Category: Books

Emo Harvey Bros 1: Gabriel

[banner] Tears of the Muses illustration, 1892

24 June 2024
· Crying rivers for Sir Thomas Smith ·

Pedantius, 1631 line engraving after earlier woodcutGabriel Harvey was a fractious, arrogant man with a talent for giving and taking offence. He wore out his welcome at Cambridge, proved too argumentative for the law, was rarely and barely tolerated at court. He became an annoying stone in my own shoe, for reasons that are too silly to go into here.

Knowing who put the butter on his bread, Harvey managed to avoid antagonising statesman and educator Sir Thomas Smith. Smith, like Harvey a native of Saffron Walden in Essex, was generous to the youngHarvey and I were close in age, though he tried to appear older than his years. See Note 2 below. scholar during his years at Cambridge. But in the summer of 1577, Smith died.

Sir Thomas Smith illustration with armsDistraught at the loss of his patron and role model, Harvey wept tears of ink in an effusive Latin elegy, Smithus, vel Musarum lachrymae (Smith, or Tears of the Muses). Published at the beginning of 1578, the book included a bonus– a second elegy, also in Latin, also teary: Mercurius, sive Lachrymae (Mercury, or Tears), by Richard Harvey, Gabriel’s younger brotherRichard was eighteen in 1578. There was a third brother, John, fourteen. I don’t know whether he was as prone to leakage as his siblings..

Gabriel prefaced Mercurius with a verse letter full of pompous brotherly advice. I have translated the letter below, the elegy in the next post. (Gabriel’s own elegy, abridged, is in my Ovid book.) I’ve seen only one other Smithus in English that includes these two pieces. Alas, it’s nihil dignum scriptu domumROMANInothing worth writing [Romans go] home about, so if you run into it, save your denarii.3 Augustan denarii linear arrangementThese Harvetical outpourings will not be everyone’s cup of tea. The letter is long and pretentious, the elegy longer and confusing. Nor do they have much to do with me, directly: I am the subject of one half of one line in the elegy. The ever erudite Alexander Waugh [sigh] wondered not long ago whether I might make some sense of the thing, and I was game. Gabriel’s letter was added to provide context.

To assist my extremely rusty Latin I made use of a few online tools of varying worth (see Sources), plus my dog-eared Lewis and Short. I make no claim that my results are bang on (it’s been far too long for that) but they’re reasonably coherent. Line-referenced notes follow the text.

Visually impaired viewers: The letter below and the elegy in the next post are displayed as images because it’s the only way the lines would fit in the available width. No one wants that much text in the ALT fields, so if you have a disability-based need for a text version of the words, drop me a line using the contact form. We’ll come up with something that works for you.

Sir Thomas’s death grieved me every bit as much as it did the heartbroken Harveys, I just didn’t get so lachrymose about it. Every word I put to paper for the rest of my life was my tribute to my teacher.

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Gabriel Harvey letter to brother Richard 1578

coronet-spacerNotes:

