Laudator Temporis Acti

Aristophanes, Lysistrata 574-578 (tr. Jeffrey Henderson):

Imagine the polis as a fleece just shorn. First, put it in a bath and wash out all the sheep dung; spread it on a bed and beat out the riff-raff with a stick, and pluck out the thorns; as for those who clump and knot themselves together to snag government positions, card them out and pluck off their heads.

πρῶτον μὲν ἐχρῆν, ὥσπερ πόκον, ἐν βαλανείῳ
ἐκπλύναντας τὴν οἰσπώτην ἐκ τῆς πόλεως, ἐπὶ κλίνης        575
ἐκραβδίζειν τοὺς μοχθηροὺς καὶ τοὺς τριβόλους ἀπολέξαι,
καὶ τούς γε συνισταμένους τούτους καὶ τοὺς πιλοῦντας ἑαυτοὺς
ἐπὶ ταῖς ἀρχαῖσι διαξῆναι καὶ τὰς κεφαλὰς ἀποτῖλαι.

Dante, Purgatorio 16.82-83 (tr. Thomas Okey):

Therefore, if the world to-day goeth astray,
in you is the cause, in you be it sought...

Però, se 'l mondo presente disvia,
in voi è la cagione, in voi si cheggia...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, I.4 (tr. Thomas P. Whitney):

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, ed. R.D. Dawe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 4 (from the editor's Introduction):

But is conventional piety manifest in Oedipus Rex? The question is not one to be solved one way or the other by the time-dishonoured process of selectively accumulating quotations with which to bolster one's case.

E.G. Stanley, "Unideal Principles of Editing Old English Verse," Proceedings of the British Academy 70 (1984) 231-273 (at 273):

We should feel happiest as editors when we have demonstrated that a manuscript reading, spurned and excised by previous editors, deserves to stand in the text. A Rettung is worth more than a palmary emendation.

Homer, Iliad 24.1-2 (tr. A.T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt, in the Loeb Classical Library):

Then was the assembly broken up, and the men scattered, each man to go to his own ship.

Λῦτο δ᾿ ἀγών, λαοὶ δὲ θοὰς ἐπὶ νῆας ἕκαστοι
ἐσκίδναντ᾿ ἰέναι.

In the first line the translation omits θοὰς (swift), modifying νῆας (ships).

Homer, Iliad 24.178-180 (tr. A.T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt, in the Loeb Classical Library):

A herald may attend you, an older man, to guide the mules and the light-running wagon, and to carry back to the city the dead, him whom Achilles slew.

κῆρύξ τίς τοι ἕποιτο γεραίτερος, ὅς κ᾿ ἰθύνοι
ἡμιόνους καὶ ἄμαξαν ἐύτροχον, ἠδὲ καὶ αὖτις
νεκρὸν ἄγοι προτὶ ἄστυ, τὸν ἔκτανε δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.

In line 180 the translation omits δῖος (goodly, noble), modifying Ἀχιλλεύς (Achilles).

The epithets were missing in Murray's original translation, and they are still missing in Wyatt's revision.

Labels: typographical and other errors

M.L. West (1937-2015), The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (1997; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), p. 261:

The Greek poet who portrays people in distress has a considerable range of cries of woe that he can put into their mouths, as the translator of a tragedy finds to his embarrassment: his petty stock of Ohs and Ahs and Alases is soon overdrawn.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Notes on Virginia, Query XVII:

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Id.:

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desireable? No more than of face and stature. Introduce the bed of Procrustes then, and as there is danger that the large men may beat the small, make us all of a size, by lopping the former and stretching the latter. Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand. That if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the 999 wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves.

Dante, Purgatorio 11.100-108 (tr. Dorothy L. Sayers, with her note):

A breath of wind — no more — is earthly fame,        100
   And now this way it blows and that way now,
   And as it changes quarter, changes name.

Ten centuries hence, what greater fame hast thou,
   Stripping the flesh off late, than if thou'dst died
   Ere thou wast done with gee-gee and bow-wow?        105

Ten centuries hence — and that's a briefer tide,
   Matched with eternity, than one eye-wink
   To that wheeled course Heaven's tardiest sphere must ride.

l. 105: ere thou wast done with "gee-gee" and "bow-wow": (lit. "with pappo and dindi" — baby-talk for "food" and "money"): "while you were still in the nursery".

Non è il mondan romore altro ch'un fiato        100
   di vento, ch'or vien quinci e or vien quindi,
   e muta nome perché muta lato.

Che voce avrai tu più, se vecchia scindi
   da te la carne, che se fossi morto
   anzi che tu lasciassi il 'pappo' e 'l 'dindi',        105

pria che passin mill'anni? ch'è piu corto
   spazio all'etterno, ch'un muover di ciglia
   al cerchio che più tardi in cielo è torto.

The same, tr. John Sinclair:

The world's noise is but a breath of wind which comes now this way and now that and changes name because it changes quarter.

What more fame shalt thou have if thou put off thy flesh when it is old than if thou hadst died before giving up pappo and dindi,

when a thousand years are past, which is a shorter space to eternity than the twinkling of an eye to the slowest-turning circle in the heavens?

The same, tr. Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander:

Worldly fame is nothing but a gust of wind,        100
first blowing from one quarter, then another,
changing name with every new direction.

Will greater fame be yours if you put off
your flesh when it is old than had you died
with pappo and dindi still upon your lips        105

after a thousand years have passed? To eternity,
that time is shorter than the blinking of an eye
is to one circling of the slowest-moving sphere.

Homer, Iliad 21.106-113 (Achilles to Lycaon; tr. Richmond Lattimore):

So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it?
Patroklos also is dead, who was better by far than you are.
Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid
and born of a great father, and the mother who bore me immortal?
Yet even I have also my death and my strong destiny,        110
and there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontime
when some man in the fighting will take the life from me also
either with a spearcast or an arrow flown from the bowstring.

ἀλλὰ φίλος θάνε καὶ σύ· τί ἦ ὀλοφύρεαι οὕτως;
κάτθανε καὶ Πάτροκλος, ὅ περ σέο πολλὸν ἀμείνων.
οὐχ ὁράᾳς οἷος καὶ ἐγὼ καλός τε μέγας τε;
πατρὸς δ᾽ εἴμ᾽ ἀγαθοῖο, θεὰ δέ με γείνατο μήτηρ·
ἀλλ᾽ ἔπι τοι καὶ ἐμοὶ θάνατος καὶ μοῖρα κραταιή·        110
ἔσσεται ἢ ἠὼς ἢ δείλη ἢ μέσον ἦμαρ
ὁππότε τις καὶ ἐμεῖο Ἄρῃ ἐκ θυμὸν ἕληται
ἢ ὅ γε δουρὶ βαλὼν ἢ ἀπὸ νευρῆφιν ὀϊστῷ.

