The Honest Chambermaid’s Greek.

A couple of days ago the prolific Michael Gilleland posted Algernon Swinburne’s aggrieved letter to the New York Daily Tribune dated January 30, 1874, complaining about Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in an interview had called him “a perfect leper and a mere sodomite.” In the course of his missive (which I recommend reading in full if you like eloquent vituperation) Swinburne refers to the “apt reply […] addressed by the servant of Octavia to the satellites of Nero,” and in a follow-up post Gilleland’s correspondent Eric Thomson explained the reference, quoting first Thomas Denman:

While we were calling our witnesses, and I was at Holland House on Sundays and at home in the evenings, anxiously sifting the minutes of evidence, Dr. Parr was my frequent correspondent, pointing out illustrations of many parts of our case from history and classical literature. He earnestly besought me to look into Bayle, and weave into my summing-up allusions to Judith, Julia, and Octavia. The two first seemed to me inapplicable; the third flashed upon me like lightning. In a moment I resolved to make the unhappy wife of Nero my heroine, and indeed, the parallel was perfect. I was deeply smitten, too, with the honest chambermaid’s Greek, but, trembling as to the effect it might produce, I wrote back to ask Parr whether I could venture to bring it forward. He, in reply, at first suggested a method of periphrasis, but, at length, recurring to it in the postscript to a long letter, he burst out, ‘Oh dear, Mr. Denman, I am for the word itself — don’t be squeamish.’

And then Denman’s biographer Joseph Arnould:

Bayle, article ‘Octavia,’ cites the parallel passages from Tacitus and Xiphilin; Tacitus Ann. xiv., c. 60, Xiphilin p. 176; and see also Dion lii. 13. Neither the Latin nor the Greek can be quoted with decency. Tigellinus was presiding at the examination in which the female attendants of Octavia were being tortured to prove their mistress guilty of adultery with a slave. The imputation cast upon Tigellinus by the ‘honest chambermaid’ was of a nameless impurity, which made him peculiar for infamy even in the infamous court of Nero.

Thomson adds, “The word itself in the honest chambermaid’s Greek that could not be quoted with decency was ‘αἰδοῖον’; in the honest chambermaid’s Latin, ‘muliebria’, squeamishly rendered, – or ‘dextrously softened off’ – by translators Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (1876) as ‘person’.” He cites Dio Cassius’s Greek (‘καθαρώτερον, ὦ Τιγελλῖνε, τὸ αἰδοῖον ἡ δέσποινά μου τοῦ σοῦ στόματος ἔχει,’ which he translates “My mistress’s privy parts are cleaner, Tigellinus, than your mouth”) and Tacitus’s Latin (“castiora esse muliebria Octaviae respondit quam os eius,” which Church and Brodribb softly rendered “Octavia’s person was purer than his mouth”). Ah, for the days when Britons (of the better sort, needless to say) could bandy such allusions and be understood by everyone who mattered!

While I’m recommending Gilleland, I’ll also send you to today’s post, which quotes Martin Luther on languages:

Truly, if there were no other use for the languages, this alone ought to rejoice and move us, that they are so fine and noble a gift of God, with which He is now richly visiting and endowing us Germans, more richly indeed than any other land.[…]

And let us be sure of this: we shall not long preserve the Gospel without the languages. The languages are the sheath in which this sword of the Spirit is contained; they are the casket in which we carry this jewel; they are the vessel in which we hold this wine; they are the larder in which this food is stored; and as the Gospel itself says, they are the baskets in which we bear these loaves and fishes and fragments. If through our neglect we let the languages go (which may God forbid!), we shall not only lose the Gospel, but come at last to the point where we shall be unable either to speak or write a correct Latin or German.

If we must have peevery, let it be that expansive and eloquent!