O Death, Where is Thy Sting?

Most of the following was well-explored in the nineteenth century, but I’ve never seen it discussed in all its aspects in one place, so here goes.

I

Hosea 14:13 goes like this:

מיד שאול אפדם ממות אגאלם אהי דבריך מות אהי קטבך שאול נחם יסתר מעיני

This is a very difficult verse, studded with several lexical difficulties. But our first guide should be its context: it is set within a prophecy of Ephraim’s ruin, so whatever interpretation we land on, it should probably be a threatening announcement of doom.

The three words that have historically caused trouble are: 

1. אהי. This is either a) an untranslatable interjection, b) the word ‘where’, akin to איה, or c) the word ‘I am’, akin to אהיה. The question is still unsettled: translations and dictionaries, even good ones and modern ones, are all at variance.

2. דבריך. ‘Your ___s.’ There is no way of knowing a priori whether דֶּבֶר, ‘plague’, or דָּבָר, ‘word/thing/affair/lawsuit’ is intended. But that דבריך comes from דֶּבֶר and not דָּבָר is made plain by the parallelism of דֶּבֶר  and קֶּטֶב at Ps 91:6. 

3. קטבך. ‘Your destruction’. This is merely a rare word, whose proper vocalization in the singular is probably קֶטֶב. 

Meanwhile there is a grammatical problem. Are the opening words מיד שאול אפדם ממות אגאלם meant to be ironic rhetorical questions (i.e. do I ransom them from the grave? or redeem them from death?)? Or are they affirmative statements that God will rescue Israel from death? And if the latter, how are they to be reconciled with the immediately following threats?

In my private view the verse is properly translated:

I ransom them from the grave, and from death I redeem them: [but] O for your plagues, O Death! O for your ruin, O grave! Comfort shall be hidden from my eyes. 

That is: ‘I save Israel from the grave and death, but only to her sorrow, for I will demand plagues from death and ruin from the grave to afflict her mercilessly withal.’ 

II

The Septuagint translates our verse like this:

ἐκ χειρὸς ᾅδου ῥύσομαι αὐτοὺς καὶ ἐκ θανάτου λυτρώσομαι αὐτούς· ποῦ ἡ δίκη σου, θάνατε; ποῦ τὸ κέντρον σου, ᾅδη; παράκλησις κέκρυπται ἀπὸ ὀφθαλμῶν μου. 

I will ransom them from the hand of Hades and redeem them from death: where is your suit, O death? Where is your sting, O Hades? Comfort is hidden from my eyes.

Δίκη, ‘(law)suit’, is a translation of דָּבָר, not דֶּבֶר. The Septuagint’s translation is thus a misapprehension of the Hebrew, especially in light of Ps 91:6 as I noted above. Moreover, it takes אהי to mean ποῦ, ‘where’, plausibly enough.

Jerome translated the verse as follows for the Vulgate: 

De manu mortis liberabo eos de morte redimam eos ero mors tua o mors ero morsus tuus inferne consolatio abscondita est ab oculis meis.

This differs in several points from the Septuagint. Jerome explained himself like this:

...In eo loco, in quo LXX transtulerunt, ubi est causa tu? et nos diximus, ero mors tua: Symmachus interpretatus est, ero plaga tua: quinta editio et Aquila: Ubi sunt sermones tui? quod hebraice scribitur DABARACH: legentes DABAR, hoc est, verbum pro DEBER, quod interpretatur mors...Pro aculeo quoque, quem nos morsum transtulimus, Symmachus ἀπαντημα, id est occursum, Theodotion et quinta editio, plagam, et conclusionem interpretati sunt.

For the word דְבָרֶיךָ, which the Septuagint translated as where is your suit?, we as ‘I will be your death’, Symmachus as: ‘I will be your plague’; and the Quinta and Aquila as: ‘where are your words?’ —the Septuagint read דָּבָר; that is, ‘word’, rather than ‘ דֶּבֶר’, which is translated ‘mors’. .. And for aculeo [קטבך], which we translated as ‘morsus’ [bite], Symmchus had ἀπαντημα, i.e. ‘meeting’, Theodotion ‘plague’, and the Quinta ‘shutting-up’.

Thus Jerome correctly noticed the Septuagint’s error at דְבָרֶיךָ; probably not independently, but following on Symmachus’ unique translation of the verse. Apparently only Symmachus had rendered דְבָרֶיךָ as ‘plagues’ rather than as one of the variants of דָּבָר. Jerome happened to prefer his translation to that of the Septuagint and all of the other hexaplar translators—which was fortunate, as it happens to have been the right one. Meanwhile, he had the good sense to reject Symmachus’ strange translation of קטבך.

[By the way, here are Frederick Field’s back-translated reconstructions of the hexaplar variants at this verse:

Aquila. ἔσομαι ῥήματά σου, θάνατε, ἔσομαι δηγμοί σου, ᾅδε.

Symmachus. ἔσομαι πλήγή σου ἐν θανάτῳ, ἔσομαι ἀκηδία σου ἐν ᾅδῃ.

Theodotion. καὶ ἔσται ἡ δίκη σου ἐν θανάτῳ, καὶ πληγή σου ἐν ᾅδῃ.

Quinta. ποῦ οἱ λόγοι σου...]

III

That would seem to be all, but I have not yet mentioned what is by far the most famous ancient commentary on this verse: Paul’s quotation of it at I Corinthians 15:54–6. In the Nestlé-Aland edition we read:

ὅταν δὲ τὸ φθαρτὸν τοῦτο ἐνδύσηται ἀφθαρσίαν καὶ τὸ θνητὸν τοῦτο ἐνδύσηται ἀθανασίαν, τότε γενήσεται ὁ λόγος ὁ γεγραμμένος· κατεπόθη ὁ θάνατος εἰς νῖκος. ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ νῖκος; ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ κέντρον; τὸ δὲ κέντρον τοῦ θανάτου ἡ ἁμαρτία, ἡ δὲ δύναμις τῆς ἁμαρτίας ὁ νόμος.

But when this corrupt thing puts on incorruption, and this mortal thing puts on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up into victory [Isaiah 25:8]. 

O death where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the Law.

This passage displays strong textual variation in the manuscripts, including an inconsistent ordering of the twin ποῦ σου θάνατε clauses. To keep to one of them, I think that we should probably not read (θάνατε, τὸ) νῖκος, victory, but rather …τὸ νεῖκος, suit; controversy. In order to clarify this error, look at the Hebrew original of Isaiah 25:8, which Paul quotes immediately before our verse:

בִּלַּע המות לנצח

Κατεπόθη ὁ θάνατος εἰς νῖκος is indeed a correct translation of this. (Κατέπιεν ὁ θάνατος ἰσχύσας, in the Septuagint, is an acceptable alternative.) Εἰς νεῖκος, meanwhile, cannot be the translation of לנצח by any stretch.  But as for Paul’s following citation, אהי דבריך מות cannot easily be translated as ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ νῖκος; and a much better translation is νεῖκος, which is in line with the Septuagint’s understanding of דבריך as a suffixed form of דָּבָר. Paul was probably relying on a manuscript of the Septuagint that had νεῖκος instead of its synonym δίκη. (Where he found the variant translation of Isaiah 25:8 is something that I’d be very happy to learn.) Anyway, I suspect that the two words νῖκος and νεῖκος in I Corinthians have been confused in most manuscripts as a result of cross-contamination between proximate verses. This is extremely understandable on palaeographic grounds; so much so, in fact, that it would be surprising if the manuscript tradition had managed to get the two words straight.

Pier Vettori, writing in the sixteenth century, observed that Jerome’s translations implied that he had read  νεῖκος in both places in his manuscripts of I Corinthians. Vettori also cited some other authors who had been under the same impression, and a manuscript that had the same reading. Most of our received texts, in contrast, tend to have νῖκος in both places. It might be tempting to conclude immediately that Paul originally wrote both νῖκος and νεῖκος, which is the correct reading as far as conformity to (the Septuagint’s reading of) the Hebrew is concerned. But this is only one of three possibilities:

1. Paul wrote νῖκος / νεῖκος, but the earliest copies of I Corinthians merged them both into either νῖκος or νεῖκος.

2. The manuscripts used by Paul had νεῖκος / νεῖκος or νῖκος / νῖκος, and he copied what he saw.

3. The manuscripts used by Paul had νῖκος / νεῖκος, and he made a mistake.

All the same, given the existence of both variants in the manuscripts of Corinthians, I think that possibility 1 is the most likely after all. Paul probably wrote ‘κατεπόθη ὁ θάνατος εἰς νεῖκος. ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ νῖκος;’, and variations of this represent scribal corruptions.

Apart from this, there are some other variants. For instance, the first θάνατε is replaced in some manuscripts by ᾅδη. But I am inclined to think that this and several other variants result from scribal attempts to bring Paul’s phrasing into line with the Septuagint’s. The double θάνατε, both for its awkwardness and for its marked deviation from the Septuagint, is the harder reading. And as we have already seen in the case of the Isaiah 25:8 citation, there is no reason to assume that Paul was copying faithfully from any single manuscript of the Septuagint or any other Greek translation of Hosea or Isaiah.

Conjecture at Horace, C. I.xxxii.15

Horace, C.I.xxxii.13–16, according to the mss.:

O decus Phœbi et dapibus supremi
Grata testudo Iovis o laborum

Dulce lenimen mihi cumque salve
Rite vocanti.

