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

 

Catalogue Raisonné of J. L. Speranza’s Publications – H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: ME

 

I verbali: Mecenate

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, MAECENAS; audīvī tē “Dicta Trabeata” scribere, sed timeō nē trabea ipsa plus loquātur quam verba.

MAECENAS: Salvē, GRICE; trabea quidem clāmat, sed ego tantum submurmurō, ut lector putet sē ipsum sapiēns esse.

GRICEVS: Bene; apud mē hoc vocātur implicātūra, cum auctor tacet et tamen exigat ut alius intellegat.

MAECENAS: Ita est; ego dō munera, tū dās sensum, et uterque laudāmur pro eō quod nēminī prorsus dēdimus.

 

I verbali: Medio

 

Gricevs: Medive, dic mihi, cur Romani semper Graecos imitantur? An porticus vobis etiam philosophus erat?

Medivs: Griceve, in porticu semper philosophamur, sed interdum etiam sub umbra ciceris requiescimus. Graeci libros perdunt, Romani porticus servant!

Gricevs: At, Medive, quid prodest porticus servare, si philosophiam ipsam in libros non colligimus? Ne totum in umbra pereat quod in sole nascebatur!

Medivs: O Griceve, porticus non solum lapides, sed etiam sermones et animos conservat. Ubi libri silent, memoria et mos vivunt—sic Romani semper invenient ubi philosophandum sit.

 

I verbali: Meis

 

Grice: Meis, ho sempre ammirato il modo in cui lei affronta la filosofia come un unico grande problema. Mi ricorda il mio tentativo di sistematizzare tutto, come dice Harman: “voglio farlo mio!” Lei, invece, nei suoi scritti, propone una visione naturalistica che parte dal vegetale, passa all’animale e culmina nell’uomo. Come è nata questa prospettiva?

Meis: Caro Grice, è proprio la vita abruzzese—con la sua semplicità e il suo spirito di concretezza—a ispirare la mia filosofia. Ho sempre pensato che la realtà si sviluppi in forme progressive, e che l’umano debba essere letto in continuità con la natura, ma senza dimenticare le sue peculiarità razionali. Forse c’è un po’ di Hegel in questo, ma anche Kant non manca!

Grice: Mi colpisce come Pirandello abbia citato il suo nome quasi come un proverbio: “Chi lo dice? Camillo De Meis!” In Inghilterra una tale generalizzazione sarebbe vista come audace; da noi, la conversazione tende alla specificità. Crede che questa libertà di generalizzare sia una forza della filosofia italiana?

Meis: È vero, Grice. La filosofia italiana ama le grandi sintesi, ma non perde mai il legame con l’esperienza concreta, “terra terra”, diremmo in Abruzzo. La generalizzazione è una sfida, ma serve a capire l’unità del mondo. E poi, come dice il proverbio: “Chi non rischia, non rosica!”—anche in filosofia occorre osare, senza perdere il senso della realtà.

 

I verbali: Melandri

 

Grice: Melandri, devo confessare che se ho inserito l’analogia nella mia “eschatologia filosofica”, lo devo proprio alla sua lettura del Simposio: il modo in cui esplora la proporzione, la simmetria e il concetto di analogia nella tradizione greco-romana è stato per me illuminante. La sua esegesi penetra davvero nelle pieghe profonde del pensiero platonico e aristotelico.

Melandri: Caro Grice, le sue parole mi onorano. La mia ossessione per l’analogia nasce proprio dalla convinzione che, senza proporzione e simmetria, il pensiero filosofico rischia di perdersi nella confusione. Platone, nel Simposio, offre spunti ineguagliabili su come l’analogia sia il ponte essenziale tra l’umano e il divino.

Grice: È interessante notare come lei, più di molti, abbia saputo vedere nell’analogia non solo una tecnica argomentativa, ma una vera e propria chiave per comprendere la comunicazione stessa. Mi ha colpito il suo “Contro lo simbolico”, dove l’analogia diventa quasi una resistenza all’eccessiva astrazione del linguaggio.

Melandri: Esatto, Grice! L’analogia ci salva dall’aridità dei puri simboli: ci costringe a mantenere un legame vitale con l’esperienza e il mondo vissuto. In fondo, come diciamo a Genova, “chi va piano va sano e va lontano”: anche il pensiero deve procedere per passi proporzionati, senza salti nel buio.

 

I verbali: Melchiorre

 

G.: Melchiorre, mi colpisce quanto la filosofia italiana sappia intrecciare il discorso sull’amore col corpo e l’identità personale. A Oxford, da Butler in poi, ci siamo spesso fermati al dilemma tra amor proprio e benevolenza. Lei, invece, ha dedicato un intero trattato al corpo: cosa ne pensa del legame tra corporeità e esperienza amorosa?

Melchiorre: Grazie, Grice. Credo che il corpo sia la prima grammatica dell’amore: attraverso la presenza fisica riconosciamo l’altro, ci lasciamo interpellare e rispondiamo. Come dicevo nel mio “meta-critica dell’eros,” l’amore implica sempre un incontro concreto, non solo una dialettica astratta. È nel corpo che l’amante e l’amato si riconoscono.

Grice: È affascinante! Da noi, la benevolenza si traduce spesso in cooperazione conversazionale: aiutare l’altro con le parole, costruire insieme il senso. Lei parla di “nome indicibile” e “immaginazione simbolica”: sono forse modi per oltrepassare i limiti del linguaggio, proprio come l’amore supera la mera parola?

Melchiorre: Esattamente, il linguaggio è una soglia, non un muro. Nell’atto amoroso, si creano ossimori: parole che cercano di dire l’indicibile. Anche Turolla, pur non essendo filosofo, nel suo “Dialogo dell’amore”, ha intuito che l’essenza dell’amore sta nel reciproco riconoscimento: amante e amato si trasformano l’uno nell’altro. La filosofia, insomma, non può ignorare questa dialettica viva tra corpo, parola e amore.

 

I verbali: Melli

 

Grice: Caro Melli, dicono che a Roma i filosofi greci venivano accolti come la pioggia in agosto: a volte sospirati, più spesso cacciati via. Tu come te la cavi con i senatori sospettosi?

Melli: Ah, Grice, ai miei tempi bastava entrare in senato con una toga un po’ fuori moda e ti scambiavano già per un retore greco! Per fortuna, Marc’Aurelio aveva più pazienza di Catone: lui almeno ascoltava prima di mandare via qualcuno.

Grice: Divertente! E Musso che avrebbe fatto se avesse visto Socrate sotto il Campidoglio? Avrebbe ordinato una statua anche per lui o solo per Giulio Cesare?

Melli: Probabilmente una statua di Socrate con la testa di Cesare, così nessuno si offendeva! Ma io resto fedele ad Aurelio: più filosofia nei suoi appunti che in tutte le statue di Roma messe insieme

 

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.

