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Edited on Thu Nov-11-04 03:08 PM by fshrink
Hegel does not explain what the proverb meant in its original context (without which it can hardly be understood); indeed a comment he makes about jumping over Rhodes suggests that he may not have fully understood it himself. At any rate, he then offers an adapted German version with a different meaning, ‘Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze’ (‘Here is the rose, dance here’, an allusion to the rose in the cross of rosicrucianism, implying that fulfilment should not be postponed to some Utopian future), punning first on the Greek (Rhodos = Rhodes, rhodon = rose), then on the Latin (saltus = jump , salta = dance ). Marx adopts the saying in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , where he first gives the Latin, in the form ‘Hic Rhodus, hic salta!’, a garbled mixture of Hegel’s two versions, and then immediately adds ‘Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze!’, as if it were a translation, which it cannot be, since Greek Rhodos (despite what all the standard commentators say to the contrary), let alone Latin Rhodus, does not mean ‘rose’.
The confusion, both deliberate and inadvertent, does no credit to either Hegel or Marx as classical scholars, and the epigram loses much of its original power – as well as its original meaning – in their hands. They were evidently intent on turning it to other purposes, but it seems doubtful whether their attempts to improve on Aesop have been of much use to their readers.
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