In the Great Hall of Memory --- In aula ingenti memoriae My teachers in Classical studies 1949 - 1963
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In the Great Hall of Memory --- In aula ingenti memoriae
My teachers in Classical studies 1949 - 1963
I am going to talk a bit about what I remember, and I hope I can avoid getting things mixed up. I have chosen as title In the Great Hall of Memory not in order to be amusing in any way by alluding to the Great Hall at the Academic Society, but because some of you probably know that St.Augustine used the expression in Book Ten of his Confessions (VIII 12-14). In it, he tells us how he calls forth his memories and then the memories come to him, but they are not the memories he wants to remember. So he waves them away “with the hand of his thought” and says: ‘No, I do not want to remember you,’ but he wants to call forth other memories instead.
Whenever I pass the Classical Department I say out loud to myself two lines from Ibsen’s Brand from the end of Act Four, ‘Only what is lost can be owned forever’. Sometimes it feels silly when I pass the department, but it has become a sort of mantra which I must repeat when I pass the building, for I so dislike the fact that this house has been expropriated by the Pufendorf Institute.
The reason that my subtitle has the date 1949 is that this was the year I started in the Latin class at Hälsingborg secondary grammar school for boys. Carl Stoltz was my teacher in Latin and later in Greek. We did Latin for four years and could then go on to read Greek in class three and four. This Carl Stoltz was the brother of the Stoltz who wrote Growing up in Ravlunda rectory. In 1929 Carl had defended his doctor’s thesis about the relative chronology in Plutarch’s parallel biographies; Albert Wifstrand (who was later to become my teacher) was his external opponent. That’s a funny subject, I thought, he must have got it from Claes Lindskog, the translator of Plato and student of Plutarch. I didn’t care a fig which biography was first, but perhaps it really does matter.
Anyway, Carl was a decent fellow, rather nervy, and he sat there on the slightly raised platform that we had in classrooms in those days, and as soon as we were to read poetry, he tapped his foot a little. Somehow we had heard that this Carl was a Christian humanist. I don’t know who thought of that expression, but we were reasonably well-educated humanists then in the Latin class, and Carl was certainly both a humanist and a Christian. He had been a teacher in Eksjö earlier, but now it was Hälsingborg 1949.
All the books Carl used in teaching were interleaved; he had written down exactly what he was going to say, so he said the same things every year and even the jokes were jotted down there on the interleaved pages. Obviously this made no difference to us who had not heard them before, but he thought that his pupils neither heard or saw anything; but of course we did.
In the summer between L3 and L4 I was in Soest in Westphalia on a kind of young people’s exchange programme, ‘Experiment in International Living’, and I had got it into my head that in the autumn of 1952 I didn’t want to read Plato’s Crito but the Apology of Socratesinstead. In a bookshop in Soest I had found a small Greek edition of the apology. It was from the war and there were small thin bits of wood in the paper; paper with no trace of wood did not exist in 1952. I took the book home with me and showed it to Carl and asked if we couldn’t read the apology instead of Crito, and he agreed. There was a commentary by Ingemar Düring, professor in Gothenburg, but at the time there was no published edition of the text. And I think it meant a lot to Carl to read a totally new text which he had never used before in his teaching.
I kept in touch with him in Lund until he died. Among other things I told him he should buy Zerwick’s Philological Analysis of the New Testament. I said it is so practical, you don’t have to look up certain words in St.Paul and so on. You get it ready-made, so to speak. And he bought it, too, in Latin (Analysis Philologica Novi Testamenti) I used it at school in Lund in the English translation, but Carl bought it in Latin. Finally Carl grew old like the rest of us and ended up in a senior home north of Hälsingborg and ended his days in depression and pessimism. He told me, when I came to see him, that his teaching had been meaningless. He had been teaching large groups of boys Latin for years though all but a few were not interested in learning Latin. He wiped out all he had done.
I passed my ‘studentexamen’ (A levels) on May 13th 1953, and in those days there was also a viva. I was examined in Philosophy, Swedish and Greek. In Swedish the external examiner was a teacher from the training college in Lund whom I actually quarelled with because he claimed to know something about Hjalmar Gullberg’s book of poems Death-mask and Paradisewhich had been published a few months earlier. I did not agree. It got rather embarrassing for the teacher of Swedish, Gösta Glad. In Philosophy and Greek Albert Wifstrand was the external examiner, and of course I did not know at the time that Wifstrand was much hated by the professor of literature, Olle Holmberg. I had no idea. And that in his book In Praise of Swedish Novels Olle Holmberg had written what he probably thought was an excellent satire of Albert Wifstrand in the chapter ’The Memoirs of Schoolmaster Chronschough’. What I am going to read from Olle Holmberg is aimed at Albert Wifstrand.
