New Year Reflection

One of my favorite excerpts from the poetry of Ovid captures the four seasons in two lines. I surely must have written of these lines before, but I believe in repetition, so here they are, courtesy of The Latin Library:

Poma dat autumnus: formosa est messibus aestas:

Ver praebet flores: igne levatur hiems.

                                                                                    Ovid, Remedia Amoris 187-188

Translation:  Autumn gives fruits: beautiful is summer with crops:

                                    Spring offers flowers: by fire winter is lightened.

I sit on this fourth day of the New Year before a woodstove. Flames dance above glowing coals, and the rain falls on last night's snow. Within the fire glows orange, the pale daylight reveals the orange spine of Millennium: A Latin Reader/374-1374 by F.E. Harrison, on the cover of which St. Jerome looks out from his writing at a slanted desk.

Reading, setting one's thoughts on fire, also lightens the dark winter. In addition to Millennium, I have Sarah Ruden's translation of Vergil's Aeneid at hand. The Latin excerpts in Millennium, balanced by the spare English of Ruden, set in the landscape of snow, before a fire--no better way to welcome another year than to look back, way back, and, catching fire, reflect the light of millennia.

Blowin' in the Wind

A young alumna of my school, a former Classics student and now a graduate of Carleton College in Minnesota, is spending her summer doing research in Manitoba, Canada. She is learning to use an Aeolian trap, a device which catches materials that are wind-borne. In an email she reported to me that the researcher who introduced her to the device did not know why it is called an Aeolian trap, so my former student explained the connection to the mythological Aeolus, king of the winds, who in Book 10 of the Odyssey gives Odysseus a bag of winds to take him home to Ithaka, and who also in the Aeneid is bribed by Juno, the queen of the gods, to disrupt Aeneas' voyage in Book 1 by means of a huge storm.

Venus and Artemis

The January 2012 cover of The Field magazine from England featured a young woman dressed in a short tweed skirt carrying a walking stick and flanked by two dogs. The article on the inside of the magazine was called “Ladies Picking Up,” or ladies using dogs trained to retrieve birds shot by a hunter.  The image called to mind the description by Vergil in Aeneid, Book 1, of his mother, the goddess Venus, disguised as a huntress:

318            namque umerīs dē mōre habilem suspenderat arcum

319            vēnātrīx dederatque comam diffundere ventīs,

320            nūda genū nōdōque sinūs collēcta fluentīs.

[For down from her shoulders according to custom she had hung a handy bow,

and the huntress had given her hair to pour out in the winds,

bare as to her knee and having been gathered as to her flowing folds.]

On the back cover of the magazine was an advertisement for a new model of a Rizzini shot gun called...”Artemis, a perfect combination of elegance and excellence.”  Artemis is the Greek name of the huntress goddess known in Latin as Diana. The classical tradition continues in words and pictures in The Field magazine.