The same, tr. Peter Green:

So, friend, you too must die: why then lament thus?
Patroklos too is dead, a far better man than you are.
Can't you see what I'm like, how handsome and tall I am?
A fine father sired me, the mother who bore me was a goddess—
Yet over me too hang death and all-mastering destiny:        110
A day will come when, at dawn, or noon, or evening,
my life too will be forfeit to someone in battle,
by a flighted spear or an arrow shot from the bowstring.

The same, tr. Alexander Pope:

Die then, my friend! what boots it to deplore?
The great, the good Patroclus is no more!
He, far thy better, was foredoom'd to die,
And thou, dost thou bewail mortality?
Seest thou not me, whom nature's gifts adorn,
Sprung from a hero, from a goddess born?
The day shall come (which nothing can avert)
When by the spear, the arrow, or the dart,
By night, or day, by force, or by design,
Impending death and certain fate are mine!

The same, tr. William Cowper:

Die therefore, even thou, my friend! What mean
Thy tears unreasonably shed and vain?
Died not Patroclus. braver far than thou?
And look on me—see'st not to what a height
My stature towers, and what a bulk I boast?
A King begat me, and a Goddess bore.
What then! A death by violence awaits
Me also, and at morn, or eve, or noon,
I perish, whensoe'er the destined spear
Shall reach me, or the arrow from the nerve.

The same, tr. William Cullen Bryant:

                                     Die thou, then; and why
Shouldst thou, my friend, lament? Patroclus died,
And greatly he excelled thee. Seest thou not
How eminent in stature and in form
Am I, whom to a prince renowned for worth
A goddess mother bore; yet will there come
To me a violent death at morn, at eve,
Or at the midday hour, whenever he
Whose weapon is to take my life shall cast
The spear or send an arrow from the string.

Dante, Purgatorio 5.12-16 (tr. Dorothy L. Sayers):

                                           What does it matter
   To thee what they are whispering over there?
Follow thou me, and let the people chatter;
   Stand as a tower stands firm in time of trouble,
   Nor bends its head, though winds may bawl and batter.

The same, tr. John Sinclair:

What is it to thee what they whisper there? Come after me and let the people talk. Stand like a firm tower that never shakes its top for blast of wind.

The Italian:

   Che ti fa ciò che quivi si pispiglia?
Vien dietro a me, e lascia dir le genti:
   sta come torre ferma, che non crolla
   già mai la cima per soffiar di venti.

Corpus Hermeticum 2.12, tr. Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation with Notes and Introduction (1992; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 11:

"What is the incorporeal, then?"

"Mind as a whole wholly enclosing itself, free of all body, unerring, unaffected, untouched, at rest in itself, capable of containing all things and preserving all that exists, and its rays (as it were) are the good, the truth, the archetype of spirit, the archetype of soul."

I don't have access to Corpus Hermeticum, Tome I: Poimandrès - Traités II-XII. Texte établi par A.D. Nock, traduit par A.-J. Festugière (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1946), but here is the Greek as preserved by Stobaeus 1.18.3, in Ioannis Stobaei Anthologii Libri Duo Priores, ed. Curt Wachsmuth (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884), p. 159:


Note the series of asyndetic, privative adjectives ἀπλανής. ἀπαθής, ἀναφής.

Labels: asyndetic privative adjectives

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), The Blithedale Romance, chapter IX:

I loved Hollingsworth, as has already been enough expressed. But it impressed me, more and more, that there was a stern and dreadful peculiarity in this man, such as could not prove otherwise than pernicious to the happiness of those who should be drawn into too intimate a connection with him. He was not altogether human. There was something else in Hollingsworth besides flesh and blood, and sympathies and affections, and celestial spirit.

This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an overruling purpose. It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one principle. When such begins to be the predicament, it is not cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly straight path. They have an idol, to which they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious; and never once seem to suspect — so cunning has the devil been with them — that this false deity, in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.

Thucydides 3.82.2 (tr. C.F. Smith):

For in peace and prosperity both states and individuals have gentler feelings, because men are not then forced to face conditions of dire necessity; but war, which robs men of the easy supply of their daily wants, is a rough schoolmaster and creates in most people a temper that matches their condition.

ἐν μὲν γὰρ εἰρήνῃ καὶ ἀγαθοῖς πράγμασιν αἵ τε πόλεις καὶ οἱ ἰδιῶται ἀμείνους τὰς γνώμας ἔχουσι διὰ τὸ μὴ ἐς ἀκουσίους ἀνάγκας πίπτειν· ὁ δὲ πόλεμος ὑφελὼν τὴν εὐπορίαν τοῦ καθ᾿ ἡμέραν βίαιος διδάσκαλος καὶ πρὸς τὰ παρόντα τὰς ὀργὰς τῶν πολλῶν ὁμοιοῖ.

F.O. Matthiessen, "The Education of a Socialist," in Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman, edd., F.O. Matthiessen (1902-1950): A Collective Portrait (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), pp. 3-20 (at 5-6):

It is appalling how much can get left out of an American education. It was not until I had begun to be an instructor at Harvard that I read Francis Parkman's history, and found that Starved Rock and the Illinois River where I had gone canoeing near my grandfather's house was the scene of the most vivid pages in La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West. La Salle had simply been the name of my grandfather's town. That it was also the name of a French explorer was lodged somewhere abstractly in my memoy, but I had not had the irreplaceable experience of sharing, as a boy, in a rich consciousness of history. No school that I attended went at all imaginatively into the American past.

The dams of isolation that block the flow of a living culture are often erected unwittingly. Not until the death of Charles Griffes, in the flu epidemic of 1919, did I begin to realize that this shy bird-like little man who directed the choir and gave music lessons at Hackley was also a composer. In the barren atmosphere of a conventional boys' school, that was apparently not assumed to be a matter of interest. Yet, many years later, I read in Griffes' biography the record of his loneliness and frustration. In the winter of my last year at school, Charles Griffes, at the end of another corridor in the same building, was reading Dostoevsky and Flaubert. Even if I was not ready for them at sixteen, there is an unforgivable wastage in any institution where the important things are not mentioned, and where communication withers through disuse.