This is gibberish. Lachmann made things better, writing obiter in his comment on Lucr. V.311: 

…præterea cumque nisi cum relativis coniunctum lingua Latina non agnoscit: neque Horatius in carminum 1,32 potuit dicere mihi cumque salve (volunt enim hoc esse ‘salve quotiens te advoco’: at cur lyra alias ei non salveat?), sed scripsit o laborum Dulce lenimen medicumque salve Rite vocanti. 

Now I propose:

O decus Phoebi et dapibus supremi
Grata testudo Iovis, o laborum
Dulce lenimen melicumque salve
Rite vocanti.

O grace of Apollo, O lyre beloved at the feasts of exalted Jupiter, O sweet and songful lightener of suffering, rejoice in him who duly calls thee.

Update: A loyal friend of mine has pointed out that T. J. B. Brady made this very emendation in the late nineteenth century. My rabbi once told me that you shouldn’t curse your luck in such a situation for being preempted, but thank God that you were allowed to attain the same insight as one of your elders and betters.  

New word submitted to the OED: Gargalism

Gargalism, n.

Something gargled; a mouthwash. 

 It is attested in the funeral sermon for Lancelot Andrewes, 1626:

And true Religion is no way a gargalisme onely, to wash the tongue and mouth, to speake good words: it must root in the heart, and then fructifie in the hand; else it will not cleanse the whole man.

John Buckeridge, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God Lancelot, Late Lord Bishop of Winchester, in the Parish Church of St. Savior in Southwarke, On Saturday being the XI. of November, A. D. MDCXXVI (London: Richard Badger, 1629), p. 7.

This word would seem to have the same meaning of gargarism, n., and could perhaps be listed with it as a variant form. Its figurative connotation, however, is not present in any of the examples listed under sense 1 of gargarism.

Letter to the OED on Torpedo

I’ve written this letter to the Oxford English Dictionary about part of their entry on torpedo:

 b. figurative. One who or that which has a benumbing influence.

a1593   C. Marlowe Edward II (1594) sig. C2v   Faire Queene forbeare to angle for the fish..I meane that vile Torpedo, Gaueston.

1762   O. Goldsmith Life R. Nash 34   He used to call a pen his torpedo, whenever he grasped it, it numbed all his faculties.

c1855   B. S. Hollis Hymn-bk. C'tess Huntingdon's Connecticut Pref.   The torpedo of formality had benumbed the churches.

Sense 1b of the existing entry ‘torpedo’ does not exist as a coherent category, and the quotations listed under it need to be resolved into at least two clearly distinguishable senses. The first of these is merely ‘numbness’, and is derived directly from the primitive sense of Latin torpēdō, defined by the Oxford Latin Dictionary as ‘A state of inertness, sluggishness, lethargy’. The citation from Hollis belongs plainly to this sense, as ‘torpedo’ does not refer to any agent, abstract or concrete, but is merely in (genitive) apposition to ‘formality’. The citation from Goldsmith about Nash is on the borderline, I think, and might belong to the distinct sense ‘that which has a benumbing influence’; but should probably just be folded into the general sense of ‘numbness’. Torpedo was already conceived of in Latin as having an active benumbing force on a person; cf. Sallust’s ‘si tanta torpedo animos obrepsit’ or Tacitus’ ‘tanta torpedo invaserat animum’. Incidentally, the Goldsmith quotation seems to be related somehow to the following passage in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which should be added to the list of attestations:

‘It has been circulated, I know not with what authenticity, that Johnson considered Dr. Birch as a dull writer, and said of him, “Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand, than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties.”’ (ed. 1791, pp. 85–6.)

I think it is highly unlikely that Johnson or Nash (if either of them indeed said this) had the electric ray in mind; far likelier they were just using a Latin word for oppressive numbness. Therefore it is questionable whether the sense of the Nash and Hollis attestations should be described as ‘figurative’, as it has nothing to do with fish and does not rely for its meaning on the abstract application of any concrete image. 

As for the citation from Marlowe, it does not belong to the other two at all, because it is unmistakably a reference to the electric ray. However, that this reference is mischaracterized by the definition ‘one who or that which has a benumbing influence’ is made clear by the full context:

Faire Queene forbeare to angle for the fish,
Which being caught, strikes him that takes it dead,
I mean that vile Torpedo, Gaueston,
That now I hope flotes on the Irish seas.
(ed. 1594, fol. C2 v.)

Marlowe’s torpedo doesn’t benumb you—it strikes you dead! In any case, I am not convinced that this attestation deserves even to be called figurative, as it rather seems to be a literal reference to the fish, to which Gaveston is likened in a simile. Thus it can arguably be listed under sense 1a.

Parsing Problems

It was a frigid January day in 2015, and I was sitting in my Herodotus seminar in college. It was my turn to translate. I was very proud of how well I’d prepared, and began confidently reading the Greek aloud. But after three words of my English translation, I was stopped short by the august professor. ‘Mr Nathan’, he said, ‘you have a parsing problem’.

I have hardly passed a day of my life without a parsing problem. It started when I realized that I had no way of knowing whether ‘the skies are not cloudy all day’ meant that the skies stayed cloudless for the whole day, or whether they were only cloudy for some of the day, but not all of it. The truth is, as soon as you start thinking about problems of phrasing, only a draught from the river Lethe will let you stop. We are surrounded every day by ambiguous syntax, and alas there is much less pleasure in solving parsing-problems than there is pain in noticing them. But at least I can make you share in some of my suffering.

In dulci jubilo, loveliest of all Christmas songs, contains the following stanza:

O Iesu parvule
Nach dir ist mir so weh:
Tröst mir mein Gemüte
O puer optime
Durch alle deine Güte
O princeps gloriæ,
Trahe me post te, trahe me post te.

O little Jesus, how I am pained for thee. Console my spirit, o greatest boy, through all thy goodness. O prince of glory, drag me after thee, drag me after thee. 

Here we have the stanza in its very earliest attestation from the fourteenth century:

If my palaeography hasn’t failed me, this says:

O Iesu parvule • nach dir ist mir so we • droste myn gemüde tu puer inclite • daȥ dů dorch dyne gůde • tu princeps glorie • Trahe me post te trahe me post te • in dines fader ryche o pater optime.

O little Jesus, how I am pained for thee. Console my spirit, thou glorious boy, through thy goodness, thou prince of glory. Drag me after thee, drag me after thee into thy father’s kingdom, O greatest father!

In both versions, the words trahe me post te are a little odd: where does that thought come from? The answer is the Song of Songs, 1:4.

מָשְׁכֵנִי אַחֲרֶיךָ נָּרוּצָה

Word for word, this means:

[Draw me] [after thee] [let us run]

But these words admit two different interpretations, depending on where one places a pause. Either we have:

Draw me after thee! Let us run.

or else

Draw me! Let us run after thee.

The Masoretes clearly preferred the second interpretation, and punctuated the half-verse like this:

מָשְׁכֵ֖נִי אַֽחֲרֶ֣יךָ נָּר֑וּצָה

The shophar holech under אַחֲרֶיךָ joins it to the following word נָּרוּצָה, which is marked with an atnah. The half-verse is thus apparently to be translated, ‘Draw me! Let us run after thee.’ (Incidentally, I don’t know why people use the word pointillation to describe the Masoretic marks, when we already have the word punctuation to hand; which comes from the same root, means the same thing, and is much more readily understood.)

 The Septuagint, for its part, translated the verse as follows: 

εἵλκυσάν σε ὀπίσω σου [εἰς ὀσμὴν μύρων σου] δραμοῦμεν.

This would suggest the opposite reading from the Masoretic text, as the interpolation (here in brackets) makes ὀπίσω σου modify εἵλκυσαν, not δραμοῦμεν. (The third-person plural aorist form εἵλκυσαν, just like the interpolation, is an eccentricity of its own, but we can’t stop to discuss it now.)

And at last, the Vulgate:

Trahe me post te curremus

Utter ambiguity. In sharp contrast to the scrupulously digested Masoretic text, Latin Bibles of the Middle Ages were systematically under-punctuated. They left questions of phrase division completely open to interpretation, so that it was left to any commentator to decide which phrasing he preferred. Thus the fourteenth-century composer of In dulci jubilo picked one interpretation, but he might as well have picked another. If we insist on the parsing as it is given in the Masoretic text, then he was wrong to quote the verse as he did. Trahe me and post te belong to two different sentences, and do not form a single phrase. But at least he is supported the authority of the Septuagint’s reading, which I suspect got nearer to the truth after all.

This is of relatively little importance, but there are other examples where the ambiguous division of a Biblical phrase could have much more serious consequences. The most famous instance of all is Isaiah 40:3:

ק֣וֹל קוֹרֵ֔א בַּמִּדְבָּ֕ר פַּנּ֖וּ דֶּ֣רֶךְ יְהוָ֑ה

If we observe the Masoretic punctuation, we must put a break at the zakef katon and translate this as:

A voice cries: prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness.

But the Septuagint had another idea:

φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ ῾Ετοιμάσατε τὴν ὁδὸν κυρίου.

A voice of one that cries in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord.

And it was the Septuagint that got quoted by all four writers of the Gospel, making the ‘voice of one that cries in the wilderness’ into a prophecy of John the Baptist. For instance (Matthew 3:1–3):

In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, and saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

I don’t want to get into the question of which parsing is better. (It has been controversial for many centuries, and a standard point of dispute between pre-modern Christians and Jews.) But it is enough to observe that one of the basic prophecies of the New Testament, repeated in all four Gospels, depends on the correct parsing of an ambiguous verse. 

