Secret Code or Language of the Heart

To explain the somewhat mysterious title of these observations I must needs first introduce you to Johann Gottfried Seume (1763-1810) and then seek to explain why a German would write in Latin, not an academic dissertation for which especially in Classical Philology Latin was still the customary medium, but rather an intensely personal document, in effect his political testament. The handout is the text of this document and I trust you will not take offense at my giving it to you in an English version as it would likely be for you a new and unfamiliar text, which has not been previously rendered into English. Even for the original Latin text, not published until after the author's lifetime in 1819, I had to go to the 1879 edition of Seume's Works (Berlin: Hempel); the most recent one of 1993, though purporting to be a scholarly edition, contents itself with a German translation, which in itself tells a rather ominous tale.

In the annals of German Literature Seume is an unusual figure: though author of some fine poems, he is not generally taken as a poet; his best known works are travel books, one entitled with a nice touch of irony A Stroll [Spaziergang] to Syracuse (1802) covering a journey of some 4,000 miles on foot, and the most revealing his critical aphorisms entitled Apocrypha (in the original meaning of observations hidden and to be hidden), which for reasons of censorship were not be printed in full until long after his lifetime in the same 1879 edition mentioned before. But here we are going to consider Seume as a classicist, not the career classicist so eloquently excoriated by Hanson and Heath, but rather one who singularly illustrated in his life the place given to the bonae litterae in that famous dictum of Cicero's: haec studia adulescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solatium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur - especially the last two.

One such illustration peregrinando or more specifically navigando Seume relates in his autobiography (Mein Leben), of which he had completed only a small part at his death. Coming from extremely modest circumstances he began school rather late but quickly acquired proficiency in Latin and Greek and an intense love of classical literature. Eluding the study of theology at the University of Leipzig he was impressed by Hessian recruiters and sold to the British for service against the American revolutionaries. On board ship on the way to Halifax he records, 'I sat on the quarterdeck just reading Horace's Angustam, ainici, pauperiein [Carm. III, ii, 1], when the fat helmsman wanted to throw me off the bench. ... The captain came along, peered in my book, and told me to remain seated. ... [the following is written in English:] You read Latin, my boy? - Yes, Sir. - And you understand it? - I believe I do. - Very well; it is a very good diversion in the situation you are in. - So I find, Sir; indeed a great consolation. ... [in German again:] He took me along to his cabin and showed me his travel library consisting of good English authors and a few Classics, and promised if I took good care of them, to lend me one or the other.' On the same voyage while reading Vergil's Insequitur clamorque viruin, stridorque rudentuin (Aen. I, 87) he concluded that Vergil had experienced the storms at sea that he describes, while the description of Atlas implies that he had never been on a mountain of any magnitude. By the time he had arrived in Halifax Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown and eventually he was shipped back to Germany.