From a student’s examination at a university in Southern Sweden we hear that the external examiner, learned scholar and long-standing candidate for the Swedish Academy, was irritated by the way the candidate Petterson used the Swedish language, which led to the following exchange:
Examiner: Do you know what people who do not speak dialect are called?
Petterson: Well, they would be classy people, wouldn´t it?
Examiner (sharply) No, Mr. Petterson, educated people!
It is part of the story that Wifstrand all his life spoke with a marked Blekinge (Southern Swedish) accent, that he had refused election to the Swedish Academy and that he spoke about the word Education in a talk in 1955 (Holmberg’s book was published in 1957), and that Wifstrand was probably the most all-round well-read of all the university professors in the Humanities. He was morerover a church-goer, something that no doubt exasperated the agnostic Holmberg. Wifstrand had also refused the bishopric of Lund.
In my book When the Ancient Gods Died (2012), which there are at present only ten copies left of, and which is being published in a second edition this year by the Artos Publishing House, I have written about my ‘studentexamen’, and I cannot do better than read out what I wrote there.
In Greek and Philosophy the Lund professor of Greek, Albert Wifstrand, was the external examiner. His reputation for being strict had preceded him. When an examination was in Swedish he would ask the examining teacher to put a question such as ‘Swedish 17th century drama. You could start with the Disa of Messenius.’
I have forgotten what happened when my group was examined in Greek, but I still remember the question set in Philosophy: ‘The history of Materialist Philosophy’. The only thing I positively remember was the title of a book: Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus. Not much to hang up one’s exam on! But I must have passed in one way or another because afterwards Wifstrand said to me in the hall, in an accent which I only later taught myself to recognize as Southern Swedish, ‘Well, perhaps I shall see you in Lund in some terms.
Yes, thank you. Me, in Lund, in some terms. I can still taste the words. They vibrated in me just like some words in the posthumous poems of magister ludi Josef Knecht in Hesse’s Glasperlenspiel :‘In allem was wir neu beginnen wohnt ein Zauber inne’ –' In everything we begin anew there is magic power’.
What Wifstrand meant by ‘in some terms’ was of course that I should read Latin before coming to him in Greek. And so it was to be. The professor of Latin was Bertil Axelson, who rivalled Nils Holmer, Licentiate of Philosophy and professor of Sanscrit and Comparative Linguistics, and Hugo Odeberg, the New Testament exegete, as the most excentric professor in Lund. Axelson (with a single ´s´ which his brother Sigge didn’t have; their father was a consul in Hälsingborg called Axel Olsson; their mother was, if I remember correctly, the sister of Martin P. Nilsson’s mother) had an advantage over the two others: he slept in the daytime and was up at night. Kristina, a good friend of mine and Margareta’s (my wife-to-be who was also studying Latin) had her B.A. examination postponed until 11 o’clock in the evening. Even Axelson realized the following day that something was wrong and had a huge cake sent home to Kristina from Lundagård's confectioners.
My own study of Latin began on the first Monday in September 1953 at a quarter past five p.m.
In those days it was common for the older students to stand on the second floor of the Classical Department to see the newcomers coming up the stairs at ten past five. So there I came along with my good friend from Hälsingborg Bertil Cavallin, and it must have been the first time Margareta saw me and Bertil. There was a very lively social and platonic life at the Classical Department in those days. Especially in the basement cafeteria, where at any time coffee was drunk and light lunches eaten and we enjoyed one another’s company. The 50s was a strange time. Quite unpolitical, so to speak. We were not directly politically conscious either (even though the keynote was safely conservative). True, there was all this rumpus about the atomic bomb, but that was some time ago. The world was not so difficult as it is today. We could enjoy our friendships and devote our time above all to our studies in peace and quiet.
Professor Axelson had announced that he would be lecturing on Minucius Felix Octavius. Just like that, ‘Minucius Felix Octavius’ it said in the catalogue of lectures which we could pick up on a chair to the left of the main entrance to the university hall (over this door Greek letters in gold spelt out (and still do) MEDEN AMOUSON, lit. “nothing un-Muselike”permitted in this hall). To me it was even then a reminder that I had chosen the right subject to study: classics.
Lectures lasted exactly 45 minutes and went on continuously until the last Monday before Christmas. This is how it went: The professor would read out the beginning of the text (about 20-25 lines). I remember thinking how beautifully he read Latin! After that there was a premeditated (perhaps learnt by heart) translation at full speed. Then it was time for the first emendation (or conjecture). Perhaps other words were used. We had done Latin for four years at school and should know some! (An emendation is an improvement of the original manuscript so that something incomprehensible becomes comprehensible. The one who emends guesses what the author wrote instead of the incomprehensible passage in the manuscript. When you read a modern newspaper today you sometimes have to make obvious emendations, especially when the proof-reader is noticeable for his or her absence.)
It was not until much later that I realized that Axelson, who like myself had passed his ‘studentexamen’ at Hälsingborg grammar school for boys, while still at school had acquired a copy of the philosopher Seneca’s prose works (contemporaneous with the letters of St. Paul) and even when he was still at school made so many emendations to the text that they were more than enough and could be used in his doctoral thesis Studies in Seneca.
I had not noted any emendations at school, however, and neither had my good friend Bertil, and it was probably November before the point of the lectures dawned on us and we realized that the professor thought the Octavius of Minucius Felix was not the earliest apologetical text in Latin, that was the Apologeticum of Father Tertullianus. It transpired that the professor had written a book about this ticklish so-called priority question but unfortunately forgotten to mention it to us students. In November my friend Bertil started to put his lecture notes together and after Christmas he showed me a typed compendium of professor Axelson’s lectures (which incidentally went on in the spring term). I was actually immensely impressed by Bertil’s compendium. Now we were both on our way to becoming true scholars, the champions of Classical philology in a world blind to the more endurable humanist values. Those were the days!
I had Axelson in translation from Swedish to Latin, and this is how it went: Axelson would read out a sentence and we had to write it down in Swedish. Then he would say: Will Mr Rydbeck please step up to the blackboard and translate this into Latin. You might have thought that these sentences would have been available on a stencil but Axelson could not manage that, only two or three copies with carbon paper on his little typewriter. It was the only way of copying that he knew. I had got to know Margareta by then and she always used to say how paralysed with fear she was the first time she was faced with this procedure. That was roughly two years before me. Then Axelson would read out a sentence to be translated, and this was the sentence: ‘The soldiers’ swords were small.’ Would Miss Eurenia (Eurenius was her surname!) please go up to the blackboard and write the translation? Margareta says her mind went blank, she simply couldn’t think. But we both gradually got used to this unusual system.
We would not have passed the so-called essay or composition (translation of unseen text from Swedish into Latin) if it had not been for a teacher of Latin at the institution called Sven Lundström. He was a secondary school teacher at the Cathedral School. Axelson called him his military tribunal, his tribunus militum. Axelson would often put his empties outside Lundström’s door, so when Lundström came in the morning there would be a whole row of wine-bottles which he had to get rid of before he could get into his study. He was a decent fellow in his own way, this Lundström. He was made professor of Latin at Uppsala instead of Gerhard Bendz whom Axelson thought lazy. Through Lundström I got to know Menge’s Reptitorium der Lateinischen Syntax, and even taught myself to find my way around in the eighth edition of Ahlberg’s Latin grammar. Axelson used it too, but he couldn’t find things in it. When in class he tried to refer to something in the grammar, he couldn’t find the word in question. Lundström was a bit funny in the way he took it for granted that in due course his pupils would end up teaching Latin and Greek at secondary school level. Every autumn term he read out the names of all senior masters and other teachers who had died since last autumn, so we should know where we might be expected to end up. Rather a morbid way of thinking, surely.
I think that Axelson in some way thought that everybody was more stupid than he himself, and perhaps they really were. But one doesn’t have to show it. He also held us students in contempt in the matter of Roman literary history. He had chosen a book called Klotz Römische Litteraturgeschichte, and that book was so terribly naïve that it beggars description. And later he would ask if the book mentioned the example ‘Fenestella was an eager collector’ (and no more), then he asked who Fenestella was, and the only thing one could (and should) answer was that he was an eager collector. Then Bertil and I asked if we could read Eduard Norden’s Roman literary history, but then he called us literary aesthetes. Rumour had it that we were conceited in some peculiar way.
When one had got past ‘the soldiers’ swords were small’, to make it all a bit more fun, I think, one was allowed to translate Axelson’s own comedian-like memoirs, and they might for example be about how the priestess Brunius used to bathe naked at Lomma, and the only help one got in a note was that Lomma is declined like Roma. I remember especially one passage where he satirized his predecessor in the chair of Latin, Einar Löfstedt. We were to translate into Latin: ‘In one of his most beautiful May 1st speeches Rector Magnificus discussed the question whether it would be just as pleasant to be alive if the sky had been green and the trees blue (...aeque bonum esset vivere si caelum viride et arbores caeruleae fuerint). Both Margareta and I got on well with Axelson, and I think Axelson was almost too fond of Margareta, because she was astonished at a lot of happenings that were properly speaking pleasant. When she once said that she couldn’t listen to the news because she had no wireless , next day there was at the department a fine new set from Axelson. When she posted a notice saying she had lost her gloves and asking if anyone had found them, next day there was a pair of gloves on the institution’s notice-board. Such pleasant and amusing things happened.
Axelson was an eminent scholar, we realized that early on, and above all in the publication he had written as his professional specimen (he became a professor in 1945). It was called Unpoetische Wörter. There is a very good poem about Axelson’s Unpoetische Wörter in Jesper Svenbro’s book On hearing that the Santo Bambino di Aracoeli was finally stolen by the mafia’. Jesper’s talent for observation and expression far outshine my own. So I quote:
Impossible to get close to, ironical,/ with no talent/ for Marxist navigation/ Bertil Axelson was firmly at the Latin helm./ His shyness was proverbial:/ it gave him an almost inherent aversion/ to the popular movement where feelings ran high in the sixties/ and made him look forward to his retirement/ with a feeling of relief. /We were very few students./ At the end of every lecture/ he quietly turned off the light there at the front/ and was already out into the autumn dark, under the stars,/ before we as much as looked up.
This expression Unpoetische Wörter is very interesting. For example, Horace has been studied intensively ever since the renaissance, of course, but Axelson discovered that in some of Horace’s poems there were words that were inadmissible in poetry. Prosaic words, in fact. Prosaic words that only belonged in prose. In a well-known poem of Horace’s (1:5), which tells how ‘Horace’ was wrecked in the ocean of Love, Horace ends with the poor man hanging up his vestments to the mighty sea god. ’Vestimenta’ was inadmissible in poetry. There one uses words like ‘amictus’. The prosaic ‘vestimenta’ in Horace’s poem almost means ‘shabby rags’ and the reader, i.e. Axelson for the first time, will give a surprised start. I don’t know how it can happen that nobody from the renaissance until the year 1945 discovered what Bertil Axelson discovered, namely that there are unpoetic words with a special stylistic effect in Horace’s poems. And of course not only in Horace!
When Svenbro wrote the poem he did not know that Axelson himself had suffered shipwreck on the sea of love. He had fathered a son with a student who had a temporary job as a waitress at the Storkällaren (the University restaurant), and he supported that son economically all his life. But this only transpired much later.
He could also be very spiteful. I heard from Claes Schaar, who was professor of English in Lund, that once when he and Axelson were having a drink at the Industry (the ‘Industry’ Restaurant in Broad Street). Ivar Harrie and Bo Strömstedt from the evening paper Expressen came by and then Schaar, who only knew Harrie by sight, said to Axelson: ‘Would you please introduce me to Dr. Harrie?’ Then Axelson says to Schaar: ‘That man is not somebody you want to get to know.’ And that was particularly spiteful because the day after Unpoetische Wörter was published Expressen ran a glowing full-page review of it, written by Harrie. Ivar Harrie was really somebody, even though like Axelson he was too fond of a drink. The best translations we have of Horace are in Harrie´s book Horace the Poet.
When Margareta and I got engaged, that was in 1955, we had a brief note from Axelson consisting of a quotation from one of Catullus’s long poems, a wedding poem which was not otherwise part of the curriculum, and if I translate it he had only written ‘Play as you please and have children soon.’ (Ludite, ut lubet, et brevi liberos date). So he must have liked us. In my BA viva I was examined by him on Tacitus (Germanicus in Egypt), and it went well. Then he examined me on Horace’s 16th epode, and I had actually read the article he had written about a line there, but he didn’t like it at all when I insisted that it was a good interpretation of the line. The he shook his head and said: now let’s translate. And this is probably the strangest thing I have been a party to, because he then said: Translate ‘Hope you will come tomorrow.’ And it was the same thing orally, I was just to say it in Latin and then he had the habit of pretending not to understand. And I began: Spero te cras... Axelson looked at me silently as if not understanding. But gradually I realized that he meant I should have taken ‘hope’ to be an imperative, I should have said ’spera!’, but in my picture of the universe there was no ‘hope’ in the imperative. I couldn’t believe one could order or admonish someone to hope. Perhaps one can in Latin. This was in the beginning of February 1955, and I wasn’t due to start reading Greek before the autumn of that year. And that term was simply wonderful, I heard lectures by all the famous professors in Lund; Olle Holmberg, Algot Werin, Hans Ruin, Ragnar Josephson, Martin P Nilsson ... This last name reminds me: I think I am the only one left in Lund (in Sweden perhaps?) who has heard him give a lecture. He lived almost opposite All Saints’ Church, his apartment was part of the seminar on comparative religion which was monitored by Erland Ehnmark. Martin P. Nilsson was introduced by Erland and understandingly he talked a lot about Ancient Greek mythology and Modern Greek folklore. If I remember correctly his lecture has been published by “The Friends of Athens” in their Hellenika.
Margareta and I were formally engaged in the spring of 1955, more precisely on April 18th at the Triangle, where there is now a shop, Klotet. I have described this in detail in chapter 1 of When the Ancient Gods Died.
And then my Greek studies began. Wifstrand’s classes were down in the university building, on the second floor when you climbed the stairs on the right. In the course of my studies (1955-1957) he talked on ‘Antiquity and the 18th century’ and on ‘John Chrysostom and His Age’. When Christmas 1955 was approaching I heard afterwards that he asked the licentiate Jonas Palm to take over so that Wifstrand himself could have his sabbatical in the spring. And Jonas Palm got his doctorate, just before Christmas 1955, so I had him as my teacher during the spring term. It was not exactly what I had had in mind. Under Palm, who later became professor of Greek at Uppsala, we read The Clouds of Aristophanes and The Poetics of Aristoteles. We also had Palm in essay-writing or composition but it was not Wifstrand’s way of teaching composition classes. Palm would take a passage of Greek, e.g. a bit from Plutarch or the like, and translate it into Swedish, and then we were to translate it back into Greek. He had the upper hand, he had the right solution, so to speak. I didn’t think it at all a good idea, when I began to understand how it worked.
In June 1957 I was examined by Wifstrand for my BA degree at the same time as Margareta was examined by the archaeologist Einar Gjerstad in Classical Archaeology and the History of Antquity. It was Gjerstad’s last examination as active professor in Lund. Margareta was examined by him at his home in Filippavägen. He was wearing tails and a white shirt with braces, as he was going to some University function. Margareta passed with distinction. Classical Antiquity was her subject. She had already discovered interesting things about the buildings under the Erecththeion on the Acropolis.
We married in the summer. In the autumn of 1957 Margareta began teaching at a secondary grammar school and I spent 57/58 studying up the immense Classical Archaeology and Antique History. In those days there was something called the Handbook for Students in Humanities at the University of Lund. It had all the subjects and examination requirements. Very interesting reading, but unfortunately I have not been able to find my copy of 1953. I have a later edition from 1960. Requirements for Classical Archaeology and Antique History were pretty stiff. When one got to the Classical Department one was advised to attend classes in Archaeology; the teacher was Erik Welin, who demonstrated how the so-called copying of inscriptions was done. You covered the inscription with a substance of some sort, then you placed a sheet of paper on it and then when you carefully pulled the paper off you could read these inscriptions. Then there was something I found very strange at the time: the interpretation of Greek vases. What was the motif on a Greek vase? Even if you knew the vase represented something, e.g. Dionysos and Ariadne, you shouldn’t say so. You should forget all you already knew and describe the figures and what you could see on the vase; like saying you saw a man turning to the left and holding something odd in his left hand, could it be a pomegranate ... and things like that. You shouldn’t say what it was even though you knew.
I also took classes given by Erwin Roos, who had a very antiquarian turn of mind. He had written his thesis on the comedies of Aristophanes as caricatures, I suppose one could say. Wifstrand did not appreciate Roos’s research, for some reason. I didn’t know it at the time, but I understood it later. Roos lectured on all the antiquarian things he could unearth in Horace, all the strange things that are mentioned in Horace’s poems which really have nothing to do with poetry. He used a commentary by the Frenchman Plessis. Even the most abstruse things were explained. I remember those classes with interest, and Roos’s interests were certainly peculiar. As far as I know he later wrote about instruments of torture in Antiquity. Nobody else would pick such a subject at the Classical Department.
I was examined for the Licentiate degree by Wifstrand in November 1963, it was the day after Kennedy’s murder. (By the way, Lyndon B. Johnson looked just like the emperor Vespasian. Wifstrand’s comment after the exam was: ‘He may grow as a person with his new office.’). I think the exam went on for at least 6 hours. And one of the important questions for Wifstrand was of course the question of literary scholarship. So I had to explain the mythology of heroes. How the heroes were used in Greek literature, from the beginning with Homer through the Hellenistic period and far into the time of the emperors. Well, in principle until Wifstrand realized that I could get no further. My knowledge had been quite exhausted and not until then did we stop. I remember also I was shown a letter from Julian (i.e. the Apostate) and suddenly it was 3 o’clock, because we had no breaks, we didn’t go down and have a cup of coffee or anything like that, we just kept on. But then I realized that he hadn’t asked about Pindar, and I had read two books of his odes. ‘Well, would you like me to ask you about Pindar?’ But suddenly he said’ No, we’ll call it a day now’, and I had passed my exam.
In the autumn term of 1958 I was called up, and I was stationed at the Malmö Naval Surveillance, in the so-called Thestrup House. I went to Wifstrand’s seminars for senior students on and off, and turned up in naval uniform. Do you remember what they looked like, with that collar thing at the back? It caused a bit of a sensation at the department and I was rather ashamed of it. I felt silly, but I couldn’t change into anything else. It was an interesting year, it was then they discovered an entire comedy by Menander which Harrie translated for the radio series about classical drama. Harrie translated the title of the comedy Dyskolos (The Misanthrope) as ‘What an old Grouch. It was great fun reading a Greek text which had no translation, you only had the Greek. By and by there were editions, of course, but what we accomplished in the form of emendations could certainly be compared to what was accomplished in the rest of the world (OCT, Teubner, Budé). It was great fun, and useful., too.
The last seminar Wifstrand gave was in January 1964; we did not know he was ill, he had got cancer. We were going to read Aristotle’s Politics. But it ended up as one seminar with a brief introduction by Wifstrand.
In the spring of 1964 I went Hamburg for the second time to study with Bruno Snell and Hartmut Erbse; I was only occasionally at home. I remember visiting Wifstrand at the old Surgical Hospital, and that I had a present with me: Walther von der Vogelweide’s ‘minnepoems’ in a pocket edition from Fischer Bücherei. The second time I was there I asked him if had enjoyed reading Walther von der Vogelweide. ‘Yes, it was interesting, and I have tried to translate him into Sapphic verse (my note: Greek, of course)´. I have often asked his widow if the translations still exist, but she has been unable to find them. The pocketbook with Walther’s ‘minnepoems’ were given back to me after Mailice’s death.
In the middle of the 50s the Greek Antonis Mystakidis came to Lund; Margareta and I went to all the classical classes we could find the time to. We learnt a lot of modern Greek from him, and Wifstrand helped him to get a teaching position, which was divided between Lund and Copenhagen, so that he was in Lund every second year and every second in Copenhagen. He was not only a teacher of modern Greek, he was a great cultural personality. He created a series of books where he translated Edith Södergran, some of Wifstrand’s Swedish articles and the Danish scholar Billeskov Jensen into modern Greek. I got so far that I started to read Myrivilis “I Panagia I Gorgona” with him, which I did for a month or two, but later something turned up, and we got no further.
In 1962 Mystakidis published a reader in modern Greek. He had his own ideas about what modern Greek was like. They are not quite the same as the ideas a number of Greeks have today, but I had nothing against his view of the relationship between the language spoken in the streets and the learned language, dimotiki versus kathareuousa. In the autumn of 1962 Margareta was teaching Greek at the secondary grammar school in Landskrona, substituting for Gerhard Bendz who had never taken up the post he had been offered. Among her pupils were Jesper Svenbro and Lars-Håkan Svensson. She invited Antonis Mystakidis to come and talk about modern Greek to the pupils, and several decades later our master of memoirs, Svenbro, writes a poem about that double period in Landskrona. And I thought I would recite that poem. It is called ‘The Spring’ and is in the Bambino.
In the course of a double period in the upper school/ Antonis Mystakidis explained/ in his exact, sunny Swedish / -I remember his sunburnt face at the teacher’s desk,/ the reflection from his glasses,/ his squat Greek figure/ the difference between people’s everyday language and kathareuousa/ (the language of the Church and the Authorities./ He seemed to be driven by an enthusiasm/which we not met before/but in spite of his standpoint in favour of the language of the people/ he could see its relationship to ‘Atticism’/ as a dynamic difference, a resource./ For a moment he stumbled over the words/ and said the people of the language/ where we pupils expected /the language of the people./ He was hardly aware of it himself./ I have often thought about his slip./ What did it mean in his own perspective/ where he lived in his exiled life buried/ in the great stream of language? What was it that made us / start at his mistake?/ It is no longer possible to ask Antonis Mystakidis the question./ But I still have one of his books,/ his reader in modern Greek from the same year I met him.
Incidentally, this reader from 1962 was printed in the same way and with the same cover as the grammar Margareta used in teaching, Severin Solder’s Greek school grammar. (Again a quotation from Svenbro’s ‘The Spring’):
He (i.e. Mystakidis) expresses his grammatic example with the precision of a lyrical poet -/ but unsigned. Hear/ how simply he expresses his exile:/ The road is long. The sea is deep. I leave with a heavy heart./ That is literally what it says on page 57:/ the example is about the declination of certain adjectives./ I took the book with me when I went to Greece./ Now that I see its green shirting/ with letters in gold it is as if I was sitting/ by the spring in an ancient olive grove/ on the hillside beneath Delphi./ It is noon, we have sought shade under the trees,/ the water in the marble trough is shimmering./ I must have had his book in my satchel,/ his moss-green book, the same shade of green/ as the moss round the clear water,/ Greece’s hidden stream from Delphi above./ Apollo’s city in the sunlight up there!/ And in the green moss/ the book’s title and its author in gold:/ a ray of sunshine has unexpectedly found its way through the network of leaves/ and makes the text shine./ ’The water of the spring was clear as chrystal’,/ it says on the page I opened the book at./ Here all the words in the language that were his are shining./ Here all the words in him that were the language´s are shining./ Who now has become part of something greater, Language. /Who humbly imagined a life/ in the service of language/ susceptible to the currents/ in the deep, at the mercy of its lively movement/ in the mountain under the ground, before it reaches/ the light of day in the marble of the trough/ where the water merges, shines, ripples/ glistens on someone’s lips./ And hurries onward.
I shall just make brief mention of the teachers of Classical Archaeology and the History of Antiquity. There was Einar Gjerstad, who devoted his life to two things. Partly digging in Cyprus, where he was so to speak the master of Cyprian archaeology, and partly later, when he was older, exploring the earliest Rome, which he was doing when I was at the Classical Department. I have heard many say that Gjerstad was the last man who had turned over every stone on the Forum Romanum, and he wrote six enormous volumes about it. But strangely enough, in spite of his immense knowledge his conclusions were mistaken. So they have left no mark. For example, he wanted to date the foundation of Rome 525 B.C. It really is rather odd. Wifstrand helped Gjerstad to get a personal professorship so he could finish this work. And instead of Gjerstad Krister Hanell came to Lund, and he was the examiner in my finals. Krister was a delightful person. Possibly a little lazy (late in life; he must be forgiven). He was very hard to anticipate at an examination. I remember my own exam started by him looking at me and saying: What is the name of the harbour of Corinth? The funny thing is that I don’t remember whether I answered correctly or not, it is actually Cenchreae.
Even when I was writing my thesis, later on, I occasionally attended all kinds of interesting classes. I followed Wifstrand’s class on drama, he had hoped to get through all the classical plays, but he did not manage to. He had chosen the Ajax of Sophocles, it was a memorable term, I now realize.
The last teacher I want to mention actually came to Lund from Uppsala in the autumn of 1963 after he had fallen out with Professor Lundström. He now lives in Lund after his retirement. His name is Alf Önnerfors. He brought something new with him. It was lectures like his that I went to out of pure inclination, pure interest. He was the first teacher to introduce sexuality into his classes. Who made it clear to me and the others how upper-class boys in Rome lived, with free access to slave girls, and how Roman married women had young slaves at their beck and call, etc., etc. Önnerfors recommended a book I have found very useful: Lyne, Roman Love Poetry as far as I remember. Önnerfors was a breath of fresh air. He was a fitting drinking companion for Axelson, who did not treat him at all kindly. Önnerfors soon left Lund and was made professor of Late Latin Philology in Berlin. We met there a few times. He ended his active German life in Trier. He applied for the professorship after Lundström in Uppsala and I cannot understand why the Latinists in Uppsala opposed and slandered him.
