My husband put one foot forward at an angle to the other and grasped his left hand with his right. ‘Occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros,’ he declaimed.
He was quoting Juvenal, the seventh satire (‘rehashed cabbage is the death of wretched teachers’), though I don’t think he could manage much more from any Juvenal satire, except perhaps ‘bread and circuses’, panem et circenses, from the tenth.
Boris Johnson was the object of his borrowed remark. Juvenal, speaking of the poor pay of literary men, came to the unprofitability of teaching rhetoric when pupils keep saying the same thing in the same words. I had thought, perhaps because I’d heard my husband say it – oh, a number of times – that crambe repetita was a widely familiar phrase. But even in 1893, the Oxford English Dictionary called crambe, the shorthand reference to Juvenal’s line, ‘obsolete’.
In telling his own life story, Thomas (not Tobias, the MP) Ellwood, an early Quaker who read to the blind Milton in Latin, referred to a book written against him as ‘a Hash of ill-cooked Crambe’.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in