Finally consider a pair of verses in the Song of Moses, where God proclaims (Deuteronomy 32:40–41): 

כִּֽי־אֶשָּׂ֥א אֶל־שָׁמַ֖יִם יָדִ֑י  וְאָמַ֕רְתִּי חַ֥י אָנֹכִ֖י לְעֹלָֽם׃
אִם־שַׁנּוֹתִי֙ בְּרַ֣ק חַרְבִּ֔י  וְתֹאחֵ֥ז בְּמִשְׁפָּ֖ט יָדִ֑י
אָשִׁ֤יב נָקָם֙ לְצָרָ֔י  וְלִמְשַׂנְאַ֖י אֲשַׁלֵּֽם׃

Here are the translations of this passage in the LXX, the Vulgate, and the KJV:

ὅτι ἀρῶ εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν τὴν χεῖρά μου καὶ ὀμοῦμαι τῇ δεξιᾷ μου καὶ ἐρῶ Ζῶ ἐγὼ εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα, ὅτι παροξυνῶ ὡς ἀστραπὴν τὴν μάχαιράν μου, καὶ ἀνθέξεται κρίματος ἡ χείρ μου, καὶ ἀνταποδώσω δίκην τοῖς ἐχθροῖς καὶ τοῖς μισοῦσίν με ἀνταποδώσω.

Levabo ad cælum manum meam et dicam vivo ego in æternum. Si acuero ut fulgur gladium meum et arripuerit iudicium manus mea reddam ultionem hostibus meis et his qui oderunt me retribuam.

For I lift up my hand to heaven, and say, I live for ever. If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance to mine enemies, and will reward them that hate me.

This is a case where the classical tradition is wrong, from the Septuagint right down to the KJV. These translations all take חַ֥י אָנֹכִ֖י לְעֹלָֽם׃, ‘I live forever’, to be an independent proposition, as if it were of great importance for God to say such a thing about himself. But it is no such thing. It was Rashi who pointed this out:

כי אשא אל שמים ידי. כִּי בַחֲרוֹן אַפִּי אֶשָּׂא יָדִי אֶל עַצְמִי בִּשְׁבוּעָה: ואמרתי חי אנכי. לְשׁוֹן שְׁבוּעָה הוּא, אֲנִי נִשְׁבָּע חי אנכי:

For I lift up my hand to heaven. That is, ‘in my wrath I lift up my hand in an oath’. And I say, I live forever. This is the language of an oath, as if to say, ‘I swear: as I live...’

He was absolutely right. חַ֥י אָנֹכִ֖י לְעֹלָֽם, I live forever, is not an emphatic proposition: it is the formulaic introduction to an oath. As God lives is the classical-oath formula in the Bible, and here we merely have an instance of its use in the first person. This is made even clearer by God’s lifting his hand: the standard Biblical oath-gesture. Sforno, agreeing with Rashi, pointed to a very similar passage at Daniel 12:17:

וָֽאֶשְׁמַ֞ע אֶת־הָאִ֣ישׁ ׀ לְב֣וּשׁ הַבַּדִּ֗ים אֲשֶׁ֣ר מִמַּעַל֮ לְמֵימֵ֣י הַיְאֹר֒ וַיָּ֨רֶם יְמִינ֤וֹ וּשְׂמֹאלוֹ֙ אֶל־הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וַיִּשָּׁבַ֖ע בְּחֵ֣י הָֽעוֹלָ֑ם כִּי֩ לְמוֹעֵ֨ד מֽוֹעֲדִ֜ים וָחֵ֗צִי וּכְכַלּ֛וֹת נַפֵּ֥ץ יַד־עַם־קֹ֖דֶשׁ תִּכְלֶ֥ינָה כָל־אֵֽלֶּה׃

And I heard the man dressed in linen who was above the waters of the Nile, and he lifted his right and left hand up to the heavens: and he swore on the One who lives forever that...

We should therefore read our verses: I lift my hand up to heaven, and I say: as I live forever, if I whet my sword, etc. 

The Septuagint was the first translation to get it wrong, and all subsequent translations followed suit. They definitively exclude the correct logical construction of these verses. Whether the Masoretic text can be said to be wrong too is a nice question: usually after oath-formulas there is no soph-pasuk, but on the other hand the poetic form of the passage imposed its own requirements of verse-division beyond the sense alone. 

Here I’ve discussed only three examples. But parsing problems are an extremely common phenomenon, and come up constantly in the history of the Bible’s interpretation. And elsewhere: I’m now editing a short book from the 1530s, which was printed with reasonable care, and still it is filled from beginning to end with fiendish problems of parsing and punctuation. To take one example at random:

Which would seem to mean: ‘above all [the damsels] should take care to pray at the very least that they not declare their wills so soon’, etc. Awful. But put a full stop after prier, and the whole passage becomes much happier: ‘they should force their lovers to beg for them. At the very least, they should not declare their wills so soon, but should dissemble as long as possible.’

In my experience, problems like this are actually much more frequent than garbled words and variant letters. Open up the Septuagint alongside the Masoretic text, and you’ll notice discrepancies by the dozen. And problems of this nature are also more difficult to correct: as soon as you undertake to repair a badly punctuated sentence, you find yourself clueless in a labyrinth of uncertainties, prey to the Minotaur of nonsense. If you do arrive at the right solution, it is always very hard to state the case in an elegant or convincing way to your peers; much harder than with other emendations. 

So pay attention to parsing, and always ask yourself whether a given attempt at representing it by punctuation it is correct. You might have all of the words that an ancient author wrote in pristine form: but unless you can establish the phrasing with which they are to be pronounced, you do not yet know what they mean.

Stoned for Saying ‘Osiris’

Herodotus refuses to utter the name Osiris on four occasions:

II.61
ἐν δὲ Βουσίρι πόλι ὡς ἀνάγουσι τῇ Ἴσι τὴν ὁρτήν, εἴρηται πρότερόν μοι· τύπτονται μὲν γὰρ δὴ μετὰ τὴν θυσίην πάντες καὶ πᾶσαι, μυριάδες κάρτα πολλαὶ ἀνθρώπων. τὸν δὲ τύπτονται, οὔ μοι ὅσιόν ἐστι λέγειν.
It have already said how they carry out the festival of Isis at Busiris. After the sacrifice they all make lamentation; men and women in great number.  But it would be unholy for me to say which god they lament.

II.86
καὶ τὴν μὲν σπουδαιοτάτην αὐτέων φασὶ εἶναι τοῦ οὐκ ὅσιον ποιεῦμαι τὸ οὔνομα ἐπὶ τοιούτῳ πρήγματι ὀνομάζειν.
The most important method of [mummification] belongs to that One whose name would be unholy to mention while speaking of this thing. 

II.132
ἔστι δὲ ἡ βοῦς οὐκ ὀρθὴ ἀλλ᾿ ἐν γούνασι κειμένη, μέγαθος δὲ ὅση περ μεγάλη βοῦς ζωή. ἐκφέρεται δὲ ἐκ τοῦ οἰκήματος ἀνὰ πάντα ἔτεα, ἐπεὰν τύπτωνται Αἰγύπτιοι τὸν οὐκ ὀνομαζόμενον θεὸν ὑπ᾿ ἐμεῦ ἐπὶ τοιούτῳ πρήγματι.
The [statue of the] cow does not stand up straight but kneels, and its size is that of a large living cow. It is borne out of its chamber once a year, whenever the Egyptians mourn that god who may not be mentioned by me while while speaking of this thing. 

II.170–1 εἰσὶ δὲ καὶ αἱ ταφαὶ τοῦ οὐκ ὅσιον ποιεῦμαι ἐπὶ τοιούτῳ πρήγματι ἐξαγορεύειν τὸ οὔνομα ἐν Σάϊ … λίμνη τε ἐστὶ ἐχομένη… Ἐν δὲ τῇ λίμνῃ ταύτῃ τὰ δείκηλα τῶν παθέων αὐτοῦ νυκτὸς ποιεῦσι, τὰ καλέουσι μυστήρια Αἰγύπτιοι. περὶ μέν νυν τούτων εἰδότι μοι ἐπὶ πλέον ὡς ἕκαστα αὐτῶν ἔχει, εὔστομα κείσθω.
At Saïs there is also the tomb of the One whose name it would be unholy to divulge while speaking of this thing. […] There is a lake nearby, […] and in this lake they represent His sufferings by night. They Egyptians call these the Mysteries. Though I know more about these things, and how it all happens, I shall stay silent. 

But three times he says it outright. 

II.42
θεοὺς γὰρ δὴ οὐ τοὺς αὐτοὺς ἅπαντες ὁμοίως Αἰγύπτιοι σέβονται, πλὴν Ἴσιός τε καὶ Ὀσίριος, τὸν δὴ Διόνυσον εἶναι λέγουσι.

The Egyptians do not all worship the same gods, apart from Isis and Osiris (who, they say, is Dionysus.)

II.144

ὕστατον δὲ αὐτῆς βασιλεῦσαι Ὦρον τὸν Ὀσίριος παῖδα, τὸν Ἀπόλλωνα Ἕλληνες ὀνομάζουσι· τοῦτον καταπαύσαντα Τυφῶνα βασιλεῦσαι ὕστατον Αἰγύπτου. Ὄσιρις δὲ ἐστὶ Διόνυσος κατὰ Ἑλλάδα γλῶσσαν.

The last of these to rule was Horus the son of Osiris, whom the Greeks call Apollo. They say that he overthrew Typhon and was the last [god] to rule Egypt. Now Osiris is ‘Dionysus’ in the Greek language.  

