A Sempiternal Superstition: For a Dislocated Joint, a Split Green Reed, and a Latin Charm

A SEMPITERNAL SUPERSTITION* FOR A DISLOCATED JOINT, A SPLIT GREEN REED, AND A LATIN CHARM WALTON BROOKS McDANIELI I The Italy of our own age still offers us great help in the interpretation and illustration of the private life of ancient Rome. This may seem a rather commonplace remark with which to begin a classical paper. Yet how few of our Latin scholars can claim to have any real intimacy with the customs, beliefs, and possessions of the ordinary people of Italy and the adjacent islands of Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia ; and, on the other hand, how few of the Italians and foreigners who have written the multitudinous descriptive works on these lands have been equipped with sound scholarly knowledge of antiquity. In the course of over half a century of experience as a teacher I have found almost nothing in our classical textbooks, commentaries, and manuals that bore witness to the author's having made any comparative study of the widely separated periods. What is more, during the years which I spent exploring all parts of Italy and Sicily in my search for parallels and survivals from ancient times, I almost never found a colleague who was traveling with the same set purpose which always possessed me. I state and stress this merely because I have derived so much profit and enjoyment from my investigations and study that * Reprinted with permission from The Classical Journal, vol. 45, nos. 4 and 5, January and February 1950. (Their footnote: The author of this paper, now one of the emeriti after long and distinguished service at the University of Pennsylvania and in the classical field, has had as one of his special interests Roman private life and its survivals. In this context, folklore and superstition have commanded much of his attention , as the present article demonstrates.) Editor's Note: The article is republished here to reach a wider circle of readers who are not concerned with it as a technical contribution. Numerous notes of the original paper have been omitted with the consent of the author. + Address: 4082 Malaga Avenue, Miami, Florida 33133. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Winter 1972 | 295 I should like to influence others and particularly beginners to attempt what I did. The field of Italian folklore seems to have attracted almost no attention from us classicists. Even Sir James Frazer in his voluminous The Golden Bough has shown almost no acquaintance with the literature of it. I must admit that much of it is hard to find in even our largest libraries, but years of delving have taught me the fascination of the quest. This opusculum may exemplify in some small way how modern folklore can interest and perhaps assist a classicist when he confronts something difficult in a Latin author. By the time we have finished, even Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and South Carolina will not seem so remote from Tusculum, where that combination of stubborn hillbilly and urban, though perhaps not urbane statesman, Marcus Porcius Cato, gathered the agricultural and economic lore that appears in his important but little read treatise. But this paper would not be quite complete, if I did not attempt to make understandable how such an able and intelligent person as Cato and the long line of men and women down to this present "scientific day" who agreed with him in resorting to sympathetic magic on occasion for the cure of disease could have continued to have faith in the prescriptions with which we deal. Believing, as I do, that we are much too prone to dismiss some of the superstitions that have survived so long as merely so much idle twaddle, I shall make it my final task to speak a kind word for Cato and his successors. We are going to study a difficult section (160) of the De Agricultura following the text which William Davis Hooper and Harrison Boyd Ash provide for their translation in the Loeb Series. The Latin offers enough uncertainties and the interpretation of it enough that is disputable to challenge criticism and inspire conjectures to the end of time: Luxum si quod est, hac cantione sanum net. Harundinem prende tibi viridem p. IHI aut quinqué longam...