QUATENUS DIES PATET
Johnson walked with a Homeric staff of oak. He and Boswell knew the classical poets well; they quote from them repeatedly, and competitively, in the course of their Tour.
This habit, of viewing Scotland through the frame of Virgil, Ovid, Juvenal, Horace or Euripides, encouraged us to commission the German scholar, Daniel Höehr, to translate some of our writings, including the dedicatory poems below, backwards, as it were, into Latin.
On their first sea-voyage, from Leith over to Fife, the travellers debate, via Ovid, on the value of views, and the sameyness of the sea. In Aberdeen, Johnson sought the spirit of his near namesake, the neo-Latin poet Arthur Johnston (1579–1641). While on Skye, and on Inchkenneth, Johnson wrote Latin verses of the islands.
Towards the end of their tour, in Ayrshire, Boswell describes ‘the groves of Auchinleck’, his childhood home, as ‘scenes which, in my mind, were all classical; for in my youth I had appropriated to them many of the descriptions of the Roman poets’.
Bibliography
Crawford, Robert Apollos of the North (2006)
Davenport, Guy 7 Greeks (1995)
Highet, Gilbert Poets in a Landscape (1957)
Johnson walked with a Homeric staff of oak. He and Boswell knew the classical poets well; they quote from them repeatedly, and competitively, in the course of their Tour.
This habit, of viewing Scotland through the frame of Virgil, Ovid, Juvenal, Horace or Euripides, encouraged us to commission the German scholar, Daniel Höehr, to translate some of our writings, including the dedicatory poems below, backwards, as it were, into Latin.
On their first sea-voyage, from Leith over to Fife, the travellers debate, via Ovid, on the value of views, and the sameyness of the sea. In Aberdeen, Johnson sought the spirit of his near namesake, the neo-Latin poet Arthur Johnston (1579–1641). While on Skye, and on Inchkenneth, Johnson wrote Latin verses of the islands.
Towards the end of their tour, in Ayrshire, Boswell describes ‘the groves of Auchinleck’, his childhood home, as ‘scenes which, in my mind, were all classical; for in my youth I had appropriated to them many of the descriptions of the Roman poets’.
AS FAR AS THE DAY GOES
journey
QUATENUS DIES PATET
iter
AS FAR AS THE TALE KNOWS
book
QUATENUS FABULA SCIT
liber
journey
QUATENUS DIES PATET
iter
AS FAR AS THE TALE KNOWS
book
QUATENUS FABULA SCIT
liber
Bibliography
Crawford, Robert Apollos of the North (2006)
Davenport, Guy 7 Greeks (1995)
Highet, Gilbert Poets in a Landscape (1957)