  •  2  Have dared in your tender years
  • Richard Harvey (born 1560⁠, died 1630) was eighteen in 1578. Gabriel (born between 1545 and 1553 depending on the source, died 1631) was in his mid 20s to early 30s.
  • 12-13  Persius shone … left Helicon behind
  • Not Perseus, the slayer of Medusa. Aulus Persius Flaccus was a Roman poet and satirist in the 1st century CE. He was just 28 when he died. This is only a guess but it reads like Harvey was saying Persius’s high reputation came quickly after his death, when he left poetry behind. Mt Helicon was home to the Muses.
  • 18  Virgil (Virgilio in the original)
  • Publius Vergilius Maro, Roman poet who lived in the 1st century BCE. Most famous for the Aeneid, the tale of Trojan prince Aeneas who fled from burning Troy, sailed to Italy, and founded the settlement that would become Rome. Gabriel likened Richard to Virgil while at the same time referring to Virgil himself. He used the name Virgilio here, which could mean Little Virgil, whereas at line 62 he called the poet Virgilius, his proper Latin nomen (usually spelled Vergilius). I’ve translated Virgilio as A new Virgil in this line, to reduce the ambiguity.
  • 20  Pilfer grand feet
  • Metrical feet, not anatomical ones. Poetry, not podophilia.
  • 24  The Trojan Muse … Arms and the Man
  • The muse invoked by Virgil at the start of his Aeneid, and its opening words: Arma virumque cano, (Of) Arms and the man I sing.
  • 28-35  Let Arpinum … Giovio
  • Harvey compared Smith, the Walden native, to the Roman general Marius and the orator Cicero, both from the provincial Latin town of Arpinum. The town of Corduba in the province of Hispania was the birthplace of the father and son Senecas. Novo Comum (now Como), founded by Julius Caesar in the Italian Alps, was the birthplace of the two Plinys, the younger being the elder’s nephew, adopted as his son. Paulo Giovio (1483–1552) was a physician, historian, and Catholic prelate, born ~70 years before Harvey, who also came from Como.
  • 45  in two draughts
  • Wordplay: draughts as drunk from the whole of Helicon, and draughts as working copies of writing in progress.
  • 47  tragic buskin
  • Translated from cothurnus, a high shoe or boot worn by tragic actors. Comic actors wore a low-heeled slipper called a soccus.
  • 52  tragic song
  • Canes tragicos in Harvey’s Latin. I suspect a typo, canos not canes, tragic song(s) not tragic dogs. You could, and certainly Gabriel could, analogise tragic poets as dogs, but it doesn’t fit the context. He was flattering his little brother as a new poet, so it seems unlikely that he’d call him a howling dog. Then again it’s Gabriel so perhaps he would.
  • 55  statue made by Phidias
  • Athena Parthenos reproduction in Nashville, TNPhidias was by many accounts the most talented sculptor in ancient Greece, living in the 5th century BCE. Among other famous works he designed the huge golden statue of Athena Parthenos, my pseudonymsake, the spear-shaking goddess inside the Parthenon on the Acropolis. That statue is long gone, but a recreated version can be seen in Nashville, Tennessee, USA (see Sources).
  • 60  the crop is still in the grass
  • From Ovid’s Epistles, adhuc tua messis in herba est, translation as above or variations such as your wheat is still in the blade. In different contexts it can mean anything from you haven’t finished growing up yet to don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
  • 70  the pillar of Latin and Greek
  • Smith was the foremost English scholar of the Latin and Greek languages in his generation. His friend and rival John Cheke might have come a close second.
  • 72  envious Fates
  • The three Fates, or Destinies, were sisters who assigned life and death to every mortal. Clotho spun the thread of life, Lachesis measured out its length, and Atropos cut it at its end. Even Jove could not overrule the Fates. Their Latin name is the Parcae.
  • 85  Thalia
  • She was the muse of comedy and pastoral poetry. I’m not sure why Harvey would appeal to her rather than to Calliope (muse of eloquence and epic poetry) or Melpomene (muse of tragedy). Thalia was also the name of one of the three Graces, goddess of festivity and banqueting, but that doesn’t fit the case either. Harvey was an obtuse fellow.

Sources and additional reading

  • • Banner: Tears of the Muses (detail)
  • · from a drawing by Charles Amédée Forestier (1854–1930)
  • · Illustrated London News, Sat 17 Dec 1892
  • · © Illustrated London News Group, courtesy The British Library Board
  • · British Newspaper Archive
  • • Smithus; vel Musarum lachrymae, Pro obitu Honoratissimi viri, atque hominis multis nominibus clarissimi, Thomae Smithi, Equitis Britanni, Maiestatisque Regiae Secretarii [Google Books]
  • · Gabrielis Harveii, Valdinatus
  • · Henrici Binnemani, Londoni, MDLXXVIII (1578)

Monitum: Asinus in Solutam (Warning: Ass on the Loose)These pages explore the stirs that Harvey made about me on a couple of occasions. He was a fool, and he should have known better. Imagine what he’d have been like on the internet. He was asinine enough on paper.

If you’re wondering where Tom Nashe is, he’s a little beyond the scope of these two posts, but I’ll get to him before long.

  • • Pedantius (Latin comedy, with English translation) [philological.cal.bham.ac.uk]
  • · image, above cc-by-nc-nd NPG D26855
  • · The NPG misIDs the image as a Puritan named Beard, but playwright Edward Forsett had Harvey in his sights in this satire of a gaunt scholar written for Trinity College in 1581.

[return to top of post]

  • • Latin translation tools. Some do a better job than others, but without a basic (human) contextual understanding of what’s being said, what they spit out can be a lot of inanis strepitusgibberish (empty noise).
  • · Copilot [microsoft.com]
  • · ChatGPT [chatgpt.com] [OpenAI] version 3.5 at the time I used it
  • · OpenL [openl.io]
  • · Google Translate [translate.google.com]
  • · Lingvanex [lingvanex.com]
  • · Google’s Gemini wouldn’t even try. Not at all surprising when you recall that its previous name was Bard. Small Latin, indeed.
    Google's Gemini AI bot punts on Latin
  • • METAMETAMORPHOSES [amazon.com]
  • · by Ovid and Ned Devere (me)
  • · Good Name Press, 2024
  • · Gabriel Harvey’s elegy Smith, or Tears of the Muses is found in a translated abridgement on pages 534-540. For book details and non-US Amazon links, see MMM: The Boys Are Back, posted 3 January 2024.

VERO NIHIL VERIUS