Grammarians, Whores, Buffoons

From an anonymous colleague:

I'm currently auditing Jennifer Houseman Wegner's class on Cleopatra. Today, in a Powerpoint lecture on Ptolemy IV, she showed the following quote from Edwyn Bevan's "A History of Egpyt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty": (Metheun, 1927, p.233)

"Agathocles and Agathoclea still, as before, ruled the king's [Ptolemy IV] corrupt affections. The palace swarmed with literary pretenders, poets, grammarians, whores, buffoons, philosophers."

Somehow put me in mind of Language Log.

Heavens!  What a motley crew!

Old Bevan really seems to have had it in for Ptolemy IV (Philopator), and was especially hard on him for his "literary dilettantism."

"There have been princes whose nature was corrupted by the enjoyment of despotic power, but Ptolemy IV came to the throne already corrupted. He cast back to his grandfather, the dilettante and voluptuary, but he reproduced his grandfather’s vices in a more extravagant form, without the serious intellectual interests which gave a touch of greatness to the second Ptolemy. The grandson not only followed ease and pleasure, but he was indifferent to the character of the people whom he allowed to direct the affairs of the kingdom, so long as they provided him the means for a life of literary and aesthetic sensuality and saved him the trouble of governing." p. 220

"Love of ease, wine, lasciviousness, literary dilettantism, had so swallowed up in this young degenerate every natural affection that he did, at the suggestion of [his minister] Sosibius, in order to remove uncomfortable agitations from his life, have his uncle, his brother, and his mother killed. It was arranged that when young Magas was having a bath, scalding water should be poured over him…" p. 221

"To one form of emotional exaltation the king was especially addicted – the orgiastic worship of Dionysos. From this god the house of Ptolemy claimed to be descended, and Ptolemy IV desired apparently to reproduce in some way in his own person his divine ancestor." p. 233

This particular fault has made it into Wikipedia, although Bevan is not cited:

"Philopator was devoted to orgiastic forms of religion and literary dilettantism."

The anonymous colleague who sent these materials to me is a devoted reader of Language Log.  But I must inform him that, here at Language Log headquarters, although we do have plenty of grammarians, as well as syntacticians, phonologists, and morphologists, we do not have any literary dilettantes / pretenders, much less whores and buffoons, though we do have a few linguists who moonlight as poets and philosophers, and a stray philologist or two, such as myself.