Driving Romanian Cars

In the Wheels section of today's Halifax Chronicle Herald, an article about cars made in Romania under the brand Dacia made me smile. The Romans under Trajan in the early years of the second century A.D. beat the Dacians, who lived in the area to the west of the Black Sea, thereby making the Roman Empire as great as it would be. The Romans called this area, around the modern country of Romania, Dacia. Before Dacia became a Roman province, the first emperor Augustus exiled the poet Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid) to Tomi on the shore of the Black Sea. Today Ovidiu is a town in Romania, near the area where Ovid died in exile. There's lots of history on the roads in Romania.

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.

RUPESTRIAN DELIGHTS

I was delighted to learn the word rupestrian from World Wide Words, an e-newsletter which I receive weekly on Saturdays here in New York. Here you can read the short article. One of my favorite passages from Ovid contains the word rupes, rupis f. cliff, rock; see Ovid's Remedia Amoris, lines 175-190 at The Latin Library: ecce, petunt rupes praeruptaque saxa capellae (Look, the she-goats seek the cliffs and sheer rocks, line 179). Ah, I wonder if past Latin 3 students remember this passage, which also has a fabulous two-line (lines 187-188) summary of the four seasons.

Watchers of PBS may recognize the allusion in the title to riparian delights, as expounded by Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced bou-quet) in the British comedy Keeping Up Appearances, but more on riparian another time.