II.156

ὅτε τὸ πᾶν διζήμενος ὁ Τυφῶν ἐπῆλθε, θέλων ἐξευρεῖν τοῦ Ὀσίριος τὸν παῖδα.

...When Typhon, having searched the world, arrived trying to find the son of Osiris.

Thus there is an apparent contradiction. Why is Herodotus ready to say Osiris in some places but not others? It might be possible to distinguish these sets of cases from each other, as follows. Each time that he refuses to say Osiris, it is in connection with the details of a religious rite. At II.61, it is the festival of Isis. At II.86, it is the ritual of mummification. At II.132, it is the festival of Isis at Saïs; and at II.170–1, it is the festival of Osiris himself in the same place. Every time he Herodotus does say Osiris’ name, he is not discussing any such rites. At  II.42 he is making a generic statement about the Egyptian pantheon, and at II.144 and II.156 he is merely recounting the details of a mythological story.

Thus the rule would seem to be: Osiris’ name may be freely mentioned, except when in so doing any religious mysteries or other rituals could be attributed to him. 

Perhaps this point is best illustrated by a popular story. One day some Oxford dons went bathing in the river, and were surprised by some ladies on a punt. They all ducked under the water to hide their naked bodies, but one stayed standing and only covered his face. He said: ‘let them see the rest; it’s only my face that they’d recognize me by.’ 

Herodotus felt no shame in mentioning Osiris’ name in a profane context; when, as it were, his clothes were on. And sometimes scholarly duty compelled him to recount the details of mysterious rites that involved Osiris. But on such occasions, he suppressed the god’s name, because if Osiris’ mysteries had to be bared, at least his face could be covered.

On inspection, Herodotus never says that it would be absolutely forbidden to say Osiris’ name, only ever ἐπι τοιούτῳ πρήγματι; in connection with this matter; i.e., in connection with sacred rites. His prohibition is not against saying the name of the gods, which is a license that he in fact allows himself explicitly at II.3:

τὰ μέν νυν θεῖα τῶν ἀπηγημάτων οἷα ἤκουον οὐκ εἰμὶ πρόθυμος ἐξηγέεσθαι, ἔξω ἢ τὰ οὐνόματα αὐτῶν μοῦνον.

I am not prepared to expound the divine elements of such tales as I have heard, with the single exception of the names of the gods. 

 

Osiris seems to be covered by this exception just like any other divine name: Herodotus says it three times without blinking, and only refuses when a second prohibition—the one against giving the mysteries away—would otherwise be violated. 

Now, the following paragraph appears in Flavius Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities (II.275-6/xii.4): 

Μωϋσῆς δ’ οὐκ ἔχων ἀπιστεῖν οἷς ἐπηγγέλλετο τὸ θεῖον θεατής γε τοιούτων βεβαιωμάτων καὶ ἀκροατὴς γενόμενος, εὐξάμενος αὐτῷ καὶ πειραθῆναι ταύτης τῆς δυνάμεως ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ δεηθεὶς ἠντιβόλει μηδὲ ὀνόματος αὐτῷ γνῶσιν τοῦ ἰδίου φθονῆσαι, φωνῆς δ’ αὐτῷ μετεσχηκότι καὶ ὄψεως ἔτι καὶ τὴν προσηγορίαν εἰπεῖν, ἵνα θύων ἐξ ὀνόματος αὐτὸν παρεῖναι τοῖς ἱεροῖς παρακαλῇ. καὶ ὁ θεὸς αὐτῷ σημαίνει τὴν αὑτοῦ προσηγορίαν οὐ πρότερον εἰς ἀνθρώπους παρελθοῦσαν, περὶ ἧς οὔ μοι θεμιτὸν εἰπεῖν.

After seeing and hearing such proofs, Moses could not but believe what the Godhead had revealed to him [cf. Exodus 4:1], and begged God that he might be entrusted with such powers in Egypt; and also asked Him not to deny him the knowledge of His name. God, who had already granted Moses a vision and hearing of Himself, should also tell him His appellation, so that Moses might summon him to sacred rites whenever he was offering sacrifices. So God revealed His appellation to him, which had never before come down to men. But it would be impious for me to speak of it.

It is difficult to read the last sentence and not think that Josephus was imitating Herodotus. I want to observe that the imitation is even closer than it might appear. Josephus is not merely refusing to say the name of God: he is refusing to say the name of God in connection with sacrificial rituals. If you open Exodus 3:13–15, Moses asks to know God’s real name for a different reason than the one Josephus gives: he wants it to win the Israelites’ trust. According to Josephus, Moses wants to know it so that he can carry out religious rites. And immediately after saying this, Josephus comments ostentatiously that he cannot divulge the name to his readers. We are not allowed to know the name of God as it is uttered during holy sacrifices. This is the Osiris principle, and even if Josephus did not feel bound by it, he at least appears to have imitated it as a literary device from the father of ethnography.

Note on Locksley Hall

Tennyson’s Locksley Hall is a monologue in three parts. First the speaker bewails his true love, who has married a dolt and abandoned him:

O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!
O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!
Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung,
Puppet to a father’s threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!
Is it well to wish thee happy?—having known me—to decline
On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!

Yet it shall be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day,
What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.
As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.
…
Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth!
Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth!
Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature’s rule!
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of the fool!
Well—’t is well that I should bluster!—Hadst thou less unworthy proved—
Would to God—for I had loved thee more than ever wife was loved.

But then he is roused from his inept complaints:

Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle-horn,
They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn:
Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder’d string?
I am shamed thro’ all my nature to have loved so slight a thing.

And finally he consoles himself with an ecstatic vision of the future: 

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
Thro’ the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day;
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
Mother-Age (for mine I knew not) help me as when life begun:
Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the Sun.
O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set.
Ancient founts of inspiration well thro’ all my fancy yet.

It once seemed to me that this conclusion was a stupid non-sequitur. A public glory – the advance of industry, the ascent of man – is supposed to be sufficient consolation for a private grief. How can that be? What relationship can there be between the fortunes of a vast civilization, and the joys and sorrows of a single person? It might be that a person has both private and public obligations, and that he might sometimes be forced to choose between the two, and even to sacrifice his private happiness for the common good. But can the emotions of one’s inner life be not only manipulated, but totally replaced by public zeal? so that it is no longer a sacrifice, but a liberation to lose oneself to the great world? The narrator himself utters this misgiving, when in the middle of his monologue he says:

Yet I doubt not thro’ the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen’d with the process of the suns.
What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,
Tho’ the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy’s?

(Compare Shelly: ‘And the sunlight clasps the earth / And the moonbeams kiss the sea: / What is all this sweet work worth / If thou kiss not me?’)

Well, I think I agree: surely a human being needs comforts that are human-sized and friendly, not cosmic and grandiose. And yet the speaker rapidly dismisses this reflection, and ends by singing a hymn to onrushing progress.

I noticed last night that Locksley Hall is (in this respect) strongly reminiscent of one of Horace’s odes. A certain Valgius has lost someone called Mystes, and cannot master his grief. (It is incidentally unclear from the poem whether Mystes was Valgius’ child who died, or a lover who abandoned him.) Horace advises the following:

C. II.ix.9–24

Tu semper urges flebilibus modis
Mysten ademptum nec tibi Vespero
    Surgente decedunt amores
        Nec rapidum fugiente solem.

At non ter aevo functus amabilem
Ploravit omnis Antilochum senex
    Annos nec impubem parentes
        Troïlon aut Phrygiæ sorores

Flevere semper. desine mollium
Tandem querelarum, et potius nova
    Cantemus Augusti tropæa
        Cæsaris et rigidum Niphaten

Medumque flumen gentibus additum
Victis minores volvere vertices
    Intraque præscriptum Gelonos
        Exiguis equitare campis.

You are always going on in weepy songs about Mystes, who was taken away from you. Your love does not abate when the Evening Star rises, or when it flees before the swift sun. But Nestor, who lived enough years to fill three lifetimes, did not mourn his beloved Antilochus for all of them, and neither did Priam and Hecuba or his Trojan sisters weep eternally for young Troilus. Stop at last with your limp moaning. Let us rather sing of the victories of Augustus Caesar, and of the frozen mountains of Niphates; and of the river of Persia, which swirls in littler eddies now that it has been added to the conquered races; and of the Geloni, forced now to ride on cramped pastures within their pale. 

No one really likes this poem, for the reason that it’s almost comically callous. It states the same glib paradox as Tennyson, but even more bluntly. Do not weep for Mystes, says Horace: why not sing of Caesar’s glory instead? Perhaps your own life is chaotic and sad, so cease to mind it, and attach your hopes instead to a man who imposes order on the whole world; who in his godly might has subdued even the savagest horsemen of Scythia; and who just might do the same to your own restive soul. Some of Horace’s poems are about Caesar, and some are about love—but the best and most revealing are the poems that show love and Caesar to be nothing but different means to the same end. Caesar’s triumphs on behalf of Rome can drown out the tedious worries of the little citizen, and satisfy his controlling wish for feeling in itself. 

My first objection to Locksley Hall was that the poem told an untruth. It could not be that political enthusiasm can really banish and supplant one’s love and grief. But on reflection, my real complaint is not that these poems are false, or even that they are glib; but that they are scandals. Our free society is distinguished from the murderous tyrannies of last century by its clean demarcation between public and private. Here is the state, here is the church, and here is the citizen. The state (but not the church) is permitted to make certain demands on a citizen, but only for his own (at least ostensible) private benefit: and it is even said that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Conversely, a citizen can expect these services from the political order, but nothing more. He cannot rely on it for excitement, or divine love, or for any passions that could ever be strong enough to displace his private cares.

