"Fama Perennis"

     My reading today from Brevissima was #268, "Fama Perennis," from Giuseppe Gatti's Sales Poetici, Proverbiales, et Iocosi (1703). It rather puts me in mind of a bit from the Hávamál, though I rather doubt that Giuseppe Gatti read the Old Norse "Sayings of the High One." The Latin text is as follows:

Transit honos, transit fortuna, pecunia transit

Omnis, sed tantum fama perennis erit.

     Roughly translated into English:

"Honor passes, good luck passes, all wealth passes

Away, but reputation alone will endure through the years."

      It is probably worth noting that honos, "honor," doesn't have the same nebulous, abstract quality in Latin that it does in English. In English, "honor" is almost equivalent to "reputation," or even "virtue." In Latin, it tends to mean the tangible rewards one can earn, or political offices held. So there is less contradiction than there might at first appear in the contrast between "honor passes away" and "reputation endures."
   
     The passage from the Hávamál that seems quite similar to this is as follows in Old Norse:

Deyr fé, deyja frændr,
deyr sjálfur it sama.
Ek veit einn, at aldri deyr;
dómr um dauðan hvern.

"Cattle (wealth) die(s), kinsmen die,

You yourself will die the same.

I know one thing only that never dies:

The reputation earned by each of the dead.

          As I have noted previously on this blog, Gatti's Latin couplets often dwell on the ephemeral nature of gold and glory, and the lasting nature of virtue or the Good. This poem is somewhat unusual in promoting fama, "reputation," as a good thing, whereas the Stoic traditions from which Gatti usually draws tend to view reputation as a thing indifferent, at best.