Category: Education

I’ve written an essay for The Public Domain Review on John Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus, widely considered to be the first children’s picture book. It was published in 1658, and it became enormously popular throughout Europe. Its author also became a famous figure in the history of education in his own right: his portrait was painted by Rembrandt, and he was asked to become the President of Harvard College.

In this essay, I look at the challenge of illustrating the divine, the invisible, and the abstract. The Orbis aims to educate children using familiar sights and sounds from their experience, but such an approach becomes problematic when discussing topics like God, the soul, and the Last Judgment.

You can find my essay here, and you can browse the other really fascinating material at The Public Domain Review at their excellent website.

[Update: Thanks to both The Paris Review Daily and The Dish for featuring this essay.]

I wrote an article in Peitho: Examina Antiqua called “Stoic Caricature in Lucian’s De astrologia: Verisimilitude As Comedy”

You can find the article here at the journal or here at Columbia Academic Commons (PDF format).

I argue that De astrologia, a text transmitted with Lucian’s texts but often thought to be spurious, is in fact of Lucian’s hand. The argument centers around the narrator’s failed attempt at earning his audience’s credibility. I conclude the article by comparing the style of comedy in De astrologia to that of a famous SNL sketch where Tina Fey lampoons Sarah Palin by quoting the Governor’s exact words.

Last week, I posted a tour of Columbia University’s Latin inscriptons. But like a giant Egyptian midden that has preserved papyrus for modern-day archaeologists, this campus can surprise us with scraps of Latin hidden in plain sight. I found another line, the one that got away.

Across 120th Street at Columbia’s northern boundary we find Teachers’ College, one of the preeminent education schools in the United States. Its Gothic architectural accents stand in contrast to the Beaux-Arts campus of Columbia College, designed by McKim, Meade & White. Like Butler Library, it advertises the names of influential historical figures, these less ancient and more modern: Webster, Columbus, Washington. Also on the façade we find a popular Latin aphorism, “Mens Sana in Corpore Sano”:

The Latin means “A sound mind in a sound body,” and its source is the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. Juvenal, who wrote in the Second Century AD, wrote a series of satirical poems about contemporary Roman life. He bemoaned the unsafe crowding of the city, the fickle desires of women, the decline of Roman literature, and in the Tenth Satire, the foolish things that people pray for. Juvenal tells us that Romans pray for riches, beauty, fame, and power — but we really shouldn’t be sacrificing pigs, sheep, and bulls for these desires.

If we knew what to pray for, Juvenal cautions, we would pray for freedom from the fear of death instead of a long life. Good health instead of beauty. Freedom from luxury instead of riches. A sound mind in a sound body.

This kind of moralizing was of course appealing to generations of schoolmasters, and like a Senecan aphorism, it emblazons the walls of educational institutions the world over. Wikipedia claims that MENSA, the high IQ society, is so named by blending the phrase “mens sana.” I’m not sure if I buy that, but it’s a fun story.

And this much-quoted line of Juvenal, too, may be just that: a fun story. In 1970, Michael Reeve showed that this line of Juvenal wasn’t an original part of the poem. Somewhere in the manuscript tradition, somewhere in the centuries of monks copying Juvenal’s poetry into books, perhaps somewhere where the light was low and where an explanatory note inched its way into the poem, “orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano” (the full line of Latin hexameter poetry) became line 356 of Juvenal Satire Ten.

What a disappointment, right? Or perhaps, as Harvard Professor Richard Tarrant writes in a 1987 article, Reeve’s discovery is “one of the most brilliant episodes” in twentieth-century textual criticism.

But even that discovery doesn’t stop schools, athletic clubs, and even MENSA from looking to this line as a source of quotable, timeless, ancient (?) wisdom. Our knowledge that “mens sana in corpore sano” doesn’t actually belong in this Roman poem hasn’t stopped us from reading it, engraving it, and (I’m sure) tattooing it.

For almost 2,000 years, in fact, “mens sana in corpore sano” was the one that got away.