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.