/I want to shower you with sugarlumps/

Journal BlackHat's Journal: /I want to shower you with sugarlumps/ 4

Journal by BlackHat on Tuesday May 23, 2006 @12:08AM

The front page item on plagiarism seemed to call for a historical trip back in time, to the origins of adaptation and revision of other works. [and] It does go clear back to the very beginnings of the Western-Tradition. Moreover, the opposition to the practice is equally as old. So, here's an overview of some of the thinking at the beginning.

Quote:
In the dramatic world comedy greatly preponderated over tragedy; the spectators knit their brows, when instead of the expected comedy a tragedy began. Thus it happened that, while this period exhibits poets who devoted themselves specially to comedy, such as Plautus and Caecilius, it presents none who cultivated tragedy alone; and among the dramas of this epoch known to us by name there occur three comedies for one tragedy. Of course the Roman comic poets, or rather translators, laid hands in the first instance on the pieces which had possession of the Hellenic stage at the time; and thus they found themselves exclusively confined to the range of the newer Attic comedy, and chiefly to its best-known poets, Philemon of Soli in Cilicia (394?-492) and Menander of Athens (412-462). This comedy came to be of so great importance as regards the development not only of Roman literature, but even of the nation at large, that even history has reason to pause and consider it.

The pieces are of tiresome monotony. Almost without exception the plot turns on helping a young man, at the expense either of his father or of some -leno-, to obtain possession of a sweetheart of undoubted charms and of very doubtful morals. The path to success in love regularly lies through some sort of pecuniary fraud; and the crafty servant, who provides the needful sum and performs the requisite swindling while the lover is mourning over his amatory and pecuniary distresses, is the real mainspring of the piece.

There is no want of the due accompaniment of reflections on the joys and sorrows of love, of tearful parting scenes, of lovers who in the anguish of their hearts threaten to do themselves a mischief; love or rather amorous intrigue was, as the old critics of art say, the very life-breath of the Menandrian poetry. Marriage forms, at least with Menander, the inevitable finale; on which occasion, for the greater edification and satisfaction of the spectators, the virtue of the heroine usually comes forth almost if not wholly untarnished, and the heroine herself proves to be the lost daughter of some rich man and so in every respect an eligible match.

Along with these love-pieces we find others of a pathetic kind. Among the comedies of Plautus, for instance, the -Rudens- turns on a shipwreck and the right of asylum; while the -Trinummus- and the -Captivi- contain no amatory intrigue, but depict the generous devotedness of the friend to his friend and of the slave to his master. Persons and situations recur down to the very details like patterns on a carpet; we never get rid of the asides of unseen listeners, of knocking at the house-doors, and of slaves scouring the streets on some errand or other. The standing masks, of which there was a certain fixed number--viz., eight masks for old men, and seven for servants--from which alone in ordinary cases at least the poet had to make his choice, further favoured a stock-model treatment. Such a comedy almost of necessity rejected the lyrical element in the older comedy--the chorus--and confined itself from the first to conversation, or at most recitation; it was devoid not of the political element only, but of all true passion and of all poetical elevation.

The pieces judiciously made no pretence to any grand or really poetical effect: their charm resided primarily in furnishing occupation for the intellect, not only through their subject-matter --in which respect the newer comedy was distinguished from the old as much by the greater intrinsic emptiness as by the greater outward complication of the plot--but more especially through their execution in detail, in which the point and polish of the conversation more particularly formed the triumph of the poet and the delight of the audience. Complications and confusions of one person with another, which very readily allowed scope for extravagant, often licentious, practical jokes--as in the -Casina-, which winds up in genuine Falstaffian style with the retiring of the two bridegrooms and of the soldier dressed up as bride--jests, drolleries, and riddles, which in fact for want of real conversation furnished the staple materials of entertainment at the Attic table of the period, fill up a large portion of these comedies.

The authors of them wrote not like Eupolis and Aristophanes for a great nation, but rather for a cultivated society which spent its time, like other clever circles whose cleverness finds little fit scope for action, in guessing riddles and playing at charades. They give us, therefore, no picture of their times; of the great historical and intellectual movements of the age no trace appears in these comedies, and we need to recall, in order to realize, the fact that Philemon and Menander were really contemporaries of Alexander and Aristotle. But they give us a picture, equally elegant and faithful, of that refined Attic society beyond the circles of which comedy never travels.