 

GRICEVS: Memmi, dic mihi, utrum Romae in horto plus philosophiam colas, an olera?

MEMMIVS: Grice, si herbae loqui possent, fortasse me meliorem Epicureum esse dicerent—ego autem, dum carmina Lucretii lego, fabam sero.

GRICEVS: Memmi, fateor, Roma tua et hortus tuus plus sapientiae olent quam totus Porticus Stoicorum. Dic, quid inter herbas et versus Lucretii requiris?

MEMMIVS: Grice, dum inter ramos legor Lucretium et inter radices meditor, invenio in orto meo id quod nec Stoici nec Accademici dare possunt—quietem animi et sapientiam, quae crescit lente, sicut faba ipsa.

 

I verbali: Mercuriale

 

G.: Alfred Street first, then metaphysics. One should always inspect the apparatus before discussing the soul.

S.: A very Mercuriale principle. De arte gymnastica before De anima.

G.: Quite. Here we are, then, the Oxford Gymnasium, opened in 1858 and, if our chronology behaves, still with us until 1967. Long enough to have trained several generations into perspiring respectability.

S.: And short enough to vanish before modern fitness discovered mirrors.

G.: Oxford was wiser then. It still believed in exercise as a moral correction rather than a spectacle of self-courting.

S.: You sound almost Roman.

G.: Mercuriale would insist on it. He disliked the accidental body and preferred the body under regimen. Oxford did much the same, but with less Latin and more flannel.

S.: And Alfred Street is your hinge because it is official.

G.: Exactly. Parson’s Pleasure is older, but aquatic and half-antiquarian. This is the proper Victorian indoor claim: apparatus, instruction, routine, and a mixed urban-university placement. Town and gown were not exactly equal here, but at least they could perspire under the same roof.

S.: Whereas Bath is too classical.

G.: Too much ruin and steam. One wants something recognisably modern if one is to connect Mercuriale with Grice rather than with the emperor Hadrian taking the waters.

S.: Though Hadrian’s Villa will return, I assume.

G.: It always does. The better emperors leave one architecture enough to misinterpret.

S.: Then this gymnasium stands for the semantic shift from gymnasium as a place of bodily discipline to gymnasium as a building one can point to in Oxford.

G.: Yes, though “shift” must be handled with care. Not a change of sense, but a redistribution of emphasis. One should not multiply senses beyond necessity. There is a long semantic patience at work.

S.: Between ginnasio and gymnasium.

G.: Precisely. Mercuriale helps because he writes before the shrinkage. For him gymnastic art is not a room of rings and bars, but an entire discipline of bodily formation. The building is secondary to the practice.

S.: Yet here the building has swallowed the practice’s name.

G.: Swallowed, perhaps, but not digested it entirely. A gymnasium is still, in principle, the place of gymnastic discipline. The architectural particular has specialised the older function without abolishing it.

S.: And that is where Bologna enters.

G.: Ah yes, Bononia, alma mater, older than Oxford if one counts by honest chronology, and perhaps the only university that can do so without comic strain.

S.: Sorbonne third, in your private ranking.

G.: A decent bronze. But Bologna interests me more because of the Archiginnasio.

S.: Which looks like a misnomer only to the modern English eye.

G.: Exactly. If one hears “gymnasium” only as apparatus and exercise hall, Archiginnasio sounds ridiculous, like calling the Bodleian a wrestling shed. But historically it is not ridiculous at all.

S.: Because ginnasio there means the schools, the studium, the place of formed learning.

G.: Yes. Archi- there is ur-, principal, chief, overarching. The Archiginnasio is the principal ginnasio in the older learned sense: the chief place of studies, not the chief room of dumbbells.

S.: So the semantic distance between ginnasio and archiginnasio is less than modern English supposes.

G.: Much less. The continuity lies in disciplined formation. The bodily side becomes dominant in one line of descent, the educational side in another. Mercuriale sits exactly where the two still recognise each other.

S.: Because for him gymnastics belongs to medicine and philosophy.

G.: Indeed. Exercise is regimen, regimen is ethics, ethics brushes philosophy, and the whole thing remains respectable because the body is not yet a private cult but an object of rational governance.

S.: Oxford liked that too.

G.: Oxford liked anything that could be presented as character-building. Cricket is tolerable if it looks like ethics in whites.

S.: And Grice fits because he was genuinely athletic.

G.: More than many philosophers are willing to admit on his behalf. He liked games, college sport, outdoor life, and the institutional seriousness of play. Mercuriale would have found him less absurd than most of the profession.

S.: Though perhaps too conversational.

G.: Mercuriale might have replied that conversation itself needs lungs.

S.: We are now in Alfred Street, then, with bars and apparatus around us, and you want to walk backwards to Athens.

G.: One always does. Europe rarely invents anything without first remembering it badly.

S.: Was the Academy a gymnasium?

G.: Not simply. Hekademos begins as a sacred grove and associated area, but by the classical period the Academy is also entangled with gymnastic use, walking, training, and the broader civic life of education. It is not merely a room for exercise, nor merely a school in our sense.

S.: So when Plato founds the Academy, he inhabits a space already mixed.

G.: Precisely. The error is to imagine “academy” as if it had always meant only a disembodied school of thought. In Athens, bodily and discursive formation were not cleanly divorced.

S.: Aristotle then leaves and settles near the Lyceum, which certainly had gymnastic associations.

G.: Yes. The Lyceum was a gymnasium and sanctuary area before it became the Peripatetic school. Aristotle does not invent the place; he philosophises adjacent to an already civic-gymnastic institution.

S.: So philosophy grows near exercise rather than away from it.

G.: Often enough. The modern division between body-building and thought-building is more recent and more philistine than either side likes to admit.

S.: And the Stoa?

G.: There I am, like you, less certain in the bodily direction. The Stoa Poikile is a colonnade, not a gymnasium. Stoicism takes its name from an architectural site of gathering and discourse rather than from an overt exercise ground.

S.: So if the Academy and Lyceum retain gymnastic neighbourhoods, the Stoa is more emphatically civic and ambulatory.

G.: Exactly. Portico, not palestra. One may stand there and think, which many have done since.

S.: Then when Rome receives Greek philosophy, why does the gymnastic side not take in the same way?

G.: Because Rome admired Greek culture selectively and under conditions of class anxiety. The noble Roman, especially in the Scipionic orbit, preferred conversation, rhetoric, patronage, literary culture, and moral seriousness to public bodily display in Greek style.

S.: So the Scipiones want a circolo rather than a gymnasium.

G.: Very much so. Conversazione over calisthenics. Roman nobility could admire Greek philosophy, but the full Greek civic-gymnastic complex looked too plebeian, too public, too exposed, and perhaps too naked in more senses than one.

S.: Rome liked baths, though.

