# in his love of



## Casquilho

Hi fellows,
I'm trying to translate this phrase by Prof. C. M. Bowra (_From Virgil to Milton_), and I can't figure the proper way to say the clause "in his love of" in Latin:

“In his love of reason, of nature, of music, of physical beauty, of poetry, of knowledge, of all the intellectual delights which he found in books or in the world, he showed himself a true Humanist.”

Shall I use the ablative, _amore eius_? If so, shall I use _cum_ or _in_?


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## Scholiast

salue Casquilho!

The simple _amore_ will do, without any preposition, and could be construed either as instrumetal ("by [virtue of]/ through love...") or as what schoolmasters used to call "ablative of attendant circumstances", but you must at any rate use _suo_ in this context, not _eius_, because "he" (I presume this is Virgil - I have read the book, but it was decades ago) is the subject of the main verb (for which, incidentally, you could suitably use _se praebere_).

_adsit Fortuna_.


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## Casquilho

Thank you Scholiast, indeed I did think about the instrumental ablative, but I was hesitant still.

"He" is actually Milton, and the quoted line is from a beautiful prose about the balance between the Puritan and the Humanist in him.


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## Scholiast

OK, Casquilho, thank you. I must re-read Bowra's book.

Of Milton's intellectual aptitudes and Renaissance-style embrace of not merely classical Latin and Greek languages and literature (indeed, Hebrew too), Bowra's judgment is doubtless right. And of course Milton bore with legendary stoicism, no doubt reinforced by his strong Puritan convictions, the blindness which afflicted him in mid-life. But despite his astonishing intellectual breadth and impeccable Latinity (and, especially in _Paradise Lost_, theology), he was regrettably not much of a Humanist when it came to the way he regarded, or treated, Mrs Milton.

(Sorry, Moderator, this looks like straying off topic. But I write in the hope that the intellectual and humanistic legacy of the Latin classics is a legitimate area of discussion or at least mention here.)


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## Casquilho

Wow, I didn't know Milton was not a good husband, I thought he was a good man with liberal opinions about marriage. Perhaps his theory was not according to his practice.

The thing I really resent about Milton is his apparent misogyny, some lines from the _Paradise Lost _which seem to suggest Eve is less "intelectually capable" than Adam, and even worse, that her sin is moved by vanity while Adam's is moved by heroic love. Maybe I'm not reading him properly, though.


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## Scholiast

Greetings once more

"Latent misogyny" is I think both understating and overstating the case. His attitudes and thought are not all that "latent", especially in _Paradise Lost.

_But I think "misogyny" is going too far. Milton was a man of his time, as well as being of exceptional Latin and Greek (and biblical) learning. Precious few women (or girls) received any formal education at all, let alone in the "artes humaniores" (Queen Elizabeth I of England was both unusual (and, even in her own time, recognised as such) in being able to communicate diplomatically in fluent and accurate Latin with the courts of, e.g., Spain and St Petersburg).

This was both a chicken and an egg: women were not supposed to be intellectually suitable for intellectual education, so they rarely received it; which meant in turn that they could not as adults compete on intellectually equal terms with men. (This was by no means confined to England).

Few if any men of Milton's age and cast of mind actually _hated_ women (in the sense of "misogyny"). But they did look down on them, as the Latin and Greek literature they learned taught them to do: they were consistently regarded as not merely physically, but intellectually, morally and emotionally inferior to men, as countless passages from both Greek and Latin literature demonstrate.

But sorry, we are straying from "Lingua Latina", and I fear Cagey or someone else may step in with a reprimand.

I'd be very happy to discuss this matter further in another Forum, if there is one suitable (Cagey, please advise?), or indeed via PM.


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## Casquilho

Well, I like your comments, they clarify a lot of things. 
Indeed even Montaigne, whom I love so much, regards the women in that derogatory way. I didn't think that it was because of a social and cultural circumstance, rather than a personal position those men took.


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