mens sana in sana corpore

Juvenal, Satura X. (As a note, ‘satire’ is one meaning that comes from the word. It originally meant a specific poetic verse form.)

It is to be prayed that the mind be sound in a sound body.

Ask for a brave soul that lacks the fear of death,

which places the length of life last among nature’s blessings,

which is able to bear whatever kind of sufferings,

does not know anger, lusts for nothing and believes

the hardships and savage labors of Hercules better than

the satisfactions, feasts, and feather bed of an Eastern king.

I will reveal what you are able to give yourself;

For certain, the one footpath of a tranquil life lies through virtue.

orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.

fortem posce animum mortis terrore carentem,

qui spatium uitae extremum inter munera ponat

naturae, qui ferre queat quoscumque labores,

nesciat irasci, cupiat nihil et potiores

Herculis aerumnas credat saeuosque labores

et uenere et cenis et pluma Sardanapalli.

monstro quod ipse tibi possis dare; semita certe

tranquillae per uirtutem patet unica uitae.

Note that orare is to ask, pray or remember and that orandum is more, to me, not so much ‘it is to be prayed’ but ‘remember’ or ‘pray’ or ‘ask’. You see the word ‘oracle’ in there as well as words like memorandum. By this, I mean we take Latin and make it passive but the language is actually active, made for the ultimate active people who placed action at the heart of what it means to be a person. This always bothers me about translations. (And my Latin is terrible these days.) I always use basic tests like arma virumque cano, the first line of Virgil’s Aeneid. It is usually translated as I sing (cano) of arms and the man, but the word order is important to a Roman and that says ‘of weapons and the man I sing’. I prefer the word ‘weapons’ because arma refers to what you use to fight and kill, to what you bear as weapons. To me, a Roman would hear that specifically as the Roman active man who takes up weapons as a Roman and that comes first. The typical translation puts the narrator first. I’ve just been looking at a new book of Caesar. It’s excellent but it translates the famous first line something like ‘Gaul, taken as a whole, is divided into three parts’. The actual is simply omnia Gallia est divisa in tres partes, literally ‘all Gaul is divided in 3 parts’. There’s no need to fuck with that.

Juvenal’s actual meaning is very Roman: you want to be an active Roman with an active mind doing active things in service of your life. The reference to Hercules is specific: your life is a labor to make yourself as a person, to aid Rome, to do and to think. It is a command that you should remember and pray and ask to be an active person doing what you can with your mind and body. That is your charge. You can’t be Hercules because Hercules was a demi-God, but you can do what you can do. That way of thinking made Rome great. Turning it into a passive ‘it is to be’ wrecks it.You almost have to read it as ‘Remember it is to be sound mind in sound body’ with the implied ‘you are’ as a command. Romans often used a neuter ‘it’ or third person to implicitly say ‘you’. They talked about stuff knowing that people would hear what was meant. That’s how Cicero ended up with his hands cut off and nailed to the door of the Senate.

Another layer of Roman meaning is that a person has limits and should be regarded for making the most of them. That carries to the disabled: if you can’t fight for yourself and for Rome with your body, then fight for yourself and for Rome with your mind. You can’t all be great but you can be the best of what you are. I sometimes think your obsessions with helping the disabled is meant to cover up, to excuse, to justify your own inability to realize your potential. You can’t really help them until you help yourself. This leads me to a remark: it’s too bad the Jewish fundamentalists couldn’t get along with the Imperial need to express Roman-ness with at least a veneer of religion. And it’s too bad the Emperors couldn’t understand what Jesus said but in reverse, that it would be good if the state kept to its sphere and religion kept to its. Neither can in fact compromise because neither knows its role, with each trying to impose its will on the other. There is speculation perhaps 10% of the Roman Empire was Jewish, with higher numbers in the cites of the east. Rome itself was perhaps 10% Jewish.

This may surprise you but the people most like the Jews are actually the ancient Romans. Jews and Romans both do. Both look for practical solutions to fit the problems of the day. Both argue vociferously about direction because it is an obligation of a citizen to care and to articulate those cares and to make appeals. These similarities run very deep because the Roman Empire is the great exception to the rules: it was not religious because, bluntly, a pious Roman did what was necessary and thought doing more a sign you lacked the balance of mens sana, in sana corpore, and Rome at its height was not deeply dynastic but instead, in typical Roman fashion, ran a sham in which the emperor would identify a successor and would adopt him. The similarity is that Jews treat God as the unknowable and Romans did the same because they believed in some God represented by ‘the Gods’ but thought the specifics were stories and metaphors for that unnamed God. The former explicitly named the unknowable and the latter implicitly named it. The Jews name ‘commandments’, the mitzvot, while the Romans made it the subject of their art and culture. The real value is obvious: in sufficient numbers, you can create lasting prosperity and security.