G.: Baths, yes, and eventually on a colossal scale. But baths are not the same as the Greek gymnasium as civic institution. Rome prefers thermal magnificence, military training, and aristocratic otium to the Greek integration of intellectual, civic, and bodily discipline in one public educational form.

S.: So the Roman nobleman may discuss Plato but prefers not to do so after wrestling.

G.: Precisely. He would rather recline and quote. The body is present, but under different ceremonial management.

S.: Naples differs?

G.: Yes. Southern Italy and the old Magna Graecia world preserve more of the Hellenic comfort with bodily and philosophical adjacency. Naples, with its Greek afterlife, remains more hospitable to the fusion than Rome proper, which makes philosophy pass through law, rhetoric, and elite sociability.

S.: Hence your earlier contrast between Roman justice and Greek dialectic.

G.: Quite. Rome institutionalises discourse differently. It legalises and politicises where Athens gymnasticises and philosophises.

S.: And Hadrian’s Villa?

G.: Ah yes. Tivoli is where Rome, in one of its more self-conscious moods, builds philosophy into imperial leisure. The Villa has spaces that look gymnastic, palaestral, library-like, theatrical, and bath-like all at once. It is the emperor’s private anthology of civilisations in stone.

S.: So the palace on the Palatine yields to the villa.

G.: Exactly. The palace is urban rule. The villa is reflective empire. Rome learns to philosophise architecturally only when it leaves the city enough to imitate Greece under imperial control.

S.: Which means architecture becomes a surrogate for the missing Roman gymnasium.

G.: Very good. Where Rome did not fully naturalise the Greek civic-gymnastic institution, it later aestheticised and appropriated its forms in villa culture, baths, libraries, exedrae, and controlled landscapes.

S.: Otium replacing civic training.

G.: Yes, though otium in the better cases still wants dignity and study. The Roman elite will not become Greek athletes, but they may become connoisseurs of Greek spaces.

S.: Then Bologna’s Archiginnasio is the medieval and early modern resolution of all this.

G.: In a sense, yes. It strips away the bodily emphasis and preserves the disciplinary one. Gynnasio now means the organised place of studies. Archiginnasio means the principal organised place of studies. The older root remains, but its energies have been institutionalised toward learning.

S.: So the semantic shift is real but not a rupture.

G.: Precisely my point. One ought not to say there are wholly different senses if one can explain the development by historical narrowing and reaccenting. Mercuriale himself would insist on continuity under transformation.

S.: Because he still hears gymnastic art as part of the whole education of the human animal.

G.: Beautifully put, though rather more zoological than he might like.

S.: He was a physician. He must forgive zoology.

G.: Physicians forgive bodies only when they obey.

S.: Then here in Alfred Street one may say that Oxford finally builds, in 1858, a proper indoor embodiment of something that had long existed in looser form on fields, rivers, and college grounds.

G.: Yes. Oxford had long cultivated athletic life in the open, but Alfred Street gives it civic walls, timetable, and apparatus. It is the Victorian domestication of a much older educational impulse.

S.: And it lasts until 1967.

G.: So far as our evidence runs, yes. Long enough to become almost invisible by familiarity, which is how institutions know they have succeeded.

S.: Grice would have known it?

G.: He certainly knew an Oxford in which official and semi-official spaces of exercise existed, though his own self-presentation leans more toward games and grounds than indoor apparatus. Still, the gymnasium belongs to the same moral weather.

S.: Athlete or aesthete.

G.: His own dichotomy, delightfully false and therefore useful. Oxford contrived to keep both in hall together and make each suspect he belonged to the better half.

S.: Whereas Bologna, older and more urban, builds the Archiginnasio as the chief house of studies rather than the chief house of exercise.

G.: Exactly. That difference is civilisational. Oxford preserves the college-field-and-river conjunction; Bologna monumentalises learned corporateness. One has more grass, the other more law.

S.: And Sorbonne?

G.: More Paris. Which is always both an advantage and a complication.

S.: Then what would Mercuriale say if we pointed from Alfred Street to the Archiginnasio?

G.: He would say that moderns have narrowed the body too much in one direction and learning too much in the other. Alfred Street remembers the body under regimen. Bologna remembers the discipline of studies. The old Greek root would prefer not to be forced to choose.

S.: So the true ginnasio is where formation occurs, whether of muscles, manners, or mind.

G.: Exactly. Formation is the invariant. The rest is institutional costume.

S.: Then why did Rome resist the Greek form if it already valued formation?

G.: Because Roman nobility preferred to control the visible means of formation. The Greek gymnasium was too public, too civic, too egalitarian in access, and too physically disclosed. Roman elites wanted conversation, patronage, and exemplary conduct under aristocratic supervision.

S.: The Scipionic circle as anti-gymnasium.

G.: Not anti-body, but anti-Greek-public-body. They wanted cultivated conversation, not shared naked instruction. One may almost say Rome spiritualised Greek sociability into elite conversational form.

S.: So conversazione triumphs over palestra.

G.: At least among the better families. The commoner and the soldier could sweat; the noble preferred to discuss virtue in a portico.

S.: Which makes Grice oddly Roman after all.

G.: In some moods, yes. He likes the disciplined game, but he likes conversation even more. He would rather make a point by implicature than by discus.

S.: Yet you have brought him into Alfred Street.

G.: Only to remind him that conversation too requires institution, architecture, and the occasional vaulting horse. Philosophers are always pretending they float. Most of them were carried there by buildings.

S.: Then the final formula?

G.: That Alfred Street, the Oxford Gymnasium of 1858, gives modern Oxford a visible body for an ancient educational impulse; that Mercuriale helps us see the continuity between bodily regimen and rational formation; that Bologna’s Archiginnasio preserves the same root under the aspect of chief study rather than chief exercise; and that the line back to Athens runs not through neat dictionary senses but through a long history of institutions in which body, speech, and schooling were never as separate as moderns lazily assume.

S.: And Rome?

G.: Rome delayed the synthesis, aestheticised it at the villa, legalised it in the forum, and left the real semantic patience to Bologna.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Mercurial, with an Alfred Street aftertaste.

 

 

Grice: Caro Mercuriale, devo confessare che il mio amore per il cricket ha spesso superato quello per la filosofia. Ma tu hai saputo unire ginnastica e pensiero, quasi come se il corpo e la mente giocassero a staffetta!

Mercuriale: Grice, sei più filosofo o atleta? In fondo, anche a Oxford si dice che sia meglio sudare in campo che in biblioteca. Io, invece, ho teorizzato che una buona corsa spalanca la mente alle idee migliori, altro che “ginnasio effeminato” come diceva Mussolini!

Grice: Allora dovrei fondare un nuovo club filosofico, ma solo per chi sa saltare gli ostacoli… del ragionamento! “Me and the Demijohns,” forse è la prova che il gioco di squadra aiuta anche nei dibattiti accademici.

