Neither rain nor hail . . .

clipped from www.atrium-media.com

That Post Office Motto

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The Times-Picayune (great name for a newspaper), opens a column by a young student with that oft-heard quote from the U.S. Postal Service:

"Neither rain nor hail nor sleet nor snow nor heat of day nor dark of night shall keep this carrier from the swift completion of his appointed rounds."

As might be suspected, the attribution is "Herodotus, 500 B.C." Now I'm probably not the only non-American who grew up thinking this to be the motto of my own (in my case, Canadian) postal service, but I have long wondered about the attribution of this to Herodotus. Godley's translation (of 8.98) at Perseus has it thus:

It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day's journey. These are stopped neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.

A little ferreting, however, provides a reasonable answer. In the January 1997 issue of Harvard Magazine, we read that a certain William Kendall -- who was charged with the task in 1876 of finding an appropriate inscription for the frieze of the soon-to-be New York Post Office -- was dissatisfied with the 'official' translations of the passage from Herodotus. He approached some unnamed former professor from Harvard who came close

clipped from harvardmagazine.com

'Nor snow, nor rain, day's heat, nor gloom hinders their speedily going on their appointed rounds.'

clipped from www.atrium-media.com

but in the end, Kendall came up with his own, which is what we have today.