Latin, usually translated: “Rhodes is here, here is where you jump!”

The well-known but little understood maxim originates from the traditional Latin translation of the punchline from Aesop’s fable The Boastful Athlete which has been the subject of some mistranslations.

In Greek, the maxim reads:

“ιδού η ρόδος,

ιδού και το πήδημα”

The story is that an athlete boasts that when in Rhodes, he performed a stupendous jump, and that there were witnesses who could back up his story. A bystander then remarked, ‘Alright! Let’s say this is Rhodes, demonstrate the jump here and now.’ The fable shows that people must be known by their deeds, not by their own claims for themselves. In the context in which Hegel uses it, this could be taken to mean that the philosophy of right must have to do with the actuality of modern society (“What is rational is real; what is real is rational”), not the theories and ideals that societies create for themselves, or some ideal counterposed to existing conditions: “To apprehend what is is the task of philosophy,” as Hegel goes on to say, rather than to “teach the world what it ought to be.”

The epigram is given by Hegel first in Greek, then in Latin (in the form “Hic Rhodus, hic saltus”), in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, and he then says: “With little change, the above saying would read (in German): “Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze”:

“Here is the rose, dance here”

This is taken to be an allusion to the ‘rose in the cross’ of the Rosicrucians (who claimed to possess esoteric knowledge with which they could transform social life), implying that the material for understanding and changing society is given in society itself, not in some other-worldly theory, punning first on the Greek (Rhodos = Rhodes, rhodon = rose), then on the Latin (saltus = jump [noun], salta = dance [imperative]).

In 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx quotes the maxim, first giving the Latin, in the form:

“Hic Rhodus, hic salta!”,

 — a garbled mixture of Hegel’s two versions (salta = dance! instead of saltus = jump), and then immediately adds: “Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze!”, as if it were a translation, which it cannot be, since Greek Rhodos, let alone Latin Rhodus, does not mean “rose”. But Marx does seem to have retained Hegel’s meaning, as it is used in the observation that, overawed by the enormity of their task, people do not act until:

“a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible,

and the conditions themselves call out: Here is the rose, here dance!.”

and one is reminded of Marx’s maxim in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy:

“Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation!.”

So Marx evidently supports Hegel’s advice that we should not “teach the world what it ought to be”, but he is giving a more active spin than Hegel would when he closes the Preface observing:

“For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. ...

The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.”

Marx also uses the phrase, but with salta instead of saltus, but with more or less the meaning intended by Aesop in Chapter 5 of Capital.