Laudator Temporis Acti

D'Arcy W. Thompson (1829–1902), Day Dreams of a Schoolmaster (1864; rpt. Boston: D.C. Heath & Co., 1898), pp. 242-246:

A dead language: what a sad and solemn expression! Trite enough, I own; but to a reflective mind, none the less sad and solemn; for in the death of which it speaks are involved deaths untold, innumerable.

I can understand what is meant by "a Dead Sea;" and should suppose it to be a sheet of water cut off from all intercourse with the main ocean; never rising with its flow; never sinking with its ebb; never skimmed by the sail of commerce; never flapped by wing of wandering bird; undisturbed by the bustle of the restless world; but slumbering in a desolate wilderness, far from the track of caravan, or railway, or steamship, in a stagnant, and tide-forgotten and unheeded repose.

The chance-directed efforts of an enterprising traveller exhumed, but recently, the sculptured monuments of a dead civilization. We thus learned that Nineveh and Babylon were not only the homes of conquering kings, but the seats of tranquil learning and treasured science, before ever a fleet had sailed from Aulis, or the eagles had promised empire to the watcher on the green Palatine.

The language of priestly and kingly Etruria is revealed to us only by dim marks upon vase or tablet, or by melancholy inscriptions on sepulchral stones. That is, indeed, a language unquestionably dead.

But can such a term be applied to that Hellenic speech that in the Iliad has rolled, like the great Father of Waters, its course unhindered down three thousand years; that in Pindar still soars heavenwards, staring at the sun; that rises and falls in Plato with the long, sequacious music of an Æolian lute; that moves, stately and black-stoled, in Æschylus; that reverberates with laughter half-Olympian in Aristophanes; that pierces with a trumpet-sound in Demosthenes; that smells of crocuses in Theocritus; that chirrups, like a balm-cricket, in Anacreon? If it be dead, then what language is alive?

Or again, is that old Italian speech dead and gone, that murmurs in Lucretius a ceaseless, solemn monotone of sea-shell sound; that in Virgil flows, like the Eridanus, calmly but majestically through rich lowlands, fringed with tall poplars and rimmed with grassy banks; that quivers to wild strings of passion in Catullus; that wimples like a beck in Ovid; that coos in Tibullus like the turtle; that sparkles in Horace like a well-cut diamond?

No: Heaven forbid it! No! Pile upon these twin daughters of Omphæan Zeus mountains of Grammars and Grammatical Exercises and Latin Readers and Greek Delectuses and Graduses and Dictionaries and Lexicons, until Ossa is dwarfed and Pelion is a wart. Let dull, colossal Pedantry—unconscious handmaid of the Abstract Bagman—with her tons of lumbal lead press heavily on the prostrate forms. For a while they may lie, breathless and exhausted; but when that is grown again wherein their great strength lay, then will they make a mighty effort, and fling high in air the accumulated scoria of ages: like a hailstorm in the surrounding sea will fall the fragments of a million gerund-stones; and the divine Twain will clothe themselves anew in their old strength and beauty, and sit down by the side of Zeus Omphæus, exulting in glory.

No, No! The music of Homer will die with the choral chants of the Messiah, and the strains of Pindar with the symphonies of Beethoven; una dies dabit exitio Aristophanes and Cervantes and Molière; the Mantuan will go hand in hand to oblivion with the Florentine, divinus Magister cum Discipulo diviniore; the Metamorphoses of Ovid will decay with the fantastic tale of Ariosto and the music of Don Giovanni; Horace will fade out of ken, linked arm in arm with that sweet fellow-epicure, Montaigne; Antigone will be forgotten maybe a short century before Cordelia; and Plato and Aristotle will be entombed beneath the Mausoleum that covers for ever the thoughts of Bacon, Kepler, Newton, and Laplace.

Moreover, before the last echoes of Greece and Rome shall have died away, a Slavonian horde will throng the Morea and the Cyclades; and in some crumbling cathedral, Catholicism will have chanted, for the last time, its own Nunc dimittis, in the grand imperial language of the City of the Seven Hills.

When all this shall have come about, then may it be said with truth: "Rome is dead; and Athens is no more! the words of whose wise ones went out into all lands, and the songs of whose singing-men to the ends of the world: their pomp and their glory have gone down with them into the pit."

But, gentle Reader, long, long before this desolation shall have come about, you and I will be lying in a very sorry plight, with a strange and not beautiful expression on our human countenances: our quips, our cranks, our oddities all gone: quite chapfallen. Yes, Friend, a very long while, indeed, before all this shall have come about.