David Beckham's new tattoo -- a classicist writes

Becks has apparently decided that a move to Los Angeles demands a new tattoo or two. Not a feeling that the prospect of LA induced in me, but therein I suppose lies the difference between us.

Amongst the many designs now decorating the celebrity right forearm is what was originally a Latin slogan, here rendered in English: “Let them hate (me) as long as they fear (me)”. The idea is, or so I have read, to express something of Becks’s anxieties about the transatlantic move, and his determination not to be battered by any adverse publicity.

I don’t mind if they don’t actually like me, so the message runs, but don’t let them mess with me. Or, to quote “a source”: “David . . . .believes his tattoos can ward off negativity and help him battle adversity.”

The original reads in Latin: “Oderint dum metuant” (a nice example for you Latinists of the use of “dum as proviso, plus the subjunctive”). According to the Daily Mail, Becks first of all wanted the real Latin, but it was the word dum (“provided that/as long as”) that caused the problem. Could it be taken as a reflection of the mental agility of Mr Beckham? Better perhaps to play safe by avoiding it entirely?

In fact as any classicist must know, the word ‘dum’ is only part of the reason why having “oderint dum metuant” or its English equivalent might be an own goal.

So far as we can tell, the slogan goes back to the second-century BC Roman tragedian Accius. Almost all of Accius’ work is lost, but it is pretty certain that this phrase came from his play Atreus, and from the mouth of the title role itself. In ancient mythology and culture, this King Atreus was the limit case of tyranny and monstrosity – in fact, so much the limit case that he was the man who, so the story went, chopped up the children of his brother Thyestes, and then served them up to him in a stew (minus the hands and feet).

From then on, it became a catchword for the kind of ethics that a proper constitutional Roman deplored in a tyrant. Cicero and Seneca both regarded the sentiment as beyond the pale (hardly surprising, Seneca acerbically observed, that Accius’ play was written during the dictatorship of the bloodthirsty dictator Sulla). 

According to Suetonius, it was a favourite saying of the bonkers and wicked  emperor Caligula – enough said? It was so well known that the wily emperor Tiberius seems to have parodied the phrase, pointedly. Confronted with some nasty popular squibs, he apparently responded “Let them hate me, provided that they respect what I am doing.” No rule of terror here, was the (somewhat disingenuous) message.

So our celebrity hero is sporting a slogan that, for the Romans, its originators, was the instant identifier of the excesses of tyranny? Enough said?

Comments

[Tattoo art]

Very well researched and written article! I totally agree with that. Your writing style is just awesome, I look forward to read more from you :)

[David Harrison]

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[Candadai Tirumalai]

Tess: I didn't mean that it is only in American public schools that Latin is no longer as common as it used to be. And my point about the niceties in Prof. Beard's article concerned the nuances of Latin and did not imply ignorance of ancient history among students. As I am sure you know, America's Founding Fathers were very mindful of the history of the Roman Republic.

[Michael Rigby]

I don't think Beckham has the faintest idea of how awfully Naff he is.
You can put a Pig in a suit;it still looks like a Pig.
Dreadful.

[Tim]

Isn't dumb spelled with a silent "b" in the UK.
Wouldn't it therefore be more of a reflection of the intelligence of the people who mistook an obvious non-English word, in the midst of a non-English phrase, and mistook it for an English word that isn't even spelled that way?

[Michael Bulley]

It is strange that this quotation should have become corrupt so early, so that even Cicero and Seneca got the wrong end of the stick. Recent research into the writings of the mediæval Alsatian scholar, Hucbald the One-legged, makes it fairly clear that the quotation does not come from Accius' Atreus at all, but from his work on agriculture, the Praxidica. In the opening to the second section, Accius is talking about poppies and says ‘odorant tum metuntur' - they give off a sweet smell and then they are reaped. An alternative version of Accius' name is Attius, and the similarity between that and Atreus (they both begin At-) caused people to believe the quotation came from the work of that name (even by Cicero's time there were no manuscripts by Accius in existence that anyone could have checked). Since the words in their original form didn't seem to make much sense coming from the mouth of a tyrant who specialized in infant gastronomy, they gradually became changed into the version we know. There was an intermediate stage, it seems, in which it was thought that Accius had portrayed Atreus as a South-American drug baron - hence the reference to poppies.

[Little Nicky Machiavelli]

Wonder if Victoria suggested that one?

For Backs a more appropriate slogan might be "non cogito ergo footballer."

[Xjy]

Where's he got "Pecunia non olet" tattooed?

[a. alcock]

"I don't mind if they don't actually like me, but don't let them mess with me" is a pretty good translation of the Latin.
What does the sentence about the "own goal" mean ?

[Nev]

Mary, couldn't you run a not-too-serious contest for the best parody on '......., dum .......' - for latinists who'd like to comment on the modern age?

[Nathaniel DesH. Petrikov]

What's written on his right armpit? "De oderint"?

[Tess]

Candadai, I'm not sure why you bash on the Americans -- I took 6 years of Latin (grades 7-12) in a public high school! The difference is that many students choose to take Spanish as a secondary language, since it's basically as widely-spoken as English in the US now. And it's not like lack of Latin doesn't mean we never learn ancient history, either. It's a required component of most universities, if not high schools. In fact, having been to school in all three, I can honestly say that there's not much difference between education in England, Canada, and the US, either in preparation for secondary school or in the secondary school itself. I've met completely uneducated students in all three.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

It used to be that a good proportion of American students were literate in Latin, and would have appreciated the niceties in your comment but those days are in the past, although private schools (Britain's public schools) still set store by the classical languages, especially Latin. Boston's old and renowned Latin School, a highly selective public institution, still requires four (sometimes three) years of Latin. I notice that Beckham acknowledges his Indian fans through the tattoo of his wife's name (slightly misspelt) in Hindi.

[Gerard Mulholland]

QED