Laudator Temporis Acti

Paul Shorey (1857-1934), "Philology and Classical Philology," Classical Journal 1.6 (May, 1906) 169-196 (at 169-170):

Greek has always been the best gauge of the philological temperature, from the absolute zero of the dark centuries to the blood heat of the Augustan age and the Renaissance. Latin is a necessity; Greek is the first of luxuries. "Latin," said Porson, or was it Bentley? "a man may in some sort master. Of Greek every man learns only so much as God permits." In the great ages of enthusiasm God permits a good deal. In the trough of the waves, in the intervals of reaction and depression, men try to believe that Latin alone will do as well. Greek is studied perfunctorily and without conviction, if at all, and the wail of the Greek professor goes up ever the same. In the time of Ausonius the world was settling down to the longest Greekless age since our civilization began. And his tribute in wonderfully constructed Horatian Sapphics to the unfortunate occupants of the chair of Greek at Augustodunum has a perennial pathos for their successors in like case. After celebrating the eloquence, the fees, the throngs of students, the diplomatic preferments of the professors of rhetoric, he comes to the names of those cultivators of the Attic muse, the grammarians Spercheius and Menestheus:

Sedulous your zeal for implanting knowledge,
Slight the harvest, little the Greek you taught me,
Yet because you fell in my time I give you
Hon'rable mention.

Even so! Carve it on our tombs, ye graduates in criminology and spring-housecleaning. We fell in your time.