{"id":142,"date":"2003-11-23T00:33:47","date_gmt":"2003-11-23T04:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2003\/11\/23\/decorative-motifs-fallen-on-hard-tim"},"modified":"2003-11-23T00:33:47","modified_gmt":"2003-11-23T04:33:47","slug":"decorative-motifs-fallen-on-hard-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2003\/11\/23\/decorative-motifs-fallen-on-hard-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Decorative Motifs, Fallen on Hard Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a207'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I just today bought an old copy of the Loeb edition of Terence&#8217;s plays.  It wasn&#8217;t until after an hour or so of trying to read it that I looked closely at the edge-patterns on the dustjacket.  The bottom of the spine looks like this:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/desultor\/fylfot.jpg\" height=\"189\" width=\"350\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><\/p>\n<p>Presumably you recognize the swastika, the ancient Indian good-luck symbol.  Also known as the fylfot (decoratively), the cross cramponnee (religiously), and the gammadion (religio-decoratively).  Of course it&#8217;s also been used as a symbol by Nazis.  I remember hearing that Nazi swastikas went clockwise, and ancient lucky ones counter-clockwise, or vice versa, but this isn&#8217;t really true; both are clockwise.  To keep the definitions lively, here&#8217;s from the Larousse: &#8220;Les quatre extr&eacute;mit&eacute;s sont recourb&eacute;es en forme de gamma grec.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Intriguingly, this edition of Terence was printed in 1959 &mdash; I&#8217;m surprised that Harvard University Press and Wm. Heinemann Ltd. didn&#8217;t change it before then.  I bet there was a crusty antiquarian involved with the series, who wouldn&#8217;t hear of changing some perfectly nice fylfots simply because those nasty Nazis had hit upon them as their symbol.  He no doubt smoked a pipe and was capable of searing sarcasm.<\/p>\n<p>Unless I&#8217;m much mistaken, new Loeb editions do not have these decorations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just today bought an old copy of the Loeb edition of Terence&#8217;s plays. It wasn&#8217;t until after an hour or so of trying to read it that I looked closely at the edge-patterns on the dustjacket. The bottom of the spine looks like this: Presumably you recognize the swastika, the ancient Indian good-luck symbol. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}