Re: Non vitae sed scholae discimus

On Saturday, September 18, 2004, at 11:44 , Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:
>
>> On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 12:51:02 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I don't know if my previous mail on this topic went thru, but I went
>>> home
>> and
>>> checked Tore Jansson's _Latin_, and it agrees with what I thought I
>> recalled;
>>> what Seneca actually wrote was _Non vitae sed scholae discimus_ "Not for
>> life
>>> but for school do we learn". It's noted its often quoted in opposite
>>> form,
>>> and yet attributed to Seneca (which strikes me as highly discourteous,
>>> no
>>> matter how dead the old man might be).
>>
>> It's not that bad since he meant it should be the other way round.
If he actually meant it the other way round, then it is very bad. "non
uitae sed scholae discimus" *cannot* mean 'we learn  not for school but
for life' and Seneca would certainly have known that! If in fact he meant
the other way round, then he has been extremely careless.

>> By
>> inversing Seneca's word, we get it the way he'd have wanted it.
How do you in fact know that that is what he would have wanted? Did he add
something like: "Oops, made a mistake there! Please transpose _uitae_ and
_scholae_." I guess not. Obviously the sentence is being quoted out of
context. But what is it that makes it clear that Seneca meant it the other
way round and why, then, did he not write it the other way round?

I am not 'just curious'; I am *very* curious.

>> It's not a
>> proper quote, but an allusion, and a quite litteral one.
Um - seems to be a bit of a contradiction there.

> Well, I don't pretend to know what Seneca would have felt about it. I do
> know
> I'd hate it if I somehow knew that future generations would invert a
> saying of
> mine and yet present it as quote with my name on it, quite regardless
> whether
> the inversion expressed what I wished to be the case.
Absolutely spot! and I suspect Seneca would in fact be none too pleased.

If we are going quote him, we might as well do it properly.

But we have assumed all along the Seneca meant 'school' when he wrote
_scholae_. But the native Latin for school is _ludus_, _schola_ is a Greek
borrowing. It may mean 'school', but it can also mean 'leisure time [given
to learning]'. Maybe he meant:
"We don't learn for our daily living but for the our leisure time."

Does any know the context in which the sentence occurs?

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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"They are evidently confusing science with technology."
UMBERTO ECO				September, 2004

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