ZIOLKOWSKI Theodore 2001 bonus intra melior exi

Princeton University Library bonus * intra * melior * exi: Frustrations and Joys of the Scholarly Pursuit Author(s): Theodore Ziolkowski Source: The Princeton University Library Chronicle , Vol. 62, No. 2 (Winter 2001), pp. 262270 Published by: Princeton University Library Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.62.2.0262 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Princeton University Library is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Princeton University Library Chronicle This content downloaded from 71.174.239.233 on Thu, 15 Jul 2021 14:29:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms bonus * intra * melior * exi Frustrations and Joys of the Scholarly Pursuit   T he Latin inscription on the mantelpiece of Procter Hall first caught my attention in , when I became tenth dean of the Graduate School. Andrew Fleming West, my predecessor and first dean, had shrewdly seen to it that the great dining hall was strategically decorated with words and images that serve as cues for the speaker on any occasion that might take place there. Scores of tigers lurking in the woodwork and masonry delight loyal alumni, both graduate and undergraduate. Gargoyles of past benefactors, grasping the symbols of their wealth (bars of soap, railway cars), gaze down encouragingly from the hammerbeams at their successors. The splendid stained-glass window illuminated at the dinner hour by the setting sun illustrates lines from the Old and New Testaments appropriate for the congratulation of winners of teaching prizes and the recipients of master’s degrees. And, of course, the handsome portrait of Dean West himself dominates the hall, embodying the ideals with which the Graduate School was founded in . Among all these prompts, however, I found none more useful on any imaginable occasion than the words above the fireplace: bonus intra melior exi (“enter good; leave better”). They served equally well for greeting new students in the fall and for saying farewell to departing graduates. No group could assemble for dinner in Procter Hall that could not be appropriately welcomed with that salutation. +  “Those who turn many to righteousness [shall shine] like the stars for ever and ever” (Dan. .); “Neither be called masters, for you have one master, the Christ” (Matt. .).  This content downloaded from 71.174.239.233 on Thu, 15 Jul 2021 14:29:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Above: Inscription over the fireplace in Procter Hall. Below: one of two inscriptions on fireplaces in the Chemistry Library on the second floor of Frick Laboratory. Soon I became curious about the source of such an incantatory phrase. The Princeton campus is well served with Latin inscriptions (not to mention Greek, Dutch, and German ones!) that provide us with thoughts to ponder as we make our daily ways. On the south wall of Alexander Hall, lines from Lucretius remind us how privileged we are to inhabit “serene temples” informed by the teachings of the wise. Waiting for the elevators in Firestone Library, a line from Ovid promises us that our harvest—presumably an intellectual one to be reaped in the library stacks—is not yet ripe. (The line contains a deliciously ironic ambivalence because it is actually taken from a poetic epistle that Helen writes to Paris before their flight to Troy, suggesting that erotic rewards still lie in store for him.) The chemists in Frick Hall—at least, back in the days when Latin was still required for the A.B. as well as the Ph.D.— were reminded on every visit to their library that “Happy is he who has been able to learn the causes of things.” Virgil also provided the thought that edifies freshmen and sophomores dining in Mathey College: that none was more righteous than former Vice President for Financial Affairs Ricardo Mestres. Unlike the words in Procter Hall, however, all of these lines stem from easily identifiable  This content downloaded from 71.174.239.233 on Thu, 15 Jul 2021 14:29:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Inscription on the first floor elevator in Firestone Library. classics of Latin literature: Lucretius’ De rerum natura, Ovid’s Heroides, and Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid. My search began with the standard history of the Graduate School. There we learn that West himself provided the epigram, explaining in a letter of  September  to Ralph Adams Cram, the architect of the Graduate College: “It is a Christian Latin motto of the fifth century, carved on an old house in North Africa. So far as I know it has never been used elsewhere. I like the meaning of it very much: Enter good, leave better.” Random inquiries among classicist colleagues at Princeton and elsewhere got me no further. Nor did more systematic searches in the standard dictionaries of classical quotations help. Finally, I stood in dismay before the multivolume collection of Latin inscriptions, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and perused several of the huge volumes halfheartedly; but in the absence of an index, I made no headway among the thousands of inscriptions recorded there. +  For further examples see Shirley H. Weber, “An Exercise in Princeton Epigraphy: Classical Inscriptions on the Campus,” Princeton Alumni Weekly,  January , –.  Willard Thorp, Minor Myers Jr., and Jeremiah Stanton Finch, The Princeton Graduate School: A History (Princeton: Princeton University, ); now available in a revised edition with a new chapter by James Axtell and edited by Patricia H. Marks (Princeton: Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni, ). The quotation from West’s letter can be found, respectively, on pages  and ; but the attribution given there is incorrect. West’s letter to Cram is among West’s papers in the Graduate School Records, box , Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.  