Volume 30, Number 1 · February 3, 1983
Honest Eggs?
By Steele Commager
Profile of Horace
by D.R. Shackleton Bailey
Harvard University Press, 142 pp., $17.50
In 1741 Sir Robert Walpole, defending himself in Parliament against an impeachment proceeding brought by William Pulteney, concluded with the pious hope, drawn from Horace, that he had been guilty of nothing, and need grow pale at no wrongdoing: 'Nil conscire sibi nulli pallescere culpae.' Pulteney leapt at once—but to correct the grammar of the Horatian tag: 'Your Latin is as bad as your logic: nullA pallescere culpA!' So delicate a textual point—whether Horace had written a dative or an ablative—could not be left unresolved. A guinea was wagered upon it, and the matter was appealed to the clerk of Parliament, who quickly rejected Walpole's reading in favor of Pulteney's.[1]
Review, 1955 words
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