A good deal of everyone's later education consists of compensating for what he missed, and of having to unlearn what he was taught.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

Homer, Iliad 20.244-255 (Aeneas addressing Achilles; tr. Richmond Lattimore):

But come, let us no longer stand here talking of these things
like children, here in the space between the advancing armies.        245
For there are harsh things enough that could be spoken against us
both, a ship of a hundred locks could not carry the burden.
The tongue of man is a twisty thing, there are plenty of words there
of every kind, the range of words is wide, and their variance.
The sort of thing you say is the thing that will be said to you.        250
But what have you and I to do with the need for squabbling
and hurling insults at each other, as if we were two wives
who when they have fallen upon a heart-perishing quarrel
go out in the street and say abusive things to each other,
much true, and much that is not, and it is their rage that drives them.        255

ἀλλ᾽ ἄγε μηκέτι ταῦτα λεγώμεθα νηπύτιοι ὣς
ἑσταότ᾽ ἐν μέσσῃ ὑσμίνῃ δηϊοτῆτος.        245
ἔστι γὰρ ἀμφοτέροισιν ὀνείδεα μυθήσασθαι
πολλὰ μάλ᾽, οὐδ᾽ ἂν νηῦς ἑκατόζυγος ἄχθος ἄροιτο.
στρεπτὴ δὲ γλῶσσ᾽ ἐστὶ βροτῶν, πολέες δ᾽ ἔνι μῦθοι
παντοῖοι, ἐπέων δὲ πολὺς νομὸς ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα.
ὁπποῖόν κ᾽ εἴπῃσθα ἔπος, τοῖόν κ᾽ ἐπακούσαις.        250
ἀλλὰ τί ἢ ἔριδας καὶ νείκεα νῶϊν ἀνάγκη
νεικεῖν ἀλλήλοισιν ἐναντίον ὥς τε γυναῖκας,
αἵ τε χολωσάμεναι ἔριδος πέρι θυμοβόροιο
νεικεῦσ᾽ ἀλλήλῃσι μέσην ἐς ἄγυιαν ἰοῦσαι
πόλλ᾽ ἐτεά τε καὶ οὐκί· χόλος δέ τε καὶ τὰ κελεύει.        255

This is part of Aeneas' "verbose arguments against prolixity" (Mark W. Edwards in his commentary).

John Herington (1924-1997), "Foreward" to D.S. Carne-Ross, Pindar (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. ix:

"It would be a pity," said Nietzsche, "if the classics should speak to us less clearly because a million words stood in the way." His forebodings seem now to have been realized. A glance at the increasing girth of successive volumes of the standard journal of classical bibliography, L'Année Philologique, since World War II is enough to demonstrate the proliferation of writing on the subject in our time. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the studies listed will prove on inspection to be largely concerned with points of detail and composed by and for academic specialists in the field. Few are addressed to the literate but nonspecialist adult or to that equally important person, the intelligent but uninstructed beginning student; and of those few, very few indeed are the work of scholars of the first rank, equipped for their task not merely with raw classical erudition but also with style, taste, and literary judgment.

It is a strange situation. On one side stand the classical masters of Greece and Rome, those models of concision, elegance, and understanding of the human condition, who composed least of all for narrow technologists, most of all for the Common Reader (and, indeed, the Common Hearer). On the other side stands a sort of industrial complex, processing those masters into an annually growing output of technical articles and monographs.

J.A. Willis, "The 'Silvae' of Statius and Their Editors," Phoenix 20.4 (Winter 1966) 305-324 (at 322):

The volume of metaclassics is very great. What Schadewaldt alone has written about Homer far exceeds in volume what Homer wrote about the siege of Troy; a year's output on the Dyscolus dwarfs the whole surviving work of Menander into insignificance; no very large bookcase would be needed to hold all the texts of Greek and Latin writers from Homer to the end of paganism, yet to house the books written on them since 1850 would tax the largest of reading-rooms. Most sinister of all is the growth of periodical publications, of which roughly 200 are noted in L'Année Philologique. New ones are constantly being born; old ones are very tenacious of life.

E.C. Marchant (1864-1960), Greek Reader, Vol. I. Selected and Adapted with English Notes from Professor von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff's Griechisches Lesebuch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), p. iii:

By a lucky accident I escaped the Hecuba and Alcestis when I was beginning Greek; but a course of parasangs inspired in me a hatred of Xenophon so intense that it took me twenty years to forgive him. Whatever estimate be formed of Xenophon's merits as a writer, it is, I think, certain that he cannot stand the ordeal of being spelt out line by line and sentence by sentence. He is tolerable only when he is read quickly, as he wrote. As for Euripides, even if the words are intelligible to a young learner, what is he to make of the feeling? What's Hecuba to him? And whom should we pity the most — the heroine or the poet, or the beginner who wonders what on earth they are at and heartily hates them both?

Tibor Wlassics (1936-1998), "Endpaper," Lectura Dantis 3 (Fall, 1988):

Consider the translator's sudden delight in finding his version (though quite 'literal') coincident with something mysteriously preestablished in the «target» language. «Oscura e profonda era e nebulosa...». The rough alliterative Saxon monosyllables take off and begin to murmur a wooden tune of their own, laboriously assuming the solemn cadences of the most solemn text in the English language: the Hymn to Light. Did blind Milton recall Dante's first sight of Hell when forging his rough pair of adjectives for the Primeval Chaos, «the rising world of waters dark and deep»? Chaucer probably did when singing of «Of Pluto's Kingdom dark and deep below». But «oscura e profonda» keeps sending echoes even more recent, incongruously so; the snows of New Hampshire appear, a nightly woodscape, a horse with a little bell: «The woods are lovely, dark and deep...». Frost would never have dreamt of it, but (since words can never completely leave behind their contexts) those promises to keep and the still hours-long ride into the night get vaguely tinged by a new, vicarious, anxiety ^__ harking back, through Milton's violoncello and Chaucer's basson, to the double bass of «oscura e profonda» which accompanied the Pilgrim's astonished glance into the Chasm.