Mercuriale: E magari, Grice, potremmo organizzare una partita di cricket tra filosofi e ginnasti. Chi perde dovrà spiegare, senza sbagliare, la differenza tra ginnico e ginnasta. Scommetto che i forlivesi tiferebbero per me!

 

I verbali: Meriggi

 

G.: Let us begin with a Lycian phrase, since Meriggi would complain if we entered by Latin only. Let us say simply: xñtabura ebeñnẽ prñnawa. A tomb for a householder, if one permits oneself the usual funerary dryness.

S.: Dry enough already. And you choose Lycian because a declension is less likely to lie when carved in stone.

G.: Quite. Living languages equivocate with charm; dead ones leave endings behind as evidence.

S.: Then your point is that the endings are not mere grammar-school upholstery.

G.: Exactly. Morpho-syntactic categories are public traces of deeper categories by which a community carves experience. Aristotle would call them ontological in one key, Kant categories of experience in another. A case-ending is a small metaphysics at the end of a word.

S.: That is rather grand for a suffix.

G.: Suffixes have long been made to do civilisation’s smaller work.

S.: Let us start with the nominative, before you become transcendental.

G.: Sensible. In Lycian, as in Greek and Latin, the nominative marks what a clause presents as subject or topic-bearer. Consider, by analogy, Latin: Lupus currit in agro. The wolf runs in the field. Lupus is nominative because the sentence is, so to speak, about the wolf as doing.

S.: And the Lycian parallel?

G.: Something like xñtawati prñnawa, if one imagines a householder acting or standing as the clause’s bearer. The exact lexicon matters less than the function. The nominative is the form under which a thing is presented as the one of which something is said.

S.: Aristotle would say substance first, predicate later.

G.: Yes, though grammar is never wholly obedient to metaphysics. Still, nominative feels like the case of presentation, the public front door of the noun.

S.: So in Greek too, ho lukos trechei. The wolf runs. Nominative as the one doing the running.

G.: Exactly. And Anglo-Saxon preserves enough of this to remind modern English that it once had manners. Se wulf rint. Subjecthood was not always entrusted to word order alone.

S.: Then nominative corresponds to the category of subject of predication.

G.: Or, if one is feeling Kantian, to the form under which an object of experience is taken as unified for predication.

S.: You are warming up unpleasantly.

G.: Meriggi would expect no less. Now the accusative. Latin: Agricola lupum videt. The farmer sees the wolf. Lupum is accusative, the object toward which the seeing is directed.

S.: So the accusative is the case of directedness.

G.: Very nearly. The case of affected or goalward objecthood in the transitive scene. Greek does the same: ho georgos ton lukon horai. And in a Lycian analogy one would look for the noun-form used where the action terminates upon or is borne toward another participant.

S.: So if Lycian marks a direct object distinctly, the community has chosen to make explicit not merely who acts, but upon whom action falls.

G.: Precisely. The nominative says, as it were, here is the bearer; the accusative says, here is the borne-upon. A very old ontology of asymmetry.

S.: Anglo-Saxon still has that, in a way. Se mann geseah þone wulf.

G.: Yes. And the demonstrative helps preserve what later English lets word order carry with weary diligence.

S.: The genitive next, I assume, before you accuse the cases of disorder.

G.: Quite. Latin: Liber pueri in mensa est. The boy’s book is on the table. Pueri is genitive. Greek: to biblion tou paidos epi tes trapezes estin. The relation is not merely possession but belonging, source, dependence, specification.

S.: So the genitive marks what is of another.

G.: Exactly. It encodes derivation, belonging, partition, kindred dependence. In a Lycian funerary phrase, one often suspects the genitival atmosphere even when the exact ending is disputed: tomb of so-and-so, child of so-and-so, house of such a lineage.

S.: Aristotle again would call this relation rather than substance.

G.: Yes, though Roman schoolmasters made it look almost domestic. But belonging is an ontological category too. The genitive tells us that things are not merely there; they are of something.

S.: And Anglo-Saxon had that with ease. Hus þæs cyninges stent. The king’s house stands.

G.: Very good. A respectable Germanic genitive before modern English began scattering apostrophes like confetti.

S.: Dative now.

G.: Naturally. Latin: Magister puero librum dat. The teacher gives the boy a book. Puero is dative. Greek: ho didaskalos tō paidi biblion didōsi. The dative marks recipient, advantage, reference, orientation toward a beneficiary or addressee.

S.: So the dative is the case of “to” or “for,” though not always reducible to prepositions.

G.: Precisely. It encodes the structure of directed giving, saying, showing, helping. A category of relation in which something is not merely done, but done to or for someone.

S.: Which sounds rather social.

G.: Many cases are. Grammar remembers that life is not a sequence of isolated substances but of directed dealings.

S.: And Lycian?

G.: One looks for the oblique forms serving recipient or target functions. The nomenclature may differ; the practical intelligibility does not. If a Lycian text says, in effect, “this tomb to X,” we are already in dative country, even if Meriggi and his predecessors quarrel over the exact map.

S.: Anglo-Saxon again: Se lareow sealde þæm cilde boc. There it stands.

G.: Yes. Enough survives there to embarrass modern English into modesty.

S.: Now the ablative, your favourite grievance.

G.: Not favourite. Merely unavoidable. Latin: Miles gladio pugnat. The soldier fights with a sword. Or: Puella ex urbe venit. The girl comes from the city. The ablative is an untidy Roman empire of separation, instrument, source, circumstance.

S.: In other words, a bureaucratic success and a philosophical nuisance.

G.: Exactly. Greek lets the dative and prepositions do much of what Latin heaps upon the ablative. This is why I have always thought the Latin ablative too successful for its own conceptual hygiene.

S.: Yet you use it.

G.: As one uses the Foreign Office. Reluctantly but repeatedly. If Lycian has oblique cases covering instrument, source, or circumstance, one should compare them to Latin ablative functions without pretending exact identity. One analogy at a time. For instrument, Latin: Scriba calamo scribit. The scribe writes with a reed-pen. If Lycian uses a marked oblique to convey “with” or “by means of,” the structural analogy is sound.

S.: So the ontological category there is mediation by means.

G.: Or source, depending on the sentence. The ablative is really several categories in one administrative overcoat.

S.: You do not sound reconciled.

G.: I am not. Which brings us to the locative, that furtive survival.

S.: Ah yes, Romae.

G.: Precisely. Latin pretends not to have a locative while quietly retaining it where place-names refuse instruction. Romae sum. I am at Rome. Domi maneo. I remain at home. The textbooks bury the locative because it interferes with tidy declensional propaganda.

S.: Greek uses prepositions instead, mostly.

