Category: Blog Post

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.

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m a pretty serious dog person. I have a dog-a-day calendar in my office. My parents’ home phone number is listed in my cell as “Chubbs,” our family dog. I sleep on a pillow every night covered with illustrations of dogs.

But I believe dogs are qualitatively and significantly different from people.

Gregory Berns’ New York Times Saturday opinion piece (“Dogs Are People, Too“) would have us reconsider that idea. The basic premise of the article is that after doing MRI scans of dogs who are alert and awake (not sedated and unconscious), researchers have found that dog brains use neurological mechanisms that are remarkably close to those of human brains. Perhaps, as the article cautions, this similarity doesn’t prove that dogs “love” humans in the same way we humans love. But it should cause us to reconsider our assumption that dogs and humans are really that different. We might even consider granting them the rights of personhood.

A recent article in the Boston Review (“On Being an Octopus“) tackled a very similar question. In that article, Peter Godfrey-Smith revisits the thesis of Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper, “What is it like to be a bat?” Godfrey-Smith summarizes the thesis of Nagel’s paper:

He asked this in part to challenge materialism, the view that everything that goes on in our universe comprises physical processes and nothing more. A materialist view of the mind, Nagel said, cannot even begin to give an explanation of the subjective side of our mental lives, an account of what it feels like to have thoughts and experiences.

Or in other words, no matter how much information we have about the neurological processes of a bat, that scientific data actually provides no real understanding of the cognitive experience of being a bat. It is, in a way, a restatement of Descartes’ formulation of mind-body dualism. Our physical body (including the physical brain tissues in our heads) is in some way distinct from our mind/consciousness/soul.

Godfrey-Smith’s excellent article probes the question of what experience is like for an octopus, an animal that is evolutionarily-speaking very removed from humans but that still exhibits some degree of problem-solving and other higher cognitive processes. The octopus, he writes,

is curious and a problem-solver. Some octopuses carry pairs of coconut half-shells around to reconstruct as spherical shelters. Octopuses can recognize (and take a disliking to) individual human keepers in aquariums. They learn the layout of their environment and hunt on long loops that take them reliably back to a den. Octopuses have eyes built on a “camera” design like ours, with a lens focusing an image. They also have sensitive chemical sensors in their suckers—they taste the world as they touch it. When watching their eyes, it is natural to think that perhaps octopuses are a bit like us, just with more arms and no bones. Like other animals, they use their senses to track what is going on around them and to guide action.

According to a well-documented Wikipedia page, the octopus also exhibits playful behavior. Heck, one octopus even successfully predicted several outcomes of matches of the 2010 World Cup.

We have a hard time ascribing personhood to the octopus, however, since it is so difficult to see it as a physical equal. It is a boneless blob with a lot of arms. I would argue, then, that Berns’ willingness to ascribe personhood to dogs is not just a matter of their neurological processes and advanced cognitive function but also of their beautiful hair, their expressive faces, and the warmth of their bodies on a cold night.

We share these physical attributes with dogs. It is easy to see ourselves in them.

It is not easy to see ourselves in the octopus, with our rigid bones and dearth of rubbery tentacles. But even if we hesitate to ascribe personhood to the octopus (or the dog), we should still try to understand the experiences of these strange aliens who inhabit Earth with us:

Getting a sense of what it feels like to be another animal—bat, octopus, or next-door neighbor—must involve the use of memory and imagination to produce what we think might be faint analogues of that other animal’s experiences. This project can be guided by knowledge of how the animal is put together and how it lives its life. When the animal is as different from us as an octopus, the task is certainly difficult, but it is one worth undertaking.

(P.S. I feel bad whenever I eat octopus.)

Columbia has a cutting-edge paranormal studies laboratory, but look at this library:

The frieze of Butler Library, which dominates the southern half of the Morningside Heights campus, proclaims the University’s penchant for the ancients to all the tourists on the 116th Street walkway. There are poets (Homer, Vergil), orators (Demosthenes, Cicero), and philosophers (Plato, Aristotle). On the sides of the library, you will see Dante, Cervantes, and Billy Shakespeare, but the oldest guys get the best real estate.

But Columbia’s campus extols antiquity through more than just a laundry list of required texts. Scattered throughout campus are Latin inscriptions.

Let’s take a walk, shall we?

Opposite the northern face of Butler Library sits Alma Mater, the unofficial mascot of the university. Her name, “Nourishing Mother,” is of course a Latin moniker in itself.

