Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses/Eumaeus/599
Annotations[edit | edit source]
pro rata (Latin) in proportion; in accordance with a fair and proportionate calculation. This is another late Latin phrase which has become naturalized in the English language.[1] The narrator of this episode (Bloom?) consistently italicizes such expressions.
Ubi patria ... vita bene (Latin) Where my country [is] ... life [is] well. Bloom is perhaps misremembering the Latin proverb: Ubi bene, ibi patria (Where [I am] happy, there [is my] homeland).[2] Or he may be misremembering a quotation from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations: Patria est ubicumque est bene (My homeland is wherever I am happy).[3] Cicero quotes this line from Teucer (fragment 291), a lost play by the Roman tragedian Marcus Pacuvius.
Alma Mater (Latin) Nourishing Mother. Since the 18th century the expression Alma Mater has been used in English to refer to one's school or university. Bloom's alma mater is the High School (069.13), as he never attended university (435.20 ff. and 635.15 ff.).
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ Online Etymology Dictionary.
- ↑ Gifford (1988) 550.
Thornton (1968) 447. - ↑ Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5:37:108.