M.: Quantity? G.: In your Griceian sense, sir, it gives too much surname and too little person. Shropshire: Or Speranziad, if one were especially vindictive. M.: That would be a late and unhelpful medievalism. G.: Shropshireiad is worse. Shropshire: Salopiad, then. Cleaner and county-backed. M.: Buriad would do for me, I suppose, if one wished to convert a decent Latin master into a minor epic. Shropshire: Exactly, sir. It makes one sound less like a man than a tribal consequence. M.: There is your answer already. Memmiadae is not merely “Memmius,” but “the Memmian one,” the man as heir, scion, representative of the gens Memmia. G.: Which is Roman enough. A Roman never entirely arrives alone; his family gets there first. Shropshire: Then Lucretius is not addressing Memmius the man, but Memmius as a branch of an old tree. M.: Well put. Though try not to sound pleased with yourself. G.: Lucretius wants the patron under a noble description. Not merely Gaius Memmius, but the Memmian, the son of the house, the gentleman with ancestry enough to be addressed in epic dress. Shropshire: It still sounds as if he has been turned into an Iliad. M.: Better an Iliad than a scandal sheet. G.: Though with Memmius one risks both. Shropshire: Because of Lucullus, sir? M.: Ah. So you have read beyond the lines, which is sometimes a virtue. Yes, because of Lucullus. The historical Memmius, tribune of 66, was not merely a recipient of verses. He was a political nuisance of some skill. G.: He attacked Lucullus by making victory politically uncomfortable. Shropshire: How does one do that? M.: One prosecutes relations, hinders honours, and keeps a victorious general waiting outside the pomerium for his triumph as if glory were a railway platform and the train delayed by procedure. G.: A peculiarly Roman cruelty. To win the war and then be kept in suspense by the city one has saved. Shropshire: Then Memmius is not a decorative name in a dedication. M.: Precisely. That is one of the things school editions conceal under notes. G.: Lucretius chooses a man who is politically real, inconvenient, ambitious, and Roman to the marrow. Shropshire: Then why dignify him into Memmiadae? M.: Because didactic poetry likes to elevate while instructing. It addresses a concrete Roman under a slightly enlarged title. The enlargement is rhetorical, not genealogical fiction. G.: It also helps the line. One should never underestimate poetry’s tendency to discover nobility where the metre asks for it. Shropshire: So if I called you Buriad, sir, I might plead prosody? M.: You might plead it; you would not survive it. G.: Suppose, sir, that Memmius himself objected. What would he say? M.: Excellent. Let us have the oratio recta. Grice, rescue your classmate. Imagine Memmius replying to Lucretius on being converted from Memmius into Memmiadae. G.: Very well, sir. “Lucreti, if you mean me, say me. If you mean my ancestors, invite them too. I came for philosophy, not family enlargement.” Shropshire: Good. M.: Continue. G.: “Do not make me a clan when I am already one tribune more than the city can comfortably bear.” Shropshire: Better and better. M.: More dryness, Grice, less applause. G.: “If I am to hear atoms and void, I should prefer not to hear myself first turned into a dynastic plural.” Shropshire: Exactly. As if I were to say, “Pass the salt, Salopiad.” M.: Which would be intolerable even at table. G.: Or “Attend, Griceiad,” which would make me feel less addressed than annexed. Shropshire: Speranziad would be worse, because it sounds self-conscious before it begins. M.: Lucretiad is in some ways the natural revenge. G.: Yes. “Very well, Memmiadae, but then permit me to answer, Lucretiad, and let us both sound like sub-epic collateral.” Shropshire: There is justice. M.: Not quite. Justice would be to scan the line first and mock afterwards. G.: May I make the historical point, sir? M.: You may, if you do not bury the class under it. G.: Memmius was not merely Lucretius’ dedicatee. He appears in the poem as addressee, repeatedly enough that he enters the rhetorical machinery. But he is not thereby part of the doctrine. He is pedagogic occasion, not atom. M.: Very good. The sort of distinction even dons forget after lunch. Shropshire: So Grice is right that dedicatees are not really part of the poem? M.: Right enough, with a correction. A dedicatee may enter the poem rhetorically without becoming part of its philosophical furniture. G.: Memmius is inside De rerum natura as hearer, not as principle. Shropshire: A listener under verse, then. M.: Quite. G.: And Lucretius names him elsewhere too. He returns to Memmius in several apostrophes across the poem, especially when urging attention, warning against superstition, or steering the reader through doctrine. M.: We shall have examples, if you please, not a mist of scholarship. G.: Yes, sir. There are places where Lucretius addresses him directly with “Memmi” in exhortatory passages, especially when trying to keep the reader from drifting back into religion or civic habit. The opening is the grandest, but not the only one. Shropshire: So Memmius is dragged through the argument whether he likes it or not. G.: Much as Rome dragged Lucullus through procedure. M.: A little too pleased with symmetry, but continue. Shropshire: Sir, if Memmiadae means scion of the gens Memmia, why not simply say “for our Memmius” in prose and spare us epic horticulture? M.: Because Lucretius is writing hexameters, not a police deposition. G.: And because “our Memmius” would be smaller. Memmiadae has elevation, family resonance, Roman public dignity. Shropshire: It also has one syllable too many for my comfort. M.: Your comfort is not among the criteria of Augustan or pre-Augustan verse. G.: Republican verse, sir, if we are being strict. M.: Quite. I shall not let you promote Augustus earlier than necessary. Shropshire: Then what sort of man was Memmius in Cicero? M.: Ah, now we come to the useful question. Cicero gives us Memmius as a recognisable political and oratorical figure, but not with the tidy preserved speech your generation always hopes for when it has not prepared the text. G.: So no perfect oratio recta survives in Cicero for us to hand to