[Aristotle,] Oeconomica 2.2.7 (1347 a-b; tr. G. Cyril Armstrong):

On one occasion the people of Lampsacus were expecting to be attacked by a large fleet of triremes. The price of barley meal being then four drachmae for a bushel and a half, they instructed the retailers to sell it at six drachmae. Oil, which was at three drachmae for six pints, was to be sold at four drachmae and a half, and wine and other commodities at a proportionate increase. In this way the retailer got the original price, while the State took the addition and filled its treasury.

Λαμψακηνοὶ δὲ προσδοκίμων οὐσῶν τριήρων πολλῶν πρὸς αὐτούς, ὄντος μεδίμνου τῶν ἀλφίτων τετραδράχμου, προσέταξαν τοῖς ἀγοραίοις πωλεῖν ἑξάδραχμον, καὶ τοῦ ἐλαίου τὸν χοᾶ ὄντα δραχμῶν <τριῶν>, τεττάρων καὶ τριωβόλου, τοῦ τε οἴνου καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ὡσαύτως. τὴν μὲν οὖν ἀρχαίαν τιμὴν ἐλάμβανεν ὁ ἰδιώτης, τὸ δὲ πλέον ἡ πόλις, καὶ εὐπόρησε χρημάτων.

<τριῶν> add. Boeckh

George Santayana (1863-1952), Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1922), p. 124:

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text.

Santayana's own scrawled comments, from the margins of books in his personal library, have now been collected in two volumes by John McCormick (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).

Related posts:

• A Long Footnote
• Apology for Extensive Annotation
• The Subject of Notes
• Text and Commentary
• Footnotes and Parentheses
• Footnotes
• The Sauce and the Fish
• Tendencies Within Classical Commentaries

Byron (1788-1824), "Beppo. A Venetian Story," stanza XLIV:

I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
    Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
And sounds as if it should be writ on satin,
    With syllables which breathe of the sweet South,
And gentle liquids gliding all so pat in,
    That not a single accent seems uncouth,
Like our harsh northern whistling, grunting guttural
Which we're oblig'd to hiss and spit and sputter all.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797), A Vindication of Natural Society: or, a View of the Miseries and Evils arising to Mankind from every Species of Artificial Society:

The nearer we approach to the Goal of Life, the better we begin to understand the true Value of our Existence, and the real Weight of our Opinions. We set out much in love with both; but we leave much behind us as we advance. We first throw away the Tales along with the Rattles of our Nurses; those of the Priest keep their Hold a little longer; those of our Governors the longest of all. But the Passions which prop these Opinions are withdrawn one after another; and the cool Light of Reason at the Setting of our Life, shews us what a false Splendor played upon these Objects during our more sanguine Seasons.

Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: The Free Press, 1991), p. 62:

Younger faculty, Carson said, tend to reject the idea of a canon. "What's one generation's standard canonical text is the next generation's pulp," Carson said. "How many people read the poetry of Virgil, or the orations of Cicero?" He permitted himself a chuckle.

Tibor Wlassics (1936-1998), "Endpaper," Lectura Dantis 11 (Fall, 1992):

«How many people read the poetry of Virgil?» chuckles Professor Clayborne Carson of Stanford U. ^__ Lectorcule! will you deride us? Late at night, as it is; alone in our book room; hesitantly at first, more and more firmly then, we raise, high in the air, a hand.

Petrarch, Canzoniere 128, lines 97-112 (tr. James Wyatt Cook):

My lords, regard the way time flies and how,
Just so, life swiftly flees,
And ever at our backs, death follows on.
Now you are here, but of that parting think:        100
For naked and alone
Must be the soul that treads that doubtful path.
In passing through this vale,
Consent to put aside disdain and hate—
Those gales contrary to a life serene—        105
The time you use to grieve
Those others, spend on some more fitting work
Of hand or else of wit:
Some commendation fine,
Some edifying study undertake:        110
Thus, down here one rejoices
And finds the road to heaven open wide.

Signor', mirate come 'l tempo vola,
et sí come la vita
fugge, et la morte n'è sovra le spalle.
Voi siete or qui; pensate a la partita:        100
ché l'alma ignuda et sola
conven ch'arrive a quel dubbioso calle.
Al passar questa valle
piacciavi porre giú l'odio et lo sdegno,
vénti contrari a la vita serena;        105
et quel che 'n altrui pena
tempo si spende, in qualche acto piú degno
o di mano o d'ingegno,
in qualche bella lode,
in qualche honesto studio si converta:        110
cosí qua giú si gode,
et la strada del ciel si trova aperta.

The same, tr. Robert M. Durling:

Lords: see how time flies and how life flees, and how Death is at our backs. You are here now; think of your departure, for the soul must go naked and alone to that perilous path. As you pass through this valley, let it please you to conquer hatred and anger, winds contrary to a tranquil life; and that time which you now spend in giving others pain, let it be converted to some more worthy action of hand or intellect, to some lovely praise, some virtuous study: thus down here one may be happy and find open the road to Heaven.

B.L. Gildersleeve (1831-1924), "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 19.4 (1898) 461-467 (at 465):

[N]othing requires more mature scholarship or riper judgment than the preparation of an edition for beginners.

Tibor Wlassics (1936-1998), "Endpaper," Lectura Dantis 7 (Fall, 1990):

If you are addicted to calling a source «intertextuality» or a plot «narratological strategies» or a puff «self-referentiality» you're in trouble: the MBAs (yes, them, with their in-terms-of and bottom line) are grabbing at your skolarese. It came even to this: the ratatouille in my neighborhood eatery boasts, on the greasy menu, of a «subtle subtext of garlic» ^__ and even we know that that is the closure of that misprision. Before our «Dantisti americani» exhibit withdrawal symptoms, we will produce from a failing memory the Gymnasium ditties of Latin and Greek grammar rules. Intertext, you said? Preposition cum accusativo. How did the versicles go? Ante apud ad adversum / circum circa citra cis / contra erga extra infra / inter intra iuxta ob... Well, how about an apudtext (l'appotesto)? How does a citratext, a iuxtatext, a mysterious ergatext grab you? Maybe a Kafkaesque cistext? A multicultural obtext? Circumtextuality for the ambientalist Dantologue... And there is more: inter intra iuxta ob / penes pone post und praeter / prope propter per secundum / supra versus ultra trans... Let's have propetexts for the philologically minded! Und Posttexte und Praetertexte... L'ultratexte to deconstruct? Transtextuality for the so disposed? ^__ There is stuff here to stuff everyone's curricula.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

Bernard Knox (1914-2010), "Preface to the New Edition," Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles' Tragic Hero and His Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. ix-xiv (at ix-x):

The polemical tone of the original Preface, for example, seemed to suggest (though it was not my intention) that I was accusing my fellow classicists of "exclusive technicality" (I had been dismayed by the appearance of an article, extended over two successive issues of a periodical, entitled "The Carrot in Classical Antiquity").