G.: Yes, though one feels the older local functions behind them. The question for Lycian is whether one should posit a distinct locative value or treat place-relations through other obliques and particles. I am not eager to multiply locatives merely because comparative philologists miss them.

S.: So your dislike is not of place, but of exuberant case-inflation.

G.: Exactly. One should not invent a case every time a noun loiters somewhere. Still, if Lycian has forms regularly marking “in” or “at” in a sufficiently morphological way, one must take the evidence seriously. Meriggi, being Meriggi, would enjoy the quarrel.

S.: And the full sentence for Latin locative?

G.: Romae poeta habitat. The poet lives at Rome. One cognate comparison with Greek is harder because Greek will prefer en Rōmēi or en polei with the preposition doing the overt work.

S.: So Latin here preserves a bit of Indo-European local dignity.

G.: A bit, yes. Enough to annoy simplifiers.

S.: What of the vocative? You have not greeted anyone yet.

G.: True. Latin: Serve, veni huc. Slave, come here. Or more politely, Marce, audi. The vocative marks direct address. Greek likewise: ō Marke. It is not a syntactic participant in the same way, but a pragmatic one. A case whose ontology lies less in being than in interpersonal summons.

S.: So the vocative is almost the case of second-person encounter.

G.: Very good. The case of turning toward another. If Lycian inscriptions name someone in address, one should watch whether the form differs. Though funerary Lycian is not exactly the agora.

S.: No one in a tomb answers briskly.

G.: Not in the better inscriptions. Now the dual.

S.: At last. Greek had it and used it just enough to rebuke later laziness.

G.: Precisely. Dyo anthrōpō, the two men, and so on. The dual marks that two is not merely a small many but a specially structured pair. Aristotle would see a numerical distinction; Kant perhaps a peculiarity in the manifold of counting; common sense sees that two shoes are not yet a crowd.

S.: Anglo-Saxon pronouns also kept a dual. Wit for “we two,” git for “you two.”

G.: Yes, and that fact alone should cure Englishmen of supposing that their language was always philosophically negligent about number.

S.: Latin lost the dual, mostly.

G.: Or fossilised it into embarrassment. Ambō, duo in certain pair-bound uses, but no living nominal dual system. Latin treats two as the first plural, which is efficient but metaphysically unimaginative.

S.: And Lycian?

G.: If Lycian lacks a productive dual, it joins Latin and later practicality. If it preserves traces, one asks whether the community still hears twoness as a distinct category of experience rather than a mere arithmetic threshold.

S.: You make grammar sound like anthropology.

G.: It is anthropology in inflectional dress.

S.: Let us go back and compare each case with one cognate example more explicitly, since Meriggi deserves schoolroom exactness.

G.: Very well. Nominative. Latin: Pater venit. The father comes. Greek: patēr erchetai. Both preserve the Indo-European root in comparable shape and the nominative as subject-presentation.

S.: Lycian parallel would then seek the subject form of a comparable kinship noun.

G.: Exactly. Genitive. Latin: Domus patris magna est. The father’s house is large. Greek: hē oikia tou patros megalē estin. The relation of belonging is marked morphologically in both.

S.: Dative. Latin: Filius patri aquam portat. The son carries water to the father. Greek: huios tō patri hydōr pherei.

G.: Good. Accusative. Latin: Mater filium vocat. The mother calls the son. Greek: mētēr ton huion kalei.

S.: Ablative or instrumental analogue. Latin: Mater manu puerum ducit. The mother leads the boy by the hand. Greek often with dative or preposition: tē cheiri agei to paidion.

G.: Precisely. And one should not force Greek to produce a Latin ablative when it prefers a different distribution of labour.

S.: Locative. Latin: Corinthi mercator habitat. The merchant lives at Corinth. Greek: en Korinthōi ho emporos oikei.

G.: Yes, and the contrast is pedagogically perfect. Latin preserves a case remnant; Greek lets the preposition do the visible work.

S.: Vocative. Latin: Pater, audi me. Father, hear me. Greek: ō pater, akoue mou.

G.: Just so. The cognates help because they show not only similar lexemes but similar relational needs.

S.: And neuter?

G.: Ah yes, the neuter, that old delight. Latin: Donum in mensa iacet. The gift lies on the table. Greek: to dōron epi tēs trapezēs keitai. Nominative and accusative neuter coincide. The language here marks not a third kind of thing in nature, but a third pattern of agreement and a special economy between subject and object forms.

S.: So the neuter is less ontology in the naturalist sense than grammar’s own quiet classification.

G.: Exactly. Yet even there one may ask whether the language treats certain conceptual regions as less agentive, less person-like, more thing-like. One must be careful, but not blind.

S.: Anglo-Saxon preserves the neuter too. Þæt hus stent. The house stands.

G.: Yes, and modern English inherits the wreckage through “it,” while pretending not to have gender at all unless scandalised into it.

S.: What about plural?

G.: The plural repeats the categories under the pressure of multiplicity. Latin: Patres veniunt. The fathers come. Greek: hoi pateres erchontai. Nominative plural marks many bearers of predication. Genitive plural: Domus patrum magnae sunt. The houses of the fathers are large. Dative plural: Filii patribus dona dant. Sons give gifts to the fathers. And so on.

S.: So number does not abolish the case-relations; it scales them.

G.: Precisely. The plural is not philosophical novelty so much as the discipline of repetition.

S.: Unless one comes to the dual, where two insists on being special.

G.: Quite. Human beings are oddly sentimental about two.

S.: Let me ask the larger question. Are you really saying that nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and the rest reflect ontological categories in Aristotle’s sense?

G.: Not crudely. I am saying that a language’s morpho-syntactic choices publicise what relations it chooses to mark as basic for the handling of experience: bearer of predication, affected object, belonging, directed recipient, instrument, source, place, address. These are not identical with Aristotle’s categories, but they are not unrelated to the same pressure to sort the forms of being and saying.

S.: And the Kantian version?

G.: That case-systems may be read as historical codings of recurrent relational forms by which experience is organised for judgment: subject, object, possession, destination, location, means. Grammar is not transcendental deduction, but it is sedimented reason.

S.: Meriggi would have liked “sedimented reason.”

G.: He would probably have declined it into Lycian.

S.: You are not wholly hostile to him, then.

G.: Not at all. Meriggi’s title, La declinazione del lizio, is charmingly schoolmasterly. It announces that one may begin from endings and arrive at civilisation.

S.: Then let us consider the local difficulty again. If Lycian shows an oblique used in place-relations, how do we decide whether to call it locative rather than dative, ablative, or merely “oblique”?

G.: By discipline, distribution, and restraint. One asks whether there is a distinct morphological pattern regularly associated with static location rather than recipienthood, source, or general obliqueness. If not, one resists locative enthusiasm.

S.: In other words, no honorary cases.

G.: Exactly. Grammarians are too ready to found principalities on small phonetic evidence.