Even in the dim Latin copy, through which we chiefly know it, the grace of the original is not wholly obliterated; and more especially in the pieces which are imitated from Menander, the most talented of these poets, the life which the poet saw and shared is delicately reflected not so much in its aberrations and distortions as in its amiable every day course. The friendly domestic relations between father and daughter, husband and wife, master and servant, with their love-affairs and other little critical incidents, are portrayed with so broad a truthfulness, that even now they do not miss their effect: the servants' feast, for instance, with which the -Stichus- concludes is, in the limited range of its relations and the harmony of the two lovers and the one sweetheart, of unsurpassed gracefulness in its kind.

The elegant grisettes, who make their appearance perfumed and adorned, with their hair fashionably dressed and in variegated, gold- embroidered, sweeping robes, or even perform their toilette on the stage, are very effective. In their train come the procuresses, sometimes of the most vulgar sort, such as one who appears in the -Curculio-, sometimes duennas like Goethe's old Barbara, such as Scapha in the -Mostettaria-; and there is no lack of brothers and comrades ready with their help. There is great abundance and variety of parts representing the old: there appear in turn the austere and avaricious, the fond and tender-hearted, and the indulgent accommodating, papas, the amorous old man, the easy old bachelor, the jealous aged matron with her old maid-servant who takes part with her mistress against her master; whereas the young men's parts are less prominent, and neither the first lover, nor the virtuous model son who here and there occurs, lays claim to much significance.

The servant- world--the crafty valet, the stern house-steward, the old vigilant tutor, the rural slave redolent of garlic, the impertinent page--forms a transition to the very numerous professional parts. A standing figure among these is the jester (-parasitus-) who, in return for permission to feast at the table of the rich, has to entertain the guests with drolleries and charades, or, according to circumstances, to let the potsherds be flung at his head. This was at that time a formal trade in Athens; and it is certainly no mere poetical fiction which represents such a parasite as expressly preparing himself for his work by means of his books of witticisms and anecdotes.

Favourite parts, moreover, are those of the cook, who understands not only how to boast of unheard-of sauces, but also how to pilfer like a professional thief; the shameless -leno-, complacently confessing to the practice of every vice, of whom Ballio in the -Pseudolus- is a model specimen; the military braggadocio, in whom we trace a very distinct reflection of the free-lance habits that prevailed under Alexander's successors; the professional sharper or sycophant, the stingy money-changer, the solemnly silly physician, the priest, mariner, fisherman, and the like. To these fall to be added, lastly, the parts delineative of character in the strict sense, such as the superstitious man of Menander and the miser in the -Aulularia- of Plautus.

The national-Hellenic poetry has preserved, even in this its last creation, its indestructible plastic vigour; but the delineation of character is here copied from without rather than reproduced from inward experience, and the more so, the more the task approaches to the really poetical. It is a significant circumstance that, in the parts illustrative of character to which we have just referred, the psychological truth is in great part represented by abstract development of the conception; the miser here collects the parings of his nails and laments the tears which he sheds as a waste of water. But the blame of this want of depth in the portraying of character, and generally of the whole poetical and moral hollowness of this newer comedy, lay less with the comic writers than with the nation as a whole.

Everything distinctively Greek was expiring: fatherland, national faith, domestic life, all nobleness of action and sentiment were gone; poetry, history, and philosophy were inwardly exhausted; and nothing remained to the Athenian save the school, the fish-market, and the brothel. It is no matter of wonder and hardly a matter of blame, that poetry, which is destined to shed a glory over human existence, could make nothing more out of such a life than the Menandrian comedy presents to us. It is at the same time very remarkable that the poetry of this period, wherever it was able to turn away in some degree from the corrupt Attic life without falling into scholastic imitation, immediately gathers strength and freshness from the ideal. In the only remnant of the mock-heroic comedy of this period--the -Amphitruo- of Plautus--there breathes throughout a purer and more poetical atmosphere than in all the other remains of the contemporary stage.

The good-natured gods treated with gentle irony, the noble forms from the heroic world, and the ludicrously cowardly slaves present the most wonderful mutual contrasts; and, after the comical course of the plot, the birth of the son of the gods amidst thunder and lightning forms an almost grand concluding effect But this task of turning the myths into irony was innocent and poetical, as compared with that of the ordinary comedy depicting the Attic life of the period. No special accusation may be brought from a historico- moral point of view against the poets, nor ought it to be made matter of individual reproach to any particular poet that he occupies the level of his epoch: comedy was not the cause, but the effect of the corruption that prevailed in the national life. But it is necessary, more especially with a view to judge correctly the influence of these comedies on the life of the Roman people, to point out the abyss which yawned beneath all that polish and elegance.

The coarsenesses and obscenities, which Menander indeed in some measure avoided, but of which there is no lack in the other poets, are the least part of the evil. Features far worse are, the dreadful desolation of life in which the only oases are lovemaking and intoxication; the fearfully prosaic atmosphere, in which anything resembling enthusiasm is to be found only among the sharpers whose heads have been turned by their own swindling, and who prosecute the trade of cheating with some sort of zeal; and above all that immoral morality, with which the pieces of Menander in particular are garnished.

Vice is chastised, virtue is rewarded, and any peccadilloes are covered by conversion at or after marriage. There are pieces, such as the -Trinummus- of Plautus and several of Terence, in which all the characters down to the slaves possess some admixture of virtue; all swarm with honest men who allow deception on their behalf, with maidenly virtue wherever possible, with lovers equally favoured and making love in company; moral commonplaces and well-turned ethical maxims abound. A finale of reconciliation such as that of the -Bacchides-, where the swindling sons and the swindled fathers by way of a good winding up all go to carouse together in the brothel, presents a corruption of morals thoroughly worthy of Kotzebue.

Such were the foundations, and such the elements which shaped the growth, of Roman comedy. Originality was in its case excluded not merely by want of aesthetic freedom, but in the first instance, probably, by its subjection to police control.

Among the considerable number of Latin comedies of this sort which are known to us, there is not one that did not announce itself as an imitation of a definite Greek model; the title was only complete when the names of the Greek piece and of its author were also given, and if, as occasionally happened, the "novelty" of a piece was disputed, the question was merely whether it had been previously translated.

Comedy laid the scene of its plot abroad not only frequently, but regularly and under the pressure of necessity; and that species of art derived its special name (-fabula palliata-) from the fact, that the scene was laid away from Rome, usually in Athens, and thai the -dramatis personae- were Greeks or at any rate not Romans. The foreign costume is strictly carried out even in detail, especially in those things in which the uncultivated Roman was distinctly sensible of the contrast, Thus the names of Rome and the Romans are avoided, and, where they are referred to, they are called in good Greek "foreigners" (-barbari-); in like manner among the appellations of moneys and coins, that occur ever so frequently, there does not once appear a Roman coin.

We form a strange idea of men of so great and so versatile talents as Naevius and Plautus, if we refer such things to their free choice: this strange and clumsy "exterritorial" character of Roman comedy was undoubtedly due to causes very different from aesthetic considerations. The transference of such social relations, as are uniformly delineated in the new Attic comedy, to the Rome of the Hannibalic period would have been a direct outrage on its civic order and morality. But, as the dramatic spectacles at this period were regularly given by the aediles and praetors who were entirely dependent on the senate, and even extraordinary festivals, funeral games for instance, could not take place without permission of the government; and as the Roman police, moreover, was not in the habit of standing on ceremony in any case, and least of all in dealing with the comedians; the reason is self-evident why this comedy, even after it was admitted as one of the Roman national amusements, might still bring no Roman upon the stage, and remained as it were banished to foreign lands.

The compilers were still more decidedly prohibited from naming any living person in terms either of praise or censure, as well as from any captious allusion to the circumstances of the times. In the whole repertory of the Plautine and post-Plautine comedy, there is not, so far as we know, matter for a single action of damages. In like manner--if we leave out of view some wholly harmless jests--we meet hardly any trace of invectives levelled at communities (invectives which, owing to the lively municipal spirit of the Italians, would have been specially dangerous), except the significant scoff at the unfortunate Capuans and Atellans and, what is remarkable, various sarcasms on the arrogance and the bad Latin of the Praenestines.

