Living with a Dead Language

by Ann Patty

  The tree died a year later, after my father had moved to Alameda and stopped being a member of the club. He was hurt and outraged that they hadn’t taken the time to water it rigorously after all the years and money he’d spent there. It felt to him like a travesty, a personal insult to both of them.

  We planted a second Mother Memorial Red Maple at my Rhinebeck house six years later. Dad was failing fast, and for the first time since my mother’s death all of us were gathered at my house. It was a beautiful September weekend, and Dad wanted to plant the tree in honor of Mom. So all of us—four kids, three spouses, and two grandchildren—dug the hole, then planted and composted and watered a ten-foot “Autumn Glory” on one side of a lichen-covered rock outcropping at the edge of my lawn. My father, terribly frail and barely able to speak, said, when we had paused after tamping the earth firmly around it, “Let’s all remember Mommie.”

  The Autumn Glory expired the following winter, the same time my father died. It was a victim of my lawn man’s overzealous weed eating, which lashed away the lower surface of the bark.

  I planted a third Mother Memorial Red Maple—a fifteen-foot, very sturdy-sounding “King Crimson” tree—the year after Dad died; it seemed so important to him that Mom have a tree at my house. And, of course, the tree was also for Dad. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure, and never have been, what the connection was between Mom and a red maple. Mom wasn’t an outdoor type; I don’t recall her ever naming a favorite tree or flower, or doing any gardening. I think it was Dad who had always loved red maples and decided to love them in Mom’s name, much the way he claimed to love their life while she drank her way out of it.

  The red maple now thrives on the border between our lawn and woods. George does not like it because it is neither a native nor an ornamental tree. He would like to cut it down, but I cannot allow that. Newly bare in late October, there is a hornet’s nest from last summer still clinging to its highest branch (the leader branch, George tells me, which indicates where the tree is going). Perhaps my mother wasn’t content to be a tree and added the hornet’s nest to make it more her own. One of her favorite expressions was “I’m so mad I could spit,” and I can imagine her in perpetuity, buzzing around amidst shrubs and flowers, mad as a hornet.

  The Mom Memorial Maple, like the tall stone engravings of the Laudatio Turiae, was the only monument made for my mother. Because she had wanted her body donated to science, there was nothing to inter, and though her name was engraved on the tombstone that my father would share with her in his hometown of Cutler, Indiana, was that for him or for her? And the tree, for him or for her? And the Laudatio Turiae, was that for Turia or to protect the interests and reputation of her unnamed husband?

  For the next class, Siddhi presented the Calendar from Antium (Insc. Ital. 13.2), the largest Fasti (calendar) unearthed so far: a wall painting 4.5 meters long and believed to date from around 60 B.C.

  As usual, Bert amplified Siddhi’s presentation with a disquisition on the history of the Roman calendar: The ancient agricultural calendar was lunar and included only ten months—winter was not counted (there was no agricultural activity during what would become January and February). Each year’s calendar started anew at planting time in March. The empty spaces in winter obviated the need to line up solar and lunar months—that could be done at planting time. (The truth had done Ruth Nelson’s statement about February being short because everybody hated it one better. In the early calendar, the Romans didn’t even allow the two winter months the courtesy of a name!)

  As Rome became increasingly urbanized, it was necessary for the calendar to serve political and judicial as well as agricultural needs. The lunar and solar calendars were brought into alignment, and January and February were added. Before Julius Caesar’s revisions, a leap month, or mensis intercalaris, was added to the end of February from time to time at the discretion of the Pontifex Maximus (Rome’s high priest). February would be shortened to 23 or 24 days, and the intercalary month of 27 days would be added, resulting in a year with 377 or 378 days.

  After Caesar’s improvements, the intercalary month was dropped, and instead February would be lengthened or shortened to align the calendar with the solar year, which is why it was left short. February (Februa, Februum, which translates as “purification”) was mostly given over to festivals for the dead and remembrance days.

