saint augustine on posting

“The sin of the sophist is that he denies the necessity of subject matter and believes that forma alone is desirable. An opposite vice, one to which historians of rhetoric have never given a name, depends upon the belief that the man possessed of truth will ipso facto be able to communicate the truth to others. It is a dependence upon materia alone. Its chief proponent in ancient times was the young Plato, and it would seem fair to label it the “Platonic rhetorical heresy” just as we apply the term “sophistry” to its opposite theory. This is not to say that the ecclesiastical writers of the fourth century looked to the Gorgias and Protagoras for a theory of communication, but rather that their reactions to the pagan culture of Rome led many of them to take up a somewhat similar attitude toward the rhetoric which was a part of that culture. Augustine apparently recognized a danger in this aspect of the cultural debate of his times, and used the De Doctrina [Christiana’s fourth book] to urge a union of both matter and form in Christian preaching.

Only if one views the book as part of the great debate of the fourth century, therefore, does its historical importance emerge clearly. The reader is struck by the author’s insistence upon the folly of abandoning a useful tool to the enemy.”

—James J. Murphy, “The Debate about a Christian Rhetoric,” in The Rhetoric of St. Augustine of Hippo, eds. Enos, Thompson, et al. (2008)

ut silvae foliis: proficio and progress


I recently recorded a podcast episode for Ut Silvae Foliis, a series of reflections on Latin words as documented in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, the world’s foremost Latin dictionary. While a postdoctoral fellow at the TLL in 2016/2017, I had the great fortune to learn about an inexhaustible diversity of Latin authors, and this 15-minute audio essay was a welcome opportunity to revisit the Thesaurus and its sources.

I chose to discuss the verb proficio, perhaps best translated in English as “to progress” or “to improve.” Over the course of a millennium, this verb appears in an almost-overwhelming array of texts, all of which raise provocative issues about our own notions of “improvement.” What does it mean to “be better” or to “become better”? What does it mean for someone or something to “progress”? These are difficult questions that straddle the domains of lexicography and intellectual history. Even if the TLL can’t settle a perennial problem like the definition of “progress,” it can nevertheless give us a glimpse at how our predecessors have wrestled with these intractable matters.

a banquet for the birds

I’ve admired the music of both Aaron Diehl and Darcy James Argue for years—the former as an inheritor of and innovator in the tradition of pianists like John Lewis and Mary Lou Williams, the latter as a composer and bandleader whose works stretch the idiom of American big band in cerebral directions while augmenting its musicality. Fantastic stuff all around.

This past weekend, Diehl (who took over the 92Y “Jazz in July” series from Bill Charlap last year) hosted Argue and his band for the final night of the concert series. After performances of some of their earlier works, they premiered Argue’s new three-movement suite “A Banquet for the Birds.” (Major thanks to the 92Y for continuing to sell digital access to concerts, even years after the worst of 2020’s ambulance sirens. I was so happy to be able to watch while on a trip to rural Michigan.) This new work draws inspiration from Emily Wilson’s recent translation of Homer’s Iliad (which I haven’t read yet), and Argue’s title comes from one of its opening lines, which recounts how the Trojan War “made men the spoils of dogs, a banquet for the birds” (αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν / οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι).

The first movement (“The Sparrows and the Snake”) begins with a continuo organ, quickly giving way to trumpet flourishes that remind me of Kill Bill (complimentary!), a muslcal echo of the Iliad‘s martial backdrop. After just a minute so, Diehl plays—unaccompanied—over sparse harmonies whose mode recall Debussy’s Little Shepherd, with both perhaps drawing from the musical vocabulary of rustic Greece. The second half trades this simplicity for piano runs and chords less rustic and more Rachmaninoff-showstopper. Have we we entered a blood-and-guts scene from later in the Iliad? Those Tarantino flourishes return in the final measures of the movement, so yes, this is all drawn from Homer’s epic of gory swordfighting.

The second movement takes its title—”The Most Meaningful of Birds”—from Homer’s description in Book 8 of an eagle who proves ominous (as birds often do in Greco-Roman literature). As a side note, I’m interested in (but very open to) Wilson’s choice of “most meaningful” as the translation of τελειότατος (αὐτίκα δ᾽ αἰετὸν ἧκε τελειότατον πετεηνῶν)—perhaps “most perfect” or “most authoritative”? Anyhow, we begin with Diehl on the piano again. This time hamonies sound a little less foreign, less of-some-other-mode, but still with bare melodies. Especially when the band kicks in, Argue’s lone woodwind lines evoke something like Copland … or perhaps a Stravinsky chorale? (I love how both Argue and Diehl walk the tightrope between classical and jazz, and this movement is a great example of that balance.)

After some smoothed, almost gentle piano lines—is the eagle soaring away?—the final movement starts with disorderly, muted trumpets. Drums and piano and bass soon add to the chaos. So begins “A Tangled Cry,” the last movement. Diehl comes back with some of those Copland/Stravinsky cadences before returning to percussive chords—soon joined by more trumpet flourishes—that remind us that we’re still in the ninth year of the Trojan War. Indeed, the sombre saxophone and trumpet lines that come shortly before the final, grim harmonies of the suite signal how the Iliad is not a tale of Greek triumph or really even of Achilles’ kleos aphthiton but of the shared, tragic annihilation of warfare.