I suspect, although I cannot be certain, that Knox's memory was slightly at fault, and that he was actually referring to the following two articles by Alfred C. Andrews, which appeared in successive issues of Classical Philology:

• Alfred C. Andrews, "Celery and Parsley as Foods in the Greco-Roman Period," Classical Philology 44.2 (April, 1949) 91-99
• Alfred C. Andrews, "The Carrot as a Food in the Classical Era," Classical Philology 44.3 (July, 1949) 182-196

It is a mark of how eccentric my interests are that, in an old notebook from graduate school, I jotted down references to these two articles. They don't dismay me. I'm more apt to read articles of this sort than any article or book with the words "gender" or "intertextuality" in the title.

Alfred C. Andrews was probably Alfred Carleton Andrews (1904-1970), about whom I can find very little information. He was Assistant Professor of Latin at the University of Vermont and later taught in the Department of Classics at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. He isn't listed in Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists, ed. Ward W. Briggs, Jr. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), despite the fact that he received a Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania, 1931).

Strabo 14.5.14 (describing civil unrest at Tarsus; tr. Horace Leonard Jones):

Finding the city in this plight, Athenodorus for a time tried to induce both Boethus and his partisans to change their course; but since they would abstain from no act of insolence, he used the authority given him by Caesar, condemned them to exile, and expelled them. These at first indicted him with the following inscription on the walls: "Work for young men, counsels for the middle-aged, and flatulence for old men"; and when he, taking the inscription as a joke, ordered the following words to be inscribed beside it, "thunder for old men," someone, contemptuous of all decency and afflicted with looseness of the bowels, profusely bespattered the door and wall of Athenodorus' house as he was passing by it at night. Athenodorus, while bringing accusations in the assembly against the faction, said: "One may see the sickly plight and the disaffection of the city in many ways, and in particular from its excrements."

τοιαύτην δὲ τὴν πόλιν καταλαβὼν ὁ Ἀθηνόδωρος, τέως μὲν ἐπεχείρει λόγῳ μετάγειν κἀκεῖνον καὶ τοὺς συστασιώτας· ὡς δ᾿ οὐκ ἀπείχοντο ὕβρεως οὐδεμιᾶς, ἐχρήσατο τῇ δοθείσῃ ὑπὸ τοῦ Καίσαρος ἐξουσίᾳ καὶ ἐξέβαλεν αὐτούς, καταγνοὺς φυγήν. οἱ δὲ πρῶτον μὲν κατετοιχογράφησαν αὐτοῦ τοιαῦτα·

ἔργα νέων, βουλαὶ δὲ μέσων, πορδαὶ δὲ γερόντων.

ἐπεὶ δ᾿ ἐκεῖνος ἐν παιδιᾶς μέρει δεξάμενος ἐκέλευσε παρεπιγράψαι "—βρονταὶ δὲ γερόντων," καταφρονήσας δέ τις τοῦ ἐπιεικοῦς, εὔλυτον τὸ κοιλίδιον ἔχων, προσέρρανε πολὺ τῇ θύρᾳ καὶ τῷ τοίχῳ, νύκτωρ παριὼν τὴν οἰκίαν. ὁ δὲ τῆς στάσεως κατηγορῶν ἐν ἐκκλησίᾳ, τὴν νόσον τῆς πόλεως, ἔφη, καὶ τὴν καχεξίαν πολλαχόθεν σκοπεῖν ἔξεστι, καὶ δὴ καὶ ἐκ τῶν διαχωρημάτων.

The graffito was a parody of a Greek proverb (tr. Glenn W. Most):

Deeds are of the young, counsels of the middle-aged, prayers of the old.

ἔργα νέων, βουλαὶ δὲ μέσων, εὐχαὶ δὲ γερόντων.

See Renzo Tosi, Dictionnaire des sentences latines et grecques, tr. Rebecca Lenoir (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2010), #1081, pp. 795-796.

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), "Von den Mitleidigen," Also sprach Zarathustra II (tr. Walter Kaufmann):

As long as there have been men, man has felt too little joy: that alone, my brothers, is our original sin.

Seit es Menschen giebt, hat der Mensch sich zu wenig gefreut: Das allein, meine Brüder, ist unsre Erbsünde!

Neal Pollack, writing tongue-in-cheek in Salon (screen shot captured today):


In text form:

It's not our style to hide our pens and our keyboards in the face of an illiterate mob. We will continue to speak truth to justice even as we consolidate our power. As I wrote in my 1964 National Review essay "The Courage of the Elites," "We have read our Herod and our Thucydides, our Aristophanes and our Homer. We have memorized the speeches of Prince Hal. We must carry forth our ideals, bow ties straightened, onward toward the precipice of freedom." I read lots of books in college, and I was pleased to let everyone know that fact.

Pollack was precocious. Although not born until 1970, by 1964 he had already attended college and was working as a journalist. Ancient historians must mourn the loss of Herod's works, as they do Livy's missing books.

I also see "Herod and Thucydides" mentioned by Michael Salewski, "Ninety Years after Jutland: Reflections," in Jutland: World War I's Greatest Naval Battle, edd. Michael Epkenhans et al. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), pp. 363-378 (at 366).

Labels: typographical and other errors

Anacreon, fragment 100 = Greek Anthology 7.226, tr. C.M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry from Alcman to Simonides, 2nd rev. ed. (1961; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 270:

Strong Agathon, who died for Abdera, was mourned at his pyre by the whole of the city; for Ares, who loves blood, never in the eddy of hateful battle slew such a young man as he was.

Ἀβδήρων προθανόντα τὸν αἰνοβίην Ἀγάθωνα
    πᾶσ᾿ ἐπὶ πυρκαϊῆς ἥδ᾿ ἐβόησε πόλις·
οὔ τινα γὰρ τοιόνδε νέων ὁ φιλαίματος Ἄρης
    ἠνάρισε στυγερῆς ἐν στροφάλιγγι μάχης.

Goethe, Italian Journey (Naples; May 29, 1787; tr. W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer):

Several days in the year and especially the Christmas holidays are famous for their orgies of gluttony. At such times a general cocagna is celebrated, in which five hundred thousand people vow to outdo each other. The Toledo and other streets and squares are decorated most appetizingly; vegetables, raisins, melons and figs are piled high in their stalls; huge paternosters of gilded sausages, tied with red ribbons, and capons with little red flags stuck in their rumps are suspended in festoons across the streets overhead. I was assured that, not counting those which people had fattened in their own homes, thirty thousand of them had been sold. Crowds of donkeys laden with vegetables, capons and young lambs are driven to market, and never in my life have I seen so many eggs in one pile as I have seen here in several places.

Not only is all this eaten, but every year a policeman, accompanied by a trumpeter, rides through the city and announces in every square and at every crossroad how many thousand oxen, calves, lambs, pigs, etc., the Neapolitans have consumed. The crowd show tremendous joy at the high figures, and each of them recalls with pleasure his share in this consumption.

---

Es sind verschiedne Tage im Jahr, besonders die Weihnachtsfeiertage, als Schmausfeste berühmt; alsdann feiert man eine allgemeine Cocagna, wozu sich fünfhunderttausend Menschen das Wort gegeben haben. Dann ist aber auch die Straße Toledo und neben ihr mehrere Straßen und Plätze auf das appetitlichste verziert. Die Butiken, wo grüne Sachen verkauft werden, wo Rosinen, Melonen und Feigen aufgesetzt sind, erfreuen das Auge auf das allerangenehmste. Die Eßwaren hängen in Girlanden über die Straßen hinüber; große Paternoster von vergoldeten, mit roten Bändern geschnürten Würsten; welsche Hähne, welche alle eine rote Fahne unter dem Bürzel stecken haben. Man versicherte, daß deren dreißigtausend verkauft worden, ohne die zu rechnen, welche die Leute im Hause gemästet hatten. Außer diesem werden noch eine Menge Esel, mit grüner Ware, Kapaunen und jungen Lämmern beladen, durch die Stadt und über den Markt getrieben, und die Haufen Eier, welche man hier und da sieht, sind so groß, daß man sich ihrer niemals so viel beisammen gedacht hat.

Und nicht genug, daß alles dieses verzehret wird: alle Jahre reitet ein Polizeidiener mit einem Trompeter durch die Stadt und verkündet auf allen Plätzen und Kreuzwegen, wieviel tausend Ochsen, Kälber, Lämmer, Schweine u. s. w. der Neapolitaner verzehrt habe. Das Volk höret aufmerksam zu, freut sich unmäßig über die großen Zahlen, und jeder erinnert sich des Anteils an diesem Genusse mit Vergnügen.

Keith Preston (1884-1927), "The Classics in a Nutshell," Splinters (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921), p. 106:

(Modern reader's library)

        VERGIL'S AENEID

Aeneas, with his little boy,
Slid down the fire escape from Troy.
He took the household bric-a-brac
He took his father pick-a-back.
His wife Creusa he forgot
(Although he loved her quite a lot).
She perished in the fire, poor dame!
He often thought of his old flame.

From Troy he sailed the raging tide, O!
To Carthage where he fell for Dido;
Then left her cold and went to hell
Came through and married very well.
No one had ever thought him bad,—
He was so sweet to his old dad.

Keith Preston (1884-1927), "Red Books and Night Lights," Splinters (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921), pp. 18-19:

Reading in bed as a fine art. The rules of the cult gleaned by a careful study of the best modern essays.

That reading in bed is a rite with a ritual,
    Those couch-cognoscenti our essayists teach;
Ye novices, learn from us aesthetes habitual
    The bed written rules that the essayists preach.
Retire to your room with the paraphernalia,
    Some hoary old volume, your brier and pouch,
And garbing yourself in nocturnal regalia,
    Then kindle the candle that stands by the couch.

For bed books, no new books we essayists handle;
    For night lights, no bright lights are known to the game—
A second-hand book by a flickering candle,
    A tattered old tome by a tremulous flame.
We cling to the candle, so human, appealing;
    It weeps as it works, shedding tallowy tears;
So second-hand books touch us readers of feeling
    With lachrymose thoughts of delectable years.

How fondly we dandle in candle-lit darkness
    Fair folios veiled in voluptuous vellum,
And thrill to the mad Latin grammar of Harkness
    Or rakish old Caesar's wild Gallicum Bellum.
How dull and drab novels or newspaper colyums!
    Ye tyros, give ear to us urging instead
The old broken volumes, the vellum-bound volumes,
    The worm-eaten volumes we lug to our bed.

The translations of Euripides by Arthur Sanders Way (1847-1930) were among the worst of the old Loebs, with the sense too often marred by the intrusion of rhymes. Those by David Kovacs are among the best of the new. Here are some nit-picking observations on the translation of Orestes in Euripides, Helen, Phoenician Women, Orestes. Edited and Translated by David Kovacs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002 = Loeb Classical Library, 11). They're intended more as aids to my comprehension than as corrections (which it would be presumptuous of me to make).

965 (pp. 518-519):

ἰαχείτω δὲ γᾶ Κυκλωπία...

Let the Cylopean land loudly proclaim ...

For Cylopean read Cyclopean. The typographical error persists in the digital version.

1303-1307 (pp. 556-557):

καίνετε, καίνετε, θείνετ᾿ ἀπόλλυτε,
δίπτυχα δίστομα φάσγαν᾿ ἐκ χερὸς ἱέμενοι
τὰν λιποπάτριδα λιπογάμετον, ἃ πλείστους 1305
ἔκανεν Ἑλλάνων
δορὶ παρὰ ποταμὸν ὀλομένους...

Slay, slay, smite, destroy her,
plying at close range your twin double-edged swords,
slay the betrayer of country and husband, who killed
so many Greeks
by the spear at the river's edge...

In line 1307 ὀλομένους may be otiose, but it deserves to be translated—so many Greeks destroyed by the spear at the river's edge.

1344 (pp. 560-561):

ἰδού, διώκω τὸν ἐμὸν ἐς δόμους πόδα.

There, I am going quickly into the house!

More literally—I am pursuing my foot into the house.

1346 (id.):

οὐχὶ συλλήψεσθ᾿ ἄγραν;

seize your prey!

More literally a question—will you not seize your prey?

1369-1370 (pp. 564-565):

ἐκ θανάτου / πέφευγα

From the realm of death I have escaped

At first I thought that "From death I have escaped" would be simpler, but now I'm inclined to agree that there might be an ellipsis of house or something similar.

