Samuel Johnson’s ‘Motto for a Goat’ Revisited Open Access

THE following death notice appeared in The Craftsman, or Say’s Weekly Journal on 4 April 1772:

On Saturday last died at Mile End, the goat which had been twice around the world, first in the Dolphin, Capt. Wallis, then in the Endeavour, Capt. Cooke; she was shortly to have been removed to Greenwich hospital, to have spent the remainder of her days under the protection of those worthy veterans, who there enjoy an honourable retirement. She had on her neck a splendid collar, on which was engraved the following distich, said to have been wrote by the ingenious and learned Dr Samuel Johnson:

As recorded by Boswell, in February that year, Johnson had written to the naturalist Joseph Banks through Sir Joshua Reynolds, responding to his request for a suitable inscription to honour the retiree:

TO JOSEPH BANKS, ESQ.

Sir,—I return thanks to you and to Dr Solander for the pleasure which I received in yesterday’s conversation. I could not recollect a motto for your Goat, but have given her one. You, Sir, may perhaps have an epick poem from some happier pen than, Sir,

Purportedly procured from ‘a friend’, Boswell appends the following expansive translation:

The variant perpetua, agreeing with praemia (‘perpetual reward(s)’) not only shifts attention from the goat’s lactic largesse but also forces haec to modify capra (‘this goat’). Although it poses no challenge to the established text³, it is this version of the couplet that has been widely disseminated in biographies of Cook and Banks. Even with perpetui restored, however, the status of haec is not beyond debate. If understood as neuter accusative plural modifying praemia, the distich may be translated:

Having twice sailed around the globe [lit. the globe having been twice encircled], a goat second only to the one that suckled Jupiter, has this reward for her unfailing supply of milk.⁴

On the other hand, if haec is feminine nominative singular modifying capra:

Having sailed twice around the globe, this goat, second only to the one that suckled Jupiter, has her reward for her unfailing supply of milk.

In favour of the latter, Niall Rudd, following E.V. Mohr, states that ‘[h]aec is needed to identify the goat’ and adds that ‘it is arguably a defect that the reward is not made clear in the poem itself’.⁵ Yet it could equally be argued that capra is sufficiently identified by altrici … secunda Jovis and that syntactic symmetry would be better served by reading haec with praemia.⁶

Could any putative classical sources provide a solution? Johnson’s thorough familiarity with the myth of Amalthea/Capella (‘goat that suckled Jupiter’)⁷ is evident from the illustrative quotations with which he furnishes his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). There are three occurrences of Amalthea by name. In illustrating the headword teat, for instance, Johnson includes a passage from Matthew Prior’s translation of Callimachus (Hymns I, 47–48):

And s.v. goat, he cites a passage from Thomas Creech’s translation (1700) of Manilius’s Astronomicon:

Similarly, s.v. dug: ‘Then shines the goat, whose brutish dugs supply’d/The infant Jove, and nursed his growing pride’. Yet there is nothing in the Latin of Manilius that would suggest any influence on Johnson’s couplet.⁸ A text which is almost universally adduced by editors and first identified as a possible source in the mid-nineteenth century, is a six-line epigram by Crinagoras of Mytelene (Greek Anthology IX, 224). In it, a generously endowed, sea-voyaging goat, press-ganged by Augustus, proclaims that she is destined, or so she believes, for stardom.⁹ There can be little doubt that Johnson was aware of this epigram; after all, he was to go on to battle insomnia by translating nearly a hundred Greek Anthology epigrams into Latin. However, editors evince skepticism as to any exact influence. The latest editors are more circumspect than most, remarking that the shared themes were perhaps inevitable and that Johnson ‘did not imitate the earlier poem though he probably recalled it’ (Brown and DeMaria 2024, 445).

The probable source for the couplet, which I believe also sheds light on which noun haec modifies, lies in two complementary passages in Ovid, neither of which, as far as can be ascertained, has been identified in previous scholarship. Johnson is recorded by the statesman William Windham as recommending the reading of the Roman calendar poem Fasti.¹⁰ Three three-volume editions of Ovid (1663, 1701 and 1713) are listed in the auction catalogue of Johnson’s library, one of which he had owned as an undergraduate at Oxford.¹¹ In the 1713 edition, the Fasti are printed in volume three, its editor Pieter Burmann the elder (1668–1741) being the subject of a biographical sketch Johnson published in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1742).

The primary passage, for 1 May in book V, addresses the Amalthea/Capella myth directly:

[Let the work start from Jupiter. Visible to me on the first night is a star that served at Jupiter’s cradle. The rainy sign of the Olenian she-goat [sc. Capella] is rising. She has heaven as a reward for the milk she gave.]

The second concerns the Roman foundation myth of the she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus:

[She made a name for the place, the place itself for the Luperci. The foster-mother has great rewards for the milk she gave.]

In Johnson’s couplet, the subject noun capra parallels here illa and nutrix. Nutrix moreover is echoed in its near-synonym altrici, the dative case form of altrix (‘wet-nurse’, ‘foster mother’). More tellingly, the object noun phrase and verb (praemia lactis … habet) are identical in the two Ovidian passages and in Johnson. For genitive singular dati qualifying lactis, Johnson substitutes perpetui, extending the notion of the milk given to the milk given unfailingly, as Banks will have told him was the case and which is attested elsewhere, this being in part the source of the goat’s fame.¹² To qualify praemia he employs the deictic haec, in parallel to magna in the second passage, thus vindicating Baldwin’s criterion of balance.

It is thus highly likely that in composing the couplet for the young naturalist on the evening of 26 February, 1772 or the following day, Johnson had a recollection—clear or hazy—of lines he had read in the Fasti concerning a famous goat and she-wolf rewarded for their milk.¹³ If the recollection was vague, then the Ovidian Opera Omnia he had to hand would have been of service.

Finally, a word on the goat’s name. It is unlikely that she had one. Baldwin states that he ‘cannot resist wondering if the second verse may imply that Banks’s goat itself was called Amalthaea’ (1995, 71). When the already well-travelled goat was transferred from Wallis’s ship to Cook’s for yet another stint of circumnavigation, it was ‘so that South Sea coffee should still have its milk’¹⁴. That the long-suffering animal should be dubbed altrici … secunda Jovis smacks of the mock-heroic and is surely a flourish of Johnsonian wit.

Notes