The Little "o"

It's only a little "o", but it's causing me all sorts of headaches.

I sit there and look out the window, mulling the little "o" over in my head. I get up and walk around. I go outside and make sure the fig trees I planted a few weeks ago are doing fine, hunting through the leaves for opportunistic snails. They're fine. I check that the dogs have water, and they do.

So I go back inside and Google the little "o". Some editions of Suetonius have it, and others don't, and then the realisation begins to dawn that I'm going to have to make a decision about the little "o".

Ordinarily, such a little thing might not make a huge amount of difference, but I'm translating a very famous passage about Julius Caesar, who has just arrived at the Rubicon and is hesitating, unsure whether to take the plunge, literally and ford across the river towards the point of no return.

Caesar is about to say the famous line - alea iacta est - only, in some versions, he's about to say alea iacta esto, and that little "o" is making my head hurt.

It doesn't seem like much, I know. One means, famously, "the die is cast" in terms of "the game has begun", and the other means "let the die be cast", but I've grown acutely aware that translating passages of ancient Latin is full of these little hoops through which one must jump.

The process of translating Suetonius is made all the more difficult by the fact that, although I studied Roman history in university, the Latin I learned was primarily concerned with funerary inscriptions and the like. As a result, give me a tombstone and I can breeze through the 'coded' Latin with no problem. When it comes to longer passages, I am very much in darker and stormier waters.

The easiest thing to do would be to translate it from someone else's translation, or at least use one as a reference point, but the issue with that is that one begins to start channelling the translator rather than Suetonius himself. The primary aim of any translation should be to preserve the narrative voice of the author, so, as much as is humanly possible, I have avoided any English language translations of the work when compiling my own.

This means that one has to make several translations of the same passage. Firstly, it's necessary to simply understand what the text is saying. The next task is to ensure that you have the finer details in the correct order. There are all sorts of pitfalls into which a casual translator can fall. There is one passage in Claudius when, on becoming a father, and having spent all the money he was bequeathed, he announces that he will stand outside the palace on New Year's Day and allow the people to give him money. People turn up and shower him with coins which they are either scooping out of the folds of their togas in handfuls (togas didn't have pockets, but one could fashion pouches from the folds) or he is scooping up in the folds of his toga, depending on what amounts to the inclusion of a little "o" or two. Either they are scooping, or he is, and my Latin struggles to discern who is doing the scooping.

So I looked it up. The context might seem minor, but accuracy is important, and for clarity on this little fact, I rely on others to provide it.

They are doing the scooping from their folds, by the way.

This is just an example of the translation process, and it reveals why it's an interesting and unique task. And, I must admit, one that I am thoroughly enjoying.

Two more edits, one for grammar, spelling, and clarity and the other for consistency of style (so dates are all in the same order, endnotes are added, and so on), and the job is then ready to pass on to someone else to go through it with a metaphorical red pen.

Suetonius himself is an absolute ball to work with. His overall tone is salacious, bawdy, gossipy and, at times, rather anarchic. One of the fun things about channelling his narrative voice is finding a part when one can let one's own hair down as much as he has. Writers like Tacitus are brilliant, but much more structured and formal. Suetonius, at times, writes like a schoolgirl gossiping at the bus stop.

Perhaps my favourite passage from all of Twelve Caesars is one where Suetonius at first tries to tell us that he is not going to engage in salacious tittle-tattle about the supposed homosexual relationship Julius Caesar had with King Nicomedes of Bythinia when he was a young man. He tells us that he is not going to tell us about it and then spends a whole passage becoming increasingly excited and breathless as he tells us all the juicy details about every aspect of their supposed affair:

"Nothing ever tarnished his reputation for sexual propriety apart from his supposed intimate association with Nicomedes, an accusation that followed him throughout his life and exposed him to universal mockery.

I will pass quickly over the lines of Licinius Calvus: "Everything that Bithynia ever had - and Caesar's buggerer too", not to mention the speeches made by Dolabella and the elder Curio in which Dolabella calls him "the queen's concubine and bed-warmer of the royal litter" and Curio “Nicomedes' brothel, the Bithynian whorehouse”). Neither will I tarry on the words of Bibulus, in which he calls his consular colleague the "queen of Bythinia" and claims that the man who once longed for a king now longs for a king's power.

There's also a story from his first consulship, which Marcus Brutus retold when Caesar and Pompey were hailed by a man who was clearly a bit off his rocker and prone to shooting off his mouth, who called Pompey "king" and Caesar "queen".

Apparently, Gaius Memmius used to say that Caesar had served as the royal cup-bearer and stood among Nicomedes' other catamites at a great party attended by some Roman businessmen, and he named them, too.

Cicero, who was not content with just writing that he had been led by courtiers into the royal bedchamber, lain on a golden couch dressed in purple and allowed the king to take the virginity of this "descendant of Venus," once went even further and interrupted him in the senate, right in the middle of a speech he was giving defending Nysa, Nicomedes' daughter, and was praising the king's generosity toward him, snapping back: "Spare us these details, I beg you! Everyone already knows what he gave you ... and what you gave him!"

And, finally, during his Gallic triumph, his soldiers, coming up with the usual ribald verses men like them were known for, marched behind his chariot singing this famous song:

"Gaul bent to Caesar, and Caesar bent over for Nicomedes.

Behold! Caesar now triumphs, who vanquished Gaul.

But Nicomedes triumphs not, who vanquished Caesar!"

(Suetonius, Divus Julius, 49)

Translation is, of course, my own.

I expect at least another month's work before I have finished.

It's fun!

James

xxxxx

p.s. I went for "alea iacta est" - "the die is cast"