1598 (pp. 590-591):

ἆ ἆ, μηδαμῶς δράσῃς τάδε.

Ah, ah, don't!

More fully—Ah, ah, by no means do these things.

1626 (pp. 598-599):

Φοῖβός

Apollo

Euripides could have written Apollo, but he wrote Phoebus.

1691 (pp. 604-605):

ὦ μέγα σεμνὴ Νίκη

Victory

More fully—Most august Victory.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Martin Chuzzlewit, ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 545-546 (Chapter XXXIV):

"Why Cook! what are you thinking of so steadily?" said Martin.

"Why I was a thinking, sir," returned Mark, "that if I was a painter and was called upon to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it?"

"Paint it as like an Eagle as you could, I suppose."

"No," said Mark. "That wouldn't do for me, sir. I should want to draw it like a Bat, for its short-sightedness; like a Bantam, for its bragging; like a Magpie, for its honesty; like a Peacock, for its vanity; like a Ostrich, for its putting its head in the mud, and thinking nobody sees it—"

"And like a Phoenix, for its power of springing from the ashes of its faults and vices, and soaring up anew into the sky!" said Martin. "Well, Mark. Let us hope so."

Hat tip: Lee Pratsch.

Derek Mahon, "Everything is Going to be All Right," Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 54:

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart;
the sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

Read aloud by the poet here.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

George Santayana (1863-1952), Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1922), pp. 62-63:

What, then, is there left, if Dickens has all these limitations? In our romantic disgust we might be tempted to say, Nothing. But in fact almost everything is left, almost everything that counts in the daily life of mankind, or that by its presence or absence can determine whether life shall be worth living or not; because a simple good life is worth living, and an elaborate bad life is not. There remains in the first place eating and drinking; relished not bestially, but humanly, jovially, as the sane and exhilarating basis for everything else. This is a sound English beginning; but the immediate sequel, as the England of that day presented it to Dickens, is no less delightful. There is the ruddy glow of the hearth; the sparkle of glasses and brasses and well-scrubbed pewter; the savoury fumes of the hot punch, after the tingle of the wintry air; the coaching-scenes, the motley figures and absurd incidents of travel; the changing sights and joys of the road. And then, to balance this, the traffic of ports and cities, the hubbub of crowded streets, the luxury of shop-windows and of palaces not to be entered; the procession of the passers-by, shabby or ludicrously genteel; the dingy look and musty smell of their lodgings; the labyrinth of back-alleys, courts, and mews, with their crying children, and scolding old women, and listless, half-drunken loiterers. These sights, like fables, have a sort of moral in them to which Dickens was very sensitive; the important airs of nobodies on great occasions, the sadness and preoccupation of the great as they hasten by in their mourning or on their pressing affairs; the sadly comic characters of the tavern; the diligence of shopkeepers, like squirrels turning in their cages; the children peeping out everywhere like grass in an untrodden street; the charm of humble things, the nobleness of humble people, the horror of crime, the ghastliness of vice, the deft hand and shining face of virtue passing through the midst of it all; and finally a fresh wind of indifference and change blowing across our troubles and clearing the most lurid sky.

In the Orthodox tradition, today is the Synaxis of the Archangel Michael and the Other Bodiless Powers. Here is the apolytikion for the day:

O Commanders of the Heavenly Host, we the unworthy beseech you, that through your entreaties you will fortify us, guarding us in the shelter of the wings of your ethereal glory, even as we fervently bow before you crying: "Deliver us from all danger, as Commanders of the Powers on high!"

Τῶν οὐρανίων στρατιῶν Ἀρχιστράτηγοι, δυσωποῦμεν ὑμᾶς ἡμεῖς οἱ ἀνάξιοι, ἵνα ταῖς ὑμῶν δεήσεσι τειχίσητε ἡμᾶς, σκέπῃ τῶν πτερύγων, τῆς ἀΰλου ὑμῶν δόξης, φρουροῦντες ἡμᾶς προσπίπτοντας, ἐκτενῶς καὶ βοώντας· Ἐκ τῶν κινδύνων λυτρώσασθε ἡμᾶς, ὡς Ταξιάρχαι, τῶν ἄνω Δυνάμεων.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Plautus, Casina 971 (tr. David Christenson):

Wolves on the left, dogs on the right!

hac lupi, hac canes.

Horace, Satires 2.2.64 (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

On the one side, as the saying is, a wolf attacks, on the other a dog.

hac urget lupus, hac canis, aiunt.

See Renzo Tosi, Dictionnaire des sentences latines et grecques, tr. Rebecca Lenoir (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2010), #669, p. 522.

Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, Chap. XIII:

'Slumkey for ever!' roared the honest and independent.

'Slumkey for ever!' echoed Mr Pickwick, taking off his hat.

'No Fizkin!' roared the crowd.

'Certainly not!' shouted Mr Pickwick.

'Hurrah!' And then there was another roaring, like that of a whole menagerie when the elephant has rung the bell for the cold meat.

'Who is Slumkey?' whispered Mr Tupman.

'I don't know,' replied Mr Pickwick, in the same tone. 'Hush. Don't ask any questions. It's always best on these occasions to do what the mob do.'

'But suppose there are two mobs?' suggested Mr Snodgrass.

'Shout with the largest,' replied Mr Pickwick.

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1783, aetat. 74):

Johnson, for sport perhaps, or from the spirit of contradiction, eagerly maintained that Derrick had merit as a writer. Mr. Morgann argued with him directly, in vain. At length he had recourse to this device. 'Pray, Sir, (said he,) whether do you reckon Derrick or Smart the best poet?' Johnson at once felt himself roused; and answered, 'Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.'

Quintilian 6 prooem. 14 (tr. Donald A. Russell):

But I live on, and I must find some reason for living, and must believe those learned men who have held that literature is our only solace in trouble.

sed vivimus et aliqua vivendi ratio quaerenda est, credendumque doctissimis hominibus, qui unicum adversorum solacium litteras putaverunt.

R.G.M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace, Odes, Book I (1970; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. v-vi:

[C]lassical scholars must seem a strange breed of pedants who refuse to admit that life is short unless they can find ten parallels to prove it.

