Sunday, April 29, 2018
Talk Is Dangerous
Aristophanes, Frogs. Edited with an Introduction and Commentary by Kenneth Dover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 22 (from the Introduction):
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Talk is dangerous, because it takes young males away from physical exercise, encourages them to question their fathers' values, and undermines the discipline which a city with its back to the wall needs.35
35 Each generation tends to believe that its children are the first rebels. Xen. M. i.2.46 is a useful corrective: Perikles, trapped in an argument by the young Alkibiades, says, 'We were clever at that kind of argument when I was young!' Robert Louis Stevenson, as an Edinburgh student in the 1870s, was a founder-member of a society whose declared purpose was to reject all the values of the older generation.