It is therefore a heresy against freedom to allow the enthusiasms of the wide political world to constitute your innermost hopes. Progress and Caesar, after all, might just be capable after all of filling your mind with their own gigantic thoughts and wishes. The human imperative of our age is not to let them.

The Plural of Octopus

The plural of octopus is octopi.

But you would never know this from a dictionary. In its first (1909) and second (1989) editions, the Oxford English Dictionary gave only the two options octopodes and octopuses. Curiously, it did not supply a single example of the supposed form octopodes, but apparently reasoned from some etymological principle that this was the correct pluralization of the word.

In its third edition (2004), the OED added the option octopi and made the following comment: 

The plural form octopodes reflects the Greek plural. The more frequent plural form octopi arises from apprehension of the final -us of the word as the grammatical ending of Latin second declension nouns.

This comment is misleading in two respects. In the first place, there is no ‘Greek plural’ to speak of. As the OED itself notes, there was never any noun octopus in classical Greek, let alone in a plural form octopodes. Second, ‘apprehension’ implies that it is unlearned and illegitimate – but regretfully common, and therefore perhaps acceptable – to treat octopus as a Latin noun of the second declension. As we will see, there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing so.

It gets worse. Henry Fowler, author of the famous Dictionary of Modern English Usage, wrote under the entry Octopus that ‘the Greek or Latin plural, rarely used, is -podes, not -pi’. Under the entry Latin Plurals he also made the sneering comment:

In Latin plurals there are some traps for non-Latinists; the termination of the singular is no sure guide to that of the plural. Most Latin words in -us have plural in -i, but not all, & so zeal not according to knowledge issues in such oddities as hiati, octopi, & ignorami.

Gee, how what a colossal idiot you’d have to be to say octopi! And not only an idiot, but a vain idiot who pretends to know Latin. 

The shamelessly titled Oxford Companion to the English Language is even more cocksure than Fowler was:

Purism, however, also has its barbarisms, such as the quasiclassical plurals octopi and syllabi for octopus and syllabus, competing with octopuses and syllabuses. (The Greek plurals for these words are, respectively, octṓpoda and sullabóntes [🚨 sic!!🚨 ].) 

It is a good thing that this entry is unsigned, because it’s a disgrace to the person who wrote it. At least Fowler and the authors of the OED could actually read Latin and Greek. The person who wrote this paragraph was ignorant of those languages, but adopted an Olympian tone of mastery nevertheless. Here we have a specimen of the dreaded Language-Maven. Such a person person loves words. He loves language. He loves etymology. And he is always ready to exude his nerdish glee for these topics. He thinks of himself as Miss Frizzle, but to teach a classroom of children would never satisfy his will to power. His itch is to instruct the masses.

There’s no end to people who will smugly tell you that octopi is wrong. Wikipedia says that ‘The alternative plural "octopi" is considered grammatically incorrect because it wrongly assumes that octopus is a Latin second declension "-us" noun or adjective when, in either Greek or Latin, it is a third declension noun.’ This lady at Merriam Webster tells us that all pluralizations are right, from a certain point of view, but that octopi is grammatically shaky, that octopuses is normal, and that whereas octopodes is technically correct, it is weird and restricted to British English (?). 

Well, I think we’ve had enough of experts saying that they know what the plural of octopus is and getting it consistently wrong. Octopodes is a preposterous hypercorrection, octopuses is fine but cumbersome, and octopi is correct.

Here goes. As the OED correctly points out, there is a class of Ancient Greek words in -πους that get pluralized as -ποδες. A good number of these words got Latinized in Antiquity, and the resulting Latin words ended in -us in the singular and -odes in the plural. Hence we have τρίπους-τρίποδες, which is tripus-tripodes in Latin. Some of these words eventually made it into English. If they did, their usual form is simply -pod, -pods. Thus we have tripod-tripods, tetrapod-tetrapods, sauropod-sauropods. But not a single one of these words has an English singular form in -us; that is, we don’t say tripus or tetrapus. Thus octopus is not in this lexical category, and is not to be compared to any of the words listed here. It might have been otherwise: we could easily have had the word octopod for the animal itself. (French, for instance, has octopode-octopodes.) But we don’t. 

Then there is a class of native Latin words that end in -pes, and in the plural -pedes: for example, bipes-bipedes, pinnipes-pinnipedes, compes-compedes. There is even octipes-octipedes, ‘eight-footed’, which is attested by Propertius and Ovid; and multipes-multipedes, ‘many-footed’, which is in Pliny. Many of these words ended up in English, terminating either in -ped (if they came straight from Latin) or in -pede (if they were borrowed from an intermediate French form). It’s conceivable that we could have had the word octiped or octopede, just like we have biped and centipede. But again, we don’t. 

The true analogy to octopus is a word which falls into a third class altogether: polypus. Since the proper English (and Latin) plural of polypus is polypi, the plural of octopus is accordingly octopi. Read on if you don’t take my word for it.

Polypus is a relatively common word in both Latin and Greek. As a (rare) Greek adjective it means ‘many-footed’, but in its first attestations in Greek it is already a noun, and denotes the tentaculate animal which we would now call an octopus. In one Linear B inscription, there is a reference to an object decorated by a  painting of a po-ru-po-de, i.e. πωλυποδει [1]. It also appears in Homer (Od. V.432) as a third-declension noun in the form πουλύποδος. However, already by the sixth century BC the lyric poet Theognis wrote the verse:

Πουλύπου ὀργὴν ἴσχε πολυπλόκου, ὃς ποτὶ πέτρῃ

       τῇ προσομιλήσῃ τοῖος ἰδεῖν ἐφάνη.

Make like the tangled octopus, who appears just like the rock he clings to.  

…which implies the existence of a second-declension noun πούλυπος with nominative plural πούλυποι. From this point on, πουλύπους and πούλυπος existed as collateral forms (alongside some others), with respective plurals πουλύποδες and πούλυποι. By the third century AD, Athenæus cited a profusion of verses that displayed both variants. (Incidentally, his whole discussion of literary octopi is exhaustive and interesting. It appears at Deipnosophistæ VII.316a–318 f.) Athenæus was very interested in the distinction between the accusative forms πουλύποδα and πουλύπουν, and also between the forms πώλυπος and πούλυπους. At no point did he address the specific question of the word’s belonging to the second declension, but he gave plenty of examples of that phenomenon. In short, the form polypodes did exist in Greek, but so did polypi. The word was indeed derived from πούς, ‘foot’, but it never occurred to anyone that it must necessarily be declined like πούς in isolation.

In Latin, the word was borrowed as pōlypus, and sorted into the second declension. (The Oxford Dictionary of Latin says that pōlypus comes from πουλύπους, but it would probably have been better to write πώλυπος, which is perfectly well attested and seems to be the real etymon.) Here the situation is unambiguous. Latin writers always understood the plural to be polypi, and never polypodes; a fact which is apparent from all the examples cited by Lewis & Short and the OLD. Here, for instance, is the word in Plautus:

Ubi manum inicit benigne, ibi onerat aliquam zamiam.
Ego istos novi polypos qui ubi quicquid tetigerunt tenent.

Whenever he lends a helping hand, he lays on some kind of damage. I know these octopi: whenever they touch something, they hold it fast. 

– Aulularia 196–7 

Now, pōlypus ended up in modern European languages in many variants. First there are Romance forms like poulpe, pieuvre, pulpo, and polpo, which represent the natural evolution of pōlypus in the spoken medieval languages. (Poulp exists even in English, apparently as a culinary term in recent usage.) Next, there are more learned medieval forms that preserve more of the original Latin word, whether as a name for an animal or else in the derived sense of ‘cancerous growth’. This category includes French polype, which was taken into English as polyp. Finally, there is the Renaissance revival polypus, which was grafted straight into modern languages from Latin. Just like in Latin, this word has the plural polypi in English, and is in ordinary medical use. Polypus, polypi: there are no two ways about it.

Keep this in mind as we turn to the modern word octopus. The first attestation that I can find of it in Latin is in De piscibus marinis, a 1554 treatise on fish by the French anatomist Guillaume Rondelet. He wrote:

ΠΟΛΎΠΟΥΣ et accusandi causa πολύποδα καὶ πολύπουν dixerunt Græci à pedum multitudine. Unde illi quoque qui Græciam nunc incolunt ὀκτόποδα vocant.

The ancient Greeks called this animal POLYPUS (in the accusative case, polypoda and polypun) on account of its many feet. For the same reason, the modern inhabitants of Greece call it octopus. [2]

Rondolet appears to have been mostly right about the modern Greeks: according to the Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität, the word ὀκτάπους [sic] is attested in medieval Greek as a name for the modern octopus. I haven’t, however, been able to track down the sources cited in the LBG’s entry, so I don’t have a sense of how ὀκτάπους was generally declined. Luckily this question is of only the faintest importance. In any event, by the seventeenth century, Greeks were calling this animal ὀκτωπόδια, as the naturalist George Wheler observed [3].

Rondelet’s polypus.

Two hundred years after Rondelet – in the early years of modern taxonomy – Carl Linnæus’ student Fredrik Hasselquist wrote a description of Octopodia, an eight-legged kind of cuttlefish which he had seen in the harbour of Smyrna. According to him, ὀκτωπόδια was what the local Greeks called this creature. [4]

Carl Linnæus later adapted Hasselquist’s entry for the 1756 edition of his Systema naturæ, and applied the name Sepia octopodia to the set of animals that we now know as octopi. He also remarked that Rondelet had called this species Polypus octopus: not quite accurately, for as you can see from the citation above, Rondelet had merely said that the Greeks called a certain kind of polypus an ὀκτόπους.

