[Peace-discuss] [Peace] 4th of July: "150 Years of Local Heroes"

[C. G. Estabrook]

Well said.

BTW, the Terence quote - homo sum sum: humani nil a me alienum (puto) - comes
from an R-rated scene in a comedy from 163 BCE, but Marx - a classical scholar -
used it as his favorite maxim in a literary game he played with his children.

The citation comes from Terence' play Heauton Timoroumenos (The Self-Tormentor)
where it refers to the main character (Chremes) being told to mind his own
business, upon which Chremes answers the now famous "Homo sum..." It can be
translated as "I am a human being and I consider nothing human strange to me,"
with "strange" in the meaning of "not my business" or "irrelevant."

Marx's replies to a set of questions given to him by his daughters Jenny and
Laura in 1865 - a Victorian parlor game:

Your favourite virtue ... Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man ... Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman ... Weakness
Your chief characteristic ... Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness ... To fight
Your idea of misery ... Submission
The vice you excuse most ... Gullibility
The vice you detest most ... Servility
Your aversion ... Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation ... Book-worming
Favourite poet ... Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer ... Diderot
Favourite hero ... Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine ... Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower ... Daphne
Favourite colour ... Red
Favourite name ... Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish ... Fish
Favourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto
Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/04/01.htm

On 5/10/10 8:34 PM, Stuart Levy wrote:
> On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 08:17:50PM -0500, Karen Medina wrote:
>> So I guess we can't include Mark Twain either then. Darn river.
>
> Dam(n) the river!  full speed ahead!
>
> We gotta include Twain.  If he can set half of Huckleberry Finn
> in Illinois, we can claim him.
>
> I think we should take the News-Gazette's
> rules as inspiration, not strait jackets.
>
>
> (I just had to look up the source of the quote,
> "I am human, so nothing human can be alien to me."
>> From Terence, in Rome, more than 2200 years ago.)
>

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