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Page 12.

Postscript October 2018

As I go to press with the [2018] edition, it occurs to me that there is still far more metaphoric and symbolic fodder in this amazing palindrome.

I have pointed out that the word opera in context within the Sator Square refers to ‘farm works’ and would be as familiar as a world-view (an all-encompassing rule of life) to a modern farmer as it would have been in the age of the Hellenic (Greek) Hesiod (fl. 750 or 650 BCE). Hesiod, a farmer and poet, authored Works and Days, a poem filled with pragmatic observations on humans, society, and the farming life. It emphasizes hard work, frugality, and common sense, in addition to mythological references including the so-called Ages of Man.

Half a millennium later, around 29 BCE, the Roman poet Virgil published his poem Georgics (whose title refers to farm work). Like Hesiod some 500 years earlier, and Ovid shortly after his own lifetime, Virgil speaks of the same Ages of Man (Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron). Hesiod had mentioned an earlier, even greater age, the Heroic, which in some ways reminds me of the relative perfection of the Garden of Eden in Jewish literature.

One reason for the grouping of such ages traditionally might be that it serves king lists in one form or another: meaning that it supports a reigning monarch’s claims to being descended from the divine. Sargon of Akkad did this, leaving the Sumerian tongue as his courtly language while the rest of the region became Semitic-speaking (language family of the Akkadians). That turned a long ago Sumerian king (Gilgamesh) into a divine ancestor of Sargon. Echoes of the same king list concept are found in Solomon’s ‘begat’ list, along with other dynasty-reinforcing tropes (e.g., the flood of Noah is in many ways an adaptation of the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which predates Genesis by many centuries). Again, at the start of the Augustan age in Rome (after 31 BCE), Virgil in his Aeneid (twelve chapters, perhaps never completed) turned Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey upside down (Odyssey first, in the journey narrative; Iliad last, in the war story on the Italian peninsula). While doing this, Virgil attributed divine origins to Rome’s new tyrant, Octavian (Augustus) by means of a mythic Iulus, ancestor of Caesar’s Julian clan. Eclesiastes 1:9 has it right: “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Back to the Sator Square specifically:

Quick note on nomenclature: I suggest there was an ancient Roman farmers’ saying, a Sator aphorism; which was then harnessed by a clever, literate oligarch in the big city, who devised the fiendishly clever and beautiful four-way palindrome through which the original aphorism or saying or proverb has come down to us in modern times.

Aside from the enduring sanctity of Neolithic cosmologies based on the annual crop cycle tied to the lunar and other life cycles, I am struck by an even deeper potential for visualization in the Sator aphorism. Namely, plowing is not just a metaphor for living our daily life and making decisions. Plowing implies sowing. Recall the Christian Testament Epistle to the Galatians (6:7), which reads: “As ye shall sow, so shall you reap.” The idea of sowing actions based on conscious decisions, and then reaping consequences, has thus been embedded in the human cultural idiom for thousands of years.

Upon deeper reflection, I see an even more profound connection with human history from the Neolithic revolution forward. The metaphor or metonym of plowing goes far deeper than the notion of driving a car, which I have offered as a way of bringing the notion of actions and consequences from the ancient Sator aphorism forward.

The language of the aphorism is metaphor, expressed as we see it.

The meaning, however, can be taken further as something like:

*The begetter planted the seed of your life (or fate), but you are the seed-planter of your own fate in this world.*

In that sense, the act of plowing (opera) becomes planting (same broad sense of ‘farm work’).

One must assume, finally, that the author of the Epistle to the Galatians must have been quite familiar with the Sator proverb, amid the general connectedness of ancient Mediterranean cultures and languages. What you shall sow, you shall reap. There is nothing new under the sun.

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