In 1788, when Johann Friedrich Gmelin revised Linnæus’ Systema naturæ for its thirteenth edition, he replaced Hasselquist’s coinage Sepia octopodia with Sepia octopus. Perhaps he thought that octopus was a more appropriate classical adjective than the puzzling octopodia. Or else he made a mistake. Or else his printer did. One way or another, this appears to have been the first modern taxonomic use of the word octopus.

In any case, Gmelin never meant octopus to be the standalone name of any animal. Octopus was rather an neo-Greek adjective which qualified a given animal as eight-footed, in this case a sepia. The neuter plural of it, meanwhile, was octopoda, which could be taken substantivally to denote the set of eightfooted molluscs. Similarly, Greek δίπους, ‘two-footed’, takes the neuter plural δίποδα, which means ‘bipedal animals’. Gmelin’s adjectival use of octopus is therefore a red herring, and does not correspond to modern English octopus. It has, however, come down to us as a taxonomic term. The order Octopoda, (or, if you prefer, the Octopods) comprises the eightfooted Cephalopods, which themselves make up a class within the phylum Mollusca. 

It soon happened, however, that Gmelin’s adjective octopus became a noun in its own right, and soon the common name of the animal itself. This is the source of our English word octopus. The first example of this usage that I can find is in a lecture by Henry Baker at the Royal Society in November 1758. He defined three kinds of ‘Sea Polypi’:

First, the Polypus, particularly so called, the Octopus, Preke, or Pour-contrel: to which our subject belongs. Secondly, The Sepia, or Cuttle-fish. Thirdly, the Loligo, or Calamary. [5]

For Baker, unlike for Gmelin, octopus was not merely a description of the number of feet that an animal had, but the name of a specific beast. Here we are no longer dealing with a Hellenizing adjective, but a substantive patterned directly after polypus. 

The decisive step was taken in 1798, when Lamarck wrote a taxonomic reorganization of some molluscs. [6] He distinguished four species of octopus: Octopus vulgaris, Octopus granulatus, Octopus cirrhosus, and Octopus moschatus. For Gmelin and Linnæus, octopus had been an adjective that specified a particular species of sepia or polypus. For Lamarck, however, octopus was the very name of the animal. It represented a genus which could be divided into species by the addition of disambiguating adjectives. Lamarck’s octopus was meant not to qualify, but to replace and supersede polypus. 

Drawings of Lamarck’s Octopus vulgaris.
From Jean-Guillaume Bruguière, Tableau Encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la Nature. Contenant l’Helminthologie, ou les vers infusoires, les vers intestins, les vers mollusques, &c., vol. VII (Paris: Panckoucke, 1791), pl. 76.

So it did. Over the century following Larmark’s 1798 article, octopus displaced polypus as this animal’s common name in most European languages. Here are some examples from the OED:

The Octopus, which was the animal denominated Polypus by Aristotle, has eight arms of equal length. (1834) 
The octopi also feed on conchyliferous mollusca. (1834) 
The body of the octopus is small, it has legs sometimes a foot and a half in length, with about two hundred and forty suckers on each leg. (1835) 
Help! The old magician clings like an octopus! (Robert Browning, 1880)
Young octopi, delicacy of the Japanese, hungrily searched about with their tentacles. (1942)

Now we have two words to distinguish from each other. There is octopus, the neo-Hellenistic adjective which Gmelin borrowed from Rondelet via Linnæus, and whose neuter plural substantival form, octopoda, begat English octopod(s). Then there is Lamarck’s octopus, a noun that denotes an animal in exactly the same manner as Latin polypus. I submit that as polypus only has one acceptable pluralization, polypi, only wanton pedantry could make us give its successor, the exactly analogous octopus, any other plural form than octopi.

We might even say that Octopods bears the same logical relationship to octopi as fishes does to fish, or louses to lice; in that the former refers to species of the same animal, and the latter to actual individuals. Examples of octopods are Octopus vulgaris and Enteroctopus dofleini. Examples of octopi are Pulpo Paul and Squidward Tentacles.

From a villa in Pompeii (1–2nd century AD).

Footnotes

[1] Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), no. 246

[2] Libri de Piscibus Marinis, in quibus veræ Piscium effigies expressæ sunt (Lyon: Matthias Bonhomme, 1554), p. 510.  

[3] A Journey into Greece (London: William Cademan, 1682), p. 291.

[4] Fredrik Hasselquist, ‘Octopodia, Sepiæ Species’, Acta Societatis Regiæ Scientiarum Upsaliensis, 1751, pp. 33–35.

[5] Henry Baker, ‘An Account of the Sea Polypus’, Philosophical Transactions, Giving Some Account of the Present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours, of the Ingenious, in Many Considerable Parts of the World vol. L, part II (1758): pp. 777–786 [778].

[6] ‘Extrait d’un Mémoire sur le genre de la Sèche, du Calmar et du Poulpe, vulgairement nommés, Polypes de mer’, Bulletin des sciences, par la Société Philomathique 1, no. 17 (Thermidor, an VI [July 1798]): pp. 129–131.

Ago

If you’re learning English as a second language, how do you pronounce the word ago? It seems straightforward: every dictionary and every native speaker will tell you agó.

You’ll pronounce it that way, and you’ll sound overeager and stilted. Three yéars agó. Two wéeks agó. A mónth agó. How lóng agó? It’s a stabbing rhythm that no native English speaker would ever use in this context. By contrast, in lots of European languages you do find that rhythm for the equivalent phrase: tertio anno ante, twee weken geleden, un mese fa, wie lange her? There are even dialectical or archaic words in English that display it: Five-and-thirty year agóne, not half an hour sínce, a gliff sýne. But not ago. 

This is the rule: when ago is used to qualify a specific amount of elapsed time, it gets attached as an unaccented enclitic to the foregoing word. Three yéarsago. Two wéeksago. A mónthago. How lóngago? A long tímeago. The same rule applies to time in the future, but with the enclitic from now — three yéarsfromnow, two wéeksfromnow, a mónthfromnow, how lóngfromnow? Here ago functions as an adjective, and modifies the unit of time to which it’s attached to make up a larger adverbial phrase. 

But there’s another family of phrases in which ‘ago’ does get accented. Lóng agó. Nót lóng agó. A lóng tíme agó in a galaxy far, far away. Or even, in a certain kind of utterance (perhaps you’re gazing wistfully into the fire): that was many yéars agó. This version of ago has a full accent on the second syllable, just like the dictionary says.

It is not an adjective at all, but an adverb in its own right meaning something like aforetime. When you say long agó, you’re not conveying any practical information about how far into the past a given event took place, but merely emphasizing that it is distant from the present. Here the grammatical relation between the two words is reversed: ago doesn’t modify long, but the other way around. More specifically, long functions as an intensifying qualifier for the adverb ago.

Thus there are in fact two ago’s that are clearly distinguishable in their grammar, pronunciation and prosody. The only complicating consideration is that one sometimes says long ago in order to really specify an amount of time. Though in writing it can sometimes look identical to the phrase I’ve just described, it’s actually just an instance of the enclitic ago and gets pronounced accordingly. The distinction is plain in speech. For example, imagine that your co-worker tells you that he signed some documents. You ask: How lóngago was that? (You’re actually wondering how long ago it was). Oh, not lóngago, he answers. And now imagine that your old friend from school brings up the time your teacher got eaten by a crocodile, and you exclaim: how lóng agó that was! Here you don’t mean to specify any particular amount of time, but are pointing to the passage of time itself.

The Oxford English Dictionary makes the correct distinction between adjective and adverb, even though it only offers the single pronunciation /əˈɡoʊ/ for both uses of the word. This is plainly wrong as far as modern usage is concerned. But it raises a problem of word-history, because after all it seems clear that at some stage in history ago really was pronounced with a full accent in both of its uses. Only at a later stage did adjective-ago decay into an enclitic. But just how long ago this took place is difficult to establish from written sources alone.

Poetry can be some help. For example, when Chaucer wrote 

I speke of manye hundred yeres ago
But now can no man see none elves mo

he didn’t seem to treat ago any differently than in the verses

And farewel! al our revel was ago

or 

‘Yis’ quod this carpenter, ‘ful yore ago’.

It would be no little task to trace the prosody of ago from the Middle Ages down to the present. And it would be made only more difficult by the fact that the meter’s own accentual claims were always liable to interfere with the natural pronunciation of a word. Quærere distuli; nec scire fas est omnia. 

Reconciliation

‘What time you liked me, Lydia,
And no young man but me
Caressed your neck, I matched the King
Of Persia in my glee.’

‘What time you burned for Lydia
And not for Chloë’s face,

Then I outshone old Ilia,

The mother of our race.’

‘That Chloë holds my soul enslaved;

She strums a honeyed lay:

I would not fear to lose my soul

If Fate her death could stay.’

‘And I am wasted in a fire

For Thurine Calaïs;

Yea I would die not once but twice,

To ransom him from Dis.’

‘What if old love could come again

To yoke us like before?
If I threw flaxen Chloë out
Would you come through my door?’

‘Though he is fairer than a star

And you out-thrash the waves;

O heart of cork, let’s go in love

Together to our graves.’

***

 Horace III.9

‘Donec gratus eram tibi
     Nec quisquam potior bracchia candidæ
Cervici juvenis dabat,
     Persarum vigui rege beatior.’

‘Donec non aliâ magis
     Arsisti neque erat Lydia post Chloën,
Multi Lydia nominis,
     Romanâ vigui clarior Ili.’