I am approaching the end of my story and intend to finish by translating one of the poems of Catullus which I am very fond of. It is easy to understand and at the same time it is a work of art. It is, naturally, about Catullus and Lesbia.
‘You once said, Lesbia, that you only knew Catullus and would not even prefer to have Jupiter in your arms rather than me. I loved you very much then, but not in the way an ordinary man of the people loves his girlfriend, but as a father loves his sons and sons-in-law. But now I know you. So even though my passion for you is even greater, I hold you much more in contempt, you have become less valuable. How can that be? you ask. Why, because such infidelity forces the lover to desire his beloved even more, but to be much less fond of her.’
How elegantly Catullus brings out the difference between ‘to desire sexually’ (amare) and the feeling ‘to like’, more difficult to define, (bene velle)! They still say in Italian ‘ti voglio bene’ as distinct from ‘ti amo’.
In May 20000 Margareta and I wrote a brief article for LUM (Lund’s university magazine). It is a short nostalgic article. I will round off by reciting it, for it sums up quite well what I have tried to say today. The title is an allusion:
End of saga about Classical Department and Museum of Antiquities
In the house at 2, Sölvegatan, a plaque in the lower hall of sculpture bears witness to the fact that it was there the physicist Janne Rydberg once ’laid the foundation of our knowledge about the structure of atoms.’ And it was there, fifty years ago, that archaeologists and philologists of world repute worked: Einar Gjerstad and Krister Hanell, Bertil Axelson, Sven Lundström, and Gerhard Bendz, Albert Wifstrand. Their nearest predecessors, Martin P. Nilsson and Einar Löfstedt (both rectores magnifici!), who both worked elsewhere in Lund until Gjerstad opened the house at 2, Sölvegatan, in the autumn term of 1951, belong forever to the study of Greek religion and Latin syntax. It is this house and all the work being done in it that is now seriously threatened.
Most humanist and theological subjects are today targeted by economy measures (and this was 18 years ago!) which are easier to launch than meet directly. Humanists and theologians do not find it quite as easy as the representatives of so-called hardware subjects to answer the embarrassing questions put by the representatives of trade and industry: ‘What are you actually good at? What does a professor of the history of ideas and knowledge actually do?’ Showing how man has through the ages sought for ways to give meaning and tenability to his own life is not the kind of answer they are looking for. When did Lennart Nilsson, who at the time was chairman of the university administration, last put the question to a professor of mathematics: ‘What are you really good at?’
The future for classical subjects in Lund is dire indeed. The archaeologist Einar Gjerstad’s magnificent idea, going back to Martin P. Nilsson’s days, to merge the study of the classical languages with the study of classical history and material culture in the same house and same library is under threat of abolishment.
Oh, how we loved that library at 2, Sölvegatan. It is difficult to explain to an outsider what it has meant to the two us who are writing these lines to go every morning to the seminar library at the Classical Department surrounded by this fantastic students’ museum consisting of the foremost pieces of ancient sculpture. Merely plaster casts, some would protest. We reply that this artificial metamorphosis in some way has made the classical art our own.
The link between the three subjects seemed obvious fifty years ago and should be so even today. It manifested itself in the common seminar library. There, in the early 1950s, we now and then had a visit from Martin P. Nilsson who threw his crutches on the table and grumbled out loud, sometimes swearing at what he saw as total disorder.
If we do not care about what those who once represented our subjects wanted to create, who will then in the future care about what we accomplish today? We must bear in mind the visions of our predecessors. This is our humanist credo. It is our hope that the university administration will decide in June that young undergraduates wishing to read Classical languages and Classical culture and society (as the subject has been renamed) have a united Classical Department to begin their studies at. (As we now know, this did not happen).
Margareta Eurenius Rydbeck
Lars Rydbeck
…who both once read Latin, Greek and Ancient History/Archaeology at the Classical Institute in the University of Lund
Talk given 13th October 2014 for “The Friends of Athens”, at The Language and Literature Centre, Lund, by Lars Rydbeck, Reader in New Testament Philology and the Greco-Roman ´Umwelt´ of the New Testament
Translators of the talk:
Dr. phil. Lis Christensen, Copenhagen and Professor Lars-Håkan Svensson, Lund
Jesper Svenbro, whose poems I quote, is a poet and a classicist and member of the Swedish Academy
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