Speranza. M.: Not in the pleasing schoolboy sense, no. Memmius is mentioned, judged, and contextually present, but Cicero does not leave us a neat set-piece of Memmius speaking in his own full preserved voice. Shropshire: So Speranza would have to reconstruct him. M.: Which is often what clever men do when the sources refuse to be neat. G.: There is, however, the Athenian business. M.: Yes. Tell Shropshire, since he distrusts all names that grow genealogically in verse. G.: Later, after political disgrace, Memmius goes into exile and is associated with Athens, and Cicero’s letters show him entangled with the site of Epicurus’ house and garden. Shropshire: Is that self-exile or other-exile? M.: A fair distinction. G.: I should call it other-exile first and self-exile second. He is driven out by conviction and electoral failure, then withdraws himself to Athens and later elsewhere. The state begins the matter; the man completes it geographically. M.: Excellent. That is nearly worth marking. Shropshire: So not a philosopher retiring from preference, but a politician displaced by consequence. G.: Exactly. Athens receives him not as an innocent pilgrim to the Garden, but as a Roman nuisance with culture. M.: And do not say he died in Athens as if certainty were cheap. The safer view is that he withdrew first to Athens and then to Mytilene, and died later, not securely at Athens itself. Shropshire: So Athens is part of the exile story, not safely the place of death. M.: At last, prudence from Somerset. G.: Which makes the irony richer. Lucretius addresses a Roman politician under Epicurean instruction, and later that same Roman turns up in the orbit of Epicurus’ own place at Athens. Shropshire: And Cicero has to write letters about property and gardens while the world collapses. M.: Rome often conducts philosophy through estate management. G.: The Garden becomes a very Roman real-estate complication. Shropshire: Then if Memmius heard himself called Memmiadae, perhaps he would have approved, being Roman enough to enjoy a gens in public. M.: Very possibly. Men often object in theory to titles they keep in practice. G.: He might say, “If I must be instructed like a schoolboy, I prefer at least to be addressed like an ancestor.” Shropshire: Better than Griceiad, certainly. M.: Everything is better than Griceiad. G.: Not Shropshireiad. That has a kind of accidental barbaric strength. Shropshire: I reject it entirely. M.: Sensibly. Now let us return to the Latin. Shropshire, construe te sociam studeo scribendis versibus esse. Shropshire: I strive that you be a companion to me in writing the verses. M.: Better. G.: And Venus as socia matters. She is not merely invoked but enlisted. M.: Yes. The proem does not only praise; it recruits divine assistance into poetry for a Roman addressee. And that too is part of why Memmiadae works. One wants the whole opening pitched slightly above the civil service. Shropshire: So in one breath we have mythology, poetics, Roman genealogy, and one slightly troublesome politician. M.: Which is already more civilisation than most modern verse manages in a week. G.: Sir, may I add that Memmiadae is also strategically distancing? To say Memmius would be straightforwardly personal; to say Memmiadae lets Lucretius address him under a public, almost emblematic description. M.: Very good. The poetic addressee is at once this man and a representative Roman. Shropshire: Then the word does more than fill the verse. It makes him typological. G.: Precisely. M.: And that is why your original complaint about a syllable too many was useful, if only because it forced us to ask what the extra syllable was buying. Shropshire: It buys a gens, a posture, and perhaps a little vanity. M.: It buys Romanity in elevated form. G.: Also the slight sense that the poem is not merely for a private reader but for a Roman public concentrated in one aristocratic hearer. Shropshire: So he is both man and audience. M.: Better: man as socially located audience. G.: Which suits Lucretius. He teaches the individual through the Roman he already is. Shropshire: Then how should I translate it, if not “for our Memmiad”? M.: “For our Memmius of the Memmian house,” if you wish to explain; “for our Memmian” if you wish to preserve the effect; or simply “for our Memmius,” if you wish to avoid monstrosity and lose resonance. G.: “For our Memmian” sounds almost tolerable. Shropshire: Better than Memmiad, which sounds like a poem about him written by himself. M.: A danger from which the republic was not wholly protected. G.: Sir, may I attempt a fuller oratio recta for Memmius? M.: You may. G.: “Lucreti, if you will have me hear of atoms, void, death, and the gods’ indifference, do not first dissolve me into a family ending. I am already Gaius Memmius, tribune enough for one life. If you insist on Memmiadae, I shall answer by calling you Lucretiad and expect hexameters in return. Yet since a Roman prefers his dignity before his accuracy, proceed.” Shropshire: That is probably exactly wrong and therefore Roman. M.: Nicely judged. Shropshire: Then if I were ever written into verse, I should like to be plain Shropshire. G.: Never Salopiad? Shropshire: Never, unless I were crossing the Hellespont. M.: Which in this classroom is unlikely. Now, one last matter. What does the opening ask of Venus in relation to Memmius? G.: That she be companion to the poet in the writing of verses for him. So the divine and the didactic converge on a Roman hearer who must be charmed into philosophy. M.: Precisely. Memmius is not merely named. He is the destination of a poetic operation requiring both rhetoric and divine patronage. Shropshire: Then Grice is right and not right. The dedicatee is not part of the ontology of the poem, but he is part of its machinery. M.: Excellent. At last a sentence fit to survive the hour. G.: So Memmius is inside the poem instrumentally, not cosmologically. M.: You have both earned that. Write it down before the county drains from your heads. Shropshire: With my beautiful handwriting, sir? M.: Do not tempt me to praise it. G.: That would imply I am hopeless at Latin. M.: In your case, Grice, it would only imply that Providence occasionally makes exceptions.