‘Me nunc Thræssa Chloë regit,
     Dulcis docta modos et citharæ sciens,
Pro qua non metuam mori
     Si parcent animæ fata superstiti.’

‘Me torret face mutua
     Thurini Calaïs filius Ornyti,
Pro quo bis patiar mori

     Si parcent puero fata superstiti.’

‘Quid si prisca redit Venus
     Diductosque jugo cogit aëneo?
Si flava excutitur Chloë
     Rejectæque patet janua Lydiæ?’

‘Quamquam sidere pulchrior
     Ille est, tu levior cortice et inprobo
Iracundior Hadria:
     Tecum vivere amem, tecum obeam lubens.’

Eine alte Geschichte

Urebat iuvenem sua virgo. Sed illa cupivit
Infelix alium: nupserat huic alia. 

Livida virgo proco cuidam se tradidit æquo—
Nec quæras iuvenis cur ita palluerit.

Fabula trita, sed omne recens remanebit in ævum;
Quin nova cui cecidit pectora dissiliunt.

***

Translated from Heinrich Heine, Buch der Lieder (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1827), p. 144:

Thea Calida

With apologies to @jchelle36 on Tik Tok.

Miss Brooke among the Florentines

In the beginning of George Eliot’s Romola, we’re introduced to the blind Florentine Bardo de’ Bardi. Bardo feels his life to have been wasted: his once-promising son has joined the Dominicans and burnt away his learning for the sake of fanatical holiness. And though in his youth Bardo was moved by affection for the visible world, and eager to seek out the literary beauties of the past and present, now he’s sightless and embittered, and ‘embedded in dark mines of books’. But at least (like John Milton) he has a meek and faithful secretary in his daughter Romola. When we meet these two characters, Romola is reading to Bardo out of Politian’s Miscellanea:   

A blind man, Politian wrote, is cut off from gaudy outer beauty, but in exchange he may forever be lit up by intellectual light; by the pure vision of the goddess Mind. This possibility has consoled many poor souls, in the fifteenth century as in ours; and some of them were not literally blind, but only wanted refuge in their books from the unresponsive coldness of the outer world. 

The thought is beautiful, but it truly contained in Politian? Ordinarily in an historical novel set among foreigners, you have to take it on faith that the author is faithfully translating the characters’ speech. But here George Eliot is translating an original source that can actually be consulted, so we have a means of measuring her faith. Here is what Politian really wrote:

In English:

Indeed in the fifth book of his Dionysiacon, Nonnos makes Actæon call Tiresias happy, for that he beheld naked Minerva on this side of death, and only lost his eyes, and that she even transferred his lost sight into his soul. And thus he spoke:

Happy Tiresias, who undestroyed didst behold the naked form of merciful Minerva, and she willed it not.

And a little later:

Thou didst live, though wrecking the light of thine eyes; but Minerva moved the gleam of thy sight into thy mind.

It turns out that Eliot mostly missed the point of Politian’s citation. Where Politian had written: [Minerva] even transferred [Tiresias’] lost sight into his soul, Eliot translated: [Tiresias] could forevermore carry [Minerva’s] image in his soul. Evidently she was tripped up by Politian’s Latin; mistakenly thinking that ipsius referred to Minerva, not Tiresias, and so understanding lumen ipsius to mean ‘the image of Minerva’, not ‘Tiresias’ sight’. Then, bound to the conceit of her misconstrued translation, she made the further blunder of taking transtulerit to refer to Tiresias’ ‘carrying’ the image of Minerva in his soul. Eliot’s rendering contains a touching and poetic image, but it is founded on a basic grammatical mistake.

Now, this is just a slip in Latin syntax. But it hints at a deeper problem with Eliot’s treatment of the Renaissance, which is that for all her heaped-up ‘period details’ – for her close observations of clothing, pottery, architecture, political intrigues, religious festivals, cookery, dynastic families, paintings, mendicant sermons, and Tuscan turns of speech – one is left to wonder how much of the literature of the period she read at length in its original languages, and more importantly, how much she read while bearing the possibility in mind that the men who lived in the time of Politian were not only different in their outer habits, but in their innermost minds and feelings, to southern Englishmen of the nineteenth century.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to George Eliot’s treatment of religion. Some of her characters are simply not Christian; like Bardo himself, who delights in profane literature, never mentions the Scriptures, and bewails ‘men who know of no past older than the missal and the crucifix’. Then there’s Tito Melema the Epicurean. Such people were vanishingly rare in the fifteenth century, if they existed at all then; but George Eliot can be forgiven for including them in her novel, for historians were already maintaining by the 1860s; wrongly and tendentiously, but seductively, that the most brilliant men of the Renaissance were secret scoffers.

What really unsettles me, though, is not the presence of atheists in Romola, but the falseness with which the sacred lives of the truly pious characters are presented. Either they’re superstitious simpletons, like Tessa, or else their sacred feelings are nothing more than the clothing of fundamentally non-religious passions. Romola and Savonarola in particular are described in rich detail; in their inner as well as their outer lives. Still, they do not adore God, or the Virgin, or the Saints in themselves, but treat them as personifications of concepts like purity and self-abnegation. The result is that not once in the whole novel does a character, however God-fearing, beg a saint for protection, or make a votive gift to a church, or pray for a dead person’s welfare, or even take communion. These Florentines undergo internal religious strife, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the religious content of their meditations is only a cipher for what Eliot considered to be their deeper, more understandable human feelings. Like this paragraph about Romola’s attraction to Savonarola:

Sorrow and joy have each their peculiar narrowness; and a religious enthusiasm like Savonarola’s which ultimately blesses mankind by giving the soul a strong propulsion towards sympathy with pain, indignation against wrong, and the subjugation of sensual desire, must always incur the reproach of a great negation. Romola’s life had given her an affinity for sadness which inevitably made her unjust towards merriment. That subtle result of culture which we call Taste was subdued by the need for deeper motive; just as the nicer demands of the palate are annihilated by urgent hunger. Moving habitually amongst scenes of suffering, and carrying woman’s heaviest disappointment in her heart, the severity which allied itself with self-renouncing beneficent strength had no dissonance for her.

Notice the phrase ultimately blesses mankind by—. George Eliot did not have the patience to reflect that the enthusiasts of the 1490s might have lived according to their religion for its own sake, and not as a path to the human good of something like ‘sympathy with pain’ and ‘the subjugation of sensual desire’. In fact, doesn’t the Gospel itself take the opposite view; that sympathy with pain and the subjugation of sensual desire are the means of seeing God?

And on the subject of sensual desire: at one point Savonarola is described as having ‘a mind possessed by a never-silent hunger after purity and simplicity’. Well, surely the real Savonarola hungered for those things, but what of his never-silent hunger after Christ? What of his affection for the gentle Virgin? It would admittedly have been hard for a nineteenth-century liberal like George Eliot to grasp that a person could really be in love, body and soul, with his God. But at the least we should expect an historical novelist to make her characters mention him, if only for ‘period flavour’. Here’s some quantitative literary analysis that I’ve carried out on my powerful computer: the words ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ are together mentioned precisely eight times in the whole novel, and always in passing. 

Before writing any of her novels, George Eliot had translated Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity into English. And the basic thesis of that book is detectable in her treatment of Christianity throughout Romola. Namely, the things which Christianity reveres as mysteries are only our inborn human values, but alienated from us and given heavenly names. But nothing heavenly is real, and therefore if we want to interpret religion properly we must work out what earthly truths its symbols really refer to.  

Thus, in George Eliot’s mind, the men of fifteenth-century Florence suffered the same human passions as the townsmen of Middlemarch, but they interpreted those passions in ecclesiastical terms. Dorothea Brooke longs to be gripped by wide feelings and to be the bed for a torrent of human kindness. So does Romola, only she speaks Italian and gets bewitched by a fiery Dominican rather than an English Wilhelm Meister. 

So even when it comes to Girolamo Savanarola, an unearthly mystic if there ever was one, Eliot cannot preserve interest in the substantial content of his beliefs for any length of time without turning her attention to his Middlemartian calculations. For example, when Savonarola hands the Host to a fellow Dominican who is about to walk through fire, Eliot tells us that it is only part of a stratagem to win credibility:

The idea that the presence of the sacred Mystery might in the worst extremity avert the ordinary effects of fire hovered in his mind as a possibility; but the issue on which he counted was of a more positive kind.

Of a more positive kind! Who is George Eliot to tell us what Savonarola considered real and positive, and what he considered half-believable fantasy? Auguste Comte was a wise man in his generation, but neither he nor anybody like him lived in the fifteenth century, and nobody drew his distinctions between what was there and what was not.

The characters in Romola, the spiritually sensitive ones at any rate, live in desperate longing for purity, goodness, justice, and beauty, and all impersonal glories of that kind – but never for their visible and three-personed God. George Eliot’s imagination was humane and sympathetic enough to grasp the minutest variations of feeling between any two of her countrymen, but for all her subtlety she could not see the starkest differences between two centuries.

Now, Romola, like Middlemarch and Silas Marner – and like Anna Karenina too – is a stinging moral admonition under the guise of a literate novel. It is like a cup of bitter medicine with honey smeared on its rim. Its lesson is this: one lives on one’s love for others, and that there is no happiness for a person too concerned with his own comfort. This lesson is indeed necessary to the salvation of a person’s soul this side of the Industrial Revolution. But it cannot be found unalloyed in the late middle ages unless one wills oneself into seeing something that was not really there. Five centuries ago the teaching of sympathy-for-sympathy’s sake was only one thread of a religion that was bursting with demons and saints, magic and miracles. To medieval people, salvation was not sympathy, or justice, or subjugation of the flesh: salvation was Christ, and Christ was in his church. 