S.: Yet one should also not flatten real distinctions.

G.: Quite. A dead language deserves justice, not economy alone.

S.: This is beginning to sound Roman.

G.: Most good philology does. Now let us make the analogies explicit in one sequence, if only to satisfy the classroom in Meriggi.

S.: Proceed.

G.: Nominative: Latin Pater filium amat. The father loves the son. Pater is the bearer. Greek Patēr ton huion philei. Lycian, mutatis mutandis, would mark the father in subject position.

S.: Accusative: the son is the loved-upon.

G.: Precisely. Genitive: Liber patris iacet. The father’s book lies there. Greek To biblion tou patros keitai. Lycian would use the form marking belonging or descent.

S.: Dative: Mater filio panem dat. The mother gives bread to the son. Greek Mētēr tō huiōi arton didōsi.

G.: Ablative or instrumental analogue: Faber malleo laborat. The craftsman works with a hammer. Greek prefers a different device, but the category of means is there.

S.: Locative: Domi puer manet. The boy remains at home.

G.: Exactly, and one sees how Latin hides a case inside an adverbial survivor. Greek: en oikōi to paidion menei.

S.: Vocative: Fili, veni. Son, come.

G.: Very good. One could almost build a civilisation from imperatives and case-endings.

S.: Many did.

G.: Quite. Now, one more thing. The Greek dual and the Latin lack of a productive dual show that number itself is culturally and grammatically negotiable. The world may contain pairs, but a language need not inflect for them.

S.: So categories of experience are not simply read off nature; they are chosen for public marking.

G.: Exactly. There is the Kantian note. Experience may be universally structured in some deep sense, but languages differ over what they force speakers to make explicit.

S.: And that is why declension matters philosophically.

G.: Entirely. Declinatio is not merely a list of endings. It is a map of what a linguistic community chooses to distinguish openly between nouns and the world.

S.: Then Meriggi, by marching Lycian beside Latin and Greek, is asking whether a less familiar Indo-European language marks the same public relations or redraws them.

G.: Just so. And that is why one should begin with a Lycian phrase rather than apologise for it.

S.: We began with xñtabura ebeñnẽ prñnawa. Have we ended anywhere worthy of it?

G.: We have ended where all good declensions end: with the suspicion that endings are not trivial.

S.: And your final word on the locative?

G.: That Rome kept it like an eccentric aunt and grammarians should neither disown her nor move her into every spare room.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Lydio-Lycian, with a Roman ablative of annoyance.

 

 

Grice: Meriggi, devo ammettere che il tuo progetto di deutero-esperanto mi ha affascinato. Davvero credi sia possibile creare una lingua che nessuno parla, eppure abbia senso filosofico?

Meriggi: Caro Grice, per me ogni lingua nasce sempre da un bisogno umano profondo, anche se resta "incompresa". Il blaia zimondal, con i suoi principi fono-simbolici, è un esperimento per dimostrare che ogni suono ha già in sé un significato naturale.

Grice: Quindi, se ti capisco bene, una 'a' non è solo una lettera, ma racconta di grandezza o luminosità? Mi ricorda i miei giochi sul linguaggio che "nessuno usa", quasi come inventare un codice della strada solo per sé stessi!

Meriggi: Esatto! E forse, Grice, come tu stesso sostieni, ogni atto linguistico nasce dall’idiosincrasia dell’emittente, ma può sempre diventare, con fortuna, patrimonio di molti. L’importante è ascoltare la musica nascosta dietro ogni suono.

 

I verbali: Merker

 

Grice: Caro Merker, permettimi una curiosità: sono quasi sorpreso che i tuoi connazionali italiani non abbiano mai pensato di italianizzare il tuo cognome in “Merchero”! Sai com’è, da queste parti ogni nome straniero viene subito infilato nel tritacarne della tradizione...

Merker: Ah, Grice, se sapessi! Al liceo classico i miei compagni ci hanno subito pensato: “Merchero”, “Mercurio”, e una volta addirittura “Marchese”! Mi divertivo molto: bastava sentire quell’accento trentino su un cognome così palesemente non italiano per far sorridere tutti.

Grice: D’altronde, “Merker” suona proprio fuori dal coro in mezzo a tutti quei Rossi, Bianchi, e Verdi... Immagino anche i tuoi professori alle prese con la pronuncia: un piccolo labirinto, degno del filo d’Arianna che tanto ami evocare!

Merker: Proprio così! E pensa che, tra uno scherzo e una battuta sull’etnia e sull’ethos, ho imparato che anche il nome può diventare una piccola lezione di filosofia: ci ricorda chi siamo, da dove veniamo e quanta ironia serve per restare sé stessi in mezzo ai minotauri della burocrazia italiana!

 

I verbali: Messere

 

St John’s SCR, Michaelmas. The room has that post-war polish which is really only a kind of tiredness dressed up: people have returned, committees have resumed, and Oxford is once again pretending that the world is made of minutes. Russell had arrived with the quiet confidence of someone who has been told, by a librarian or by fate, that he is “needed.” He was not yet, to me, a character, only a newly-elected fellow with the fresh paint still on his title. Irony, isn’t it, Grice, he said, dropping into the chair opposite as if the chair were a continuation of the conversation rather than its beginning. You philosophy, I classics. I hated the remark at once, not because it was false, but because it was the sort of truth that is always smuggled in under the name irony. It’s only irony if you mean something by it, Russell. I mean, he said, that they tell me you’re a Latinist. Who tells you that. The librarian. I could hear the whole scene in my head: the librarian, half joking and wholly earnest, announcing the new appointment by means of a category. Have you met our new Latinist. The phrase made my teeth itch. Oxford loves labels that are both too big and too small. Have you met our new Latinist, I said, repeating it with the contempt it deserved. Yes, Russell said, as if bracing. I suppose I’m to accept it. I nearly said yes, often, at the Flag and Lamb, and then I stopped. There are jokes you do not hand to a new colleague on his first week, because the new colleague is still deciding whether you are a colleague or a nuisance. A Latinist, I said, is a man with a known vice. A classicist is a man with two vices and no confession. Russell gave a small smile, the sort that admits the point without paying for it. And what are you reading, Grice. Oh, nothing important. A bit of Neapolitan gossip, really. An inaugural lezione in Greek. In Greek. Naples, 1681. Russell leaned forward. They had a Chair just for Greek. So it seems. A cattedra di Lettura Greca, at the University of Naples. And you’re reading this because… Because I am trying to decide whether it is a memory, a memoria, or merely an excuse to say the word Greek in a room full of men who prefer Latin. Russell had the decency to look wounded, which was exactly what I wanted. A man who does not defend himself is impossible to tease. I don’t prefer Latin, Russell said. You don’t. Not in your sense. In my sense I mean: you will, eventually, end up associated with Latin whether you like it or not, because Oxford distributes reputations by need, not by love. Russell gave me a look: not hostile, not yet; merely the look of someone marking you as a phenomenon. And Naples in 1681, he said, had a Greek chair. Yes. Funded by a certain Valletta, and given to a man named Messere. Messere. Gregorio Messere. Pugliese by birth, Napolitan by adoption. Forty-four at the time, by my arithmetic. Russell’s eyebrows went up, just slightly, as if arithmetic were a moral virtue. And you have the text of his inaugural lecture. I have no such thing. I have a notice, a report, a bibliographical smell. But I am an Oxford man, and therefore I cannot see a new Chair without imagining the speech that must have been made to justify it. Russell laughed. That is very Oxford. No, it’s very human. Oxford only does it with better Latin. Russell took the paper from me with the calm of someone trained to handle documents. He read the line aloud, slowly, as if Latin and Greek might be hiding inside it. Lettura Greca.

