Procul, O Procul Este Profani

The Loeb Classical Library is that red- (Latin) and green- (Greek) jacketed friend of Classics students the world over. They are cribs, basically, with facing pages of ancient text and English translation. Many an under-prepared student has surreptitiously slipped a Loeb inside the respectable, somber blue-bound Oxford edition and thus made it through section with dignity intact. The texts are not authoritative, and lack an apparatus criticus, while the translations are usually very, very bad. But, newer editions are better, and they get the job done. Try using Lattimore's translation of Aeschylus as an aid to reading sometime and tell me how you fare. (Spoiler: badly. And please don't tell me you just sit down with the dictionary, commentary and the OCT, either. No, you don't, not until the third read.) The Loeb's have a funny feature, though. When things get too racy in the Greek text, (see Aristophanes, passim) the facing text suddenly becomes (slightly bowlderized) Latin. The editors, in their desire to protect schoolboys from smut, seem to have reasoned that if their Latin was good enough to get them through they were old enough to know about buggery. But what about the Latin texts? What to do with, say, Catullus XVI (oh, all right, and passim)? This is where the editors got clever. In these cases the English text suddenly becomes Italian. Clearly, any lad old enough to have learned such a racy language, spoken by such emotional people and so on, can learn about forcible oral sodomy and what not. (Yes, the Romans had a word for it. Fine, it's pedicare.)

UPDATE: I was wondering about this myself in the wee hours of the night, but Mitch kindly pointed it out. To orally sodomize someone is actially irrumare; pedicare is just the regular anal kind. They both appear in the first line of Catullus XVI; I couldn't remember which was which and my Latin dictionary is at John's office for no reason. Hope this didn't result in any awkwardness for time-travelling blog readers in the meanwhile.

Comments

[Mitch Mills]

Ah yes, "pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo". Those verbs certainly weren't in our pocket Latin dictionaries. (Aside: Why is it so fun to learn dirty words in a foreign language?) I remember well just how flustered and redfaced our rather proper Latin teacher got as he rendered them, quite accurately actually, into modern colloquial English. Number 58 triggered in him the same fits of blushing and stammering, but he did a great job of patiently explaining how "magnanimi" was a double entendre.

[Mitch Mills]

Hold on a second, isn't "pedicare" the one about the buggery, and "irrumare" the one about the, um, other practice?

I just want to be sure, so I won't make any faux pas the next time I speak to, say, the Pope.

[ben wolfson]

According to The Student's Catullus, pedicare is indeed about buggery and irrumare fellatio. For conversation with the Pope (about which cardinal is cinaedissumus, or something) I'd just stick to the more general-purpose (ec)futuere, though.

[Asaf Bartov]

Hilarious! Thanks for posting this.

[Klara]

Ha! Thank you for reminding me. There is a reason why I know all the bad words in Greek, Latin, Italian (and English) and not in my native Norwegian.

[Mad Latinist]

Yeah, fellatur qui irrumat, irrumatur qui fellat.