Secret Code or Language of the Heart

In such ringing blank verse following his great predecessor Lessing and his great contemporaries Goethe and Schiller, who hardly took notice of him, Seume expresses his perennial call for equal rights and equal -freedoms to the exclusion of all positions of privilege and thereby of tyranny, the wellsprings of his political philosophy to the very end 'which brings us now, having set the stage for it, to a closer look at the Praefatio ... in locos Plutarchi difficiliores, completed on the first day of the year in which Miltiades was published but destined itself not to be published at all during the author's lifetime, intensely though he certainly desired it, conscious at the age of forty-four of his failing health and impending death, and accordingly a personal philosophical testament.

We need first to distinguish fact from fiction in the title. By all indications Seume had indeed compiled a series of annotations and conjectures of some obscure passages in Plutarch with the intention of publishing them, but these have been irretrievably lost. Our Preface, however, is a fiction in the sense that it has little to do with Plutarch, who is not even mentioned till the last paragraph, and is in no sense a scholarly introduction, though in its opening words it presents itself as such; hence the ostensible reason for writing in Latin, while its pragmatic reason undoubtedly was under the guise of a philological essay to circumvent the censorship.

When Seume begins by saying ... tentandum si quid umquam Romani in me fuit, id possit reviviscere, this is not the formulaic captatio benevolentiae of Cicero's si quid est in me ingenii ... quod sentio quam sit exiguuni but a completely straightforward admission of his limitations. It is thus somewhat redundant when a commentator (Gudrun Wicht) says that this is not Caesarean or Ciceronian Latin, but nonetheless a genuine Latin text well-versed in idiomatic usage, rhetorical practice and literary allusions; in fact, as early as the fifth line we can hear in his self—description as one qui multum terra jactatus et alto, Vergil's inultuin ille et terris iactatus et alto (Aen. I,3) and such places more numerous than we can here singly cite are clearly not learned references but a copia rerum et verborum completely assimilated and interiorized through lifelong conversance with the Classics, especially his favorite authors. Vergil, you recall, was one whom along with Homer and Horace he had taken all the way on his 'stroll' to Syracuse and brought home again. Taking the presumption of the propertied classes to vex the rest and treat them pro stipite ... et fungo (which I rendered idiomatically: like clods and blockheads) he draws upon Terence (Heaut. 5, 1, 4). for the former and Plautus (Bacch. 5, 1, 2) for the latter. When Seume puts into the mouth of the aristocracy addressing the working people the words, nos volumus ut vos detis ac faciatis, nos qui sumus nati ad fruges consurnendas (p.3), we can readily hear Horace's nos nurnerus sumus et fruges consumere nati (Ep. I, ii, 27) significantly attributed there to the sponsi Penelopae nebulones (Penelope's windbag suitors), but just different enough syntactically to mark it as a spontaneous reminiscence rather than a deliberate quotation. But the civis eximius whom Seume quotes as saying periculosam malo libertatem quam quietam servitudinem (p. 3) was not an ancient Roman but so far as we can determine the woiwode of Posen, Leszinski, a contemporary, which underscores the sense of continuity with Classical Antiquity so prevalent among the humanists. Caelum ipsum petimus stultitia (p. 4) is again a reminiscence of Hor. Carm. I, iii, 38, seamlessly woven into the text. That the common soldiers are forced into service non vitibus sed baculis, non baculis sed fustibus (p.4) does not even when rendered into English, 'not with vines but with staves, not with staves but with cudgels,' make much sense, except perhaps generally to convey progressively harsher forms of coercion and punishment. For a more precise understanding we have to advert to the idiomatic origins in the phrase. Vitis, a vine branch, was the centurion's rod of office, and as Pliny the Elder relates (XIV, iii, 19), etiam in delictis poenam ipsam honorat (even in offences it confers honour on punishment itself), because only soldiers who were Roman citizens were beaten with a vine sapling. At the other extreme fustis, a cudgel, takes on the meaning of beating to death as a form of military punishment (also called fustuarium), as we can read of one Calvinus Domitius, then Goyernor of Spain, who centurionem nominee Vibillium ob turpem ex acie fugam fusti percussit (caused a chief centurion by the name of Vibillius to. be beaten to death for cowardly flight from the line of battle) (Vell. II, lxxviii, 3). With that understanding the passage takes on a much sharper meaning. It also reflects Seume's particular interest in military history.