Yes. So at Naples they institutionalised Greek reading as an office. They did. And at Oxford. At Oxford we institutionalise Greek reading as a title, I said, and pointed with my chin at the air, as if the Regius Professor were hovering somewhere above the port. There is a Regius Professor of Greek. Russell nodded. Dodds, at the moment. Yes. And yet you will still be called a Latinist. Because the librarian needs a noun. Because Oxford needs a simplification. Russell handed the paper back. But surely Bologna had it hundreds of years earlier, he said, because this is what classicists do when they feel the conversation drifting too far into England: they restore Italy to the centre by means of “surely”. Surely, Russell, I said, is not an argument. It is a polite form of pressure. But did Bologna have a Greek chair earlier. I expect Bologna had Greeks before it had chairs, I said. And Naples had a chair before it had enough Greeks to deserve it. That is the difference. Naples was declaring an intention. Russell looked pleased by that, and then immediately suspicious, because he had not yet decided whether my praise was praise. And why are you interested in Messere. Because Messere is a useful joke under a serious entry. Forty-four, Naples, 1681, teaching Greek under an endowed arrangement. It makes “our Socrates” sound less like a nickname and more like a professional hazard. Russell frowned. “Our Socrates.” That is what they call him, or so the Italians say. And you believe it. I don’t believe it. I hear it. And I ask: what is being implied when a man is called Socrates. Compliment. Threat. Warning. Perhaps all three at once. And then, more to the point, what does the man do to survive the label. Russell leaned back. You philosophers. You hear a compliment and start looking for the knife. Not the knife, Russell. The mechanism. Compliments are how institutions move people without admitting it. Russell glanced again at the paper. So: Naples has a Greek chair. Oxford has a Greek chair. Yet Oxford calls its new fellow a Latinist. Exactly. And you think that matters. It matters because it is the easiest case of the general rule: one word, one office, one man, many senses. Classics is a cover-name. Latinist is a misdescription. And Greek, in England, is always somebody’s second love even when it is their first competence. Russell looked at me, and I could see him doing what good classicists do: checking the text behind the phrase. I did Mods in Greek and Latin, he said, very calmly. And you survived. With difficulty. Good. Then you are already an Oxford Greek. Oxford Greek is not a language; it is a biography. Russell laughed again, more openly. And Messere. Messere is a reminder that “Greek” can be an institution rather than a hobby. Naples made it a chair in 1681. Oxford made it Regius centuries earlier, yes, but we behave as if Greek is still an elective refinement. Russell took a sip of port, as if considering whether to allow himself a confession. The truth is, he said, I like Greek because it misbehaves. Latin behaves. That is the first honest sentence you’ve said, Russell. That’s unfair. No, it’s a compliment. And I mean it without the knife. Russell’s smile tightened. Now who’s implying. I am, I said, and heard myself. I am, in other words, doing the one thing that ruins philosophy in public: making the implicature explicit. Russell looked delighted, which annoyed me, because I had handed him the advantage. So you see, he said. You do belong in philosophy. And you, I said, do belong in classics. Classics is where one learns how to enjoy misbehaviour while pretending it is grammar. He stood to go, the way new fellows do, with the modest urgency of people who still feel they must be seen doing something. And Grice. Yes. I shan’t tell the librarian you object to “Latinist.” Don’t. Let him keep his noun. But if he calls you a Latinist again, correct him in Greek.

Russell laughed, and went out. And I thought, privately, that Oxford had once again done its favourite trick: it had taken a man whose heart would always be in Greek and placed him where the College needed Latin shored up. Classics, indeed: the art of being named for what the institution requires while you go on loving what you love.

 

Grice: Messere, ti chiamano “il nostro Socrate”, ma vorrei essere certo che non intendano il Sileno di Alcibiade! Com’è vivere con questa implicatura sulle spalle?

Messere: Grice, avessi avuto la saggezza di Sileno, forse avrei evitato sette anni tra le grinfie del vescovo d’Oria! Ma, come si dice a Torre Santa Susanna, “l’importante è non perdere la musica anche quando ti chiudono in cella”.

Grice: Ah, la musica nascosta dietro ogni suono... e dietro ogni accusa ingiusta! Tu, tra filosofia, canto e greco, sembri un vero campione di resilienza: hai mai pensato di scrivere un trattato su “Sileno e la pazienza del filosofo pugliese”?

Messere: Potrebbe essere una bella idea! D’altronde, in prigione ho avuto tutto il tempo per imparare il greco: se a Napoli ho brillato, lo devo anche ai silenzi di Oria. Del resto, come dice il proverbio, “chi non ha peccato, ha almeno un chierico che lo accusa!”.

 

I Verbali: Messimeri

 

St John’s. A lecture-room that still thinks it is a chapel: wood, draughts, the faint moral threat of portraits. I had been lent to St John’s from Merton in the way one lends a book one hasn’t read: with optimism and a reminder to return me in good condition. The advertised topic was Personal Identity and Memory. I had meant to lecture. I had, in other words, meant to talk continuously while other people remained silent. This was already a misunderstanding of my own temperament. I began with a sentence I immediately regretted for being too much like a thesis. If you want a grip on personal identity, I said, you begin with memory. Harlowe, who had the air of a man determined to make the thing “practical”, raised a hand at once. Memory, Grice? I don’t follow. That’s exactly the difficulty, I said, and realised too late that I had answered him as if he were a tutee and not a member of an audience. A lecturer is meant to prevent questions from hatching. I, by instinct, warm them. You mean memory as in recollection, Harlowe. But memory is used in oh so many ways, Grice. I know, I said. That’s my whole point. He then did the one thing that guarantees an Oxford philosopher will stop lecturing and start conversing: he produced a book as evidence. As a matter of fact, he said, I’ve been reading a memory. A memory. A memoria, he corrected, and he said it with a faint Italian flourish, as if vowels were already an argument. I stopped. The word memoria sat on the air like a foreign coin. You’ve been reading an actual memoria. Yes. By Messimeri. Messimeri, I repeated, as if repetition would either clarify or summon the man. Grimaldi, really. Domenico Grimaldi. Marchese di Messimeri. That is not a memory, I said. That is a memorandum. Or a memoir. Or, at worst, a paper. But it is not a memory in the sense Locke means, or in the sense I mean.

