Laudator Temporis Acti

Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Monday:

There are few books which are fit to be remembered in our wisest hours, but the Iliad is brightest in the serenest days, and embodies still all the sunlight that fell on Asia Minor. No modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the mind. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death of that which never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in his rising.

The statue of Memnon (which survives in damaged condition but is not "cast down") was said to emit a sound when the morning sun's rays first struck it (Tacitus, Annals 2.61, etc.).

Thoreau did not look favorably on the ancient Egyptians. In Walden, chapter 1 (Economy) he dismissed them with these words:

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.