To get across a literary conceit that she’d hit upon, George Eliot made Politian say something that he had never really written.  And then in her eagerness to teach a moral lesson of immense grandeur, she mistook the whole spiritual consciousness of the Renaissance. We do not distort the past for selfish or political reasons alone: just as often it’s our need for beauty and goodness that makes us do it. 

Tydides Melior Patre

Tydides Melior Patre

If ever Venus could be overwon,
Then never needed Sodom plot her crime
Against her holy guests, and burn like lime;
Or Phædra die to know her stainless son,
(For she had found some cure besides that one);

Or Myrrha cheat her father for a freak

Of natural love; or Polyphemus’ songs
Be sung to earless trees and voiceless throngs.
Thinkst now thou canst prevail, where these were weak,
Against the sting of Canaanite and Greek?

Yet once Minerva armed one, who impugned
The goddess’ swanny car. He stuck her wrist;
She gaped, and daring nothing to resist,
Watched gleaming ichor dribble from her wound,
Then fled aloft to heaven, where she swooned.

Two Shakespearean Inscriptions

A text can be mysterious in two different ways. It can conceal a pregnant secret, or else it can be difficult to interpret. Either the author hid a secret teaching under deceptive appearances; or else he simply wrote in a language that we can’t figure out, whether on account of of the lapse of centuries, or our want of learning, or the author’s obscurity. The Egyptian hieroglyphs were held for millennia to be mysterious in the first way – they were supposedly magical secrets of the universe, which the godly ancients had engraved on huge stones for all posterity. Young and Champollion only managed to decipher them by treating them as mysteries of the second class: a set of signs that could encode all sorts of content, and which could be worked out not by philosophy, but by philology and historical reflection.

Even texts of the first class are not as exciting as we’d like to think. True secret codes are boring and practical. They have historically been limited to the correspondence of criminals, alchemists, businessmen, diplomats, diarists, gossipers, and military commanders. There isn’t really any such thing as a literary code, for the simple reason that absent a clef possessed by the reader alone, there is no practical way to ensure that a mystery interpretable by your friends won’t also be interpretable by your enemies. Most of the allegories and secrets supposedly buried in our literature are therefore either the coy pretences of authors or the tendentious speculations of readers.

Tendentious speculations— if a text is obscure or badly understood, then its interpretation is unfortunately prey to any scholar who longs to discover any sort of hidden meaning in it. These midrashic enchanters are happy to let a type-II mystery be converted into a type-I mystery, because it gives their rash hypotheses an hieratic aura.

No one has been more mangled by these savants than Shakespeare. For one, proponents of the theory that somebody else wrote Shakespeare’s plays have sucked on the obscurities in his works like lampreys on a shark. But even worse than these are the neoteric literary critics who gloss every obscurity in the texts with their own unphilological interpretations, reasoning that if the text is fundamentally mysterious, then nobody will mind very much if yet another equipollent opinion is added to the pile. Anything to fill up the pages of a tenure-qualifying book.

The only defence against uninformed speculation is to supply solid philological explanations, and to do away with all appearance of mystery. To that end let’s explain two supposedly cryptic inscriptions associated with Shakespeare.

I.

The first edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609, has a curious dedication at the beginning. With its capital letters and interpuncts, it is made to resemble an inscription on a Roman tomb:

With its clauses unknotted into a more idiomatic oder, it can be read: ‘Thomas Thorpe, the well-wishing adventurer, wisheth in setting forth all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living Poet to Mr. W. H., the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets.’

‘Our ever-living Poet’ is God, the creator – ποιητής – of men, to whom He promises happiness and eternity. The eternity enjoyed by successful poets is of course of a different kind to that enjoyed by the souls whom God has saved, but conflating the two concepts is Thorpe’s joke.

(So much I figured out on my own while falling asleep a little while ago, and I was sad the next morning to find that I’d been beaten to the punch. See Donald W. Foster, ‘Master W. H., R.I.P.’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America CII, no. 1 (January 1987): pp. 42–54.)

There is only one point of real difficulty. Who is W. H.? Oscar Wilde proposed that it was Willie Hughes, Shakespeare’s lover and the ‘fair youth’ who inspired the sonnets, hence ‘begetting’ them from a certain point of view. One woman writing for the British Library asserted that W.H. was definitely Shakespeare’s homosexual lover, but that aside from Willie Hughes he might have been one of half a dozen other men whose names can sort of be read as W. H. I remember my high-school teacher (who encouraged us to use Shakespeare’s works as a sort of ouija-board for ruminations on power/gender/sexuality) running through all the possibilities, and then telling us with sick glee that the mystery was the whole point.

The only sensible theory that I’ve ever seen in print holds that W. H. was a misprint for W. S., and referred to William Shakespeare. Misprint or not, W. H. must be Shakespeare. The ‘only begetter’ of the Sonnets can only comfortably refer to their author, not the person who inspired their author. And even if a person who inspired an author might in an extremely left-handed way be called the book’s begetter, then surely in the case of the Sonnets the Dark Lady shares that title with the Fair Youth, and neither one can be called the only begetter. Besides, it would have been appropriate for a publisher to dedicate a book to his book’s author. It would have been strange to dedicate it to a third person, and stranger still to call that third person the book’s ‘only begetter.’

All the same, I think that the misprint-theory is unlikely, even if it’s not altogether impossible. The dedication is laid out primly and with great care, and to print the single most important letter incorrectly would have been a bizarre mistake.

Consider, however that Thorpe, who had already made his dedication resemble a Latin inscription, might also have given Shakespeare a classical name, akin to Melanchthon for Schwarzerdt or Peter for Cephas. Now, Hastatus, hastifer, hastifragus, and hastiger are all plausible calques on Shakespeare. More than plausible: they are by far the most likely learned renditions of the English name. (Matthew Paris even tells us of one Nicholas Breakspeare, alias Hastifragus.) Thus W. H. might stand for some variant of Wilelmus Hastiger. Shakespeare is not attested anywhere else by any name of the kind, but it’s perfectly plausible that this was a private and occasional conceit of Thorpe’s.

Thus we have a dedication by the publisher Thorpe to the author Shakespeare. Learned, clever, coy, but not anymore enthrallingly mysterious.

II.

Here is Shakespeare’s epitaph in Stratford-on-Avon, subscribed to an effigy of him and placed above his grave:

Iudicio Pylium genio Socratem, arte Maronem,

Terra tegit, populus mæret, Olympus habet.

Stay passenger, why goest thou by so fast,

Read if thou canst, whom envious Death hath plast

With in this monument, Shakspeare: with whome

Quick nature dide whose name doth deck this Tombe

Far more then cost: Sieh all, that He hath writt,

Leaves living art, but page, to serve his witt.

                                                                            Obiit anno domini 1616

                                                                             ÆTATIS 53 die 23 Ap. 

The Latin distich means The earth covers, the people mourn, and Olympus possesses one who was a Nestor [Pylius] in his judgment, a Socrates in his spirit, and a Virgil [Maro] in his art. Unfortunately the lines are malformed: the o in ‘Socrates’ is long and does not fit the hexameter. But that’s nothing compared to the loopy badness of the English poem, which has to be explained point-by-point:

Read] Either it is intransitive, and which makes the whole opening sentence read ‘Siste viator et lege hæc, si quidem potes.’ Or else it it takes ‘Shakespeare’ for an object, and means ‘recognize Shakespeare [in this effigy] if thou canst’. (Cf. Spenser’s ‘Such ugly monstrous shapes elsewhere may no man read’.)

With whome quick nature dide] This is reminiscent of Cardinal Bembo’s epitaph for Raphael in the Pantheon, written a century earlier:

Ille hic est Raphaël timuit quo sospite vinci
Rerum magna parens et moriente mori 

This man here is Raphael: when he lived Nature feared to be surpassed, and when he died she feared to die.

Name] That is, ‘reknown’. The word in this sense (and, in fact, the sentiment of this inscription) is to be found in Ecclesiastes 7:1 – a good name is better than good ointment. Or else Ovid. Met. XV.876, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum.

Cost] ‘Sepulchral pomp’. Shakespeare himself used it famously in this sense (S 64):

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age

That is, ‘when I have seen the proud tombs of the dead destroyed by time’.

The whole phrase ‘whose name doth deck this Tombe / Far more then cost’ means that Shakespeare’s true tomb consists in his writings, not any visible monument. This conceit is classical (cf. Horace C. III.xxx Exegi monumentum and the end of Ovid’s Metamorphoses), and it was also applied in other contemporary eulogies of Shakespeare. Here are Leonard Diggs and John Milton, in the First and Second Folios respectively:

Sieh all that he hath writt] Sieh could an archaic or Germanizing spelling of ‘see’, and thus have the meaning lo! On the other hand, sich, since, and sith have been conjectured since the eighteenth century. They are easier readings, but not supported by the monument itself or the contemporary sketch of it.

Leaves living art, but page, to serve his witt] Probably the idea is that the art of all living men is henceforth only a lowly servant to the eternal genius of Shakespeare, with a pun on ‘page’, leaf, and ‘page’, servant.

With all this in mind, the best sense I can make of the whole inscription is:

Stop, traveller, why goest thou by so fast? Read this if thou canst: Envious Death has placed Shakespeare in this monument; with whom living Nature died. His renown adorns this tomb far more than funereal pomp. Lo, all that he wrote leaves the art of living men as nothing more than an apprentice to his genius.