Harlowe looked pleased. He had succeeded, within three minutes, in dragging me from my own topic into his. It’s called a memoria, he said again, and began to read with the careful pomp of someone giving Latin verse in school. Memoria sopra di una certa specie di pianta pratense chiamata sulla. I couldn’t help it. Memoria sopra. Over. As in over the moon. As in the cow jumped. Harlowe blinked. It just means “on”, he said. Of course it does. That’s what “over” always means, until it means “finished”. Go on. Di una certa specie. A certain species, I said. Not certain in Descartes’s sense.

Certain in Cicero’s sense: aliquis. Some chap. Some plant. Chiamata sulla, Harlowe continued. Called sulla, I said, and leaned into the cruelty because the room was listening now and I felt I had to reward them. Or miscalled Sulla. Who was an emperor, Harlowe? Or merely a dictator with delusions of permanence. Sulla, Harlowe said flatly, is a plant. Then we are safe from Roman politics for the moment. He looked down at the page again, like a man who has come with a train timetable and intends to use it. What plant. Now we were back to the word species, which is a dangerous word in a lecture because it can mean classification, kind, specimen, and sometimes merely “sort of thing”, which is what philosophers secretly mean by it when they think they’re being scientific. The plant called sulla is Hedysarum coronarium, Harlowe said, pleased with himself for producing the Latin as if it were the decisive move. Forage. Legume. Pea-family business. I approved in spite of myself. A Latin binomial is the best way to calm a philosophical room: it looks exact, which makes everybody behave as if they are exact. Hedysarum coronarium, I repeated. The crown sweetener. Coronarium. Good. A garland plant. A plant already designed to be worn as if it had opinions. And in modern botany it’s often filed under Sulla rather than Hedysarum, Harlowe added, as if he were doing me the kindness of an update. So the plant is now called Sulla, and it was already called sulla. Delightful. A case where ordinary language has beaten taxonomy by arriving first. And there you have it, Harlowe said, the real point. It’s a memoria. For the Georgofili. Could the Georgofili have a collective memory then. That, I said, is exactly the unphilosophical question I was hoping you would ask, because it allows me to look philosophical while merely being grammatical. The room laughed in the polite way it laughs when it is grateful to be given permission. No. The Georgofili do not have a collective memory in the Lockean sense. They have minutes. Records. Papers. Archives. What they call memorie are not memories. They are things to be remembered. Or things offered for remembrance. Or simply things filed under a rubric. So only Messimeri has the memory. Only Messimeri has the memory, if he has one at all. The rest is label. But why call it memoria, Harlowe insisted, as if he were prosecuting a charge. Because academies like to pretend that what they circulate is recollection rather than information. It sounds less pushy. Less commercial. More civilised. You call it a memoria and you imply: this is not mere novelty; it belongs to a tradition. It deserves to be kept. This was, I admit, not lecture but sermon. Still, it moved the room along. Harlowe would not let me stop there. And the plant itself, he said, why is it called sulla. Is it in memory of Sulla. In memory of Sulla, I repeated, as if tasting the absurdity. Now, Harlowe, I said, you are doing the thing philosophers do when they are tired: turning a coincidence into a theory. But it’s plausible. It’s only plausible because you want it to be witty. The plant-name “sulla” is just the common name; the Latin does not commemorate the dictator. Hedysarum coronarium is not an imperial monument. Harlowe looked faintly disappointed. So how many memories, then. How many what. How many memories in the whole business. There’s the memoria as paper. There’s Messimeri’s memory that the plant is called sulla. There’s the academy’s memory when they print it. There’s the reader’s memory when he reads it. At this point I realised Harlowe had, in his own dull way, stumbled into my actual topic. He had walked into it backwards, but he had walked into it.

Exactly, I said. And now we can go back to personal identity. But I could not resist one more snap, because it was too neat. Only note this: the whole scene is held together by a word that tries to do too much. Memoria. It means memory in my mouth, and it means a submitted paper in Messimeri’s. And the audience is expected to sort it out without complaint. That, Harlowe, is what the world does all day: it relies on you to repair ambiguity without calling it ambiguity. And that is why I do not lecture. Lecturing is pretending there is only one sense at a time. So you want to converse. I want to make you do the work, Harlowe. Conversation is the only honest examination-system: it forces the hearer to supply what the speaker has left out, and then to discover whether he supplied it responsibly. Harlowe looked down again at his page, as if checking whether responsibility was listed in the table of contents. So the Georgofili. Leave the Georgofili alone, I said. They are innocent. They are merely Italian. And with that I returned, somewhat shamefacedly, to my intended beginning: memory and the self. But the lecture had already confessed its real nature. It had become a tutorial with seats.

 

Grice: Messimeri, spesso a Oxford trascuriamo l’economia filosofica, mentre a Cambridge – vedi Keynes – la studiano con entusiasmo. Ma tu, da Seminara, come hai conciliato il pensiero filosofico col libero mercato?

Messimeri: Grice, la mia formazione aristocratica mi ha portato a vedere l’economia non solo come scienza, ma come filosofia della libertà. La gestione innovativa delle mie terre mi ha fatto comprendere che il mercato è un laboratorio di ragione e implicatura, dove ogni scambio è un dialogo.

Grice: Mi piace questa visione: il mercato come conversazione. Forse, ogni transazione cela delle implicature filosofiche, proprio come nei nostri scambi verbali, dove ciò che si intende va oltre ciò che si dice.

Messimeri: È proprio così, Grice! Dall’Accademia dell’Arboscello agli studi sulle colture di ulivo e gelso, ho imparato che persino in agricoltura la ragione conversazionale illumina l’economia. Dopotutto, un vero filosofo non coltiva solo pensieri, ma anche terre e relazioni.

 

 

Verbali: Metronace

 

Gricevs: Salve, Metronax! Dic mihi, quid est haec dialectica Neapolitana? Nonne Oxoniensis aut Atheniensis sufficit?

Metronax: O Gricevs, Neapolitana dialectica plus saporis habet! Hic philosophi argumentantur inter pizzam et espresso, non inter toga et librum.

Gricevs: Mirum! Fortasse veritas accipit gustum mozzarellae, non tantum syllogismorum. Seneca certe laetus aderat!

Metronax: Sic est, amice! In Napoli, philosophus non solum disputat—sed etiam risus et panem partitur. Dialectica hic semper calida est, sicut vulcano Vesuvio!