This content downloaded from 71.174.239.233 on Thu, 15 Jul 2021 14:29:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Over the next few years I pursued my casual researches. Dean West’s remark suggested a religious source, and Christian history is certainly replete with statements expressing the same thought, if not in those precise words. Already in the Gospel of John (.) Jesus is quoted as saying: “I am the door; if any one enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture” (Ego sum ostium. Per me si quis introierit, salvabitur: et ingredietur, et egredietur, et pascua inveniet). Moreover, portals and gateways play a central role in religious imagery. Accordingly, similar thoughts show up frequently in churches and monasteries all over Europe. For instance, the keystone originally mounted in the gateway of a seventeenthcentury church in Stuttgart (torn down in ) and now located in the garden of the conference center of the Academy of the Diocese of Rottenbrugg-Stuttgart begins: Janua sum vitae. Precor omnes introeuntes. Per me transibunt Qui coeli gaudia quaerunt. I am the gateway of life. I invoke all who enter: Those who seek the joys of heaven Shall pass through me. In  I found another tantalizingly close wording on the ceiling of St. Michael’s Church in Bamberg, which depicts a white swan accompanied by the terse inscription exit qualis intrat (“he departs just as he enters”). However, my letter inquiring about the source—whether it referred to the monastic order or to the heraldry of a donor—as well as its association with the image of the swan went unanswered. Similar inscriptions can be found, of course, on secular buildings. On one of the Dornburg palaces near the university town of Jena, famous because Goethe visited them more than twenty times, this distich was inscribed in :  See the entry “Portal” in vol.  of Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade et al. (New York: Macmillan, ); and the entry “Door” in vol.  of Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings et al. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, ).  This content downloaded from 71.174.239.233 on Thu, 15 Jul 2021 14:29:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Gaudeat ingrediens, laetetur et aede recedens, His qui praetereunt, det bona cuncta deus. May he rejoice entering and be happy leaving this house; may God give all good things to those who pass by. In  Goethe translated the couplet as follows: Freudig trete herein und froh entferne dich wieder! Ziehst du als Wandrer vorbei, segne die Pfade dir Gott! For years, however, my search was fruitless. Dictionaries, lexicons, friends, travels—nothing brought me closer to the actual source of the words in Procter Hall. + Then the Age of the Internet arrived. Well aware of my frustrated search, my wife, Yetta—on the recommendation of our classicist son, Jan Ziolkowski ’—one day typed the Latin words into a search engine, and Google immediately spilled out twenty-nine hits! Most of them turned out to be useless: passages in which the vocables bonus, intra, melior, and exi occurred, regardless of context (intra, for instance, as the preposition meaning “within,” or exi as the prefix of such words as “exi-stent”). Several, however, appeared to be worth following up. One tip took me to a list of Latin proverbs on a website maintained at the University of Munich: Lateinische Weisheiten. Sprüche für Klugscheißer (“Latin Words of Wisdom: Proverbs for Smartasses”!); but although the epigraph was there, no source was cited. Another led me to the website of the Vietnamese Pastoral Centre in London, where a two-page text otherwise wholly in Vietnamese contains the words bonus intra, melior exi. Neither my fax nor repeated e-mail appeals brought any clarification, and I still have no idea how the Latin phrase found its way into the Southeast Asian prose. Townsville Grammar School in Queensland, Australia, was much more forthcoming. When I inquired how “our” words became the school motto, Principal Richard Fairley promptly replied that the motto dates back to the foundation of the school in , when it  This content downloaded from 71.174.239.233 on Thu, 15 Jul 2021 14:29:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms first appeared on the school crest, and to , when it was included in the school song, written and sung in Latin. (That usage, pace Dean West, therefore antedated its inscription in Procter Hall.) But he was unable to provide a source. Lastly, I wrote to Professor Dr. Dušan Keber, minister of health for the Republic of Slovenia. The ministry’s website opens with the familiar attribute of Aesculapius—the staff entwined by a serpent—and Cicero’s famous salutation: si tu vales bene est, ego quoque valeo (“If you are well, I’m pleased; I’m well, too”). The text goes on to justify the image with the information, new to me, that our words—bonus intra, melior exi—were found on a sign at the entrance to the sanctuary of Aesculapius. Learning through a quick check that Aesculapius boasted some five hundred sanctuaries or cultic sites in the ancient world, I wrote in considerable excitement to Dr. Keber and asked about his specific source for the motto, explaining the reasons for my inquiry. I was dismayed, two days later, to receive a terse e-mail reply from the minister, saying that his name was “obviously wrongly connected with the quotation in your institution.” My follow-up fax reproducing his website and asking him to put me in touch with the colleague who had written the statement ascribed to him elicited no further response. That website, however, prompted me to turn my search in a new direction—from Christian to pagan, so to speak. At first I had no success: none of the standard reference works, not even the mighty Pauly-Wissowa lexicon of antiquity, turned up the Princeton quotation in connection with Aesculapius. Finally—and through that serendipity that, more often than we care to admit, comes to the aid of the frustrated scholar—as I was consulting various handbooks of classical mythology on a bottom shelf on the third floor of Firestone, I happened to notice a two-volume set immediately above them: Asclepius: A Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies, by Emma J. and Ludwig Edelstein. Curious, I took it out and discovered that the first volume contained a complete collection of the  inscriptions connected in any way with Asclepius or, in his Latin form, Aesculapius. I took the volumes back to my office and, within a couple of hours, located our fireplace epigraph at number . It was identified there as an “inscription on the Asclepieion at   vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ).  