Fred Jenkins > Recent Status Updates

domesticis consiliis rem publicam administravit; bellum, pacem, foedera, societates per se ipse, cum quibus voluit, iniussu populi ac senatus, fecit diremitque. (1.49.7)

Am I reading Livy on Tarquinius Superbus or today's New York Times?

"Is he all right?" I asked. "He does not seem quie right."
"Louise, it's too much ancient Greek. I just don't know. Go talk to him."

Up to the reign of Servius Tullius. And the first citation of Fabius Pictor, a fragmentary history with whom I once sojourned for an extended period.

It was the feeling that the entire world known to him was a sunken city whose monuments and buildings, church towers and palaces were still just visible beneath the surface of the water, but whose time would never return.

Lajos believed the old man had died without their having noticed, but was unable to part from his profession and so he simply continued as a ghost.

Like Sandor he lives in the past--but for some people there is no other place

He found it incomprehensible that people could just disappear, that they died and disappeared, and it was just as if they had never existed.

"Where am I?"
He shrugged. "Back of the north wind. The end of the world. Nowhere at all."

Reading Acts for Eastertide.

"Abi, nuntia" inquit "Romanis, caelestes ita velle ut mea Roma caput orbis terrarum sit." (1.16.7)

"Go, tell the Romans," he {Romulus] said " that the gods thus wish that my Rome be the head of the world."

"Children, of course, always see a troll for what he is. You can't get anything by them. Adults, on the other hand, are mostly hopeless. They live too much in the world to see beyond it."

"When you're translating yourself-reading medieval French, say-you aren't just taking one word and mentally transposing it to English. You are able to think and feel things you can't think and feel in modern American. Things only a French yeoman might have thought and felt in a cosmos ruled by a god at war with a beast-the beast in the human soul."

No matter how many trolls you wiped out, Mordor always had more.

τί τῶνδ’ ἄνευ κακῶν;

But what of these is without evils?ygh

"The problem with inviting the unnatural into your life is that it might decide to stay."

"It would be a mistake to assumue that characters will remain contentedly within the confines of their books."

πάθει μάθος

The original school of hard knocks.

"Too much reality only spoils things."

me a conspectu malorum quae nostratot per annos vidit aetas, tantisper certe dum prisca illa tota mente repeto, avertam

αἴλινον αἴλινον εἰπέ,το δ’εὖ νικάτω.

Sing woe, sing woe, yet may the good prevail.

Slow going, with much time in the commentary and the lexicon. And the regular refrain of Sir Denys: "Text and interpretation are extremely doubtful."

"I don't see how either of those things being true excludes the other from being just as true, Jack. From what I have witnessed so far this evening you might be both a crazed kidnapper and a dumbass dupe."