you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

So I am supposed to give a nebulous presentation tomororw on Hecuba, Early Modern Canons, Translation, Anything Else You Can Think Of. It's mostly going to be about Erasmus and translation, I think, and a little bit about rhetorical education and practicing emotions, courtesy (mostly) of Lynne Enterline's book on Shakespeare's Schoolroom (which I am kind of conflicted about, because (a) interesting readings! but (b) this is kind of the same thing that people are starting to do with Roman rhetorical education, which I guess is interesting, but which makes me feel that I've kind of seen this all before (except with less eroticized corporal punishment -- Quintilian doesn't approve of beating students. Although, actually, that too is present in less top-.1% contexts.)

But I've been reading Roger Ascham's Schoolmaster, which is six thousand kinds of entertaining. Because Double Translation Can Teach You Fluent Latin in 3 months, you guys! Just like the handsome young man Ascham roomed with, once, who went from zero to LATIN in only a few months. Then he died, which is sad, but at least he died Knowing Latin. This is my favorite quote, though.

For he, that can neither like Aristotle in Logicke and Philosophie, nor Tullie in Rhetoricke and Eloquence, will, from these steppes, likelie enough presume, by like pride, to mount hier, to the misliking of greater matters: that is either in Religion, to haue a dissentious head, or in the common wealth, to haue a factious hart: as I knew one a student in Cambrige, who, for a singularitie, began first to dissent, in the scholes, from Aristotle, and sone after became a peruerse Arrian, against Christ and all true Religion: and studied diligentlie Origene, Basileus, and S. Hierome, onelie to gleane out of their workes, the pernicious heresies of Celsus, Eunomius, and Heluidius, whereby the Church of Christ, was so poysoned withall.

Remember: it's just a small step from disrespecting Cicero to social and moral collapse!

These noble sentiments are often echoed in the letters and speeches he wrote at this time. After Caesar's murder, Cicero felt himself in imminent peril. But he was still more anxious for the State than for himself...Finally, in the Fourteenth Philippic, "after the high Roman fashion, (he) spoke weighty and solemn words on the shortness of life and the eternity of glory. This speech, the last public utterance which we have of Cicero's is in his highest strain, and is in every respect worthy of the orator who delivered it, of the language he spoke, and of the Roman name." It was the twenty-first of April, 43 B.C. In December of that same year he was done to death by the agents of Antony.
. . .
"Rome's least mortal mind" remained to the end very mortal still. But all who know Cicero intimately must admit that the glory he hungered after was no mean or vulgar thing. It inspired him to live nobly and to die bravely, like one of his old Roman heroes.

--Francis A. Sullvan: "Cicero and Gloria." TAPA 72 (1941).

So I have a stomach bug today, and I feel crummy. I should go to bed, but I don't want to go to bed.

Read most of Catilina's Riddle (Steven Sayler); today, while moping around. About 30 pages from the end, I got frustrated by the twistyness (SPOILERS?) of the MC's theories, by which Cicero was actually machinating everything, and using his spies to plant and instigate all of illegal activity/apparent illegal activity among the so-called conspirators, which, okay, is not that implausible, because doen't the FBI do that now, sometimes, but anyway, I skipped and read the author's note at the end, and and found my suspicions confirmed, because "I am not trying to rehabilitate Cataline like Josephine Tey and Richard III, but OMG ALL THE SOURCES ARE TOTALLY BIASED."

Which is true, except that Sallust was an enemy of Cicero, so you do have at least two sources which would be inimical to each-other agreeing.

(Also, I am not in a good position to judge how plausible all of this convolution is, partly because I am sick, partly because what I remember about Cicero's version is "quouseque abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra" and the bit about Catiline's followers being the types to dance naked at parties, and the post-conspiracy debate between Cato and Caesar from Sallust. Although I think that A Slave of Catiline had more or less the outline, except for the bizarre bit with Cicero handing off the mantle of future rescue of the res p. to Caesar at the end.)

Um. So the point of this post, I think, was to wonder about how someone with the username "ricardienne" can get annoyed by historical conspiracy theories. It's true that I no longer either 1) care so much about Richard III's innocence as I did in, say, 8th grade, or (shall I be honest here?) high school, or 2) think that he was TEH EPITOME OF INNOCENCE (although maybe he was a moderately decent person who tried to do some kind of right thing most of the time, and didn't necessarily murder his nephews). Seriously, there was a point when I used to lie awake at night getting angsty with doubt about R3's True Character.

I also like Cicero, and I think he gets bashed a bit unfairly. Just because he was a lawyer and a politician, and ambitious and vain and left an immense body of writing to document it all... but then, all that writing survived because he was a freaking brilliant writer and intellectual and orator, too. (Why don't people ever mock Caesar, hmm? He doesn't even get a bad rap in Asterix, for crying out loud?). So if feels like a cheap shot to say "oh, Cataline: probably innocent, because, after, all it's Cicero who's going on about it, and we all know what his agenda was like."

Even though that's PRETTY MUCH THE SAME ARGUMENT that gets used in defense of R3. So maybe I'm just encountering this later in life, when I have, *sigh*, grown more *conservative* and don't want to start anything too *radical* within the historical canon.

Whatever. Maybe I will finish the novel: I kind of what to find out where the headless bodies were coming from. Also whether there will be a giant family feud over Cicero vs. Catiline.