This content downloaded from 71.174.239.233 on Thu, 15 Jul 2021 14:29:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Asclepius. Reverse of a bronze medallion of Hadrian, ca. –  .. From Francesco Gnecchi, I medaglioni romani, vol.  (Milan: Hoepli, ), pl. .. Courtesy of the Numismatics Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Lambaesis, Africa,” and the source was specified as the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (vol. , pt. , no. ). With that information in hand I went back to the Graduate Study Room for Classics on the third floor of Firestone and consulted the appropriate volume, which turned out to contain inscriptions from North Africa (“Inscriptiones Africae Latinae”). Our epigraph, I learned there, was found at the temple of Aesculapius and Health (templum Aesculapii et Salutis) in the Roman military settlement Lambaesis in the province of Numidia (today’s northern Algeria), where it was set in a mosaic on the pavement of a smaller sanctuary on the left as one departed from the principal building. So I had come a bit closer to Dean West’s source: “an old house in North Africa.” But fifth century? This temple was begun in  .. by the third Roman legion Augusta. And Christian? During the second century, when our inscription was fashioned into the mosaic at Lambaesis, the authority of Asclepius was at its height, while Christianity was still a struggling minority. Indeed, the Greek deity—whose principal temple was at Epidaurus but who could claim, in addition to great sanctuaries at Pergamum and Cos, cultic affiliates throughout the ancient world—had risen to become in Rome the most popular of all Greek deities, rivaling in fame and influence such Egyptian gods as Isis and Osiris. Because of this  Edelstein and Edelstein, Asclepius, :. See also Karl Kerényi, Der göttliche Arzt: Studien über Asklepios und seine Kultstätten (Darmstadt: Hermann Gentner, ).  This content downloaded from 71.174.239.233 on Thu, 15 Jul 2021 14:29:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms popularity and because he conspicuously shared various attributes with Jesus, notably his philanthropy and his miracles of healing, this so-called “savior of the heathens” was perceived as one of the leading antagonists of the evolving new religion and was widely attacked by the early Christian Apologists. Accordingly, when our words were inscribed at Lambaesis—and who knows whether or not there for the first time?—they were clearly a tribute to the pagan god of healing: salvation of the body rather than the soul! (Their use in the Slovenian website suggests that the phrase may also have made its way north to that part of the Roman Empire known as Pannonia.) The vogue of the temples of Asclepius lasted well into the sixth century .., even as paganism was being eradicated throughout the ancient world. However, it has been shown that, beginning as early as the late third century .., in the process of iconotrope through which the pagan deities and their attributes were absorbed into Christianity, images of Christ were often based on familiar Roman representations of Aesculapius. It is quite likely that by the same process of assimilation the Lambaesis sanctuary inscription of the pagan healer was known and adapted by another North African in the fifth century as the greeting for his Christian threshold. + We may never know precisely where Dean West got his motto. Perhaps it was suggested by Howard Crosby Butler, the first Master in Residence of the Graduate College, who, as an archaeologist, had traveled extensively around the Mediterranean. For, as West noted in his letter to Cram, he had discussed the motto for the fireplace “in a conversation today with Professor Howard Butler on the train.” Had he come across it in the Corpus Inscriptionum  Edelstein and Edelstein, Asclepius, :. Erich Dinkler, Christus und Asklepios: Zum Christustypus der polychromen Platten im Museo Nazionale Romano (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, ). On iconotrope in general, see Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” in Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, ), –.  Butler (–) was known primarily for his excavations of classical sites in Syria. But in –, while a fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Rome, he made two trips to North Africa and still another in . He also had a particular interest in Christian archaeology. See Butler’s papers in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library.   This content downloaded from 71.174.239.233 on Thu, 15 Jul 2021 14:29:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Latinarum, which was available by that time, he would have known— classical scholar that he was—that it came from a pagan temple of Aesculapius and was anything but “a Christian Latin motto.” Yet, regardless of his intermediate source, we now know the primary source of the words, which, whether pagan or Christian and whether referring to body or spirit, lend themselves equally well to the purpose for which they were so judiciously inscribed in Procter Hall: bonus * intra * melior * exi.  This content downloaded from 71.174.239.233 on Thu, 15 Jul 2021 14:29:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms