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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
Comment on this article This friendly argument over Latin grammar, written in chalk under the High Street Bridge, might look at first like a vast improvement in tone over the usual campus graffiti.
But classics professor Kirk Freudenburg explains that the original graffito, “Optimates defloreantur,” is a sly off-color play on ancient Roman sloganeering. “It would mean ‘May the best flourish,’” says Freudenburg. “The trouble comes in casting it in the passive voice and adding that nasty little prefix ‘de-’. You thus have ‘May they be deflowered,’ as in ‘Screw the aristocrats.’” Adds Freudenburg, “In its own way, it’s just what one might have expected on a wall in ancient Pompeii, right down to the impossible grammar.” The caption accompanying the illustration doesn’t accurately capture the full history of the various chalk writings. In the original hand, the text reads simply “Optimates Floreant,” which matches Kirk Freudenburg’s translation of “May the best flourish.” Before anyone started writing the argumentative comments about grammar, someone else wrote in the four additional letters alluded to in Freudenberg’s comment: the change from the active to the passive voice (i.e., the ending “-ur”) and the added verbal prefix “de.” So what’s stated as the “original graffito” in lines 9 and 10 of the legend (the impetus for all the grammar arguments) is actually already an alteration of the true original graffito as first translated by Freudenburg. Though this seems a small point, the wording of the caption is thus a bit misleading and without the photographic evidence would not have made much sense.
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