In general no references to the events or circumstances of the present occur in the pieces of Plautus. The only exceptions are, congratulations on the course of the war or on the peaceful times; general sallies directed against usurious dealings in grain or money, against extravagance, against bribery by candidates, against the too frequent triumphs, against those who made a trade of collecting forfeited fines, against farmers of the revenue distraining for payment, against the dear prices of the oil-dealers; and once--in the -Curculio- --a more lengthened diatribe as to the doings in the Roman market, reminding us of the -parabases- of the older Attic comedy, and but little likely to cause offence

But even in the midst of such patriotic endeavours, which from a police point of view were entirely in order, the poet interrupts himself; -Sed sumne ego stultus, qui rem curo publicam Ubi sunt magistratus, quos curare oporteat?- and taken as a whole, we can hardly imagine a comedy politically more tame than was that of Rome in the sixth century.

The oldest Roman comic writer of note, Gnaeus Naevius, alone forms a remarkable exception. Although he did not write exactly original Roman comedies, the few fragments of his, which we possess, are full of references to circumstances and persons in Rome. Among other liberties he not only ridiculed one Theodotus a painter by name, but even directed against the victor of Zama the following verses, of which Aristophanes need not have been ashamed: -Etiam qui res magnas manu saepe gessit gloriose, Cujus facta viva nunc vigent, qui apud gentes solus praestat, Eum suus pater cum pallio uno ab amica abduxit.- As he himself says, -Libera lingua loquemur ludis Liberalibus,-he may have often written at variance with police rules, and put dangerous questions, such as: -Cedo qui vestram rem publicam tantam amisistis tam cito?- which he answered by an enumeration of political sins, such as: -Proveniebant oratores novi, stulti adulescentuli.-

But the Roman police was not disposed like the Attic to hold stage- invectives and political diatribes as privileged, or even to tolerate them at all. Naevius was put in prison for these and similar sallies, and was obliged to remain there, till he had publicly made amends and recantation in other comedies. These quarrels, apparently, drove him from his native land; but his successors took warning from his example--one of them indicates very plainly, that he has no desire whatever to incur an involuntary gagging like his colleague Naevius. Thus the result was accomplished--not much less unique of its kind than the conquest of Hannibal--that, during an epoch of the most feverish national excitement, there arose a national stage utterly destitute of political tinge.

But the restrictions thus stringently and laboriously imposed by custom and police on Roman poetry stifled its very breath, Not without reason might Naevius declare the position of the poet under the sceptre of the Lagidae and Seleucidae enviable as compared with his position in free Rome. The degree of success in individual instances was of course determined by the quality of the original which was followed, and by the talent of the individual editor; but amidst all their individual variety the whole stock of translations must have agreed in certain leading features, inasmuch as all the comedies were adapted to similar conditions of exhibition and a similar audience.

The treatment of the whole as well as of the details was uniformly in the highest degree free; and it was necessary that it should be so. While the original pieces were performed in presence of that society which they copied, and in this very fact lay their principal charm, the Roman audience of this period was so different from the Attic, that it was not even in a position rightly to understand that foreign world.

The Roman comprehended neither the grace and kindliness, nor the sentimentalism and the whitened emptiness of the domestic life of the Hellenes. The slave-world was utterly different; the Roman slave was a piece of household furniture, the Attic slave was a servant. Where marriages of slaves occur or a master carries on a kindly conversation with his slave, the Roman translators ask their audience not to take offence at such things which are usual in Athens; and, when at a later period comedies began to be written in Roman costume, the part of the crafty servant had to be rejected, because the Roman public did not tolerate slaves of this sort overlooking and controlling their masters. The professional figures and those illustrative of character, which were sketched more broadly and farcically, bore the process of transference better than the polished figures of every-day life; but even of those delineations the Roman editor had to lay aside several--and these probably the very finest and most original, such as the Thais, the match-maker, the moon-conjuress, and the mendicant priest of Menander --and to keep chiefly to those foreign trades, with which the Greek luxury of the table, already very generally diffused in Rome, had made his audience familiar.

If the professional cook and the jester in the comedy of Plautus are delineated with so striking vividness and so much relish, the explanation lies in the fact, that Greek cooks had even at that time daily offered their services in the Roman market, and that Cato found it necessary even to instruct his steward not to keep a jester. In like manner the translator could make no use of a very large portion of the elegant Attic conversation in his originals. The Roman citizen or farmer stood in much the same relation to the refined revelry and debauchery of Athens, as the German of a provincial town to the mysteries of the Palais Royal. A science of cookery, in the strict sense, never entered into his thoughts; the dinner-parties no doubt continued to be very numerous in the Roman imitation, but everywhere the plain Roman roast pork predominated over the variety of baked meats and the refined sauces and dishes of fish. Of the riddles and drinking songs, of the Greek rhetoric and philosophy, which played so great a part in the originals, we meet only a stray trace now and then in the Roman adaptation.

