Saturday musings

Ah, the weekend. Blessed Saturday, the morning of no alarm clock (other than the dog). Slept until I woke up naturally, walked the dog in the sunshine, ate breakfast on the deck with the fountain plashing. Delightful.

I am reading The Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius, on my Kindle. My edition is an older translation, and in between the lives of the Caesars are essays by the translator, Alexander Thomson, regarding the literary figures who lived during the time of each Caesar. I was not expecting that, and the Kindle screen does not always give visual clues where one section ends and another begins, so at first I thought I was still reading Suetonius. When I read remarks like, "So and so was born before the beginning of the Christian era," I thought, "Oh, Suetonius is a later writer than I thought, maybe during or after the time of Constantine." But eventually I figured it out. Without having looked up any information yet about Mr. Thomson, he may be part of or at the tail end of the Victorian age because he will frequently say that while some writer produced many excellent and virtuous ideas yet his writing is marred by that indecency so common among the ancients, and just a little while ago I read him saying about one writer that certain of his passages could not be translated out of regard for decency.

So now I'll do a quick check online. Suetonius lived from approximately 70 to approximately 130 B.C. Ah, ha: discovered that the edition I am reading was published in 1909. The text link above is to the edition I'm reading, and I'm including a picture link to more recent edition, translated by Robert Graves. He's the guy who wrote the novels I, Claudius, and Claudius the God, which were made into a BBC miniseries in the 1970s. He also wrote a famous memoir, Good-Bye to All That, expressing his post-War ("War" with a capital W meaning WWI, "the great War," as it was called until WWII) disillusionment. Just looking up all those books makes me want to buy all of them. I have read the Claudius novels, but not for long time. I think I was in college (and that's a while ago now). I have picked up the memoir in a bookstore and been very engaged by the opening passages but didn't buy it. Perhaps I was at a moment where I just didn't feel up to post-War disillusionment.

But now, I am going to wash my hair, as a courtesy to the young woman who will be cutting and highlighting it this afternoon. She will wash it, too, and give me a lovely scalp massage at the same time, but I don't want her to have to handle less-than-clean hair. That would be a "not so fresh feeling." :-p