  As Siddhi resumed his lecture, he paced before his projected calendar, pointing out and explaining its various elements. It was a very complicated calendar. The abbreviated names of the months are arranged across the top. Because the calendar has thirteen months altogether, including the intercalary month, we know that this calendar is pre-Caesarian. There were eight days to a week, as well as a market day. The days are listed vertically beneath each month and represented by a recurring cycle of letters A through H, every ninth day being identified as a market day (nundinae), which was painted in red (from this we retain our expression: a “red-letter day”).

  There were an amazing number of festival days: My favorite was the Violaria, or festival of violets, in March. On that day, families privately paid homage to their dead by placing violets on their graves. It was on my birthday—violets and death, attending my birth! Obviously, Rome’s climate was quite a bit warmer than ours, since usually at the time of my birthday in late March the ground is still frozen and the appearance of violets at least two months away.

  Violets are profuse in my gardens and lawns in May, as they are throughout Rhinebeck. From the Gilded Age through the Depression, the violet was the world’s most popular flower, the fashionable choice for corsages and nosegays (ah, nosegays, where have they gone?). And Rhinebeck was known as the Violet Capital of the World.

  In those years, there were over four hundred violet greenhouses in Rhinebeck. Only one remains, though now it grows anemones, lilies, and Christmas trees. The owner, Fred Battenfeld, as a small homage to history, plants one row of cultivated violets every year—most of which go to restaurateurs for use in salads and decorations. Battenfeld’s is a mile’s walk from my house. Perhaps seeds from that violet farm had made the short journey by wind to my property, and I am grateful. I, too, am sometimes inspired to put them in a salad or to decorate a dessert with them.

  After class, I congratulated Siddhi on his presentation, and the two of us walked to the Retreat together. At last I could ask him about the SPQR tattoo I’d been curious about all semester. The tattoo, he told me, was his second. He lifted up his T-shirt to expose his first tattoo: the biohazard symbol emblazed on his back between his shoulder blades:

  “I have a double major: biology and classics,” he explained, “and I wanted to have both passions represented on my body.”

  “Why those two symbols?” I asked.

  “I love what SPQR represents, you know, the people and the Senate, even though everyone knew the emperor was pulling the strings. I love the democratic feel of it, how it stands for this huge body of people—all these populations, who had nothing in common but the empire—as one entity. I find it beautiful, like e pluribus unum.

  “I got the biohazard sign not only because I love the way the symbol looks but I love the parts of nature that kill you. I’ve always admired the beauty of deadly animals—I was obsessed with dinosaurs when I was a kid, and that’s what started me liking Latin, because their names were in Latin. I also love the mysteries of germs, bacteria, and viruses.”

  I was smitten anew. This adorable, lively young man was also formidably bright and thoughtful, not to mention sweet. I wanted to ask him if he’d like a second Mom but restrained myself.

  CHAPTER 12

  Festina lente.

  Make haste slowly.

  —Augustus

  That winter was the coldest, snowiest winter we’d had in twenty years. In late November, after the first deep freeze, a flock of bluebirds appeared, accompanied by a couple of goldfinches and a few titmice. They all flew abo
ut the yard for several hours. The next day they were gone.

  My resident deer family, a doe, a yearling, and a two-year-old, that usually kept to the forest or the gullies on either side of our long driveway, now slept closer to the house. They made daily forays to scavenge whatever seed the birds dropped from the feeder. Augie, at fourteen, was mostly deaf and no longer heard the approach of the deer, but he stood sentry at the French doors when he was not sleeping on the couch. When he spotted deer approaching the feeder, he’d set up a fury of barking until I let him out to chase them away. The deer would retreat to the rise just on the other side of Augie’s electronic fence, taunting him as he barked and barked, nequiquam (in vain). Finally, I would don coat and boots and chase them away, if only to stop his incessant barking.

  Familiarity bred not only contempt but also fondness, and I’d finally accepted that they live here, too. George had even named the doe Gertrude, after his grandmother. This winter, rather than longing for the city, I practiced the simple pleasures of study, both of Latin and of the wildlife on our property. It was, all and all, a Lucretian winter.

  Rob Brown’s Vassar course on Lucretius and Virgil began the last week of January. Attending were the same seven of us from Bert’s epigraphy class, along with Alissa, who had returned to our fold. We had all become friendly in that lively class and were happy to be together for another semester. Rob seemed delighted to see us all and welcomed us in his elegant, low-key way.

  “We’ll begin with Lucretius then move on to Virgil. I’ve not taught Lucretius in a long time, but I wrote my doctoral thesis on him. Since this may be the last time I teach Virgil, I thought I’d do something I haven’t tried before. We’ll focus on both poets’ view of the afterlife, Virgil VI and Lucretius III. Reading both, we’ll see the opposite poles of ancient belief.”

  Lucretius has been enjoying a second renaissance in the past few years, ever since Stephen Greenblatt’s 2012 best seller, The Swerve, which chronicles how Lucretius’ masterwork, his only work, De Rerum Natura, was suppressed and almost lost during the Christian Middle Ages, then rediscovered during the Renaissance. Lucretius predated the antireligion writers Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Maher (not to mention atomic physics) by two millennia: He inveighed against the superstition that the gods influence human life, and spent many verses (yes, it’s an epic poem) listing all the damage done human life and society by fear of hell.

  Lucretius was an Epicurean. Epicureanism in Greece and Rome was much more complex than hedonism, with which it is often confused today. The Greek philosopher Epicurus believed pleasure was the highest good, but pleasure meant living a simple, austere life, without anxiety, without fear of death and the afterlife. The goal of life was to avoid pain, and one avoided pain by avoiding desire and attachment. Lucretius, in De Rerum Natura, translates the philosophy of Epicurus into Latin. Epicurus believed that the world was composed of atoms (prima materia) and void (inane), and that the soul and body, twinborn, also died at the same time: The soul could not exist without the body. Though he allowed that the gods existed, they lived in their own ethereal sphere, quite unconcerned about the doings of us mortals below.

  I had no truck with the concept of gods and god. My religious upbringing was desultory. My mother had been raised Catholic and attended only Catholic schools (all that Latin!), but she left the Church when I was an infant. My brother Charles, at three, had fallen out of a two-story window onto a cement sidewalk, resulting in a six-inch skull fracture. Only the red cowboy hat he always wore held his head together. Through the long weeks in the hospital, my mother sat vigil, praying and promising god that if Charles should live, she would have a mass said for him. The priest would often remind her, “The lord giveth and the lord taketh away.” It was not the consolation my mother wanted and needed. Mother identified the priest with the Church. When Charles was released from the hospital, she did have a mass said in his honor, then she left the Church. She had long disagreed with its stance on birth control, and that priest was the final straw. Had she lost her faith in god or merely the institution? She never said. Was the loss profound? She never said.

  My father was a Presbyterian, but his religion seemed to be largely prophylactic. He worried that I did not plan to baptize my daughter, Sophie. “What if you’re wrong?” he asked. I’d already reasoned that if I were wrong, we’d end up in hell together with most of the other intelligent people on earth. I had considered myself an atheist since I was thirteen, when my mother, much to my alarm, enrolled me in a confirmation class at the local Lutheran church we sporadically attended. Though we weren’t really Lutherans, we simply attended whatever church was closest to home. The pastor hated my questions in confirmation class and knew, I’m sure, what were my true beliefs or lack thereof. I took my First Communion and never set foot in that church again.

  It wasn’t until years later that I realized atheism was not a socially acceptable choice. It was during a fancy summer party in the Hamptons, populated by well-known authors, agents, and editors, that I was set straight. As was my wont in those days, before I’d learned, like my colleagues, to have interesting opinions about books I hadn’t read and to comment on the current ephemeral topics popular among the chattering classes, I used to try to engage in meaningful conversation at such parties by sitting alone off to the side somewhere (as Humphrey and I had always done). I felt less anxious sitting alone than I did trying to break into conversations. Only the brave would stop to say hello, and often we would have interesting, rather than phatic, conversation. Once a powerful agent came and sat by me. I’d been contemplating some absurdity of the Moral Majority, which was the Tea Party of the eighties, when I revealed myself to be an atheist. The agent disapproved. “I really don’t know why you say that. Isn’t it better to say you’re agnostic?”

  “But I’m not agnostic,” I countered. “I’m not unknowing about a supreme being. I fully believe it to be a fiction.”

  He spent another five minutes trying to convince me that it would be better for me, that I’d sound friendlier and nicer, if I switched to calling myself an agnostic. “Really, what’s the difference,” he concluded, “and it sounds so much better.”

  I’ve always favored those who aren’t afraid to speak their true minds, popular opinion be damned. The only celebrity autobiography I ever published was that of Frank Zappa, who included in his book an antireligious screed and a copy of his application to the state of Alabama to incorporate his own new religion, which he did in reaction to Alabama judge W. Brevard Hand’s ruling that “Secular Humanism was, in fact, a religion and that the tenets of its faith were dominating the curriculum of Alabama’s public schools, and thereby violating the civil rights of Christians.”

  Zappa called his church C.A.S.H., the Church of American Secular Humanism, and wrote down the Tenets of the Faith. They are still a needed corrective, all these years later:

  “The people of Our Faith refuse to be persecuted any longer by a fanatical fifth column, shoveling money in the direction of ‘special friends’ in Washington DC.”

  When a higher court struck down Hand’s ruling, Zappa withdrew the papers and “dissolved the religion.”

  Zappa once told me, “It’s my job to take everything to its most absurd extreme.” His was a brave and original soul if ever I’ve met one. He’d made his point well; Lucretius would have loved him.

  Little is known about Lucretius. Some believe this to be the result of a conspiracy of silence conducted by early Christians determined to suppress the atheistic arguments made in De Rerum Natura. The only reference made to him was in the fourth century A.D., in the annals of St. Jerome (who is portrayed, elegantly dressed, in a portrait hanging in Vassar’s Lehman Loeb Art Center). The history records that Titus Lucretius was born in 99 B.C. He was driven mad by a love potion but managed to compose several books (which were later corrected by Cicero) between episodes of insanity. He committed suicide in 55 B.C. at
the age of forty-four.

  Most scholars believe none of these assertions; Lucretius’ opinion of romantic love was no higher than his opinion of religion—he believed both were scourges to a peaceful life.

  Rob tells us we’ll go slowly at first, and the class will focus on literary analysis. He assumes we’ll take care of the grammar on our own, though he assures us that we’ll go through our translations line by line at the beginning. He then asks us to sight read the first ten lines, since they “aren’t as difficult” as later lines. Xavier, five students away from me, offers to begin. Luckily, class ended before it was my turn. Vah!

  A contemporary of Catullus, Lucretius set his sights on a high perch in the poetic pantheon. He wrote only in dactylic hexameter, and he consciously competed with the Greek poets (he preceded Virgil by thirty years). Lucretius is maddeningly difficult to translate: De Rerum Natura is didactic, it’s philosophy in poetic form, and the demands of dactylic hexameter make the usual confusing placement of Latin words even more scrambled. How’s that for a triple whammy?

  Consequently, translating is a slow and painstaking slog. Plus, we did little translating last semester so now, after a year of not being immersed in daily translation, I’ve lost some of my limping mojo. It still takes me three or four hours, and two different sittings, to translate forty lines.

  Lucretius begins Book III with praises of Epicurus, who laid out the void before his students: