Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis
Posted by kovaiputhalvan on August 10, 2006
Was watching Troy on the TV as I attempted to hack. Interesting movie, that. I have mixed feelings towards the movie – I like it, and I hate it. Someone else seems to have the same opinion, for pretty much the same reasons – so I’ll be lazy and save myself some typing by pointing you, gentle reader, to Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
Update:Looks like ilium.scrump.net is on hiatus. Pity, there was good stuff there :(
If you have the time and the patience, I would point you elsewhere – to Homer’s Iliad, and to Virgil’s Aeneid. I myself have not read the Aeneid, but I’ve read the relevant parts of the Iliad – translated into modern day English, of course. The nice thing about classics is that they are available for cheap in paperback. Around a single Smiling Blue Gandhi or so. Which is infinitely cheaper than the single Smiling Green Gandhi or so that you would end up paying for the latest in trash – like the Blah Frenchie Coat, for instance.
Anyway, watching Troy set a few neurons firing in my brain, and for some strange reason I found myself thinking of Sir Nigel Hawthorne and Derek Fowlds, who played Sir Humphrey Appleby and Bernard Woolley in Yes, Minister. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why. A little head-scratching fired off a few neurons more, and I got it, at last.
There’s a Yes Minister episode which has Sir Humphrey correcting Bernard’s quote from Virgil. I forget the exchange, but I do remember the quote: Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.
A rough translation would be “Whatever it is, I fear Greeks even when they bear gifts“. This is Laocoon’s line in The Aeneid when he tries to prevent the Trojans from accepting the Greeks’ gift of a huge wooden horse.
You have to hand it to these Greek heroes – they have no pretentions of being noble. They live to eat, drink, make merry, womanize, scheme, and wage war, and they make no bones about it. They Just Did It, to paraphrase the catchline from the adverts for a certain brand of shoes. Nike, incidentally, was the Greek goddess of victory.
Anonymous said
The Yes Minister episode towhich you rfefer was when James Hacker was offered the position of “Transport Supremo”. Sir Arnold predicted Sir Humphrey would use the expression but, in the event it was Bernard who then mused at length on the similarity of the latin and Greek for Timeo.
kovaiputhalvan said
Thanks, anonymous :) You inspired me to google a little, and I came up with this from http://www.yes-minister.com:
Hacker: “Sir Mark thinks there may be votes in it. And if so, I don’t intend to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Sir Humphrey: “I put it to you Minister, that you are looking a Trojan Horse in the Mouth”
Hacker: “If we look closely at this gift horse, we’ll find it’s full of Trojans?”
This sparks off Bernard on an absolutely hilarious monologue:
Bernard: “If you had looked a Trojan Horse in the mouth, Minister, you would have found Greeks inside. Well the point is that it was the Greeks that gave the Trojan Horse to the Trojans, so technically it wasn’t a Trojan Horse at all, it was a Greek Horse. Hence the tag Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes which you recall is usually, and somewhat inaccurately translated as Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Or doubtless you would have recalled had you not attended the LSE. [...] No well, the point is, Minister, that just as the Trojan Horse was in fact Greek, what you describe as a Greek tag is in fact Latin. It’s obvious really, the Greeks would never suggest bewaring of themselves if one used such a participle, bewaring that is, and it is clearly Latin, not because Timeo ends in ‘o’, because the Greek first person also ends in ‘o’. Though actually, there is a Greek word called Timao meaning I honour. But the ‘os’ ending is a nominative singular termination of the second declension in Greek, and an accusative plural in Latin of course, though actually Danaos is not only the Greek for Greek but also the Latin for Greek, it is very interesting really.”
Yuan said
Hi, just wanted to let you know that while ilium.scrump.net will never return and it’s instead going to be integrated into my personal blog. I’ve created a section for it at http://zade.scrump.net/ilium and will continue to post mythology related tidbits there.