On Thursdays I am a man of my word

[venta]

Spot question for the day:

Without googling, does the following phrase mean anything to anybody ?

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.

Comments

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

*astonished*

It is part of the inscription on Trajan's Column in Rome (which I have visited, but I used the photo behind that link). I chose it as a classic(al) serif letterform with an enormous influence on 'modern' typography.

Your chain of deductions is an impressive example of how classicists infer so much about the ancient world from sources which are so partial (in both senses).

[venta.livejournal.com]

Can I have half marks for visiting it in the V&A :)

In case it's of interest, there's a fantastically thorough-looking site dedicated to Trajan's Colum here (http://cheiron.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~trajan/).

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, I've used that site quite a bit, and often recommend it to my students. It's really cool, although it sadly doesn't have images of the entire column: just most of it!

[venta.livejournal.com]

doesn't have images of the entire column

Which is what I was looking for! I just wanted to check that the plaster cast in the V&A that I was thinking of was of the correct column.

(Google image search sorted me out.)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

The V&A definitely have casts of the whole thing, so I'm pretty sure you've seen it.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Indeed - the whole thing is an amazing monument to the Victorian vicotry of determination over sensibleness :)

Although the Victorian outlook did have some strange and terrible results overseas, there is also something rather splendid about a mindset that just can't grasp that there may be things it can't achieve.

My favourite example of this is the White Horse (http://www.mikekipling.com/yorkshire_moors/ky4033.htm) at Kilburn (that's N Yorks, not N London!) To celebrate Victoria's jubilee, someone decided to cut a white horse into the hillside.

Some impertinent local pointed out that, er, it wasn't actually, er, a chalk area, and so, er, a white horse wasn't possible.

They cut the white horse anyway, and it (still) gets whitewashed every year :)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

They were definitely people with high ideals, that's for sure.

The white horse story is great, although if I didn't know from you that it was real, I'd be yelling 'Photoshop' on seeing the particular picture you linked to.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Er, it does look a bit fake, doesn't it ? So does this one (http://www.lastrefuge.co.uk/images/html/aerials_UK_historical_sites/hill_figures/pages/AWDS_hill_figure028.htm) :(

It is real, though, honest, I've walked round it! And, if you accept teeny-tiny-white-blob-on-hills-over-there you can see if from trains running on the East coast mainline (look East about 15 minutes south of Darlington).

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

*astonished myself*

Now that I see the full text, I can see my deductions were more-or-less bang on, although I missed out Trajan's own adoption of the name 'Nerva'.

I can now date the inscription to precisely AD 112, and tell you that the last two lines of it (the bits I couldn't guess were there from your icon) say 'to show how high a mountain, and the site for such great works, had been cleared away'. It is probably a claim that the height of the column represents the height of a hill cleared away to build Trajan's forum, but scholars are a bit dubious about whether this is really true...

Guessing what I guessed from the section of the inscription I could see initially is actually a lot less hard than you might think, since imperial titles were very standardised, and most inscriptions start in very much the same way. But still, I'm proud of my deductions!

I also agree that the script here is absolutely beautiful: official inscriptions in this period are pretty much the apogee of ancient epigraphic technique.