The havoc, which the Roman editors were compelled in deference to their audience to make in the originals, drove them inevitably into methods of cancelling and amalgamating incompatible with any artistic construction. It was usual not only to throw out whole character- parts of the original, but also to insert others taken from other comedies of the same or of another poet; a treatment indeed which, owing to the outwardly methodical construction of the originals and the recurrence of standing figures and incidents, was not quite so bad as it might seem.

Moreover the poets, at least in the earlier period, allowed themselves the most singular liberties in the construction of the plot. The plot of the -Stichus- (performed in 554) otherwise so excellent turns upon the circumstance, that two sisters, whom their father urges to abandon their absent husbands, play the part of Penelopes, till the husbands return home with rich mercantile gains and with a beautiful damsel as a present for their father-in-law. In the -Casina-, which was received with quite special favour by the public, the bride, from whom the piece is named and around whom the plot revolves, does not make her appearance at all, and the denouement is quite naively described by the epilogue as "to be enacted later within."

Very often the plot as it thickens is suddenly broken off, the connecting thread is allowed to drop, and other similar signs of an unfinished art appear. The reason of this is to be sought probably far less in the unskilfulness of the Roman editors, than in the indifference of the Roman public to aesthetic laws.

Taste, however, gradually formed itself. In the later pieces Plautus has evidently bestowed more care on their construction, and the -Captivi- for instance, the -Pseudolus-, and the -Bacchides- are executed in a masterly manner after their kind. His successor Caecilius, none of whose pieces are extant, is said to have especially distinguished himself by the more artistic treatment of the subject.
-- T. Mommsen

News collected and displayed in brass cages:
Fear the irony lips of doom! For the full effect one should note: the site, its stance, the author, and the text. And, most of all, the direction of the argument too. My my, the layers of irony are getting quite thick.

Judy's been laying it on rather thick too.

McCain's a bit thick too. Repeatedly fondled by the Shrub and then Pwn3d by a school girl. Pathetic. See my Toon sub-titled: 'rohe-rohe-yar-boat'.

Staff of Thicky's PlayLand may strike. Zimbabwe's main labour union movement has stepped up threats to lead a national strike for higher wages. The warning follows the failure of five-month talks with the government to protect salaries in a country where annual inflation is more than 1,000%.

The dogs of War. Two and four legged. [Cue Pink Floyd A:Dogs ~15secs]

Having run out of #3's they've moved on to Aide'ing.

In the Forgotten Land: Mars stalks eternal.

Although some places claim to be even more Forgotten.

Simon pays, The main debate was on MPs' pay, a topic of perennial fascination to MPs. I must be careful here. Members take the view that they are unjustly criticised in the press, specifically by people who probably earn more than them. This is true in many cases, though of course we don't have their allowances, and we don't get to vote on our own pay. Still, it's a real problem, and one that was sidestepped yesterday by keeping this year's rise to a mere 1%. The new leader of the House, Jack Straw, said that salaries were now "out of kilter with the comparators", which is not a line you often heard from an old-fashioned shop steward.

BrownLeatherJacket You couldn't make it up. Former South African deputy president Jacob Zuma, defending himself in court against a charge of rape, explained that the woman who brought the complaint, a family friend less than half his age (she is 31, he is 64) who was staying in his home, had signalled that she wanted to have sex with him. How? By wearing a knee-length skirt and sitting with uncrossed legs. So what was a gentleman to do? If the woman truly wanted to have sex with him, Zuma pointed out, then the rules of Zulu culture obliged him to oblige her. Not to have done so when she so clearly wanted it would, by the rules of Zulu culture, have been tantamount to raping her. In other words, he had to have sex with her in order not to rape her.

Texttoon:
Fumetti : Stock photo of Tony Blair speaking to the press outside of #10. Overlayed speech bubble has him singing; "/Simple peace can't be found/ Inside our restless minds/ Keep on hoping it's there/ Take a number stand in line!/"

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