She presides over the “urban beach” that is Low Plaza, designed and built by McKim, Mead & White, the Neoclassical dream team responsible for the Brooklyn Museum, the Morgan Library, and the West Wing of the White House. A stone plaque in the middle of the plaza bears McKim’s name:

The Latin on this plaque is great: “The monuments of the architect look down from above throughout the years.” Nice thought, right? The real magic with this Latin phrase is the careful consideration of meter. Shakespeare was a master of iambic pentameter (e.g., “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”), but for many poets from antiquity, the dactylic hexameter was the weapon of choice. (You can listen to a rather…enthusiastic recitation of it here.) McKim’s plaque, too, follows this metrical pattern. I leave the extra-credit scanning for you budding Latinists out there.

As we walk south toward Butler, we’ll pass a sundial in the middle of campus. This sundial, sadly, is no longer functional. Instead of a metal pole, this sundial once relied on a giant marble sphere to cast its time-telling shadow. (The marble sphere was discovered, broken, in Michigan.)

There is a small Latin phrase affixed to the base. It announces to passers-by “Await the Hour. It will come.”:

The hour never comes for this sundial. Without its marble sphere, the sundial lies naked in the sun. (Maybe this is why some students are dependably late for class….)

[A brief aside: This isn’t the only sundial inscription I’ve seen recently. I stayed with my friend Gabriele outside Florence this summer, and he has this sundial on the side of his B&B. It reads Sine Sole Sileo — “Without the sun, I am silent.”]

You can’t enter Butler Library if you’re not granted access through the university, but the most interesting Latin is right in the foyer. A gently-sloping dome covers the room, and at its center is a brief quotation from the seventh letter of Seneca the Younger (4 BC — 65 AD).

It reads Homines dum docent discunt — Men learn while they teach. Seneca’s writing is frequently pithy and witty — and therefore very quotable. You often find his writing in grade school mottoes. The Spence School across town, in fact, uses a reversed Senecan quotation: Non scholae sed vitae discimus (“We learn not for school but for life.”) The original quotation, Non vitae sed scholae discimus, bemoaned the Romans’ excessive literary pursuits.

Leaving Butler Library, we head back north across the eastern edge of the South Lawn. The building just south of the central walkway of campus is Hamilton Hall, so named for Columbia College’s most famous alum, Alexander Hamilton, Class of 1777. His statue — one of three in Manhattan — stands before the entrance to the building. Hamilton Hall is home to the Dean of Columbia College, and its lobby, like the frieze of Butler Library, enshrines central figures of a Columbia education in its architecture:

To the left of the doors into Hamilton Hall, we find the longest inscription in this brief tour. It’s notable not just for its length but also for its succinct telling of the history of the university.

Huius collegii olim regalis nunc Columbiae dicti regio diplomate an[no] Dom[ini] MDCCLIIII constituti in honorem dei optimi maximi atq[ue] in ecclesiae reiq[ue] publicae emolumentum primus hic lapis positus est Sept[embris] die XXVII an[no] Dom[ini] MDCCCCV

The first stone of this College, once called “King’s” and now called “Columbia,” established by royal charter in 1754 AD in honor of God the Almighty and for the benefit of both Church and State, was placed here on the 27th day of September in 1905 AD.

As we are told here, the University was started under a royal charter of King George II in 1754 (the oldest in the state and the fifth oldest in the country). Appropriately, its name then was King’s College. Originally, the campus was downtown on Madison Avenue and then later moved to its uptown home in Morningside Heights, so the date given here for the construction of Hamilton Hall is much later than the date of the university’s founding.

We notice the appeal to both religious and civic benefit in this inscription. They are two interests that lead us to our final two inscriptions. One, on the frieze of St. Paul’s Chapel at 117th and Amsterdam, announces the religious purpose of that building (“On behalf of the Church of God”):

(Columbia is not an explicitly religious institution today although there is still a University Chaplain and several religions represented on campus.)

Our last stop is Kent Hall, which sits on the northern side of the walkway at 116th Street, directly across from Hamilton Hall. There we see an inscription above the doorway. It reads Ius est ars boni et aequi (“Law is the art of goodness and justice”):

(My lawyer friend laughed when I read this to him. :( )

Today, Kent is home to the illustrious offices of the registrar and ID center, not the Law School. The Law School moved across Amsterdam Avenue in 1960 into a, well, differently styled building. Kent’s inscription, thankfully, did not leave with the lawyers.

And our Latin, thankfully, did not leave with the Romans.