Goethe, Italian Journey (May 17, 1787; tr. W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer):

A word about Homer. The scales have fallen from my eyes. His descriptions, his similes, etc., which to us seem merely poetic, are in fact utterly natural though drawn, of course, with an inner comprehension which takes one's breath away. Even when the events he narrates are fabulous and fictitious, they have a naturalness about them which I have never felt so strongly as in the presence of the settings he describes. Let me say briefly what I think about the ancient writers and us moderns. They represented things and persons as they are in themselves, we usually represent only their subjective effect; they depicted the horror, we depict horribly; they depicted the pleasing, we pleasantly, and so on. Hence all the exaggeration, the mannerisms, the false elegance and the bombast of our age. Since, if one aims at producing effects and only effects, one thinks that one cannot make them violent enough. If what I say is not new, I have had vivid occasion to feel its truth.

Now that my mind is stored with images of all these coasts and promontories, gulfs and bays, islands and headlands, rocky cliffs and sandy beaches, wooded hills and gentle pastures, fertile fields, flower gardens, tended trees, festooned vines, mountains wreathed in clouds, eternally serene plains and the all-encircling sea with its ever-changing colours and moods, for the first time the Odyssey has become a living truth to me.

---

Was den Homer betrifft, ist mir wie eine Decke von den Augen gefallen. Die Beschreibungen, die Gleichnisse etc. kommen uns poetisch vor und sind doch unsäglich natürlich, aber freilich mit einer Reinheit und Innigkeit gezeichnet, vor der man erschrickt. Selbst die sonderbarsten erlogenen Begebenheiten haben eine Natürlichkeit, die ich nie so gefühlt habe als in der Nähe der beschriebenen Gegenstände. Laß mich meinen Gedanken kurz so ausdrücken: sie stellten die Existenz dar, wir gewöhnlich den Effekt; sie schilderten das Fürchterliche, wir schildern fürchterlich; sie das Angenehme, wir angenehm u.s.w. Daher kommt alles Übertriebene, alles Manierierte, alle falsche Grazie, aller Schwulst. Denn wenn man den Effekt und auf den Effekt arbeitet, so glaubt man ihn nicht fühlbar genug machen zu können. Wenn, was ich sage, nicht neu ist, so hab' ich es doch bei neuem Anlaß recht lebhaft gefühlt.

Nun ich alle diese Küsten und Vorgebirge, Golfe und Buchten, Inseln und Erdzungen, Felsen und Sandstreifen, buschige Hügel, sanfte Weiden, fruchtbare Felder, geschmückte Gärten, gepflegte Bäume, hängende Reben, Wolkenberge und immer heitere Ebnen, Klippen und Bänke und das alles umgebende Meer mit so vielen Abwechselungen und Mannigfaltigkeiten im Geiste gegenwärtig habe, nun ist mir erst die Odyssee ein lebendiges Wort.

Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), Orlando Furioso IV.1.7-8 (tr. Barbara Reynolds):

In this our life, so full of envious spite,
And gloomier by far than it is bright.

The Italian, from Orlando Furioso secondo la princeps del 1516, edizione critica a cura di Marco Dorigatti ([Florence:] Leo S. Olschki, 2006), p. 68:

in questa assai più oscura che serena
vita mortal, tutta d'invidia piena.

George Santayana (1863-1952), Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), p. 77:

There is some danger in pointing out the obvious. Quick wits, perceiving at once how obvious the obvious is (though they may never have noticed it before), will say it is futile and silly to dwell upon it. Pugnacious people will assume that you mean more than you say, and are attempting to smuggle in some objectionable dogma under your truisms. Finally, docile minds, pleased to think you are delivering an oracle for their edification, will bow before your plain words as before some sacred mystery.

Euripides, Orestes 215-216 (tr. David Kovacs):

What place did I leave to get here? How did I arrive?
I cannot remember: my former state of mind has left me.

πόθεν ποτ᾿ ἦλθον δεῦρο; πῶς δ᾿ ἀφικόμην;
ἀμνημονῶν γάρ, τῶν πρὶν ἀπολειφθεὶς φρενῶν.

M.L. West (1937-2015), The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (1997; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), pp. 222-223:

When the final outcome is yet unknown, Homer's characters will say that it 'lies on the knees of the gods' (or in the lap of the gods, as the derivative English idiom has it):

ἀλλ᾿ ἤτοι μὲν ταῦτα θεῶν ἐν γούνασι κεῖται.

There is, however, nothing in Greek myth or art to explain the phrase. 'In the gods' hands' would be easier to understand; why 'on their knees'? Babylonian poetry, while it does not possess a matching expression, nevertheless offers an attractive answer. There the future is determined by the so-called Tablet of Destinies, the ṭupšīmātu. Whoever possesses it controls the world. Its place is on its owner's knees, as we see from Anzu. After Ninurta has regained it from the usurper Anzu, Dagan is advised:

'Send for him and let him come to you;
let him set the Tablet of Destinies on your knees.'¹²

This may plausibly be identified as the mythological concept that underlies the Homeric phrase.

¹² Anzu III 38 f.

George Santayana (1863-1952), Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), p. v:

I have a great respect for orthodoxy; not for those orthodoxies which prevail in particular schools or nations, and which vary from age to age, but for a certain shrewd orthodoxy which the sentiment and practice of laymen maintain everywhere. I think that common sense, in a rough dogged way, is technically sounder than the special schools of philosophy, each of which squints and overlooks half the facts and half the difficulties in its eagerness to find in some detail the key to the whole. I am animated by distrust of all high guesses, and by sympathy with the old prejudices and workaday opinions of mankind: they are ill expressed, but they are well grounded.

Euripides, Orestes 696-697 (tr. David Kovacs):

When the common people fall into a rage and feel their vigor,
it is like trying to put out a raging fire.

ὅταν γὰρ ἡβᾷ δῆμος εἰς ὀργὴν πεσών,
ὅμοιον ὥστε πῦρ κατασβέσαι λάβρον.

There is a series of asyndetic privative adjectives in Plutarch, On Brotherly Love 13 = Moralia 485 A:

ἄχαριν ἀνελεύθερον ἄτιμον ἄπορον ἀσθενῆ.

Labels: asyndetic privative adjectives

Homer, Iliad 17.446–447 (tr. A.T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt):

For truly there is nothing, I think, more miserable than man
among all things that breathe and move on earth.

οὐ μὲν γάρ τί πού ἐστιν ὀιζυρώτερον ἀνδρὸς
πάντων ὅσσα τε γαῖαν ἔπι πνείει τε καὶ ἕρπει.